Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  “It’s hard for us to believe this scenario,” Detective Scott Bernal explained to me later. “We found Erika’s prints on the outside window of the bathroom.” Thus, if BJ had kicked the door open as she ran upstairs, there would have been no reason for her to even be on the opposite side of the bathroom window, which you had to lean over the handrail of the balcony to get at. “No, instead, we believe,” Bernal added, “that at this time, when Geney and Joshua were locked in the bathroom, Erika was looking in the window and directing BJ, telling him when to shoot Joshua and where.”

  Continuing along with Erika’s first version of this tragic event, she said that BJ then stormed into the bathroom and went straight for Joshua, who had already been shot in the arm and was holding a towel on the wound.

  Erika said she was pacing in the bedroom: “I did not even want to look in the bathroom.”

  Then, she said, BJ pointed the gun at Joshua’s head and said, “Now you gonna tell me where our shit is?”

  Joshua wouldn’t answer at first. He was obviously in a lot of pain. Geney was terrified, screaming and crying, shaking. Then Joshua said, “I was in the army, you’re in the navy, man. Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this to us?”

  BJ got right up in Joshua’s face at this point, Erika later explained, and said to him, “See you later, motherfucker!” Then he shot Joshua in the head, which dropped him to the floor.

  Erika said she was still in the bedroom when she heard the shot and the thump.

  Joshua did not die immediately, however, according to Erika.

  “Come in here,” BJ said excitedly.

  Joshua was “bubbling, and there was blood coming out of his mouth,” Erika explained.

  “No,” she yelled from the bedroom to BJ. She didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to be a part of it. She didn’t want to know what he had done.

  So BJ came out of the bathroom. He looked at Erika. She had a wet patch easily visible on the front of her pants.

  She had pissed herself.

  “He started making fun of me,” Erika recalled.

  “You fucking pussy,” BJ said, laughing. “You pissed your pants? Oh, my God.” He couldn’t believe it.

  As BJ continued to laugh, Erika started shaking, she later insisted, and crying.

  With Joshua on the ground, his legs straight out in front of himself, Geney had used his body for a shield and curled up into a fetal position, crouched underneath the open area underneath the countertop across from the hot tub. She was naked and whimpering and crying, scared for her life.

  The determined gunman, Erika insisted—and keep in mind that BJ was qualified as an expert marksman with higher ranking in the military for shooting than most anyone else in his unit—missed his first shot at Geney. This, mind you, was while he was standing at point-blank range. The bullet hit the ground and lodged itself in the tile.

  “This is impossible,” Bernal later said. “Think about this. BJ is standing right in front of Geney, Erika tells us, and he misses. No way. You see, it’s those little mistakes that a liar makes that can expose her.”

  Pissed off that he missed, BJ then held the gun up to Geney’s left shoulder and shot down at her, “through her lung,” Erika said, “and it went straight down through her, like he shot her down and hit her” on the top of the left shoulder.

  There was blood everywhere by this point, Erika said. On Geney’s arms. On the floor around them. All over her body.

  The blinds were spattered with blood—apparently from the shots.

  The walls. Behind the hot tub.

  “All over the place.”

  This, with just a few shots from a .357 Magnum.

  Again, Bernal said, it doesn’t make sense.

  Where Geney was curled up underneath the countertop, there was a pool of blood underneath her body, Erika explained, but she couldn’t tell at that point if BJ had slit Geney’s throat or not. At this point, all she said she knew was that BJ had shot the two of them, and that she had played no part in any of it.

  With both Joshua and Geney now dead, BJ walked out of the bathroom and told Erika, who was again pacing in the bedroom, “You go out on the beach right now and you see if they threw our stuff over the balcony, or if there are any cops out there because of the shots.”

  (Erika had explained that there was blood all over the place, especially the floor in the bathroom. And she was certain that she and BJ had gone in and out of the bathroom. Yet, crime scene examiners found zero trace of blood or even bleach on the carpets outside the bathroom.)

  BJ then explained to Erika—again, if you believe what she later said—that it was possible Geney and Joshua had tossed the stuff over the balcony in hopes of grabbing it on their way home.

  “Go now, check that out.”

  Erika reluctantly left.

  Interesting enough, as Erika told this part of her story to Bernal and the state’s attorney (with her lawyer sitting by), she floated something out there that she needed them all to hear.

  “He wanted me to go look for the police because, number one, he was afraid people heard the shots, and, number two, he was afraid from my 911 call that someone might be stopping by . . . and I swear I called 911 before any of that happened. I thought that they were stealing our stuff. I did not do that to cover up. I never even heard of anybody doing that to cover up. I wouldn’t even think that.”

  “I cannot be away from you,” Erika said she pleaded with BJ when he demanded she go outside and take a look around.

  “You go and get the walkie-talkies (which they had used to communicate when doing burgling jobs) out of the Jeep and you bring one up here to me. I’m gonna sit here and watch these bodies.”

  So she went and retrieved the walkie-talkies, and took a quick look around the beach.

  But didn’t find anything.

  “So we looked all over the place,” Erika later said, “. . . and it (her missing purse) was underneath the bed in the master bedroom on the balcony side.”

  So all their stuff—the large Hooters bag with the gun, jewelry, pills, her wallet, their cash, and everything else—was underneath the bed upstairs in the master bedroom, Erika explained.

  Sitting, listening to her, Bernal had the feeling that she was lying about everything. Later, after the interview, Bernal went back and measured the clearance between the bed and the floor.

  Half an inch.

  She was lying.

  As they both stood there staring at their stuff, Erika recalled, with two dead bodies in the bathroom, BJ started to make fun of her again, calling her a sissy for pissing in her pants. Then: “These bodies are going to start stinking,” she claimed BJ told her. “We need to get rid of them.”

  And that’s when things, Erika said, took an unusually graphic, terrifying turn for the worst.

  24

  All Jacked Up

  BJ was fired up, Erika said, when she arrived back upstairs and they had found the belongings they thought Geney and Joshua had stolen. But now, she explained, BJ was faced with the growing dilemma that they had two bodies to get rid of, and nowhere to dispose them. Also, they had a bathroom in a rented condo that was full of blood.

  “Go downstairs and get me some garbage bags,” BJ said to Erika. She could tell his wheels were spinning; he had an idea.

  “He was, like,” she said later, “acting really, really rash. He was, like, all pumped up and just telling me what to do and calling me a pussy and, like, ‘Go do this’ and ‘Go do that.’ All jacked up.”

  Erika ran down the stairs and brought back the bags. Tossed them on the countertop inside the bathroom.

  “They’re white, you stupid bitch,” he said. “What am I gonna do with white bags? They’re fucking white! Go get me black ones.”

  Again, all this traveling in and out of the bathroom by the pair of them, and not one trace of blood was ever located anywhere else in the condo besides this bathroom.

  “I don’t wanna leave, Beej. I cannot leave. I’m too
scared. I cannot drive. I don’t want to leave.” (Erika added later, “It was four in the morning.”)

  “Go get some black garbage bags right now.” BJ wasn’t asking.

  Erika left. She said she went to a dollar store right around the corner from the condo. (This seemed unlikely. A dollar store open all night? Didn’t make sense.) Nonetheless, Erika said she got the bags—maybe at an all-night convenience store, later she couldn’t recall which—and returned.

  By then, BJ had managed to get both bodies, she claimed, into the hot tub by himself. Erika had spread the bags out on the countertop in the bathroom, where she had put the white ones earlier.

  “Come . . . come over here,” BJ said next. “I want you to look at this.”

  Erika looked at Geney and Joshua. Their eyes were glassy and glazed. Blood was all over them, all over the inside of the hot tub, all over the floor.

  “Are these the first dead bodies you ever seen?” BJ asked.

  Erika whimpered.

  “Why don’t you take a minute and look at it. It’s a pretty sight, ain’t it? Just take a minute and look.”

  “No. No. I’m going downstairs.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s probably better, anyway. Because if the police come, then you need to be down there and you need to distract them so they don’t come upstairs.”

  “Please don’t yell for me,” Erika said, “until you have this stuff gone, because I don’t want to see anything. It’s making me sick. I don’t want to see.”

  “Go downstairs on the couch and wait until I call you up here,” BJ said.

  What was odd to Erika, she recalled later, was that as BJ stood in front of her talking, a knife in his hand, waving it at her as he spoke, he was butt-ass naked. While she had gone to the store, he had undressed. It was as if BJ had shot a few deer and was preparing to dress them down.

  He was in combat mode. Ready to take care of business.

  25

  The Inconceivable

  Erika was curled up on the couch downstairs. She was holding herself, she later claimed, like a baby, rocking back and forth, scared to death.

  Petrified.

  Anxious.

  “Lainey,” BJ yelled from upstairs.

  Erika looked toward the stairs.

  “What?”

  “Come up here.”

  Erika walked slowly up the stairs, she said. She had no idea what to expect. She knew that if she didn’t go, BJ would come down. When detectives later looked at this and went through Erika’s story, it became hard for them to consider the notion that Erika was that intimidated by her husband. She could have just as well run out of the condo and gotten help, or gone pleading to the police, telling them exactly what had happened. She had even left the condo at one point.

  But she did none of that, of course. Instead, she gripped the railing of the stairs and slowly took those steps up toward BJ and his “little shop of horrors.”

  She explained later that she stood in front of her naked husband, who was now holding Joshua’s head out to one side in one hand, and Geney’s head out to his other side in the other hand. He was painted with their blood like a warrior. Smiling.

  “Take my picture, Lainey,” BJ demanded, according to Erika. He had an erection, too, she later claimed. He was standing there in front of her with both of their heads out to his sides. Their headless corpses were inside the hot tub. “Get your camera and take my picture. Do we have a digital camera?” BJ asked. “I’d like to send this photo around to my buddies.” He laughed.

  Erika was sick. She had her hands over her mouth. “You asshole,” she said, “don’t call me back up here again.”

  “You sissy,” BJ said, mocking her. “You’re a baby.”

  She ran back downstairs, and “I vomited in the bathroom down there.” She didn’t have anything in her stomach, so she began dry-heaving, a fluorescent yellow mucus coming out of her. “It was the grossest thing I had ever seen in my whole life,” she said later, recalling seeing BJ holding the two heads, standing in front of her with that erection.

  The heads were BJ’s trophy, Detective Bernal remarked. “His crowning moment of the kill.”

  The knives BJ had used to decapitate Geney and Joshua, and eventually to dismember them, Erika explained, had been gifts.

  “The two knives he used were identical Spyderco knives. We had got them for Valentine’s Day, matching ones—they were silver . . . Spyderco blades, just, only about three and a half inches long—that’s what’s so sick!”

  Erika was downstairs on the couch again, crying, holding her hands over her ears. BJ was taunting her from upstairs. Yelling at her. “Baby. Sissy. I cannot believe you are not watching me do this.”

  Erika went back upstairs at some point. BJ pointed to the walls. “Isn’t that so cool?” he said. “Just like in the movies.”

  He was referring to all the blood spilled on the walls. It was like someone had tossed gallons of red paint everywhere in a fit of artistic rage.

  “I felt like I was actually watching myself in a movie,” Erika later explained. “I was literally in shock. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s the truth.”

  If what she had seen already wasn’t shocking enough, what happened next might seem as though that Hollywood movie had taken an even darker, more evil turn.

  There was blood now covering the entire floor of the bathroom. The headless corpses were still inside the hot tub. According to what detectives later said, Erika told them that BJ then took Geney’s head, propped it up on the water spout, grabbed her headless corpse, and then had sex with it while Erika was “forced” to watch.

  But even that wasn’t the worst.

  Erika had run back downstairs and started pacing. BJ called her back upstairs.

  She went, thinking that he was finally finished with whatever he was doing.

  By now, BJ had cut off the arms and legs from the bodies. He had placed them in the garbage bags Erika had purchased earlier. Joshua’s torso, however, was up on the edge of the hot tub and BJ needed help lifting it into a bag.

  “No way,” she said. “I cannot help you do that. I can’t do it, Beej.”

  “Help me move this.” BJ had his hands on one end of Joshua’s torso. “Come on now. Help me out here.”

  When she refused again, BJ picked it up like a sack of potatoes, heaved it over his shoulder, and moved it himself.

  “Sissy.”

  When he was done putting Joshua’s torso into one of the big black bags, he walked over to one of the other bags with the legs inside, opened it, and cracked the leg in half with his foot, as if it were a piece of wood. Staring at Erika, he said, “Can we have this for dinner?”

  “What?”

  “I want you to cook this.”

  Bernal later asked Erika, “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Did he cook it?”

  Erika wouldn’t answer.

  “Did he eat any part of these two people?” Bernal wanted to know.

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Do you know if he drank the blood?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Back inside the bathroom, Erika said, BJ was fixated on cooking the leg. He had always talked about eating human flesh, she said. It was a turn-on for him to even talk about it.

  “If I cut the meat off,” BJ said, “will you cook it?”

  “No. No way, Beej.”

  “Go downstairs and get the kit bags,” BJ said after Erika apparently talked him out of cooking and eating one of Joshua’s legs.

  Kit bags were BJ’s old SEAL canvas bags, larger in size and obviously a lot stronger than plastic. Joshua’s torso wouldn’t fit into one of the garbage bags the way BJ had wanted. The kit bags, about five or six feet long, would do the trick.

  The way in which Erika described the bathroom at this point of the night was indeed worse than any scene out of any horror film. You couldn’t walk in that bathroom without splashing blood all over, she claimed. There were or
gans, she added, just floating in a pool of blood inside the hot tub. Body parts all over the place. Bits of flesh and bone on the floor. Blood on the walls. The blinds. The countertops.

  Everywhere she looked. Red.

  After BJ packaged the body parts in bags, he said they were going to have to dispose of the bags in Dumpsters somewhere.

  By now, it was six o’clock in the morning. The sun was up. They had all these bags with body parts and they needed to get them into the Jeep so they could drive somewhere and dispose of them.

  Erika took one last look at everything, she claimed, as BJ smiled and teased her. For a moment she just stood with her hands over her face, wondering how the night had turned into such madness.

  BJ had these plastic storage tubs he had put all of the bags into. This way, they could get them downstairs without leaking blood on the concrete or inside the Jeep.

  “I’m taking a shower,” he told Erika. “Then we’re packing up the Jeep and taking off.”

  26

  Dump Site

  Erika claimed to have passed out in the Jeep on the way to the first dump site. She said she had snorted so much Xanax throughout the night and into the morning that it knocked her out. She and BJ had been up by this point for twenty-four hours. They were driving north on Route 1, heading toward the next major beach town, Rehoboth. It was a little more laid-back in Rehoboth. More private. Lots of supermarkets and large department stores. Residential neighborhoods.

  BJ was thinking . . . Dumpsters.

  When Erika woke up the first time, they were parked in the back of the Hotel Blue. “Where are we?” she asked, coming out of it, opening her eyes, looking around.

  BJ got out. There were people around.

  Then he got back into the Jeep. “We’re gonna keep driving.”

  Erika went back to sleep.

  It was a “considerable amount of time” before she woke up again, because Erika looked at the clock in the Jeep the second time she got up and about forty minutes had passed.

  When she opened her eyes, the Jeep was parked. BJ was not in the vehicle by her side. Her heart raced for a moment. She looked around. Where is he?