Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  Carri Campbell was pregnant. It was most obvious. She would be asking the questions, while Doyle and Jack Johnson sat nearby and conducted the actual test. Erika took one look at Campbell and smiled. There was a built-in rapport there almost immediately. By 10:03 A.M., they were sitting down, comfortable, ready to begin. All Secret Service polygraphs start with a medical questionnaire, then proceed with a personal history questionnaire. Erika sat, pen in hand, and took her time answering each question. As she did this, she started to talk to Carri Campbell about her life before marrying BJ, and also her relationship with him afterward. Erika seemed forthcoming for some reason—as if she wanted to talk. No one had yet asked a question.

  Campbell wasn’t going to stop Erika from talking. Obviously, Erika felt at ease and needed (or wanted) to unload a few things before the actual polygraph started.

  So be it, Campbell thought.

  After talking a bit about her mother and father’s deep bond to each other and how it affected her upbringing (Erika said she often felt left out), Erika asked Campbell, “Have you seen my jewelry that the police had in their inventory room?” It was as if Erika felt she was going to walk out of the jail later on that same day and wanted the jewelry back as soon as she was finished with the test. She sounded almost cocky, like she’d had some sort of plan all along and it was almost completed.

  “Yes,” Campbell said, “I am aware of what is in inventory.”

  “Oh good!” Erika exclaimed happily. “I miss that shit and I really want my diamonds back.”

  It was odd that Erika was sitting, preparing to take a polygraph regarding a case where a double murder had been committed—and the bodies had been dismembered and tossed in a Dumpster like trash—and yet, she was concerned about her diamonds. If nothing else, the question told Campbell and the others where Erika’s priorities were.

  A pre-polygraph interview is an important aspect of any polygraph examination. It establishes a melodic, conversational tone between the examiner and the examinee. They begin to trust each other and develop a way to communicate that the machines begin to pick up on. It is extremely important for the examinee, being that a polygraph is based on the nervous system and blood pressure. As they spoke, Campbell and Erika became more appreciative of each other’s lives. Erika began to talk about where she met BJ and how they had run off to Las Vegas together to get married, describing that first year of their marriage as “exciting” and full of partying “five days a week” with “cocaine and ecstasy.” The way Erika described the drug abuse, it was as if it was a stage every marriage went through.

  “It was the second year,” Erika said at one point, “when I started to fear him.”

  “Oh, really?” Campbell responded. “How so?”

  Erika talked about how BJ, a nonbeliever, dragged her kicking and screaming “away from God.” She had grown up Lutheran, Mitch said later. They weren’t ultrareligious, but they believed in God and Jesus Christ and had attended church at times.

  “We didn’t celebrate Christmas,” Erika said, “because BJ didn’t believe in Jesus.”

  As Erika opened up more about her marriage, she said, “Beej never gave me a present until April this year, when he bought me a Smith and Wesson .357.”

  In doing this, Erika had admitted to a government agent—perhaps without even realizing it—that the gun that killed Joshua and Geney was indeed hers.

  “No kidding. Wow,” Campbell said, encouraging Erika to continue.

  “Yeah,” Erika piped in, “it’s the same weapon Beej used to shoot Josh.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I never even fired the gun since I’ve owned it.”

  “Not once?”

  “Beej was trying to frame me by using that gun, you know.”

  And so as the conversation continued, it seemed at first that Erika was laying the foundation for her defense. Sitting there, calmly talking to a Secret Service agent, she may have been thinking the entire time that she was getting one over on the agent. Maybe she could lay out her side of this story and push all the blame on BJ.

  Yet, Erika was about to drop a bombshell—something that would stop the interview in its tracks.

  65

  Her (Latest) Story

  There is no doubt that Erika Sifrit was the flame in the Grace household. As Erika was unable to accept magazines in the jail where she was being housed, her mother would sit in front of the wire mesh that separated them and hold up a current issue of Vogue or Vanity Fair and turn the pages slowly for Erika, several jailhouse sources said. She and her mother would not marvel at the articles, but rather at the jewelry ads. Erika was a jewelry addict; into and out of her college years, she could not go without expensive, over-the-top diamond rings, necklaces, and bracelets. Jewelry was one of those luxuries Erika needed to have. And the anecdote of Erika sitting with her mother, both of them staring at the magazine while Erika sat behind bars, is a metaphor, essentially, for how strong the attachment was between the Graces and their only child. And yet, Erika herself was about to jeopardize any chance the Graces had of saving their child.

  As the pre-polygraph interview continued, after telling Secret Service special agent Carri Campbell a story of how BJ had asked her to get pregnant, only to turn around and demand she abort the child or he would cut it out, Erika began to reflect on that night in Ocean City when she and BJ met Geney and Joshua.

  Down the hall, like an expecting father, Arcky Tuminelli was staring at his watch, waiting and wondering. Arcky had no idea that as he sat and waited with E. Scott Collins, Erika was confessing to the entire crime, beginning with how and why she and BJ ended up going to Ocean City, Maryland, that week. Moreover, even if Arcky felt like walking in on the interview to see what was going on, he couldn’t. If he barged into the interview and stopped it, Joel Todd could tear up the deal, which was what he probably wanted to do, anyway. And anything Erika had said during the time she was speaking with Carri Campbell would then be written into a report.

  As Erika sat, talking to Campbell, a terrifying picture regarding her version of the events that took place in room 1101 emerged. As Campbell listened and her colleagues wrote down what Erika said, it seemed as though Erika was unleashing a great weight from her shoulders.

  An enormous monkey.

  She began with a breakdown of her criminal life with BJ. As Erika explained, she and BJ’s crime spree had begun back on April 4, 2002. Erika said she started participating in what she called “B and E’s” with her husband, seemingly against her better judgment and even will. Before she got involved, Erika said, BJ would “pick locks at ATMs and other locations” just for the fun of it. Some called BJ an expert lock picker. Erika was more concerned about her role in these crimes than their nature, however. For example, she said they were at a reptile show once and BJ broke into an LA Weight Loss Center while she was passed out drunk in the car. There was another time when, again, she claimed to be passed out in the car in Duncansville, close to where they lived at the time, when BJ robbed a Nextel store.

  Still, that was the beginning. Over the course of several weeks after this, or the “next five B and E’s,” Erika said, she committed those herself. It was a rush. She got off on the notion of breaking into a building and robbing the store blind, then turning around and selling the items on eBay. The more she did it, the more she wanted to do it.

  “He picked the locks and I ran in, making several trips inside the store, back to our Jeep Cherokee, until it was full,” Erika said. BJ would be the lookout. They’d use extremely expensive walkie-talkie radios—which they stole, of course—to communicate while Erika was inside the establishment doing the job. It was as if they were living out some sort of wild Hollywood fantasy.

  Bonnie and Clyde.

  “Did you two have code words, or anything?” Campbell asked.

  “‘It is good,’” Erika explained. She’d be inside the business or store and BJ would be guarding the entrance, looking out for people. The all-clear sign w
as “It is good.”

  The look in her eyes as she talked about the crimes: Erika was transfixed by the way in which she and BJ had broken into so many different stores and never got caught. She ticked them off, as if talking about a tour they had gone on: Cost Cutters in Altoona; Sports Nutrition in the same Orchard Plaza strip mall, where her scrapbook store was located; the Top Ten Tanning Salon in Duncansville; and “two heavy-duty supply stores,” but she had trouble recalling the names, one in the Blockbuster Plaza in Altoona and the other in Johnstown (both burgled on the same night).

  Now, that was a real rush: two in one night.

  The Sports Nutrition store was an interesting choice, seeing that, under BJ’s direction, Erika stole cases of Yellow Jackets (over-the-counter speed pills). She said BJ had fed them to her “so I wouldn’t eat.”

  The life of a prolific thief and scrapbooking business owner was getting to Erika, however, she admitted. She and BJ were getting tired. They worked all day at the store and then went out at night and stole things. The speed stopped working. They were burning a candle. BJ was even sleeping inside the scrapbook store during the day so he could rest up for a night of crime.

  “I needed a vacation,” Erika explained to Campbell.

  The drugging and drinking weren’t helping, either.

  “Your dad can get us a room in Ocean City,” BJ said one afternoon. It was close to the Memorial Day holiday. The thought perked Erika up a bit.

  “Yeah—”

  “We can do some serious B and E’s there,” BJ suggested. Murder wasn’t part of the plan, Erika claimed. They had intended to go to Ocean City and steal as much as they could.

  Erika smiled. She liked the idea.

  They’d sold some goods on eBay recently and had a lot of cash lying around.

  “We take cash with us,” BJ said, “so we don’t have to use credit cards and leave a trail.”

  “No one can trace us,” Erika said.

  66

  Snakes on a Plane

  According to what Erika was now telling Carri Campbell, she, Joshua Ford, Geney Crutchley, and BJ sat around the living room of their condo after leaving Seacrets together and walking the beach back to room 1101. Geney and Joshua had stopped by their room on the way to the Rainbow to pick up their bathing suits, in case they decided to take a romp in the hot tub. Joshua had also, Erika claimed, picked up some marijuana. As Geney, BJ, and Joshua sat around the living room, Erika explained to Campbell, and “smoked some weed,” she walked out onto the balcony of the condo and shut the door behind her. She needed a moment to herself. That Saturday, May 25, 2002, had been a long day of partying. All those drugs. All that booze. Up. Down. In and out of it. Erika was tired and burned out. On top of that, she wanted to make a phone call to a friend. It was either that, someone close to her later suggested, or she was setting up an alibi for herself, knowing exactly what she and BJ had planned for Geney and Joshua in the coming moments.

  Erika’s “friend” Brian (a pseudonym) lived in Florida. A popular exotic-reptile trader, with an upstanding reputation on the Internet, Brian would meet Erika and BJ at various reptile trade shows up and down the East Coast so Erika and BJ could pick up whichever reptile they had previously ordered. Brian later said that he and Erika communicated daily—by telephone and/or e-mail—for a spell of time when she was in a buying frenzy. Brian was well-liked by his customers. He’d taken photos with the likes of Snakes on a Plane movie star Samuel L. Jackson and successful film director Quentin Tarantino. If you wanted a crocodile, cobra, turtle, or any number of hard-to-find exotic reptiles, Brian was definitely the go-to guy.

  In the scope of their relationship, however, Brian and Erika had met only two times, and BJ was present during both business meetings. Still, in a series of e-mails between them leading up to Memorial Day, it was clear that Erika had a crush on the guy, and he was not doing much to push her away. In fact, in one e-mail exchange, Erika had apologized to Brian for calling the previous night. She said she hadn’t even recalled the phone call because she was so high. Apparently, Brian’s wife answered a few times and there were some words exchanged. Erika had even told Brian at one point that she and BJ were at a bar they had just been kicked out of after she fell off a bar stool and her .357 Magnum slid out of her purse when she fell. After the incident, she called Brian and told him about it, adding that she and BJ were on their way to “do a specific heist.”

  It was 2:26 A.M. when Erika made the first call to Brian on that night when Geney and Joshua were in the other room with BJ. According to what Erika later said, she had called Brian to let him know that she was in Ocean City. It was late, she realized, but Brian was one of those guys she felt she could bother at any time of the night (although Brian said that their relationship was strictly professional), even if she hadn’t spoken to him for a while. (“I had a little crush on him,” Erika admitted to Carri Campbell, “even though I knew he was married.”)

  “Hi,” Erika claimed she said when Brian picked up the phone. Although half asleep, Brian recognized who it was.

  “It’s late,” Brian said groggily (according to Erika). “What are you doing?”

  “I know . . . sorry.”

  “Call me back in the morning,” Brian purportedly said.

  As Erika started to talk, she could hear Brian’s wife in the background saying something. Then the phone went dead, she claimed. (“[Brian’s wife] had unplugged the line,” Erika told Carri Campbell.)

  According to Brian, however, the phone call went a little differently. He said his phone rang and he picked it up saying, “Hello? Hello?”

  But nobody was there.

  Phone records prove this call lasted five seconds.

  A minute later, Brian’s phone rang again. This time, he said, he knew who it was because his caller ID had picked up the number. “Hello . . . ?” he said again, but there was no one on the other end of the line.

  That call, Brian said (and his phone records back it all up), lasted four seconds.

  Why?

  Because “I unplugged the phone,” Brian later testified under oath.

  Later in the week, Erika had called again. It was Wednesday night, Brian later told police, somewhere around midnight.

  “I really need to talk to you. . . .”

  “What?”

  “I really need to talk to you,” Erika said. “I met—BJ and I met—this guy at a bar. We went back to his place. BJ passed out. This guy . . . umm . . . he did some personal harm to me . . . and I really need to speak with someone about it.”

  “Call the police.”

  “I called 911. They called me a liar. They said I was drunk and fooling around. They didn’t do anything.”

  “OK. You need to wake BJ up. Call the police and tell them what happened.”

  “Keep this between just us, OK? I don’t want BJ to know.”

  The next day, Erika called Brian back. “I told BJ. We went looking for the guy. Thank God he left town. BJ was going to do something terrible to him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’d have killed him.”

  67

  Déjà Vu

  After the phone call to Brian, while Geney and Joshua were with BJ in the other room, Erika claimed she walked from the balcony to the kitchen to get “beers for everyone.” Leaving the balcony, she closed the sliding glass door behind her, then passed by where BJ, Geney, and Joshua were sitting on the couch in the living room and smoking a joint.

  “I wanted to be hospitable,” she told Campbell, referring to making her guests feel comfortable by offering them a drink.

  When they entered the Rainbow that night, Erika recalled to Campbell, she had placed her pocketbook on the kitchen table. She remembered this distinctly as she now walked back by that same table after making the phone call to her friend Brian. The only difference was that the pocketbook had been moved by someone (not her, she later claimed) and was now sitting on the backrest of the couch—which she thought was rather o
dd.

  As she stood thinking about it for a moment in whatever drug-induced, cloud-of-alcohol haze she had been in after nearly twenty hours of drinking and drugging, the fact that someone had touched her purse without her knowledge began to bother Erika, she said.

  So she picked it up and unsnapped the front flap.

  “My jewelry and pills,” she later explained to Campbell, “were missing.”

  And that, Erika now claimed, set off the beginning of the end of Joshua Ford and Geney Crutchley’s lives.

  68

  “People with Diseases”

  As they sat and listened to Erika describe what was a complete narrative account of the night, it was something Carri Campbell and, most certainly, Joel Todd, Arcky Tuminelli, and anyone else involved in the case had never expected to get out of a pre-polygraph examination. But Erika sat and talked openly about the details, as if she were reliving the night all over again.

  As Campbell listened carefully, one thing became fairly obvious as Erika kept talking her way through the night: she hadn’t yet made a connection between her and the murders. Thus far, she was putting all the blame on BJ, carefully telling a story that had BJ initiating the entire violent night—that is, until Erika spoke a few words that told Carri Campbell the lie detector test was never going to take place.

  The comment came during a point in Erika’s story in which she said Geney and Joshua were locked in the bathroom upstairs. BJ had walked over to Erika and asked, she recalled to Campbell, what to do now that they had two people locked in their bathroom—two people he had, in fact, just pulled a gun on. Erika had gone through and explained that BJ had pulled out his gun and threatened Geney and Joshua, asking them where Erika’s jewelry was and why Erika’s purse had been moved. It was after that, Erika explained, that Joshua and Geney ran into the bathroom and locked the door behind them to hide from BJ.

  Now, according to what Erika was saying, BJ had gone to her and asked what she wanted him to do with Geney and Joshua. That it was entirely up to her.