Bizarre break-in at '90 Day Fiancé' star's salon cracks open unsolved murder case
When Christine Cramer, co-owner of the Martson Hair Company in suburban York, Pennsylvania, arrived at the salon the morning of Feb. 1, a Wednesday, she noticed bottles of hair product were scattered on the floor just inside the front door.
At first, she blamed her staff. They had been to a bridal show that weekend and she thought “the girls,” as she called them, had just tossed the bottles into the shop when they unloaded upon returning from the show. “Couldn’t they have put them in the shelf?” she asked herself.
She called her business partner, Ashley Martson. Martson is the face of the salon, having earned fame as a contestant on TLC’s reality TV show “90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After” in 2019. It didn’t end happily ever after, though. She did get married but divorced the man as the show was still airing after learning he had cheated on her.
“I think we’ve been robbed,” Cramer told Martson.
“What do you mean ‘think’?” replied Martson, who was at an orthodontist's appointment with her daughter.
When Cramer described the condition of the shop – it had been ransacked – Martson said, “Hang up the phone and call the police."
Cramer did.
That set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to a suspect in a homicide that had occurred six months earlier 50 miles away from the salon, a crime that had stymied investigators.
“Do you want to know the craziest part?” Martson said during a recent interview. “I knew the victim.”
The murder
Four minutes after midnight on Aug. 6, 2022, the Berks County (Pennsylvania) Department of Emergency Services received a call from someone reporting a suspicious vehicle on the property of Pinnacle Transport.
Pinnacle Transport is headquartered in Elkhart, Indiana, specializing in delivering manufactured houses, RVs, travel trailers and utility trucks, and it has a satellite operation south of Reading in Berks County, not far from the Morgantown exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The sprawling gravel lot on that night housed dozens of trucks.
The person who called 911 was one of two security guards on duty that night, Rafael Yambo, who patrolled the lot every night from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. with his brother-in-law, Troy Rickenbach. They were charged with being on the lookout for catalytic-converter thieves, as there had been a rash of such thefts in recent months.
So, when Yambo spotted the beam of a flashlight about 150 yards south of his Chevy Express security van, near the edge of the parking lot, he sensed something was amiss. As he and Rickenbach approached the area, Yambo would tell police later, his headlights washed over a dark-colored mini-van parked by the edge of the lot.
That’s when he called 911.
While he was on the phone with emergency dispatchers, he and Rickenbach got out of the truck. Rickenbach approached the van, and Yambo hung back and watched. Rickenbach shined his flashlight inside the van and immediately ran back to his brother-in-law, saying there was someone in the van, crouched down in the passenger seat.
It was then that Yambo saw a man with “a scruffy beard” and “a sloppy build” standing about five feet away, pointing a gun at him. He and Rickenbach jumped in their truck – Yambo driving and Rickenbach in the passenger seat – and just as Yambo slammed the truck into reverse, the first of five shots rang out.
The first bullet struck Yambo’s right forearm. “Rickenbach told him he was hit as well,” Pennsylvania State Police Trooper George Bailey would write in a criminal complaint later.
Yambo fell between the seats of the truck and “played dead,” he told police, as he listened to the shooter’s footsteps crunching on the gravel as he approached the truck. Then he heard the steps retreating, and a few seconds later he heard the van “peeling out.”
He stayed between the seats for 20 or 30 seconds before pulling himself up. He did not see the van or the person who shot him and Rickenbach.
He looked at his brother-in-law. He wasn’t breathing, a bullet had ripped through his chest, the autopsy revealing later that the .32-caliber round pierced both Rickenbach’s lungs and severed his aorta.
Police processed the scene and collected evidence, including an air dam that had apparently broken off the front of the suspect’s minivan and five bullet casings and five projectiles.
Yambo, a few days later, provided an FBI sketch artist with a detailed enough description to produce a composite drawing of the suspect.
For five months, the investigation languished. Investigators had a lot of evidence, but none at the time provided a roadmap leading to a suspect.
That was until police in Springettsbury Township in suburban York County – about an hour’s drive away from Pinnacle Transport – began investigating a burglary at a hair salon.
"It was like watching 'Dumb and Dumber'"
The morning of the burglary, Cramer noticed that, in addition to the salon being trashed, one of the security cameras mounted on the wall in the small office/storage room at the back of the salon had been ripped from the wall.
Unbeknownst to the burglars, though, there were other cameras inside the salon, and they recorded the crime. The footage shows that at 7 p.m., one of the men ducks his head in the back door and then leaves. He returns at 2 a.m., accompanied by another man, and they proceed to tear through the salon, looking for anything of value. They took hair products, hair clippers, curling irons and other tools of the trade. They also took a 200-pound Sentry Link safe. The safe contained only about $400, Cramer said. But one of the staff had stored some personal items in the safe, including her passport, her children’s passports and birth certificates and her deceased fiancé's cell phone and dog tags from his time in the service. Her fiancé had passed away about a decade ago, and those were the only things she had to remind her of him.
When she watched the video, Martson said, “It was like watching ‘Dumb and Dumber.’” At one point, she said, one of the men turns to the other and says, “You got your gloves on, right?” Recalling the moment, Martson laughed and said, “I don’t know what they were thinking.”
The men took all they could, emptying trash cans to fill with hair products and other items, and left.
Two hours later, the video shows one of the men returning to the salon, dashing inside, picking something up and leaving in a hurry.
“These were not criminal masterminds,” Cramer said.
A surveillance camera at a neighboring business captured the image of a black Chrysler Town and Country minivan, including the plate number, parked behind the building.
The minivan was registered to David Hartsook, a 34-year-old man who lived in York.
"They would all go to jail"
Springettsbury Township Police obtained a search warrant for Hartsook’s home on Feb. 3.
When police executed the search warrant later that day, they found Hartsook with his wife, Rebecca, and his 37-year-old brother, Richard. They also allegedly found a lot of the items stolen from the hair salon, including some of the hair products and the handgun, a Smith and Wesson M&P Shield 9mm semi-automatic pistol. According to documents, David Hartsook told police that he and his brother Richard had burglarized the hair salon and, after removing the cash and the gun, had ditched the safe in a dumpster. Police seized the evidence, along with David Hartsook’s minivan.
David and Richard Hartsook were taken into custody and, eventually, taken to Central Booking.
While David Hartsook was awaiting arraignment, according to the criminal complaint, he called his wife and “told her there was a firearm in the residence and she needed to dispose of it."
Rebecca Hartsook did not dispose of the firearm, a .32-caliber Colt 1903 semi-automatic pistol.
Instead, she called the police and handed the gun over to a detective from Springettsbury Township.
She told police later that her husband said “they would all go to jail if she did not get rid of the firearm.” He did not specify why he wanted her to get rid of the gun, according to the complaint.
The Colt was sent to the state police firearms lab, and forensic tests matched it to the bullets that were fired on that August night in a remote parking lot miles away, the same bullets that shattered Yambo’s right forearm and pierced Rickenbach’s lungs and aorta.
The eyewitness
On March 29, state police investigators interviewed David Hartsook at the York station. Hartsook denied being at the scene of the homicide and told them he didn’t know why his minivan’s air dam would be there. He also said he had never seen the semi-automatic .32-caliber Colt. He didn’t know that his wife had turned a gun over to police.
“When asked about the homicide and the physical evidence,” Trooper Bailey wrote in the criminal complaint, “Hartsook seemed to become frustrated and took offense to being questioned about it.”
During the interview, according to the complaint, he mentioned a man named Arty Johnson, a co-worker who had been living at the Hartsook’s place at the time.
On May 11, troopers spoke with Arty Johnson – Arthur Johnson III. While he was living there, he told troopers, he had assisted David Hartsook in stealing catalytic converters. He told them that in August 2022, Hartsook asked him to go along with him to Morgantown to scope out a potential location to steal the devices.
He told the troopers that after Hartsook parked in a concealed area by the lot, Hartsook got out of the van. Johnson said he reclined the passenger seat in an attempt to hide. He was scared, he said, and wanted to leave. Shortly after they arrived, he told the troopers, he saw lights illuminating the van and believed that a flashlight had been shined on him.
Then, he told the troopers, he heard four or five gunshots.
When they returned to the Hartsook home, he told the troopers, he got into an argument with Hartsook “about why Hartsook shot at whoever was in the field.” The dispute “became physical,” according to the criminal complaint, and Rebecca Hartsook “stepped in and separated them.”
Not long after that, Johnson moved out of the Hartsook’s home and hadn’t spoken to him since.
On May 18, state police charged David Hartsook with the murder of Rickenbach and wounding Yambo.
The burglary arrest put the Berks homicide case together
Berks County District Attorney John Adams said the evidence collected in the burglary investigation “led us to put this together.”
Up until that point, he said, they had evidence, but could not tie it to a suspect. After the burglary, he said, it all came together.
“But for that investigation we probably wouldn’t be able to identify David Hartsook as the perpetrator,” Adams said. “With that evidence, we were able to put the case together.”
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Society made him do it?
After the Hartsook brothers were arrested for the burglary at the hair salon, Martson took to social media to spread the word about the terrible person who had ransacked her business and stole about $20,000 worth of hair products, shears, curling irons, hair clippers and other tools of her trade.
She posted their photos to allow her followers on Instagram, Facebook and other platforms to get a gander at the man she said had victimized her.
Her reach on social media is wide – on Instagram alone, she has 375,000 followers – the result of her appearance on “90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After.”
Because of her presence on social media, a good number of people were expressing that they shared Martson’s intense dislike of the Hartsook brothers.
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A woman sent Martson a message on Facebook that read, "They're my family. I'm sorry they stole from you. Please let them go. I understand you but society isn't right now a days. You don't understand what or why they would do this but society is pushing more and more to do these things."
The “society made him do it” excuse really angered Martson.
Martson poked around the internet and found that David Hartsook had posted a profile on a Facebook dating group called “Thai Girl Loves Western Guy.” In his message on the site, David Hartsook wrote, and this is verbatim, from a screenshot, “Looking to talk and see where it goes I love the the USA I own my company and work really hard to live an enjoyable life.”
Martson’s comment on the screengrab read, “My robber is also looking for love, I guess when his wife isn’t around.”
She posted it on Instagram and said she sent a copy to Hartsook's wife.
It comes back 'full circle.'
After David Hartsook was arrested for the homicide in Berks County. Martson looked up news reports of the homicide.
She was shocked.
She knew Rickenbach.
It’s kind of complicated, but she said her best friend from elementary school’s ex-partner was best friends with Rickenbach, and years ago they hung out together. She spoke with her friend and others, and they reminded her of the places they used to frequent and that Rickenbach would be with them. She described him as “an acquaintance.”
“It just came back full circle,” Martson said. “It’s weird. My whole life is weird, so...”
Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.