Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  Part II

  Snakes, Crocodiles, Drugs, Murder

  9

  Pill Snorter

  It was near noon when Erika and BJ Sifrit left for Ocean City, Maryland, on Saturday, May 25, 2002, from their apartment outside Altoona, Pennsylvania. Erika had just finished a nail-grooming appointment at the local salon, and she and BJ took off in their Jeep Cherokee immediately after. It was a bit odd that Erika and BJ had a Jeep Cherokee—because they also drove an Audi. Cookie and Mitch Grace drove an Audi and a Jeep Cherokee. As much as Erika had said later that she despised her parents’ storybook marriage and close friendship, she was certainly doing her best to mimic every little nuance of it.

  That Saturday had been a summerlike morning. From the moment the sun rose, it was hot and sticky. As Erika strolled out of the nail salon into the waiting Jeep, she caught a glare from the sun against her already heavily tanned face. She and BJ were ready now to head south-east, toward Ocean City.

  To drink.

  And drug.

  And do whatever else had given them that thrill both had been chasing lately by breaking into Hooters restaurants and retail stores of all types—a thrill, however, that the burglaries just weren’t satisfying anymore.

  Erika had some Xanax and Valium on her. She still had several hundred pills left over from a gross of about three hundred that she said she had purchased in South America. It was a good thing. Erika was into snorting Xanax these days. Just popping a few pills with a beer wasn’t doing it anymore.

  “We bought them in Chile,” Erika later told Scott Bernal. “They were like ninety for a dollar. . . . My doctor at home had gotten word from my mother that my husband and his . . . friends had taken all of what my doctor prescribed me, so he refused to prescribe me anymore.”

  She’d packed the pills in her Coach purse before they left the apartment that morning. Erika was crazy about her purse, not to mention the jewelry inside it that she had collected and usually kept with her wherever she went. Jewelry and the finer things in life had made the difference to Erika: Some said she relished in gloating over what others couldn’t afford. She got off on the fact that she had it and others didn’t.

  “Stop and get some beer,” Erika told BJ as they headed out of town on the freeway.

  “Yeah,” BJ said excitedly. BJ was drinking more these days. Any chance he could, really. Stuffing that dream of his deeper down into an abyss of alcohol and criminal behavior.

  They stopped at a gas station about halfway between Pennsylvania and Ocean City, and Erika picked up a twelve-pack of Bud Light. They could get more when they arrived in Ocean City.

  Bottoms up!

  As BJ drove, Erika popped two Xanax and washed them down with a slug of her Bud Light.

  After the long ride down Route 1, part of which went alongside the Delaware coastline, in through Rehoboth Beach and onto the Ocean City strip, BJ parked the Jeep, then hauled their baggage up to the top-floor penthouse, room 1101, inside the Rainbow Condominiums. He would have made Erika do it, she later claimed, as he generally made her do most of the heavy lifting around the apartment back home, but he was excited to get up in the room and party, and so he helped.

  The room was spectacular. A friend of Mitch’s owned the building. Mitch and his company had done some of the construction work. Anytime Mitch (or Erika and BJ) needed the room, Mitch picked up the phone.

  When they got into the room, BJ filled the fridge with more beer, broke out Erika’s Xanax, and crushed it up on the glass table, just beyond the kitchen. Erika, kneeling over her husband with a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill in hand, started the party all over again.

  BJ didn’t want any. He was more of a joint-and-beer man.

  The view from the penthouse’s balcony was magnificent: something out of a magazine.

  Coastline for miles.

  Sand.

  Surf.

  The infamous Ocean City Boardwalk.

  What more could they ask for? What a life. BJ smiled at his wife. When he was feeling good, BJ and Erika got along well. One could say with certainty that Erika was frightened of BJ on some levels. On others, Erika was the yin to BJ’s yang.

  “Dynamite” was how one source described BJ, “but Erika was the wick.”

  “Without her, he would have been fine. And without him, she would have been fine,” said another source close to the case. “Together, though, watch out. Something happened when they were together.”

  Indeed, Erika and BJ were like a virus, feeding off each other’s weaknesses, while using each other’s strengths to manipulate situations to get what they wanted. Staying at the Rainbow, which was then one of the higher-quality condominiums on the Ocean City strip, turned out to be one of those perks BJ had enjoyed in marrying Erika.

  At one time, Mitch Grace had a large company. He’d started the small construction business a few decades ago and it had grown into a massive workforce of over 150 employees through its first incarnation, but then “averaged about seventy-five for about ten years,” Mitch said later, “and now [2007] with our need for finances at its worst, I am hoping to get back up to fifteen [employees] in the spring [of 2008].”

  Mitch’s company had built the likes of high-rises and hotels and office buildings up and down the East Coast.

  No sooner had BJ unpacked and chopped a few lines of Xanax for Erika to snort, when she said, “I want to go to Hooters, Beej.”

  BJ smiled.

  Erika collected Hooters waitress tank tops (which customers couldn’t buy) like baseball cards.

  “I had some of them with me,” she said later, “and I wanted to go there and see if they would trade me. I didn’t have one from Ocean City yet, so the first place we went was to Hooters.”

  At Hooters, BJ and Erika had two pitchers of beer and some hot wings.

  “Hey,” Erika said to one of the waitresses, “where can a girl go for a good time around here?”

  The waitress thought about it. “Seacrets.”

  BJ and Erika looked at each other. Smiled. Seacrets it was.

  So they drove the Jeep back to the Rainbow and boarded the bus out front, where they ran into Joshua and Geney, who paid their fare, and headed off together to the hottest nightspot on the strip, Seacrets.

  10

  Everyone Has Secrets

  The line to get into Seacrets was out the door and around the corner. After one of them in Erika and BJ’s party—which included Geney and Joshua, and now another couple they met on the bus ride over—walked up and asked, the bouncer said it would be an hour, at the least, before they got in.

  “I would much rather have just gone to a hole-in-the-wall,” Erika explained later. “But we were obligated to buy them (Geney and Joshua) a drink.”

  It was that deal BJ had made on the bus: pay our fare and we’ll buy the first round.

  Funny, they had burgled scores of restaurants and retail stores by this point in their marriage, but Erika said later that they were “obligated” and maybe even afraid to burn this couple out of a few bucks.

  So they stood in line and waited.

  Erika became quickly irritated and impatient. As she later put it, “I was losing my high.” She had snorted some Xanax before leaving Hooters, but now Erika was worried that if she didn’t get into the bar soon, that high she had worked so hard to maintain throughout the evening would be lost. On top of that, the Xanax “intensified the alcohol,” she explained. “It just gives you a different high.”

  And she was craving it.

  Erika had started taking the Xanax after BJ had “an affair on me,” she claimed. “And then I started having depression, anxiety attacks, panic, symptoms of obsessive-compulsive [disorder], so my psychiatrist prescribed me Xanax. . . .” She insisted that it was BJ who suggested she snort and take them with booze. He was the one who introduced her to a more intense and a more animated high than simply popping them with a few beers.

  One of the other couples standing in line waiting to get into Seacrets b
esides Joshua and Geney, a couple who had gotten off the bus with them, had taken a walk to a local liquor store and had come back with a six-pack of pony beers.

  “You want one?” the guy asked Erika, BJ, Geney, and Joshua.

  Erika spoke up, “Yeah, thanks.”

  No one else was interested.

  “No problem,” the guy said.

  “Hey, you want to go with me over there,” Erika said to the guy, pointing. She made a gesture with her hand to her nose, giving the impression that she wanted to duck out of line and snort some drugs.

  “No,” the man said.

  “Come on,” Erika insisted.

  “No!”

  So Erika grabbed him by the crook of his arm, latched her arm around his, and pulled the man away from the line.

  “I’m going around the corner over there,” she shouted as Joshua, Geney, and BJ waited, watching her leave. Erika was pointing again to an area near the beach. No one would see her. It was dark out by now. She could zip in between a few cars or the Dumpster and blast a few lines of Xanax with her new friend by her side.

  “I’ll be back,” she said, and took off with the new guy.

  To BJ, it didn’t matter. (“I liked to let her do what she wanted. It didn’t bother me,” he said later.)

  Erika saw it differently. Ever since BJ had cheated on her in October 1999, not even a year into their marriage, she had gone off the deep end when it pertained to doing what she wanted. Erika had found e-mails between BJ and his lover, which explicitly detailed the relationship. She followed him. She had heard him on the telephone talking to the woman, who lived in Arkansas. It was a one-night stand BJ had while on SEAL maneuvers, but turned into a six-week Internet romance when he returned home. Erika said the woman started calling and e-mailing her, which sent her into a “diagnosed serious depression.” She couldn’t even get out of bed at times. Yet, even with all that evidence against him, Erika said, BJ would “not admit to it, because he has no sense of guilt or remorse.”

  Erika walked around the corner of the building, found an out-of-the-way space where no one would see her, and snorted some Xanax.

  There we go . . . there it is . . . back to normal.

  When she returned about fifteen minutes later, she was ready for a drink. She’d gotten that original buzz back and was feeling good. Geney, Joshua, BJ, and the newly met woman were still in line, but a lot closer to the door.

  The woman whose male friend had left with Erika leaned over to BJ and asked him, “Doesn’t that bother you that your wife walked off with another guy like that?”

  BJ didn’t have much to say.

  Erika was getting restless again and said to the guy she had strolled off with, “Hey, she’s cute,” referring to the woman he was with. “She’s really cute.”

  “This is my friend,” he said.

  “She’s nice . . . cutie!” Erika said again.

  As the woman listened to Erika, she felt that she was making a pass at her. It was “uncomfortable,” the woman said later, and would continue to be throughout the night as Erika continued making strange remarks to the woman. There was one time when Erika began rubbing the woman’s arm slowly, petting her sexily, saying, “Let’s go into the bathroom . . . me and you.”

  The woman refused.

  “Come on,” Erika demanded.

  “No.”

  Later, police would learn that Erika had dabbled in homosexuality, but it had always been in the context of her marriage. She claimed that BJ wanted to bring another female into the bedroom. He had gotten bored with their sex life, apparently. The deal was, however, that BJ could touch Erika; the other female could touch Erika; and BJ couldn’t touch the other female.

  11

  Don’t Shoot

  After waiting for an hour in line, they were finally inside the club: dancing, drinking, drugging, and just living it up—the way that Erika had grown accustomed to over the past year.

  Joshua had given BJ bus fare and BJ had responded kindly, per his promise, by buying Geney and Joshua a drink. Inside the club, lights flashed and pulsated in strobes all around them, the music of a DJ blared so loud you could barely hear the person next to you. Erika was nervous, cagey, and out of it, she claimed, after doing a shot of her favorite liquor, vodka. Watching her, Geney noticed how “out of it” Erika seemed. BJ and Erika were young; Geney certainly must have registered that. Both Erika and BJ were twenty-four years old. Hell, they were just kids, really. But still, there was something going on with Erika, Geney noticed. Throughout the night, Erika had been consumed with the idea of losing her high—or, rather, maintaining it. Even though she had snorted some additional Xanax outside while waiting in line, and more when she got into the club, Erika was preoccupied with keeping the party going. It wasn’t enough to do shots and beers.

  She needed more.

  She demanded more.

  As the night progressed, at some point, Erika ordered more shots for everyone. This one must have been the tipping point, because Erika said later that she “blacked out” for a time after downing this second shot of vodka, but then she recalled BJ slapping her on the arm somewhere near midnight.

  “How cool is that, girl, you got in here with your piece?” BJ said in a slur of words. “Some security they have here,” he said, laughing.

  Geney was standing nearby. She had a quizzical look about her: What’s he talking about? she wondered.

  BJ was referring to Erika making it past security with her .357 Magnum revolver—a gun Erika rarely left home without. There were four security guards at the door with wands.

  Erika had made it past them all.

  Indeed, there it was, tucked in her waistband, as if she were Annie Oakley. The way Erika talked it up, she was “Bonnie” to BJ’s “Clyde”—two names, in fact, Erika explained to Joshua and Geney, they had given to their pythons, one of which was back at the Rainbow right now. They had cobras, too. Even a crocodile. BJ had named the cobra Hitler, after one of his and Erika’s idols. In private, BJ had made no secret to Erika of the fact that he was a racist, according to what Erika later said. Erika would later refer to BJ as a control freak who had become mentally and physically abusive over the short span of their marriage. But tonight they were partners, living up to that “Bonnie and Clyde” image. Erika had laughed as she explained to Geney and Joshua how they had acquired the nickname.

  Erika smiled at BJ’s announcement. Actually, it was more at the way in which he demeaned the security guards by suggesting that a woman like Erika could get a loaded weapon into a popular, packed nightclub.

  “Yeah,” Erika said, stammering. “Imagine that.”

  And yet, it was probably that innocent appearance of being so small and delicate that had allowed Erika to get the gun into the club to begin with.

  Either way, Geney walked over to Erika. Geney was concerned. Worried about the gun. Geney liked to party. After all, she and Joshua were on a short vacation. But what type of people had they met?

  Guns. Snakes. Crocodiles. Xanax. Hitler.

  That’s one hell of a combination.

  “Why would you have guns? Why would you need guns?” Geney asked Erika (who spoke in detail about this conversation later on to Detective Scott Bernal). Geney was referring to BJ’s gun, too.

  Erika laughed, screaming over the loud music. “I’ve only had mine for a few months. It was a gift from BJ.”

  Later, Erika was asked if it was customary for her and BJ to carry guns.

  “Yes, I always carried my Smith and Wesson in my red Coach bag. I’m addicted to Coach! I even carry my pills and jewelry in a little Coach pouch inside my Coach bag.” BJ, she added, went for the more rugged, manly look, and carried his gun inside his waistband, or wore it on his side in a leather shoulder holster. But on the night they met Geney and Joshua, Erika said, she did have her .357 in the club. Being around BJ and his SEAL friends so often, Erika continued, had made her immune to the sight of weapons. “With me, it’s like, like, if I sat arou
nd with ten SEALs drinking in some bar, they all had weapons, and there’s ten pistols laying on the table. That’s just the way it is, you know—I got used to it.”

  Joshua stepped in as Geney was asking Erika about the guns. He could tell Geney was getting worried.

  “It’s no big deal, Geney,” Joshua said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  They had a third weapon also.

  “But that was in the Jeep,” Erika said later. “It never leaves the console of the Jeep.”

  12

  Natural Born Lovers

  The Erika Sifrit of 2002 hanging out in Ocean City with her dishonorably discharged husband was quite a different person from the Altoona girl and basketball star back in the days before she met BJ. It was as if BJ had brought out all of Erika’s repressed nature and hidden evil desires. The intercourse between their personalities was charged with a doomed disaster. It was almost as if BJ knew there was a dirty girl in there somewhere that he could exploit and raise whenever he wanted her to come out. BJ loved it, of course. It fed his enormous ego. Yet, it also added to an underlying will he had developed, probably during his Navy SEAL training, to make the people around him believe he was this quietly tamed machine of power—that because he had made it through what some claimed to be the most rigorous military training on record, having graduated from the SEALs at the top of his class as honor man, BJ was somehow a different human being: stronger, able to conduct himself one way—and be totally planning something different in another.

  A chameleon. Sneaky. A pragmatist.

  Erika would later write to friends and detail her view of the marriage during this period. She said that her “final weakness,” when all was said and done, was that she loved BJ more than life, she penned.

  He was her entire being.

  Her lifeline.

  Her inspiration.

  Motivation.

  There were times during the marriage, Erika went on to note, when they seemed to be at their best, working together as a fine-tuned machine. It was as if they had been living out some sort of fantasy.