2 cases tagged “life insurance motive”
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: Adele Vicuna Craven
When Ronald Scott Pryor crouched in the basement of a handsome Edgewood, Kentucky home on July 12, 2000, a crowbar in his hand, he was waiting for a signal. It came from upstairs, from the pilot's wife: a whispered code phrase, 'the ferret is loose.' What followed would expose one of the most calculated murder-for-hire plots in Northern Kentucky history, orchestrated by a woman trained in the science of death, fueled by a secret affair, and financed by a half-million-dollar life insurance policy. Adele Vicuna Craven was a trained mortician turned stay-at-home mother, living inside the comfortable shell of a life she had come to despise. Her husband, Delta Airlines pilot Stephen Craven, earned $200,000 a year and had no idea his wife had not only taken a lover but had shopped around for someone willing to kill him. Pryor bludgeoned Stephen with a crowbar twelve times. When Stephen survived, Adele handed Pryor a firearm. Three shots finished the job. The case would consume nearly four years of courtroom battles, produce a mistrial, and ultimately force Adele into a guilty plea that sent her to the Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women for the rest of her natural life. This is the story of how a marriage rotted from the inside out, and what one woman was willing to do to escape it.