Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  Regardless of the horrific nature of the crime and the way the press treated BJ and Erika as monsters (perhaps understandably so), on the surface things appeared to be going reasonably well for Arcky and Erika. It seemed that the deal Arcky had cut for Erika with Joel Todd and E. Scott Collins, his assistant state’s attorney, would be consummated, and, within some time, life would carry on for Erika Sifrit.

  56

  Divine Intervention

  Detectives Scott Bernal and Brett Case had their doubts about Erika. But they were cool with allowing Joel Todd to do his job. What they had to do now was build a case against BJ and Erika for the state’s attorney. Collect evidence. Calculate it. Study it. Interview witnesses. And figure out exactly what had happened inside that bathroom on their own, without Erika interfering with her lies and constantly changing stories.

  Bernal and his boss, Detective Sergeant Richard Moreck, attended the autopsies of Geney and Joshua on June 4.

  Dr. Adrienne Perlman conducted the autopsy on what amounted to a human torso, two human arms, and one human leg. A lot could be learned from body parts. From just looking at them, it was easy for Bernal to tell that as BJ (or Erika, they weren’t sure just yet) cut up the bodies, it was apparent where the knife had begun to dull. The first arm was cut clean off. The second arm looked as though it had been cut and torn off.

  As Perlman put the torso on the table and readied it for X-ray, Richard Moreck stood and watched, with Bernal by his side. Bernal could barely take the smell. For some reason, it was getting to him today. For Moreck, however, it didn’t seem to bother him.

  “What is it?” Bernal asked Moreck. Bernal had his hand over his nose and mouth. He could tell Moreck had locked onto something important.

  Moreck stared. The entire torso wouldn’t quite fit on the autopsy area in which the X-ray was going to pick up; just a bit of the top section of the torso was not going to make it in the image.

  Moreck leaned in. The smell was worse, the closer you got to the torso.

  “The worst I had ever smelled in my career,” Bernal said later. “With the decomposition and the dump, it was ripe in that room. Unbearable.”

  “Look at that,” Moreck said. He was pointing.

  “What?”

  Moreck was focused on an area near the shoulder. “Get that in the image,” he told the technician.

  Sure enough, in that little area that would have been otherwise missed, there was another spent round, on top of the one Perlman had already recovered.

  “There were several of these incidents,” Bernal suggested later, looking up toward the sky as he spoke, “that led some of us to believe that something larger than ourselves was working alongside this investigation.”

  57

  The Fighter

  Brett Case drove out to Lewes, Delaware, one afternoon in mid-June to speak with the tattoo artist who had drawn the snake tattoo on Erika’s side. The OCPD had several photographs of Erika getting a tattoo of a snake only a few days after Geney and Joshua were known to be murdered. Case wanted to understand Erika’s and BJ’s demeanor and attitude while they were there. The way in which they acted was going to be important to the case.

  As Erika stood in front of the mirror, the tattoo artist explained to Case, she looked at herself and said, “I’m too fat. I look so damn fat.”

  She had shorts on and a belly-button-cut tank top. It was May 28, just a few days after the murders.

  The artist laughed. “Huh! Eat a few more cheeseburgers, honey. Look at you.”

  Erika smiled. She loved the comment.

  BJ was sitting there beside Erika as she grimaced and bit her teeth while the artist inked the new tattoo.

  “She’s a fighter,” BJ said. “She’s tough. She can take a punch.” He laughed.

  “My husband has a new tat,” Erika said. She explained the swastika on BJ’s chest, but BJ would not show the man.

  “You guys ever seen the movie American History X?”

  Erika said she and BJ had seen the movie and loved it. BJ was in and out of the shop, always returning with a drink in his hand.

  If nothing else, Case learned while interviewing the tattoo artist that Erika and BJ were like any other married couple, getting along, laughing, joking, having some fun while on vacation, and getting a tattoo. There was no indication that BJ was controlling his wife and making her do anything.

  58

  No More Tears

  Arcky visited with Erika a few times throughout the month of June and into early July. When the time came to begin talking about the actual polygraph, Arcky felt fairly confident Erika was ready.

  Joel Todd called Arcky one morning in early July.

  “We need to sit down with Erika and we need to go over this thing in detail.” Since their initial contact during the weekend of June 1, 2, and 3, detectives from the OCPD and/or Joel Todd had not spoken with Erika at any length. Everyone was waiting on the polygraph to see which road the case would take next.

  “Sure,” Arcky said.

  After hanging up and taking care of a few issues in his office, Arcky took off to visit with Erika and explain that going in to speak with OCPD detectives and Joel Todd before she took the actual polygraph was more or less a requirement of the deal she had signed. She needed to sit down with them, in other words, and lay everything out. For the OCPD, it was a certainty that every time they uncovered something on their own and brought it to Erika, she kind of said, “Oh yeah, I remember that now.”

  “It was a game with her,” Bernal later said. “She had selective memory.”

  Erika agreed to sit down and talk. She had no choice, really.

  As he thought about it, something gnawed at Arcky. A gut instinct, perhaps. He had a feeling something was off. He was still concerned about the deal. Mitch and Cookie were continuously telling him that Erika would never lie, and never keep anything from him (or them). That she would stick to her end of the deal. Arcky had nothing to worry about.

  Before they headed over to Joel Todd’s office, Arcky explained to Erika that if there was any minor detail she had forgotten to tell him, she needed to come clean with it now.

  Erika insisted, reaffirming her earlier position, that there was nothing to worry about.

  A few hours later, Erika and Arcky sat in Joel Todd’s office. Todd and OCPD detective Scott Bernal were on one side of the room. There was a tape recorder in the middle. Todd and Bernal wanted to question Erika again about everything to make sure her story was the same. It was, essentially, a pre pre-polygraph exam. Erika would be preinterviewed again by the polygraphist once she was inside the room where the actual test would be taken, but Todd wanted to be certain she wasn’t wasting everyone’s time.

  Bernal questioned Erika as Arcky and Todd sat and listened. Things went well. She was stronger than she had been a month earlier. More together. She’d even put on a little weight and seemed to be adapting to prison life quite well.

  As the interview went forward, Erika answered Bernal clearly. She was confident and seemingly open and willing to talk about everything. At one point, Bernal asked if BJ had any brothers and if Erika was scared of him or his family at all.

  “No brothers,” she said. “One sister.”

  “Does he have anybody that would carry out any deed he would want them to do, or do you know if there’s any friends—”

  “Yes! I’m actually a little scared about that,” Erika interrupted. “He has SEAL friends that might . . . I don’t, like, I definitely would not want him to know that I was here talking to you. And if I go up and testify, and for some reason you guys don’t get him locked up, my family will end up like Joshua and Geney. So I hope that you guys know what you’re doing. I seriously do. Because my family, my parents’ home will be burned down, and my family will end up exactly like those people. Cut to pieces and him jerking off to the body parts. . . .”

  This was the first time they had heard that BJ had masturbated on the body parts after cutting up Geney and
Joshua.

  Arcky shook his head at times, agreed with the questioning at others, and felt decently reassured that all would go well for his client with the polygraph. The entire story Erika had retold, which amounted to about three to four hours’ worth of details, was full of new information and gruesome particulars Todd and Bernal had not yet heard. It was here where Erika talked for the first time about how BJ had wanted Erika to take a photograph of him holding up Joshua and Geney’s heads and send it to his SEAL buddies.

  As the interview went forward, Erika admitted that the story she had told of Geney and Joshua being murdered on the beach was nonsense. It happened inside the condo. In that bathroom upstairs. She was sleeping, she said, downstairs. She heard the shots. Woke up. Saw the bodies. Helped BJ get rid of them after he cut them up.

  It was BJ’s doing all the way. Erika said she had taken no part in any murder. Heck, she wasn’t even there when the actual murders took place. He did it all. She was an accessory, sure.

  But only after the fact.

  After everyone ate lunch, they all met up again in Joel Todd’s office to continue. They were almost done, Todd said. “Just a few more questions.”

  Erika continued to blow the trumpet of BJ being responsible for everything. Arcky watched Bernal. He felt Bernal wasn’t so convinced Erika was being truthful. Arcky could tell by Bernal’s tone and the questions he asked that he still had reservations regarding Erika’s claim of total ignorance.

  Arcky could understand. The guy was a seasoned detective. But enough with the continued badgering of his client! The polygraph would answer Bernal’s concern.

  And then Bernal came out with it: “What about the second couple?” he asked Erika.

  Arcky was puzzled. Second couple? What is he talking about? Arcky had no idea what Bernal meant.

  On the Wednesday after Geney and Joshua were murdered, Erika and BJ had invited that second couple—Todd Wright and Karen Wilson—up to the condo and it had apparently turned into a scene much like what had happened with Geney and Joshua—except for the murder and dismemberment part. BJ had gone berserk and accused them of stealing Erika’s purse.

  “What?” Arcky said, stopping the questioning for a moment.

  “I’m sitting there thinking,” Arcky recalled later, “‘What’s this all about?’ It was the first time I had heard about another couple in a similar situation inside that condo. Also, how could this same conduct occur in that room a second time without anyone being killed? None of it made any sense to me as I sat there listening.”

  Bernal was interested in the fact that Erika had allowed this same situation to take place a second time, after knowing what BJ had done the first. Throughout the interview, Erika had repeated over and over that she was terrified of BJ all week after witnessing what he had done. She was scared that he’d kill her or her family and went along with everything he had done because of that fear. Sitting there, listening to her, Bernal knew it was all bullshit. He knew from his own investigation that Erika had gone along with BJ that week because she wanted to serve him. BJ hadn’t threatened her.

  “She was lying to us. I knew it. We all knew it.”

  If, in fact, she had not participated in the first crime, why was she involved in the second? Why hadn’t she walked out? More important, knowing what she knew about the first couple, and how they ended up dead, why had she helped BJ lure this second couple back up to the condo? This second occurrence screamed of Erika’s hands-on involvement.

  “It told us,” Bernal said, “that Erika was in on this as much as—if not more than—BJ ever was.”

  Moreover, as Bernal sat and listened to Erika put it all on BJ, he could see images from the photographs the OCPD had confiscated inside BJ and Erika’s Rainbow condo. Erika playing miniature golf, smiling, eating shrimp and crabs, drinking beers, getting a tattoo, shopping at Home Depot, lying on the beach. Was this a woman being held captive by a domineering husband who had killed two people and made her help him dismember and dump the bodies? Or, Bernal wondered, was this a woman who had helped her husband murder one couple and had tried to again assist him in luring a second couple up to the room so they could engage them in their missing-purse game in order to do the same damn thing?

  Hearing Erika mention the second couple, Arcky now knew for certain there were details Erika had not shared with him—and he felt slighted and used. Why wouldn’t she admit to this second couple? Why would she keep it from him? He was there to protect her.

  “Still,” Arcky explained later, “I am sitting there, thinking, ‘We’re OK. We’re not sunk yet.’ Though I’m now worried what this ‘new information’ is going to do to the deal regarding her cooperation. I am confident that it won’t have any effect on it at all.”

  On the other hand, no matter what, the state’s attorney was bound by that deal—providing, that is, Erika passed the lie detector test. It all came back to that lie detector test she was scheduled to take.

  As Erika talked about the second couple, Arcky allowed her to continue, thinking, What else don’t I know? Which was more important to him than the information itself. How much had Erika kept from him?

  “The fact that this situation took place a second time,” Arcky said later, “was not something I wanted to hear. But, on the other hand, it doesn’t preclude the deal, as long as they don’t have some reason to think that she participated in the actual murder.”

  Leaving Joel Todd’s office, Erika was confident she could pull off the polygraph. She had secrets, sure. But somewhere in her twisted mind, she believed she could contain them and get through that all-important polygraph.

  59

  The Right Button

  Inside Erika and BJ’s condo, detectives uncovered one of Erika’s scrapbooks that proved to be quite telling in its own way. Being in the scrapbooking business, Erika had documented a better part of her life with BJ. It was as much her job to scrapbook as it was a hobby and something she enjoyed doing.

  On one page of a book detectives took during the search, a few photographs of Erika and BJ struck them as particularly odd. BJ, for one, appeared younger and more boyish. He didn’t have that gruff, military look to him. He was even smiling in several of the photos. Erika also looked content. She was a normal weight for her size, smiled genuinely, and looked comfortable next to her husband. You might even take a leap and suggest that they appeared to be in love.

  Erika had titled the page in big bold letters at the top: MARYLAND, along with the subtitle You are my sunshine. It was a play on words, obviously. The “you” was Benjamin, of course. In her synopsis of the trip she and BJ had taken, Erika marked the date May 2000, and the reason for the trip to Ocean City that particular summer: to take a friend of hers she called “Becky,” Erika’s aunt, along with two of her aunt’s friends, down to the seashore for a quiet getaway. They had all stayed at the Rainbow.

  In reading this, the minutia of the trip didn’t matter much to detectives. But it was what happened when Erika and BJ were in Ocean City that seemed to ring a familiar bell. Erika had documented on the page how she, BJ, and her aunt went shopping in Rehoboth at the outlet stores. After a long day of browsing through racks of overpriced sweaters and designer blue jeans, they all went out to eat. Where else? Hooters, of course, a favorite spot for Erika and BJ. After eating wings, they decided to walk around a muscle car show the restaurant was having in the parking lot.

  It was a cold weekend, Erika wrote, which sent them looking for something to do indoors. The car show was boring, anyway, she added.

  At a nearby tattoo parlor, BJ and Erika wanted to get some “new ink.” Yet, once they got inside the parlor, Erika wrote, she had to back out. She didn’t have any money. Nor did she have her wallet. In realizing this, she wrote, she accused some girls [inside the tattoo parlor] of stealing my wallet when I really had left it at the Rainbow!

  It was a joke. Blaming the girls for thieving her purse when she knew where it was all along.

  When Erika got
back to the condo, she called her father. “I cannot find my purse.” She was hysterical, her father later told me. She was convinced that someone had actually stolen the purse.

  “Calm down,” Mitch Grace told his daughter. “I’ll check into it.”

  Mitch called condo management and had “everyone looking” for Erika’s purse, he said.

  After quite a spectacle of searching high and low, someone recovered the purse under a couch cushion inside the condo living room—now a familiar place for detectives. BJ had stayed in the background and watched the day unfold. He saw how obsessive Erika had become when she realized her purse was missing. She freaked out. According to some, this was when BJ began to understand that by the simple act of losing her purse, Erika had exposed herself. She had become unnerved to the point of mayhem. Losing something was one of Erika’s many buttons BJ began to understand that he could push.

  Another was the telephone. BJ would be in Memory Laine reading a magazine, Mitch Grace later said, or just hanging around, and the telephone would start ringing. Erika would be with a customer or just busy doing any one of the thousand things she had to do in the store every day.

  Hearing the phone ringing in front of him, however, BJ would not budge.

  “He could be sitting within arm’s reach of the phone,” said Mitch, “and he would just let it ring and ring and ring, because he knew it would get to Erika.”

  60

  Training a SEAL

  There was a time after BJ graduated from SEAL school, while living near Virginia Beach, when he and Erika weren’t yet seeing each other regularly. Erika had met BJ by this point and had fallen for him—and had perhaps even become obsessed with him. But BJ had other plans: he was focused on SEAL training and his career. Erika wouldn’t take no for an answer when BJ told her he really didn’t want to get involved. They were out with a few other couples having some beers.