Stack Overflow Error

I am getting a stack overflow error for my method that recursively gets the height of an AVL tree. The odd thing is that it returns the height of the tree the first time I call that method, but when I call it again later on, I get that error, which I does not make any sense to me. I have a base case, where it is supposed to stop when the node is null, but it never reaches that. Also, when I print out the values, it alternates b/w three values: 5, 4, and 24. Something else, which I think is important to state, is that if I put the print statement before my base case, the IF, I get a warning stating that my entire IF statement is dead code...but why?

is that everytime I insert/delete a value into the AVL tree I must make sure that it is height balanced (none of the siblings may have a difference in height from each other > 1); if its not height then I rotate certain nodes accordingly. The first 10 items that I input are: 100, 50, 24, 200, 190, 10, 5, 190, 100 and 4. The pre and in order prints of these, from the console are:

PRE ORDER: 100 10 5 4 24 50 200 190 100 190
IN ORDER: 4 5 10 24 50 100 100 190 190 200 .

private int rheight(AVLNode<E> node) {
//if i put the print statement here, my IF becomes "dead code"
if(node == null){
return 0;
}
else{

[code]....