Erika pointed out a Dumpster in the back of a grocery store, which was actually across the street from where she and BJ had put the body parts. The problem with this new location was that detectives found out that the garbage from this particular Dumpster, the one Erika was now lying (or was confused) about, had been dumped in two different landfills, which meant they’d have to search two separate locations.
47
The Great Pretender
According to several sources, throughout the weekend of June 1 and 2, Mitch Grace had a tough time stepping back and letting the attorney he hired to work on Erika’s case “do his job.” “Micromanage” is probably too strong a word to describe Mitch’s input; but for one, records indicate that he was calling Arcky Tuminelli all weekend, constantly asking what was going on and, at times, trying to direct Arcky regarding what to do next.
As he had promised, Arcky spent Saturday and Sunday finishing the brief he had due in another case. Late Sunday afternoon, however, he finally finished, e-mailed it, and then began to focus exclusively on Erika’s case. It was close to eight o’clock on Sunday night, June 2, when Arcky left his house outside Baltimore and headed south to Snow Hill, where Erika was being held in Worcester County Jail. Dealing with Mitch all day, and now into the night, had been difficult. But Arcky understood the guy was simply worried about his daughter. What father wouldn’t be? Arcky had been schooled in legal defense long enough to know how to deal with people like Mitch. The guy’s daughter was in jail facing serious charges—maybe even murder. He had every right to question and call on the man he had retained to represent her.
In learning more about Erika’s case, based on what Mitch had told him, Arcky was sure that Erika had said too much to the police already, sending them on a mission to find what she had admitted by the end of the weekend were “bodies and body parts,” as opposed to “missing people.”
Big difference.
By Monday morning, Arcky knew, dozens of cops would be searching dump sites in Maryland and nearby Delaware looking for the bodies, based on what Erika had been supposedly telling them. If the OCPD located Geney and Joshua’s bodies, any type of bargaining Arcky could possibly do for Erika was history. She would have no carrot left to dangle in front of the state’s attorney.
Still, everything depended on the assumption that Erika was telling the truth—which Arcky, as any good defense attorney would agree, wasn’t so sure about.
Arcky’s secretary had gotten the prosecutor’s name, cell phone, and home numbers. Worcester County state’s attorney Joel Todd was going to be prosecuting Erika and BJ, Arcky was told. Todd had been with the OCPD all weekend, advising and talking detectives legally through questioning Erika and BJ. Worcester County is located on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, tucked there in the armpit of southern Delaware.
Beyond being the president of the Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, and the onetime president of the local bar association, Joel Todd was a seasoned prosecutor with a terrific, almost ironclad, track record, Arcky knew. The guy was hard to beat in a courtroom, no doubt about it. In addition, Todd’s assistant, E. Scott Collins, was a hotshot veteran trial lawyer himself.
Completely bald (by choice, perhaps), wearing his glasses and speaking with just a touch of a Southern drawl, Joel Todd embodied the academic prowess and intellectual suave his job sometimes required. Todd had been the state’s attorney since 1995 and the assistant state’s attorney since 1985. His experience preceded him. He knew the ins and outs of Maryland courts, especially in his own county. If Erika Sifrit knew where to find the bodies of Geney and Joshua, Todd felt it was his duty, as well as his responsibility, to get that information out of her and bring those bodies back home to family members.
Arcky learned with a quick phone call to Todd that he was extremely interested in learning exactly where the bodies had been dumped. There was some indication by this point that Erika might have been lying about the locations she had taken detectives to earlier—and that she was playing games. This infuriated the police, of course, but they knew Erika was going to break down sooner or later. Otherwise, she would have done what BJ was doing: keeping his mouth shut. Little by little, as Bernal kept asking Erika questions, she started telling the truth.
Just that Sunday morning, for instance, Bernal had asked Erika, “If BJ told you to tell me where the two victims were tossed, would you do it?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I have to know what will happen to me. I have to be with my husband.”
“Not possible,” Bernal said.
“What can you do for me?”
After speaking briefly with Todd, agreeing to meet at the Worcester County Jail, Arcky called Mitch and told him he was on his way down to see Erika. Snow Hill, Maryland, Arcky explained, was a good three-hour trip from Baltimore.
He had better hurry. Because the more time the OCPD had with Erika, the tighter the noose around her neck was getting.
“We’ll meet you there,” Mitch said.
The Graces believed Erika had played no part whatsoever in the crimes. Whatever had taken place beyond the burglary was BJ’s doing. By this point, the newspapers were running with the story. It was being widely reported over the weekend that the OCPD had been searching for the bodies of a missing couple from Virginia. On June 1, that Saturday, the Washington Post published a story by reporter Jamie Stockwell under the headline 2 CHARGED IN KILLINGS OF MISSING VA. PAIR; PA. COUPLE ARRESTED. The article explained the initial charges BJ and Erika faced: . . . first-degree murder in the deaths of two Fairfax City residents who had been reported missing. Jay Hancock, a spokesman for the OCPD, had released a statement on behalf of the OCPD, in which he said, “Extensive blood spatter, spent shell casings, and what appears to be human tissue were found in the 11th-floor penthouse that Benjamin and Erica Sifrit of Altoona had rented at the Rainbow Condominiums.”
Those words, “human tissue,” sent shock waves throughout the community.
Mitch and Cookie were overwhelmed with disbelief, shock, and grief—suffice it to say—when reports that BJ and Erika could have been involved in dismembering two human beings started circulating. One former friend later said that Mitch was quickly soured by the media coverage. And later, he put others into that same box, making anyone, and everyone, who did not believe in his daughter into an enemy, saying, “Look, you take the media, lawyers, and investigators, put them in a brown paper bag, shake it up, dump it out, and you get the same thing! They all take your words and turn them into what they want them to sound like.”
Looking at Erika’s upbringing and background, the Graces had to think: How could something like this happen? How could Erika allow herself to get involved with this guy and end up in jail, facing such serious charges? The Graces had sensed a dark side to BJ the moment they had met him. There was always that strange gleam in his eye, that look about him that spoke of trouble. In no way did they want to believe that Erika could have had anything to do with what looked to be the most horrible crime imaginable. And yet, the truth was, no one really knew the horror that was about to be unearthed.
48
Hometown Girl
Erika’s old high-school friend and AAU basketball teammate Kristin Heinbaugh had worked for a local Altoona newspaper for quite a few years leading up to Erika’s arrest. Part of Kristin’s job was to monitor the wire stories and look for anything that would be of interest to local readers. By coincidence, Kristin had been working on an unrelated Ocean City, Maryland, murder story for quite some time. On that Friday afternoon, after BJ and Erika had been arrested and processed, as Kristin was putting together stories for the following day’s front page, her managing editor, who was standing in the middle of the newsroom, yelled over to her.
“Kristin, hold off on A-1, we have an Altoona couple arrested for murder in Ocean City, Maryland.”
“OK,” she said, and went back to searching the wire for any information about the crime. She had been working on that other story for so long, Kristin ju
st assumed that her editor was referring to the same thing.
Kristin had no idea what Erika’s married name was, but she did know that not a lot of women with the same first name spelled it with a K. It was rare to see that name. As she sat and watched the wire, the Associated Press ran a few sentences by: Altoona couple, Erika and Benjamin Sifrit, arrested for double murder. . . .
Huh? Kristin thought. That’s odd. I cannot believe this . . . but I don’t know any other Erika with that spelling. She double-checked. Yup, it is Altoona/Duncansville. Erika and BJ’s apartment was actually in Duncansville. Not many people knew that.
But Kristin did.
There’s no way—this cannot be her! she thought.
Kristin picked up the telephone and started calling old friends to see if anyone knew Erika’s married name.
Nobody did.
As the day went on, Kristin kept checking the Associated Press photo wire, hoping the OCPD would release a mug shot of the couple.
And then, sure enough, there it was: a mug shot of Erika and the man Kristin had seen her with at the mall a few years back.
“I was . . . I don’t know,” Kristin said later, “shocked. Speechless, actually.”
She printed the photograph out and walked over to her managing editor and stood in front of him.
“What?” he said after Kristin didn’t say anything.
By now, she was shaking, “trembling so bad,” she recalled, “that I was unable to pick up my hand” and show him the photograph.
“It’s Erika Grace,” Kristin told her editor. “Mitch Grace’s daughter.”
Everyone in town knew Mitch Grace.
“Oh, my goodness,” her editor said, looking at the photograph, “you’re right!”
Kristin turned and walked back to her desk. She was so nervous, she said, and shocked that it was actually Erika in that photograph, her nose started to bleed.
“I was a mess,” she said later. “I just could not fathom it. And as more of the case came out, I thought, ‘OK, I still believe that it was his [BJ’s] influence.’ But apparently, as I would learn, she thrived on all of this. They had, we found out, committed a lot of burglaries around the Duncansville area, and throughout the entire county, actually.”
This reaction echoed throughout the small community of which Erika had been a part for her entire life. Last everyone knew, Erika was a history major who graduated from a fairly decent college in Virginia. She was a local business owner. The daughter of one of the region’s best known contractors. She had grown up with a silver spoon. Now everyone was supposed to believe she had taken part in a double murder and actually had a hand in dismembering two people. None of it added up.
49
Hubris
Part of what the OCPD had uncovered at the Rainbow, inside Erika’s cache of photographs, proved that she had planned on perhaps putting together some sort of scrapbook representing all of her and BJ’s criminal activities throughout the years. Among the photos, detectives were puzzled by several pictures of the inside of a house outside Altoona. The photos were from a night when BJ and Erika met some dude at a local bar and ended up going back to his house to play some pool and have a few drinks. While BJ kept the guy busy, Erika searched throughout the guy’s house, checking things out, no doubt to see if he had anything worth thieving. Well, lo and behold, Erika took a series of photos in just about every room she entered. In one, she was smiling, sitting on the guy’s toilet.
After they left the house, later that night, BJ and Erika went back. BJ was on his knees, picking the front door lock of the same guy’s house. Either Erika and BJ were too drunk to realize it or they hadn’t even thought about it, but the guy was home while they were trying to break in. Then again, maybe that was part of the game? Perhaps BJ and Erika, not getting anything out of breaking into retail stores and Hooters, wanted to up the ante and try it while someone was home?
As BJ was picking the lock, the dude opened the door and pointed a shotgun at his head. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Oh,” BJ said, startled, “we forgot some things from earlier and wanted to retrieve them.”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
50
Circumspect
Arcky Tuminelli’s niche was federal court. That was where his experience and skill in the courtroom was able to shine. Still, the Sifrit case was something Arcky saw as a challenge. As he viewed it, Erika was a “highly motivated, driven, accomplished athlete, intelligent,” and not necessarily the type of person, with her background, that you would see involved in such a disturbing case. Arcky knew bad people. He sat across from them at conference tables in prisons and in courtrooms. He knew the smell of evil. In Erika Sifrit, at least during the early portion of the case, Arcky didn’t see any of it.
Arcky was a philosophy major in college. Law wasn’t even part of his outlook at the time. In fact, a decade after high school, college wasn’t even in Arcky’s plans. He had grown up in Baltimore, in the northwest section of the city, not too far from where the famous Preakness horse race is run every year—and he didn’t go back to school until he was twenty-eight.
From Arcky’s standpoint, Erika’s case posed some significant legal challenges right out of the box, which he needed to get a handle on immediately if he was going to be of any help.
“You had what appeared to be a double murder,” Arcky later explained, “by two people who—not knowing much about either one of them as I drove south—I believed, at least in Erika’s case, appeared to be from this really stable, good family. This wasn’t your typical murder case. There was something odd about it. Benjamin was the first in his class with the SEALs. Both of them were very interesting people. And then you have a suggestion that something happened with the bodies. So, in that sense, as a lawyer, as a trial attorney, it was unique. I’ve had murder cases—a number of death penalty cases, in fact—but never with facts lining up like this.”
And so as he drove from Baltimore on that Sunday night, June 2, Arcky thought about the case. The plan was to meet up with Erika, Mitch, Cookie, and, eventually, Joel Todd and OCPD detectives that night. As he looked at Erika’s background, nothing made sense to Arcky.
The hum of nighttime driving on a Sunday, when the roads are mostly clear, can do a lot for preparing the mind. Arcky began to analyze what he had been told. From what he understood, he could see BJ involved in the murders. A crazy SEAL, discharged from the service after a court-martial, had maybe gone nuts and snapped. It happened. The SEAL training alone, most people knew, was enough to make any good man crazy.
Yet, the delicate image Mitch and Cookie had painted of Erika didn’t fit into that insanity mold that seemed to fit the particulars of what was beginning to look like a truly horrible crime.
Something was missing.
“And the more I learned,” Arcky said later, “the more interesting and complicated it all became, which was the challenging aspect of it all.”
Nevertheless, regardless of what Erika had told her parents or even the police, Arcky believed he was in a good position. Erika apparently had some information that the state’s attorney wanted. Arcky could use it as a bargaining chip, if nothing else, and possibly save Erika a lot of trouble down the road.
Inside the jail, near 11:00 P.M., Arcky got settled in one of the visiting rooms. He knew that Joel Todd and a few OCPD detectives were at the jail already, and had been questioning Erika most of the day. But before he sat down with Todd, Arcky needed to speak with Erika alone. He wanted her take on what had happened.
Tossing his notebook on the table, Arcky looked up and saw that the guards were bringing Erika in. She looked disheveled: crying, shaking, entirely unraveled.
Looking at her, Arcky was surprised by how thin Erika appeared.
They sat and talked. Within an hour, Arcky was aware of the details regarding what had happened the previous Friday night, and some of what took place over the weekend, when Erika and BJ were taken into c
ustody. According to court documents (Arcky would not talk about anything he and Erika discussed), he was made aware of how Erika had spoken to detectives regarding where the bodies were dumped, and that BJ had murdered Joshua and Geney without her knowledge.
Of course, all of this information was contingent upon the idea that Erika was telling the truth. And Arcky certainly had no reason not to believe her. She seemed sincere. Mitch and Cookie, pretty shaken up by the entire incident, were upstanding people. They had reputations.
The irony in the case was tremendous. Had Erika and BJ simply left town—which they were scheduled to do earlier on the day they were caught burgling Hooters—they might have never been arrested, or even questioned about the disappearance of Joshua and Geney. But here they were: in jail, facing murder charges.
“Yes, I was there . . . but Benjamin did this,” Erika told Arcky at one point, according to court documents. “I didn’t know anything about it or that it was going to happen.”
Arcky was being told that Erika had had nothing whatsoever to do with the murders, but had, in fact, helped her husband clean up the mess and dispose of the bodies.
As her lawyer, Arcky was equally concerned about any role Erika might have played in the crimes. OK, she wasn’t there. She claimed not to see BJ kill the couple, but she knew they had been murdered, and, moreover, she had helped BJ, according to what she had told police already, get rid of the bodies. By themselves, those were pretty serious charges.
“I went with him when he disposed of the bodies,” Erika confirmed.
Arcky wrote it down on his notepad, saying, “Listen, what these people are really, really interested in is where the bodies are.”
Arcky had stepped out and spoken briefly to Joel Todd and several of the investigating detectives. He could tell from the conversation that they didn’t necessarily believe Erika, especially Brett Case and Scott Bernal. She had taken detectives to two Dumpsters, where she said she had helped BJ dump the bodies. But detectives were under the impression that she wasn’t being totally truthful.
Cruel Death Page 16