“Sorry,” BJ said. “I want to focus on my training and military career.”
Erika didn’t say anything.
She refused to take no for an answer.
Before Erika met BJ, she had been dating another man. According to sources, the man had finally had enough of Erika’s obsessive behaviors and possessive nature and told her to forget it. The relationship had run its course.
Erika wouldn’t accept the breakup. She couldn’t accept it.
So she got up, former friends said, walked over to a brick wall outside the bar, where they had all been hanging out, and began ramming her forehead into the wall.
“No, no, no, no . . . ,” she kept saying.
Rejection was not easy for Erika Grace to swallow. She had left Pennsylvania as, essentially, the star of her hometown—a basketball superwoman.
Everybody’s hero.
In college, however, rejection began: She wasn’t the luminary anymore, but more of an average student and average ball player. In a sense, Erika didn’t know how to react to rejection.
“Come on,” the crowd said. “Stop that.” She was beginning to bleed.
Erika continued.
And continued.
Until her head was bleeding profusely.
The cops were called.
According to witnesses, one of the officers asked, “What’s going on here?” after rolling up to the scene outside the bar.
“She’s upset,” someone said.
According to law enforcement, this same scene played out again with BJ sometime later, when he decided after meeting Erika that they had no future. At first, seeing how badly bruised and bleeding Erika was, police thought BJ had been beating on her. But they split them up, asked some questions, and BJ was told to take Erika home.
They had known each other only a few days then.
As BJ’s friends got to know Erika more intimately, she began to express a part of herself that was quite odd, said one former acquaintance.
“Erika wanted what she wanted—and that was that.”
She was possessive, yes indeed, but there was another side to Erika that shocked one friend. It began at the beach. They had all decided to go to the beach one day, to kind of accept Erika into the group as BJ’s girl. After all, they were married. This same friend had dropped Erika off at the airport, in fact, to head off to Las Vegas.
“She mentioned nothing to me about going there to get married.”
Anyway, they were at the beach one day and Erika told a story. She was partying down in Ocean City with some girlfriends a few years back, she said. They were drinking, doing pills, having a ball. “Yes,” that friend said, “I knew Erika was into drugs before she met BJ.”
“Listen,” Erika said, “we’re down there in Maryland and one of my friends gets into a car with this stranger, this guy she just meets, and takes off.”
According to what Erika said, that friend was then raped by this guy.
What startled Erika’s new friends—BJ’s people, if you will—as they sat there on the beach, listening to Erika tell this story, was her reaction to the rape. “I guess that’ll teach her not to get into the car with strangers again,” Erika supposedly said, reacting to her friend’s rape.
“It was very blasé the way she went about saying it.”
One of the women there listening was a criminal defense attorney. The woman looked at the other friend as Erika spoke and they both popped their eyes out, like, Huh? That’s a bit weird—to have a reaction like that.
“You’d think someone would tell a story like that with a bit more sympathy in their voice.”
From then on, the former friend continued, Erika was “like psycho for BJ, crazy jealous.”
BJ’s sister came down to visit him once when they were living together in North Carolina with these friends.
Erika was jealous of BJ’s sister and the time that he was spending with her.
There was one time when BJ hadn’t seen his friends for six weeks; he was out on a training exercise with the SEAL team. When he returned, they all met up at a local bar.
“Hey, BJ,” said his friend’s wife. They gave each other a little hug. She kissed him on the cheek. “Welcome home, soldier!”
Erika was standing nearby.
She flipped out. “Never touch him. Never speak to him again.”
61
Hide in Plain Sight
At one point, Erika had told Detective Scott Bernal that she had photographed BJ holding up Geney and Joshua’s heads; his face was painted with blood, and he sported a throbbing, enormous erection. She said she had used a digital camera and mailed the card file back home with some of her other stuff. BJ wanted to send the photos to his SEAL buddies when they got back.
Bernal wasn’t so sure if it was just a story, or if Erika was telling the truth. So Bernal and his boss, Richard Moreck, headed north to Pennsylvania to search Erika’s apartment.
The Graces had put all of Erika’s belongings into storage containers. They had emptied the apartment of everything and placed all of it, Bernal said later, into these containers and then into a storage shed in back of Erika’s grandmother’s property.
“Somebody knew what they were doing in storing that stuff there,” Bernal said. “This became a nightmare for us to obtain a search warrant.”
This story was worth checking out, however—no matter what the OCPD had to go through to get that search warrant.
After spending the day securing the search warrant, while going through one of the containers, looking for a digital camera or card file, Bernal noticed out of the corner of his eye that Mitch Grace, who was there watching their every move, had picked something up out of a container and had quickly put it in his pocket.
Bernal grabbed Mitch by the wrist harshly. “Hey, whatever you put in your pocket, if it’s a weapon, move your hands back slowly.”
Maybe it was the card file they were looking for?
Mitch had what Bernal described as a “kid caught with his hands in the cookie jar” look about him. He was scared. He took his hand out of his pocket and raised both arms.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
Bernal told him to put it on the table.
It was a marijuana pipe.
“What do you think . . . ,” Bernal said. He was dumbfounded by what Mitch had done. “We’re here, Mitch, searching for evidence of murder. Do you think we give a shit about some pipe with pot residue inside of it?”
Mitch didn’t say anything.
“Mitch’s mind-set,” Bernal remarked later, “was always protect, protect, protect. That’s where his mind was. He had no sense of where things began and where things ended. And to think, Erika did this to the poor guy. She destroyed that family.”
62
The Test
Joel Todd called Arcky Tuminelli and made it perfectly clear that it was time to get on with the polygraph. It had been almost a month since that rather illuminating meeting and interview with Erika had taken place in Joel Todd’s office. In order for what was officially now known as the “Memorandum of Understanding” agreement, which Arcky and Joel had drafted back in June at midnight in Todd’s office, to be put into full effect, the polygraph needed to be completed.
“Let’s go, Arcky,” Todd said.
By now, the OCPD had forensically identified the torso, arms, and leg they had uncovered in that Delaware landfill as a match to Joshua Ford and Geney Crutchley. The state’s attorney needed to get the case moving along. This had been a horrific crime, of which the media was buzzing around the periphery, wondering what was going on. Todd’s community wanted answers, not to mention the family members on Joshua and Geney’s sides. Beyond that, a preliminary ballistics report confirmed that the bullets recovered from Joshua’s decomposed torso were fired from the gun Erika Sifrit had in her possession on the night she was arrested with BJ in the parking lot of Hooters.
If Detective Scott Bernal and Joel Todd were betting men, their money was on t
he fact that Erika was holding on to more secrets than she was willing to reveal. A polygraph, although not a legal means of truth-telling, was a good barometer to begin the process of where to take the investigation and prosecution next. But they needed to get Erika into that chair and get those wires strapped to her arms and chest.
Arcky met with Erika and her parents. It was showtime, he explained.
“Look, what happened is not something that’s very helpful,” Arcky said, referring to when Erika had withheld that information about the second couple from him, especially when it seemed so vital to her future defense. Not to mention why she would surprise Arcky with it. A second couple? Two people who actually lived to tell their story. Witnesses the state’s attorney and OCPD detectives had already located and interviewed. “You’re telling me I can trust you, and I didn’t know about this?” Arcky explained later. He was upset that by withholding what was crucial information, Erika seemed to have deliberately tricked him.
What else was she withholding?
Addressing Mitch, Cookie, and Erika, Arcky was clear about where they now stood: “If there is anything else that you are not telling me, you need to explain to me now what it is. I cannot protect Erika if I don’t know what the hell is out there.” Arcky felt as if he’d had this conversation with Erika and her parents a hundred times already.
“OK,” Erika replied. “I know. I understand.” There was nothing else, she said.
It was July 24, 2002. Erika was driven in a white van over to where the polygraph was going to be conducted inside the OCPD. In the agreement Tuminelli had written with Todd, he made a point to insure that the polygraphist conducting the interview was to be an outside party, meaning someone from the federal end of law enforcement. An agency neutral to the case. Smartly, Arcky didn’t want an OCPD detective to get Erika in the hot seat and begin to work on her. Erika had to feel comfortable. The questions, which Arcky had been given before the test, turned out to be more or less what he had expected. They were centered on the deaths of Geney and Joshua, but they also touched on the year 1999, before Erika had met BJ:
1. Are the lights on in this room?
2. Concerning the deaths of Geney Crutchley and Joshua Ford, do you intend to answer each question truthfully?
3. Prior to 1999, did you spread lies or vicious rumors?
4. Did you shoot a gun at any of those people?
5. Prior to 1999, did you think about hurting anyone and not do it?
6. Did you cut on any of those people?
7. Are you now sitting down?
8. Prior to 1999, did you lie to a person in a position of authority?
9. Prior to 1999, did you threaten anyone with physical harm?
10. Are you in Ocean City, Maryland?
Joel Todd had agreed to this stipulation. The FBI said it would never polygraph a witness if it wasn’t involved in the case. So Arcky went to someone he knew in the Secret Service and asked if he could find an agent to do the job.
The Secret Service provided the perfect agent, an unthreatening female agent who was noticeably pregnant at the time.
63
Door Problems
OCPD detectives were tracking down every possible lead. What impressed Joel Todd later was that the OCPD had located, at one time or another, just about every person in the background of every photograph Erika had taken over the course of her trip to Ocean City over that Memorial Day week. This had eaten up a lot of the OCPD’s time, and some of the detectives were quite outspoken in their disagreement with being asked to do this by their boss. However, they did it without question.
Since one of the photos depicted BJ at Home Depot, detectives found customers in line with BJ and Erika. Clerks and managers. One woman distinctively remembered meeting Erika in line one day during the middle of that week. She said BJ was “carrying a money . . . like a deposit bag.” He didn’t say much while waiting in line. But the woman that BJ had been with—“Yup, that’s her,” the witness had said after looking at a photograph of Erika—had said plenty.
Erika was carrying a triangular-shaped piece of wood. The woman asked what it was for.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Erika said, smiling, “that’s all that’s left of my door.”
Erika and BJ had broken off a piece of the upstairs bathroom door in the condo to bring into the store so they could match paint colors.
“That must have been some party,” the woman said to Erika.
BJ had walked off.
Erika had a good laugh after she heard the comment, adding, “I guess you could . . . call it that.”
When the clerk didn’t have the exact color BJ and Erika needed, Erika asked for a phone book. BJ had returned. He had a brand-new wooden door in his hands, but it needed to be painted.
“Hey, you know where this Lowe’s is in Delaware?” Erika asked the woman. “Can you give us directions?”
“That’s pretty far away. I don’t know that you want to go there. It’s over near the outlet stores in Rehoboth.”
Erika beamed. Said it would not be a problem. “We were just in Rehoboth. . . .”
64
Truth or Dare
Having the Secret Service conduct the polygraph was something that gave Arcky Tuminelli a bit of comfort on a day that was filled with frayed nerves and anxiety, to begin with. Arcky felt that if Erika went into the interview and answered those questions just as they had talked about beforehand, all would turn out just fine. Joel Todd would be satisfied, the agreement would be consummated, and perhaps Arcky could begin to work on getting Erika out on bond and then structuring a solid defense.
Throughout the days leading up to the polygraph, Mitch Grace demanded constant feedback from Arcky regarding every nuance of the case. Both Mitch and Cookie were driven by the idea that once Erika passed the polygraph, she was coming home. It seemed they were under the impression—and Mitch later agreed with this—that once Erika passed that test, she was as good as out on bond.
After talking with Joel Todd and one of the Secret Service agents, Arcky met with Erika and asked her one more time if there was anything that she hadn’t told him. Now was the time to come out with it. Arcky made that perfectly clear, he later said.
Erika reassured him that she had nothing to hide. She was ready.
Arcky could renegotiate a deal for Erika at any time, essentially. The only time it would be too late to go back to the bargaining table would be after the polygraph—especially if Erika didn’t do as well as she expected.
Erika and BJ had been in jail for nearly two months by this point. Just about every time Arcky met with Erika, she’d generally cry her way through the conversation. Here was a rich girl, if you will, from an upscale community in an extremely suburbanized part of Pennsylvania. Petite, fragile, and rather unassumingly shy and quiet, she was locked up with what were hardened criminals—of which, Joel Todd and the OCPD certainly believed, she was one. Erika herself had gone on and on in letters to a friend about the conditions she had faced in prison: not being let out of her cell, the rats, feces everywhere, vomit, the smells, the urine, the dirty showers.
It was not a nice place to be.
Many who spoke to Erika during this period, however, believed the crying and “poor me” aspect of Erika’s demeanor had little to do with the situation she faced behind bars, but had more to do with the predicament she faced in a court of law. One of the stories Erika had told OCPD detectives included a desire on her part to stop the inevitable. There was a point during that awful night, Erika explained to the OCPD, when she, BJ, Joshua, and Geney were getting along rather well, but then BJ “flipped out,” she claimed, “and accused [Geney] of stealing [my] pocketbook.” Geney and Joshua were locked in the upstairs bathroom by that point. BJ was standing outside the door, according to Erika, pacing, stomping around, wondering what to do. Erika told Bernal that she had run downstairs and had searched the living-room area, hoping to find the pocketbook so she could calm BJ down. He was supposedly inc
ensed and getting violently angry. She knew how BJ could get. She understood what he would do, so she desperately searched for the purse, fearing the worst if she didn’t find it.
“That was one story,” Bernal said later. “We heard so many versions of it, we had no idea what to believe anymore.”
Which was where the polygraph came into play.
“The bottom line,” Arcky said later, referring to the polygraph test, “was that if that test came out that she was not being deceptive, Erika would not be prosecuted for murder. It wouldn’t matter what Joel Todd or the detectives believed. They wouldn’t be able to prosecute her under those charges. . . .”
It was as simple as that.
Joel Todd had made it clear that without a doubt he believed that Erika had had more to do with these crimes than she had been claiming. And although BJ was the obvious muscle behind the crime spree the duo had been engaged in for the past two years (burglaries and now double murder), Erika was an important motivating factor and a driving force behind the behavior.
It was just before 10:00 A.M. when Secret Service agents Carri Campbell and Bill Doyle said they were ready for Erika. They, of course, read Erika her Miranda rights and asked if she understood that the polygraph was voluntary. They were in a small interrogation room at the OCPD. Arcky Tuminelli and Assistant State’s Attorney E. Scott Collins were waiting down the hall. It was going to take a while. Several hours, in fact. Joel Todd was in his office next door. Scott Bernal and the other detectives were in another part of the same building.
“Yes, I understand,” Erika said. She appeared more confident and less dramatic than she had previously. She even showed poise. Arcky Tuminelli, Bill Doyle, Carri Campbell, Detective Bernal, and, from the Forensic Division, Jack Johnson, the Secret Service special agent in charge, had all been present when the forms were signed to conduct the test.
Cruel Death Page 19