Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  Erika thought about it. Then, “Just fucking do it,” Erika said, explaining to Campbell what she had told BJ that night.

  “Huh?” Campbell responded.

  “Now you have me on murder?” Erika asked as she sat there telling Campbell what happened.

  “What do you mean by ‘Just fucking do it’ and ‘just do it’?” Campbell asked. She wanted to be sure she understood exactly what Erika was saying.

  Erika paused. Then, “I meant, ‘Just kill them.’”

  In other words, Erika was now claiming that she had given BJ the order to shoot Joshua and Geney. To murder them.

  Campbell asked Erika the same question ten times, she later wrote in her report of the conversation, and her answer was always the same.

  Except one time. Erika had changed it up a bit, saying, “I meant, ‘Kill them.’ I knew he wanted to.”

  “How could you know that?” Campbell asked.

  Erika then proceeded to explain the remainder of the night.

  “I knew he wanted to kill someone, because he asked me just two weeks ago if he could kill my family,” Erika said to Campbell. “He wanted to kill my parents, both nannys and pappys (grandmothers and grandfathers), and even a wealthy aunt. He was going to do it in the middle of the night and leave for Argentina. Then I, being the sole heir to all the money, would fly over and meet him. . . .”

  BJ was entertaining himself, Erika explained next, as she and Campbell got back into the actual narrative of what had happened inside the condo that night. Having two people locked in his bathroom turned BJ on. Because now, Erika said, BJ had Joshua and Geney right where he wanted: “Yelling and begging for their lives.”

  BJ got off on the fact that he had two people under his control, inside the bathroom, and, apparently, the green light from his wife to put a couple of bullets into their heads—something he had wanted to do to somebody, Erika suggested, for a long time.

  And then as they both stood outside the bathroom door, Erika said something to BJ that rattled him.

  “BJ . . . ,” Erika said.

  “What?”

  “I called 911—”

  BJ went ballistic at hearing the comment. “You did what?”

  Erika said she started to cry. “I called 911.”

  “What the fuck are we supposed to do now? Am I supposed to—” And then he abruptly stopped talking.

  He thought about it. Leaning with his back against the bathroom door, BJ seemed to have an epiphany, phrasing his next statement as a question to Erika, using what had become a familiar phrase: “I’m just going to fucking waste them, cool?” He smiled.

  “Huh?”

  He said the same thing again, phrasing it as a question: “I’m just going to fucking waste them, cool?”

  It was a strange way to communicate. But when BJ said “Cool?” Erika knew he meant it as a question, or euphemism for “Is that OK with you?” It was BJ’s way of once again asking for her approval.

  Erika’s stamp.

  Joshua and Geney were “getting very loud,” according to what Erika explained, “and I just wanted them to shut up.”

  Indeed, someone was going to hear the commotion.

  “The people out on the beach,” she said. (They might have figured out what was going on.) “I was worried about the police coming and the people out on the beach hearing us,” she told Campbell.

  Geney was screaming the loudest, banging on the door: “Help me, help me, help me.” Then Geney went over to the glass window in the bathroom, which faced the beach. “Help me,” she screamed again, banging on the window.

  While Geney hammered on the glass, Joshua was thumping on the door with his fist, yelling, “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?”

  BJ was on the opposite side of the door . . . thinking.

  Erika was standing nearby. They were looking at each other. BJ had the gun in his hand.

  “Just fucking do it,” Erika said nonchalantly. “You got them fucking naked, you put a gun to their heads, just do it!”

  The implication was that they were in big trouble by this point, anyway. Why not finish the job? Kill them. Get it over with.

  “Why are you doing this?” Joshua yelled again. He was still thumping his fist against the door.

  “Help me, help me,” Geney was yelling.

  BJ turned toward the door. Then he put the gun up against it. Eye level.

  From looking at this situation, it’s clear to see that BJ was playing a game. Considering his size and build—military SEAL training aside—he could have kicked that door in and shot both Geney and Joshua.

  But he didn’t—at least not at first.

  As Joshua was beating on the door, BJ held the gun up and fired in the direction of the banging, then backed away from the door and, with all his might, kicked it open.

  “The kick was so hard,” Erika said, “that BJ fell backward.”

  The door flung open quickly with the force of the kick, and the door handle broke through the Sheetrock and lodged itself in the wall.

  BJ was now inside the bathroom.

  Geney was screaming. Joshua had gone quiet.

  “I saw Joshua fall to the right side of the bathroom,” Erika explained to Campbell, “against the closet.”

  Joshua had been shot. He was in great pain. Yet, he continued to scream at BJ, saying, “Why are you doing this?”

  According to Erika, BJ walked over to Joshua at that moment and shot him in the head, silencing him. Shortly after BJ killed Joshua with that single gunshot to the head, Erika pissed in her pants. Then she walked out of the bathroom (she had been standing in back of BJ) and sat on the edge of the bed and “waited for it to be over.”

  With that comment, Carri Campbell asked, “What do you mean, ‘Waited for it to be over’?”

  “The killings,” Erika answered.

  The killings.

  As Erika sat on the edge of the bed, she heard two more shots—and they startled her—in quick succession, “five seconds apart.”

  BJ walked out of the bathroom, flexing his muscles like a bodybuilder, yelling and laughing. He was covered with blood, Erika claimed. The blood, as she looked at BJ, was smeared all over him. He had taken some of the blood and lathered himself up with it.

  War paint.

  “Come here,” BJ said to Erika. He was pointing to the bathroom. He wanted Erika to see his work. Joshua’s necklace had shattered when BJ shot him. There were little “black beads” from the necklace, Erika explained, all over the floor. Geney was in the corner of the room, underneath the vanity, crying, shaking, scared for her life.

  He hadn’t killed her yet.

  BJ picked up several of the black beads and tossed them at Erika. “This is your cherry,” he said mockingly. “Isn’t it a beautiful sight?”

  Geney had curled herself up into what Erika described as the “fetal position.” There was a channel of blood around the vanity, Erika added, “so deep that it would splash” whenever one of them stepped in it. Joshua was leaning against the closet, his legs extended outward, blood all over the front of his body.

  Dead.

  Bill Doyle, the other Secret Service agent with Carri Campbell, stopped the interview for a moment and took out a photograph of Joshua and Geney and showed it to Erika, asking, “Is this the couple you’re talking about that was killed?”

  Erika smiled. “I took that picture,” she said nonchalantly, as if she and Geney and Joshua were old friends. It was odd. She had just finished describing how scared she was and how violent Joshua’s murder had been, and now she was smiling at the photograph of him. Then she added, “He’s cute! I sort of hoped something did happen at Seacrets that night in the bathroom.... Do you think he was Jewish?”

  “Did you and BJ think he was Jewish?” Campbell asked, searching for a motive.

  “BJ was never able to tell, but he always asked if I thought someone we met was a Jew.”

  “Why is that?”

&n
bsp; “BJ did not like niggers or Jews,” Erika said, “or people with diseases. He believed mongoloids, retards, and cancer people polluted the gene pool.”

  69

  The First Cut

  What was clear as Agents Carri Campbell, Bill Doyle and Jack Johnson sat and listened to Erika Sifrit talk about how she and BJ murdered Geney and Joshua was that Erika was doing her best to paint BJ as a twisted sociopath who got off on murdering two people and, in turn, sucked her into his evil web. She made it clear that it had been all BJ’s idea—that she only went along because she felt she had to; that she only said “Just fucking do it” to feed a desire he’d already had to kill a few people.

  With Joshua dead and Geney about to die, it occurred to Erika as she stood inside the bathroom—blood all over the place, from the floor to the walls to the ceiling—that BJ had fired her gun several times and that the noise might arouse some sort of suspicion. More than that, she later told Carri Campbell, “I asked BJ, ‘What about 911?’”

  BJ looked at her. Surprised. Oh yeah, that.

  “Where’s my shit?” she then asked, talking about her jewelry.

  “You need to run down to the Jeep, get the Motorolas, check the beach for our stuff, in case Geney and Joshua threw it over the balcony, and take a look around for the police,” BJ said hurriedly.

  Erika just stood there.

  “You understand me?”

  She nodded.

  “What the fuck?” BJ asked. “What did you do, wet your fucking pants?”

  Erika looked at herself.

  BJ started laughing, mocking her once again.

  Erika ran downstairs, found the Motorola radios, and quickly brought one back up to BJ and then ran back down to the beach to check for the jewelry BJ had claimed Joshua and Geney had stolen and maybe tossed over the balcony.

  As she walked along the beach, scoping things out, Erika keyed the radio. “You there?”

  “Go ahead,” BJ said.

  “I want to come back upstairs.... There are people out here on the beach. Are we good? Are you the only one up there?” It was the same language they had used when committing burglaries. Erika was asking if BJ had finished what he was doing: had he murdered Geney (who was still underneath the vanity) yet?

  BJ didn’t answer.

  “I was paranoid,” Erika later explained, “to say ‘dead’ or ‘alive’ on the radio in case someone heard me.”

  Erika ran back up to the penthouse when BJ failed to respond. He was still upstairs in the bathroom, she said, just staring at the vanity, where Geney was hiding. He had a look on his face, a crazy haze about him.

  Erika stood beside him. “Baby,” BJ said, “open your knife like I taught you. Get down there and check to see if she’s dead. Get down there and make sure.”

  “But I thought you said she . . .” Erika started to say, walking over to where Geney was hiding.

  Kneeling down, Erika looked and saw Geney was still crouched in a fetal position. She claimed later that she didn’t know, at this point, if Geney was alive or dead, but that she was under the impression BJ had shot and killed her.

  “So I began to cut her body,” Erika explained to Carri Campbell.

  With that comment, Campbell moved into the same position she believed Geney might have been in at the time. But Erika said no, that wasn’t it. And then she got up, crouched down, and curled up to show Campbell what she meant, saying, “Like this.”

  Back inside the bathroom, Erika explained, she got down on one knee and began “cutting” Geney. “Deep,” she said. Geney started bleeding so profusely, Erika added, that the blood got all over her clothes as she continued. Interestingly enough, as Erika described this graphic, brutal scene, she showed no emotion. She never once said she felt forced to do it, or that it grossed her out having to cut up a fellow human being.

  “Where did you cut her?” Campbell asked.

  Erika explained it was the right side of Geney’s abdomen, above her hip.

  “I was surprised how much pressure it took to cut the skin, since I had never cut someone before. I cut her twice, like this,” Erika said, and then proceeded to show Campbell how and where.

  At one point, Erika paused, looked at Campbell, and said, “You have me on murder, don’t you?”

  Ignoring her, Campbell asked, “Was [Geney] alive or dead when you cut her?”

  “I do not know for sure, but I thought she was probably dead.”

  “Did you check to see in anyway before you cut her?”

  “No.”

  70

  My Girl

  From about the time she was nine years old and playing Pee Wee League basketball outside Altoona, Pennsylvania, Mitch Grace stood along the sidelines—sometimes as her coach—cheering on his daughter, hanging on every move she made with that ball. In fact, in all those years, Mitch said later, right up until Erika left for the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, he’d never missed a game.

  Not one.

  The game Mitch recalled off the top of his head took place in New Orleans when Erika was twelve years old. It was during an AAU tournament. Erika’s team had made it to the finals, but they faced elimination. Down by two points, with no time left on the clock, Erika, the best three-point shooter on the squad, hurled a bomb from her hip as the buzzer went off, but it slapped the backboard and failed to go in. It seemed there would be no Hollywood finish. No cutting down of the net. No hoisting Erika on their shoulders and parading her around the gymnasium floor. Their season, at least for the moment, was over.

  Or was it?

  As the shot flew through the air, Mitch Grace, sitting, watching every degree that orange-and-black ball arced toward the basket, thought he heard the faint rustlings of a whistle.

  Erika had been fouled.

  “Three shots,” the ref yelled.

  No one could believe it.

  The team could not have asked for a better free throw shooter. Erika had spent countless days taking hundreds of foul shots. One obstacle she put on herself before she allowed herself to retire into the house after school, her father later explained, was she needed to hit a layup, a foul shot, and a three-foot jumper, all in a row, or she wouldn’t eat dinner.

  As much as she pushed to succeed on the court, Erika lived for the pressure. She reveled in the chance to take a free shot and move her team forward. Still, today the team needed her to be perfect: If she made all three, they won. If she missed one, overtime. Missed two, they were going back to Pennsylvania with their heads between their tails.

  Not only did Erika Grace make all three shots, but the ball never rubbed against any metal: all three swished the net and the team won by a point.

  Mitch Grace almost had a heart attack from the anxiety, but he nearly cried as his only child was heralded as a champion and hero.

  That Disney moment seemed to embody the life Erika Grace would begin to lead after that game, setting a precedent for herself as she began to go through life, as a teenager and then into her early twenties. There seemed to always be that constant pressure to perform. Constant pressure to be somebody. Constant fear that she would not live up to the expectations others had put on her. Even at home.

  Mitch and Cookie, a former nurse, met in a hospital one afternoon while Mitch was working construction nearby and had injured himself. They dated. Then married. And, Mitch said later, they had never—“not for one night”—been apart since, some twenty-five years later.

  As Erika grew up, she was a witness to the perfect life. The white picket fence. The cars. The money. A mom and a dad who truly loved each other.

  Her idea of the perfect life, Erika later said, as she began to date and think about perhaps going to law school, became: Could she live up to what was expected of her, without failing? Erika Grace: the overachiever who, inside, was scared to death of disappointing and letting people down. Scared because, as Erika grew into a woman, she began to have these strange feelings guiding her—feelings of darkness and re
morse, anger and resentment. Feelings that her mother and father cared more about their marriage than they did for their daughter. On paper, Erika had the ideal upbringing. In reality, underneath her transparent, thin skin, Erika suffered self-esteem issues that would lead her away from her goals and into a life Mitch and Cookie could never have imagined possible—even in a nightmare.

  “It’s such a horrible crime,” Mitch Grace later told me, talking about what had happened to Geney and Joshua, “so it’s hard to talk about it. I don’t want to make light of it, implying that she (Erika) is more important than the poor thing that had happened to these good people.”

  Although Mitch was clear that he didn’t want it to sound like his daughter was more important than the victims in this case, he was concerned that his daughter would be forever branded a monster for the fact that Geney and Joshua were dismembered, admittedly, by Erika and BJ. Mitch, of course, didn’t want to view his daughter—what father would—as some sort of barbarian who could cut another human being up in pieces.

  “She has been portrayed as this horrible killer,” Mitch continued, “but no one understands.... Because she’s my daughter, I feel there’s a huge difference between actually killing somebody and not knowing. Everybody in a situation has their own tragedy.”

  The implication was that Mitch believed Erika had had nothing to do with actually murdering Joshua and Geney—that it was all BJ’s doing. And yet, as Erika herself continued to explain to Carri Campbell, she had participated willingly in these murders, ordered them, and then took part in dismembering their bodies.

  71

  Can It Be True?

  Agent Carri Campbell noticed that Erika had what looked to be a fairly new snake tattoo on her right side, slightly above her hip. It was in the same location that she had just claimed to have made that first “cut” on Geney. “Is that the location you cut [Geney]?” Campbell asked, pointing to the tattoo.

  “Yes,” Erika answered without hesitating. “I got this tattoo two or three days later.”

  “Did you choose that particular location on your body for some reason?”