Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  From BJ’s perspective, Erika had perhaps passed the ultimate test. He knew now that he could trust her. He could ask of her the most intimate, the most personal, and the most horrible of things to do, and even though she might kick and scream, he understood that she was loyal and would likely do whatever he asked.

  Now, that’s one story of the abortion. A friend of Erika’s tells a completely different version of this event in Erika’s life.

  BJ had lived in North Carolina with some friends, a SEAL buddy and his wife. For a while, even after they were married, Erika lived with them. But they had, according to the friend, “moved out by this point.... We had heard they were having problems and she had been causing him a lot of problems by then with the military, calling his command and getting in his business.”

  BJ’s SEAL buddy’s wife was pregnant. Erika knocked on the door one day to have a chat with her. She had just been to her therapist, she said, whose office was close by.

  Erika’s pupils were so dilated, the friend recalled, you could barely see the color of her eyes.

  “I just wanted you to know that I was pregnant and we (meaning she and BJ) decided that I should get an abortion. He’s been doing so much coke (cocaine) and I’ve been popping so many pills, it was better this way.... It probably wouldn’t be safe for me to have a baby.” She even said she’d just discussed it with her therapist, and the doctor agreed.

  “Well,” the friend said, “you did the right thing. Don’t feel bad about it.”

  Was this Erika covering for her husband’s craziness? Her friend didn’t think so. Erika seemed fairly sincere that day.

  “The only people that truly know what happened are them.”

  17

  “911 . . . ?”

  If what Erika later said is true, sometime around 2:30 A.M., Joshua, Geney, Erika, and BJ walked along the beach up to the Rainbow Condominium and entered room 1101, BJ and Erika’s spacious, elegant flat, after stopping at the Atlantis, where Geney and Joshua were staying.

  When they first got inside, Erika later explained, Geney and Joshua were overwhelmed by how nice the place was.

  “Wow. Look at this,” Geney marveled, looking around, walking in and out of various rooms.

  Erika walked toward the refrigerator to get beers for everyone. As she did that, BJ, Joshua, and Geney sat down at the glass table just off the kitchen, broke out the marijuana Joshua had brought with him, and began chitchatting.

  Geney soon got up. “I don’t want to change down here,” she said.

  The plan had been for everyone to smoke a joint, get into their bathing suits, and then take a swirl in the hot tub.

  “Go upstairs, then,” Erika said. She pointed. The master bathroom (with the hot tub) was right at the top of the stairs, to the left, off the bedroom.

  Joshua and BJ sat and smoked. A few minutes later, Geney came back down the stairs and sat with them. As Erika later explained the scene to Detective Scott Bernal, “I’m not even paying much attention to them or sitting with them because I have no interest in smoking.”

  Erika was not a fan of marijuana; again, her thing was snorting Xanax.

  The one thing about Erika was that no matter where she went or what she was doing, all of her personal belongings were organized. She had a place for everything. One drawer was just for blue jeans; another for underwear; another for bras; another for T-shirts of a certain color; and so on. Moreover, she had always put things in the same place so she knew exactly where they were—it gave her a sense of power over her obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She could essentially relax.

  While Geney and BJ were at the table smoking, Joshua got up for a moment and wandered around the living room. Erika began looking for her brown Hooters bag, which she always kept in a certain place inside the condo; then she noticed her purse was sitting on the “other side of the room,” where she said she would have never put it herself. Putting the two together, in Erika’s panic-stricken, drug-induced, alcohol-soaked mind, she said later that she believed at that moment that someone had taken the Hooters bag—and, worse, moved her pocketbook.

  Where is my shit? What the hell is going on here? Erika thought.

  Without telling anyone, she started looking around the first floor of the condo. As you walked in, the laundry room was right in front of you. To the left of that were two bedrooms, a bathroom attached to one. Walking down a short hallway toward the east end of the condo, off to the right was a set of stairs leading to the second floor, almost directly across from the kitchen. From there, there was that glass table with six chairs, in back of which were three bar stools against a counter/ bar opening into the kitchen. Before the balcony, which spanned the entire width of the unit, were two roomy rec areas with couches, end tables, entertainments centers, and a television.

  After a moment, Joshua sat back down at the kitchen table. The three of them were having a good old time: Joshua, Geney, and BJ. Laughing and drinking beers and just talking.

  Erika was beginning to go into full-scale panic mode, without telling anyone, she later claimed.

  She looked in a few obvious places to see if she could find her pocketbook, but it wasn’t there. Under the white cushions of one couch; under the sky blue cushions of the other couch.

  Nothing.

  So she ran upstairs.

  When she got into the bedroom, her purse was sitting on the counter by the bed. But when she looked inside, Erika noticed that her little red Coach handbag, in which she carried anything of value—including her $10,000 Canary diamond, cross, wallet with all her credit cards, cash, and her pill case—was missing.

  It wasn’t inside her purse, where she had always kept it.

  At least this was the story she told Detective Bernal. “All this stuff is missing and I don’t know where it is,” she later explained. “I don’t want to freak out, because they’re all sitting downstairs smoking, and I’m like, ‘I’m not gonna make a scene, I’m just gonna try and find my stuff.’”

  By this point, Erika started flipping out, running around, overturning pillows and blankets and looking inside cabinets, the bathroom, the closets. That feeling was coming on: of not being able to control the situation. She sensed an anxiety attack in the works if she didn’t find that Coach handbag with her valuables in it.

  Her heart was racing.

  Her pulse beating.

  Faster.

  Steadier.

  “So, at that point,” she continued to Bernal, “I decided to call 911 because I seriously thought that they (Joshua and Geney) were trying to pull some scam where they were stealing those things. I had showed those things to Geney earlier that evening. And the drugs were gone and these people have marijuana, so, of course, they do drugs themselves to some extent. So they would be interested in one or two hundred pills of the Xanax.”

  In total alarm mode now, Erika began frantically searching for her things once again. There were two strangers downstairs in her condo, and now her jewelry and her drugs and her money were all missing.

  What am I supposed to do?

  Not once, she later claimed, did she think of notifying BJ, a U.S. Navy SEAL, who could have likely taken on Geney and Joshua by himself and made them admit to where the items were. Nor did she think to confront Geney and Joshua herself.

  Instead, she contemplated calling the police, knowing that they all had drugs.

  With the feeling that Joshua and Geney had stolen her things and that she and BJ had somehow invited a pair of thieves into their lives, Erika said later that she then picked up the telephone (without telling anyone) and dialed 911 from the upstairs bedroom. Granted, this bedroom is almost directly above where Joshua, Geney, and BJ were sitting at the glass table. The place wasn’t big enough to where you could go upstairs and not be heard. The walls and floor, moreover, were not soundproof. Unless she whispered, the three of them downstairs would definitely have heard Erika’s end of any conversation. If not plain, easily decipherable words, at the least mumbled wor
ds that would, without a doubt, send BJ into a “Who are you talking to at this time of night?” mode. Erika had made private calls from the condo before, she later said. And those were all made from her cell phone, either from the upstairs outside balcony or the outside balcony downstairs.

  According to telephone records, the first 911 call Erika made was at 3:01 A.M.

  “Hello,” the operator said. “Ocean City Police.”

  “Hello . . . ,” Erika said. She was not whispering. In fact, she was talking fairly loudly.

  “Yes?”

  A clicking sound could be heard in the background.

  “Hello . . . hello. . . Ocean City Police.”

  “Yes,” Erika responded.

  “Ma’am, did you want the police?” the operator said in a rather frustrated tone.

  “Yes, I did, sorry . . .”

  “Where?” the operator started to say, but Erika interrupted.

  “Yes, I did, but I think there is another person on the line right now.” Erika paused. All of a sudden, she sounded sleepy and out of it. Drunk. High. She did not sound as if she was in some sort of frenzy over her missing jewelry and money. She was actually calm. “Hello?” she said, trying to get whoever had possibly picked up the other line in the condo to respond. There was a telephone in the kitchen (attached to the wall) right by the glass table.

  Then there were a few seconds of silence.

  “Do you have a direct line I can call you back at?” Erika asked the operator.

  The dispatcher gave Erika the telephone number.

  Erika had trouble with it at first, repeating the numbers slowly, so the operator repeated it even slower, like she was talking to a child.

  “OK,” Erika said. “Thanks.”

  They hung up.

  Next, Erika later insisted, she heard someone coming up the stairs, so she hid. With her fears alleviated a few moments later, she called 911 back—this after reassuring herself that no one was coming.

  This seems to be an odd representation—or, perhaps, misrepresentation—of the facts and doesn’t gel with what was later learned. Erika’s husband was downstairs at this time getting high with their new friends. Her husband, a former SEAL who had graduated at the top of his class, was a trained killing machine. This was the same guy who had been trained to handle and subdue people with his bare hands. The same man, she claimed, she didn’t want to ever be apart from. BJ Sifrit was downstairs. Both Erika and BJ had guns. Upstairs, in the bedroom, in one of the drawers, was a loaded .45-caliber weapon. Erika could have easily armed herself. Somewhere in the same room where Erika was standing was a .357 Magnum.

  But Erika claimed she picked up the telephone and called 911 a second time (which she did), because she was frightened and scared that Geney and Joshua would get away.

  “We believe,” two OCPD detectives later told me, “that Joshua and Geney were already dead when Erika called 911.”

  And one more time, the operator picked up, asking, “911, what’s your emergency?”

  “Yes, I have an emergency at my apartment,” Erika said during that second call. This time, she sounded quite calm, and, although a bit tipsy, she did not sound panicked in any way.

  More important, she was not whispering.

  “What kind of emergency do you have?”

  “Umm . . . there are people in my house that I don’t know . . . and,” Erika said, sounding more out of it than she had previously, “my purse is suddenly missing . . . and I think I’m going to have a robbery here. . . .”

  What one detective theorized later was that Geney and Joshua were already in the bathroom upstairs, shot dead and lying on the floor. And this phone call was a way to cover up the noise those shots had made, if someone in the condominium complex, awoken by the pops, had called 911.

  Going back to Erika’s story, what she told 911 made little sense. Her purse wasn’t missing. Her jewelry bag inside her purse—so she later claimed—was the item that had turned up missing. And her last comment—“I think I’m going to have a robbery here”—reflected the incoherent state Erika was in at the time.

  But even more revealing, why did Erika say she didn’t know these people? She had spent the entire night with them, knew their names, where they worked, where they were staying. Furthermore, if it was a true emergency, as she had later purported it to be, why didn’t Erika simply say, “There’s an emergency here, send somebody fast”?

  “OK, there’s people in your apartment at this time?” the operator asked, hoping to clarify.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll connect you to the police. Stay on the line.”

  “Hey,” Erika said.

  “What?” the operator responded before making the connection.

  “I’m upstairs inside a bedroom, where they don’t know where I am. . . .”

  This was another strange comment. BJ was supposedly still downstairs smoking a joint with Geney and Joshua.

  Why didn’t Erika mention BJ?

  BJ, Joshua, and Geney certainly knew where Erika was; they had seen her dart up the stairs after standing around downstairs while they rolled and then began smoking that joint—this was according to what Erika later told police herself. How could they not know where she had gone? In addition, if Erika was panicking, why hadn’t someone—BJ, especially—followed her up the stairs? Why would BJ, Geney, and Joshua continue partying by themselves, with Erika freaking out upstairs? The way in which Erika later spun the story, she was in and out of it all night, snorting Xanax, blacking out, snorting more, blacking out, and coming to. How was she now, well after 3:00 A.M., sober enough to not only make all of these decisions, but then later recall them with such exactness?

  “OK, I’ll connect you to the police,” the dispatcher said. “You can tell them, OK?”

  The phone went dead for a moment as the dispatcher connected Erika to the OCPD. After some ringing, a new operator came on the line and asked what the situation was.

  “Hi,” Erika said in an unsteady tone, almost as if she was ready to fall out at any moment, “there are peop—” she began to say, but before she could finish the word, perhaps conveniently, the phone line went abruptly dead, as if someone had cut the line or had hung up the phone. Studying the telephone and where it was inside the upstairs bedroom, one would have a hard time ripping the line out of the wall. The phone was in the center of the bed headrest. There was a hole drilled in the headrest, in which the phone cord went down toward the floor and plugged into the wall jack in back of the bed. To rip it out of the wall, one would have to jump on the bed, grab the bulky table phone, and pull it out of the wall. It could be done, certainly, but it would take time and energy, neither of which Erika had at this very moment.

  Just then, Erika later claimed, Joshua came up the stairs and started asking her what was going on. He was by himself.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” Joshua supposedly asked.

  “Nothing . . .”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  Erika later told Detective Bernal, “Joshua was being all sweet, almost like he knew that I knew what was going on, and he was trying to smooth me over by coming on to me.”

  At that moment, Erika claimed later, Joshua put his hands around her waist and started to kiss her neck, allegedly saying, “What’s the matter? We’re all having a good time here. What’s the matter?”

  “My shit is missing. Where is my stuff?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look, my stuff is gone! My purse was not where I put it. It was moved. And everything of value is out of it—and my Hooters bag is gone!”

  Erika was getting heated. Angry and verbal. Causing a scene.

  “Come on, what are you talking about?” Joshua said. He backed away from Erika at this point.

  Erika got scared, she later said, and yelled, “Beej! Beej! Come up here.”

  BJ and Geney ran up the stairs immediately after Erika yelled, according to Erika’s version of the night.

&n
bsp; The implication she made when they arrived was that Joshua was causing her some sort of problem by putting the moves on her.

  “What’s wrong?” BJ asked. He was looking at Joshua, then at Erika. “What is this? What the fuck is going on?”

  “Beej, my shit is missing,” Erika said. She sounded mad. Upset. She was suggesting in her tone that they were being robbed. This was the first time, she insisted later, that she had let any of them know that she believed her things had been stolen.

  BJ’s SIG SAUER .45 was downstairs inside the Jeep, where he had always kept it. Erika thought it, too, was missing.

  “Beej, all of our stuff is missing—where is your gun?”

  “Lainey, you know,” BJ said, indicating that he always kept the gun in the Jeep. “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me where your gun is, Beej!”

  “Well, it’s not where I put it!” BJ said, picking up on what Erika was trying to say.

  They were playing a game now with Geney and Joshua. BJ even stomped around in a circle for a moment and confronted Joshua, getting right up in his face, screaming like a drill sergeant, “Where’s our shit? Did you fucking take our shit?”

  “Everything is gone,” Erika said. “Our pills. Our cash. Our jewelry.”

  It’s odd that a SEAL would misplace or allow his gun to be stolen—a gun, mind you, that BJ had kept in a holster on his side or in the crook of his pants most of the time that he and Erika were in Ocean City—the same gun, in fact, he had on him at Seacrets earlier that night.

  Erika said she was getting scared. The situation was quickly becoming uncomfortable. She knew when BJ was about to snap and go off on a tangent. He was almost there. That look in his eyes. The way he was staring at Joshua and Geney.

  He was planning something.

  “Give me your gun,” BJ said to Erika. On the top of the bed headrest was Erika’s .357 Magnum. She admitted later that she had put it there herself after walking into the condo from Seacrets earlier that night.