2 cases · Violent Crime
Convicted: Kimberly Michelle Hricko
On Valentine's Day 1998, guests at the Harbourtowne Golf Resort on Maryland's Eastern Shore laughed through a murder mystery dinner called 'The Bride Who Cried,' a campy audience-participation whodunit where everyone got to play detective. Somewhere in that dining room sat Kimberly Hricko and her husband Steven. By morning, one of them would be dead. Kimberly was a surgical technologist with direct access to succinylcholine, a muscle paralytic that stops breathing and metabolizes so quickly it leaves almost no trace in the body. She had spent months telling friends and coworkers, in precise and specific detail, exactly how she planned to kill her husband: inject him with the drug, set a fire, make it look like a drunken accident. She had even bought the cigars she intended to plant at the scene. When Steven's body was found burned in their hotel bed that night, Kimberly told investigators he must have fallen asleep drunk while smoking. But the autopsy refused to cooperate: no carbon monoxide in his blood, no soot in his airways, no alcohol in his system. Steven Hricko had already stopped breathing before the first flame was lit.
Convicted: Sante Louise Kimes (née Singhrs; also known as Sandra Louise Singhrs, Sandra Chambers)
When New York City police stopped Sante Kimes and her son Kenny on an unrelated bad-check warrant on July 5, 1998, they expected a routine collar. What they found inside the car rewrote the definition of premeditation: two loaded pistols, plastic handcuffs, wigs, fright masks, syringes, a date-rape drug, an empty stun gun box, thirty thousand dollars in cash, a forged deed to a $7.7 million Manhattan mansion, and fifteen notebooks in which Sante had carefully practiced forging an 82-year-old woman's signature. Irene Silverman, the socialite who had rented a room to Kenny just weeks earlier, was already gone. Her body has never been found. It was the ending of a story that had begun decades earlier in the dust of Oklahoma City, wound through con jobs and slave-keeping and a White House party crasher and insurance fires, and arrived at last at the feet of a woman a judge would call 'a sociopath and a degenerate.' Sante Kimes was 64 years old and had not yet finished.
