Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  BJ was outside the Jeep putting everything into two different Dumpsters.

  “Get your ass out here and help me!” BJ had yelled at one point, but Erika refused.

  She said she never got out of the Jeep, and never helped him, but instead she lay back down and tried falling asleep.

  After BJ was finished, he jumped back into the Jeep and started to drive. Looking both ways, pulling out of the back of the supermarket, he said, “You know where we are?”

  “No,” Erika said.

  “Delaware.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’re going to come shopping here tomorrow. I’m gonna bring you out here to the outlets.”

  The trip would serve two purposes: he wanted to make sure the Dumpsters were emptied, he explained, and a good shopping excursion at the outlets was something Erika could probably use at this point.

  As they drove, Erika began falling in and out of it again, still tired from her night of horror, and coming off so much Xanax and booze. She and BJ had been going in high gear for about eight hours, up all night.

  At one point as they drove back to the condo, BJ looked at Erika, she later said, and, as calm as could be, he said, “I’ve never been that excited in my life.”

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

  “Sexually, you know.” BJ was referring to killing and then dismembering Joshua and Geney. It had stimulated him.

  BJ had split up the bags and placed them into two different Dumpsters, each about forty yards apart from each other. He had even jumped inside the Dumpsters and sprinkled sloppy joe mix and various rotting foods over the bags so that no one got curious and opened up the bags.

  Because he had worked at a grocery store when he was in high school, BJ knew that the large chain grocery stores emptied their Dumpsters two or three times per week. He knew that the particular Food Lion in Delaware he had chosen would be on the same schedule. He also knew that because rotten meat and other foods had been tossed out with regular garbage fairly regularly, the smell of the decomposing body parts wouldn’t cause anyone much concern. The smells were expected, in other words.

  When they got back to their condo at the Rainbow, BJ said, “Let’s take a nap.”

  He plopped himself down on the couch and slept for “three to four hours,” Erika later told detectives.

  Erika had told BJ before his nap that there was no way she could clean up all the blood. He could sleep as long as he liked, but she wasn’t about to go upstairs again. It was too damn eerie and disgusting.

  As BJ slept, Erika went into cleaning mode, which is something she did whenever anxiety hit, like hunger pains. She started rearranging and fixing things downstairs in the condo. She didn’t need sleep because she had slept pretty much the entire ride to and from the dump site.

  When she was finished, she woke BJ up and told him, “You need to get this blood out of here. It’s starting to smell. It’s making me sick. You need to go up there and clean.”

  BJ smoked some of the marijuana he claimed Joshua had brought to the Rainbow and then went upstairs and started the gruesome task of trying to get the bathroom to look normal again. To BJ’s delight, he and Erika still had almost the entire week left to their stay. The next couple expected at the condo wouldn’t arrive until the coming Saturday morning, about six days away.

  Most of Joshua and Geney’s personal belongings had gone out with their bodies in the Dumpsters. But BJ, Erika later described, wanted to keep certain things for “trophies.” Their IDs and Social Security cards, especially. Seeing that BJ could use them in the future if he needed identification for “something illegal,” he had tossed them aside and kept them.

  “He talked about [how] he wanted to wear the ring,” Erika explained. “He saved the bullet, which he wanted to make a necklace out of. . . .”

  The bullet was from Joshua’s torso. According to Erika, BJ had carved the bullet out of Joshua so he could save it.

  Later that day, they went to the local hardware store in Ocean City to buy cleaning supplies. The bags of supplies were heavy, and Erika said BJ made her carry them upstairs.

  “You must understand,” she explained to Detective Bernal, “when we go for groceries at home, he goes grocery shopping with me and leaves eight bags of groceries in the car and goes upstairs and sits on the couch. Like, I carried all the cleaning supplies up to the bathroom, or they never would have gotten up there.”

  Upstairs, BJ took a gallon of bleach and poured it all over the blood on the floor.

  “That’s not going to do anything,” Erika told him.

  “I know. They have that stuff that they spray to see if there’s blood.” It was almost a joke to BJ, she said. Like he was having fun with the entire idea of cleaning up the murder scene.

  Later, as she was explaining this to detectives, Erika was laughing about the memory. “I’m sorry,” she said, “there’s nothing funny, but he dumped Clorox . . .” And she started laughing again.

  “Clorox,” BJ had said, “will cover up DNA, but they’ll still be able to spray luminol and tell where the blood was.”

  BJ then got down on his knees and started scrubbing the floor. He was kneeling in about an inch of blood—high as a junkie, Erika said.

  Looking back up at Erika as she stood just outside the bathroom, he said, “Help me.”

  “No way. I cannot clean up that amount of blood. You need to clean up the basics of it . . . the guts and the [leftover body] parts off the floor.”

  Erika walked over to the toilet and vomited.

  Every time BJ would “come down from his high,” he’d go back downstairs and smoke another joint.

  Instead of helping BJ, Erika lay out in the sun on the balcony, making sure not to lose her tan. Back home, she went to the tanning salon every day. Why waste a moment in the sun—seeing they were in Ocean City already—and she was determined not to help BJ?

  After a few hours, BJ was able to get the bathroom to a point where, Erika later described, “it looked like somebody had had a bloody nose or something. It didn’t even compare to what it had been.”

  The next day, Tuesday, BJ and Erika went to the Home Depot and purchased paint and a new bathroom door and other supplies they needed to get the bathroom back to as normal as it was going to get—without gutting it and starting over. Any garbage they accumulated, bloody rags and paper towels and “body organs” and tissue and “guts,” as Erika called them, along with wood molding too darkened by blood to be painted over, were tossed into trash bags or put directly down the garbage chute in the condo’s main hall.

  Throughout all this, Erika later insisted, BJ made her take photos, documenting the entire bathroom remodeling job. She said she was scared to say no to him, because he was acting so crazy. Looking back on the entire week, Erika, the scrapbook queen, had documented everything on film, even after the murders: the trip to Home Depot, everywhere they had stopped to eat or drink. And just about everything else they did together. In no way was she forced to take these photographs.

  “And so you have to understand that this entire time everything he’s asking me to do, I’m—I’m incredibly frightened to even tell him no, because I’ve never . . . I’ve heard him say things and I’ve seen him do crazy things . . . I was snorting Xanax . . . I cannot even tell you how many.”

  Still, looking at the facts, it’s hard to agree with Erika. In almost all the photos taken of them together (by a passerby or stranger they met up with and befriended) during this period (before and after the murders), they are smiling, hugging, and kissing. There are even photos of Erika eating chicken wings and drinking beers and playing miniature golf and getting a tattoo of a cobra on her hip, where BJ later said she had made the “first cut” on Geney (which she later backed up during an interview with a government agent). There’s one photograph of Erika and BJ each with a pile of crab legs in front of them—and this photo was taken about twenty hours after the murders.

  While they were running
around Ocean City like two newlyweds on their honeymoon, drinking and drugging and gorging themselves on all-you-can-eat crabs and pitchers of beer, Erika was wearing Joshua’s ring, a tiny little blood spot on the inside arc of it, on a chain around her neck. And Geney and Joshua’s IDs were in her purse. In no way was BJ forcing Erika to do any of this. Her own photographic documentation of the events before and after the murders, along with her behavior in the coming days, spoke to an entirely different scenario—one that put Erika Grace Sifrit at the helm of this ship, sailing her and BJ into a week of thrill-seeking madness, which they had both been leading up to for quite some time.

  27

  The Real Me

  Questioning Erika, OCPD detective Scott Bernal had a tough time wrapping his mind around the idea that she was just some sort of innocent bystander who stood behind her violent husband because she was scared to death of what he would do to her. But as Erika talked about her marriage, which was based on lies and violence and threats, she explained that for her it was more than any of that—much more.

  “Because I didn’t think that anyone else would want me,” Erika said when Bernal asked her why she had stayed in the abusive relationship, and why she never went to the police. “He loved me. He laid down with me at night. He worked with me. He, you know . . . Why would anyone else want me? I didn’t want to be alone.”

  Erika further explained that “during that whole week, I was petrified of him. I didn’t know, day to day, what was going to happen after that week. . . .”

  Erika and BJ’s crocodile was named Alabama. She loved having these types of reptiles in the house. BJ thought that snakes were “associated with the Devil,” Erika said, which was one reason why he enjoyed having them around.

  Further along, Erika told a story about BJ, something he had once said regarding hurting people. There was a “true way” to hurt a person.

  “If you want to hurt someone or there’s someone you hate,” Erika said, “you just go and kill their whole family so that they have to live without them, and you film it and you film you. . . . You film you torturing their family and then you mail them the tape, and they have to live without their family forever, and they have to watch the way that their family died—being tortured.”

  28

  Killer Wife

  In the middle of their ten-day vacation in Ocean City, two days after they had spent the night partying with Geney and Joshua, murdering and dismembering them, BJ and Erika met up with a new friend, Todd Wright.

  BJ and Erika had gone back to Seacrets, drinking and drugging and having a good time, on Wednesday afternoon, and found themselves there well into the night. Todd seemed pretty drunk, but he was fun. What had started as a day of just sitting outside in the sun, banging back beers and shots, had turned into a night of heavy and hard drinking with Todd.

  Erika was acting crazy, BJ said later. Totally out of it. Their new friend, Todd, was even drunker.

  At some point that night, well before midnight, one of the bouncers from Seacrets approached BJ and Erika and asked them to leave. Erika was out of control. Stumbling all over the place. Slurring her words. Laughing at people. There was one point where BJ had done a shot of tequila and vomited right there in the bar.

  Erika broke out her camera and photographed it for a scrapbook she was going to make of the trip.

  BJ had no problem leaving. They had been there for about ten hours already.

  Erika snapped. She started yelling and screaming. Swearing. Spitting.

  BJ walked over and restrained her. “I’ll kill you . . . ,” Erika screamed at one point as the bouncer began to now insist that they collect their belongings and get the hell out of the bar. As he did that, Erika took her gun out of her purse and began waving it around, saying, “I’ll kill you. . . . I’ll kill you!”

  “Come on, Erika,” BJ said, “let’s go.”

  “I stopped her,” BJ later recalled in court, “I mean, why not . . . of course I stopped her.”

  The bouncer was prepared to call the police after catching BJ trying to pick the lock of a bank machine inside the bar. BJ, however, grabbed Erika as she was laughing and waving the weapon, pulled her away, and, with their new friend, Todd Wright, left the club.

  29

  Fish Tales

  Near midnight, as Erika, BJ, and Todd were out on the road after leaving Seacrets, Karen Wilson (a pseudonym) was at home when she began receiving telephone calls—sixteen in all. It was Todd, her friend. He was “falling-down drunk,” Karen said later, and wanted her to meet him and his two new friends at another Ocean City bar. He just wasn’t sure which one.

  “Stop calling me,” Karen said during one of the calls.

  “Come on . . . ,” Todd said.

  “Stop it.”

  After being talked into it, perhaps just to get Todd off her back, Karen agreed to make the drive down to Ocean City from her home in Delaware, which took about a half hour. Todd had said something about being stuck on the side of the road with his new friends and not being able to change a flat tire. All of them were so drunk, he stammered, that they had no idea what to do. In fact, BJ was out there at one point trying to get the Jeep lifted up on a jack, and Erika was, of course, taking photographs, documenting the little mishap.

  Erika later said BJ knew how to do it, but he was just “too damn lazy.” This does not mesh with the photograph of BJ sitting on his ass on the concrete, trying to get the Jeep off the ground after taking the tire off it. Apparently, it had fallen off the jack.

  When Karen made it to the outskirts of Ocean City, she pulled over and answered her ringing cell phone. She had first called Todd to ask him where they were. He wasn’t sure, when she had spoken to him last, but he said he’d find out and call her back.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We left one bar . . . You’re not going to believe what happened. I’ve been hanging out with this couple all night. We got a flat tire.”

  As Karen now understood it, they were too drunk to change the tire. They had been sitting off to the side of the road, waiting, trying to decide what to do next. The guy Todd was with—meaning BJ—had gotten the tire off the Jeep, but couldn’t get the spare on.

  “Name off a few streets around where you’re at,” Karen told him, “and I’ll come and find you.” She couldn’t believe what was happening. Why in the world was she getting involved with this mess?

  Karen and Todd finally agreed on meeting at Phillips Crab House, a decades-old establishment on Philadelphia Avenue in Ocean City.

  Karen was right down the street. “I’ll be there soon.”

  Describing her friend Todd Wright, Karen later said, when he got into the car, he was “incapacitated,” drunk beyond anything she had ever seen. “Cross-eyed and stumbling.”

  When she and Todd arrived at the Jeep, where Erika and BJ were waiting, two blocks south, Karen got down on the ground herself and changed the tire. BJ had removed the flat tire, but he couldn’t manage to get the spare onto the rim and attach the screws. He and Erika were laughing and stumbling all over the place like two junior-high kids drunk for the first time.

  When Karen was done, BJ and Erika walked over and thanked her.

  “Can we buy you . . . a drink for helping us out?” BJ asked.

  It was strange how he and Erika seemed so out of it one moment and OK the next. Not quite sober, but coherent enough to communicate. How could they not figure out how to change a flat tire?

  Karen felt “uneasy about the whole situation,” she later said in court. Something about the couple wasn’t right. It was her intuition, telling her to stay the heck away. Not only were they drunk, but Karen saw a bit of craziness in their eyes.

  “I’d rather not,” she told BJ.

  Todd stumbled over. “Let’s go get another . . . drink . . . ,” he tried to say. “Come on, Karen.”

  “You really don’t need another drink,” she told her friend. “Let’s just go home.”

  Erika said, “Oh, come on, just
one, please?” She held up a finger. “Just one drink.”

  “Let’s just go with them,” Todd pleaded. BJ and Erika were pressuring him to get Karen to take them up on the offer. “Come on, just one drink.”

  “All right,” Karen said reluctantly. “Just one.”

  It was late. Well after midnight now. So they drove to Fish Tales, only a few blocks away from Phillips. Karen was going on a trip in a few days. It had been planned for some time. The last thing she wanted to do was stay out all night.

  One drink and I’m out of there.

  After entering Fish Tales, as was her normal course, Erika took out her camera and started snapping photos of everyone.

  “Come on, Karen, get in there with Todd and BJ, so I can take your photo.”

  Karen balked.

  “Just do it.”

  She did. At no time did Karen ever notice BJ insisting that Erika take photographs. It seemed to Karen that Erika was doing it all on her own, directing everyone and truly eager to document the night.

  At one point, Karen noticed that BJ had a bloody lip, bloodstains on his lower teeth, and some swelling near his chin.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Ah,” he said, “I hit my mouth on the steering wheel when we hit a curb and got that flat tire.” He was so drunk, he explained to Karen, he couldn’t see where he was driving.

  Karen had Hawaii on her mind. She was flying out of town in two days. She needed to phone a friend who was already there, she told Todd, and give the girl her flight information. So she excused herself from the bar, where they were all sitting, and went outside to make the call.

  When she returned a few minutes later, Todd had spilled his drink, drank the drink Karen had ordered (but hadn’t touched), ordered her another, and drank half of that.

  Whatever was left over, Karen dumped out.

  I’m out of here.

  Indeed, it was time to leave. Karen needed to get home. She told Erika, “You guys should probably call a taxi. You’re in no shape to drive.”