Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  Now Joel Todd and Arcky Tuminelli were witnesses. Testifying, telling their versions of what was now being called the “midnight deal.”

  During a hearing on September 30, 2002, from Arcky Tuminelli’s viewpoint, the charges against Erika were supposed to be dropped in exchange for her helping authorities locate the victims’ bodies, and also for her potential testimony against her husband, BJ. It was, Arcky said, as simple as that: Erika helped the OCPD; now it was their turn to help her.

  Arcky insisted that Scott Collins and Joel Todd had violated the arrangement. “The breach,” he said rather vehemently, “occurred when they refused to allow my client to carry through with a polygraph examination, terminating a pretest interview after she incriminated herself.”

  “She maintained that [Benjamin] was the murderer and she was the obedient spouse,” Todd testified. “She contradicted herself so many times, I wasn’t sure she had any value as a witness. She was not innocent! And therefore, well, she needed to be prosecuted for murder.”

  Plans for BJ’s trial had moved quickly. He was scheduled to face a jury on December 9, 2002. Arcky described Erika as “too distraught at the prospect of not being allowed to testify against her husband.”

  When Erika was asked whether she remained willing to take a polygraph and testify against BJ, she said, “Most definitely. Yes. Of course.”

  In rejecting the motion, which Arcky expected, circuit court judge Theodore R. Eschenburg Sr. said, “In early interviews, Erika Sifrit told authorities she had been on the first floor of the two-story Ocean City condominium and heard shots as her husband killed Ms. Crutchley and Mr. Ford in an upstairs bathroom. Her statements, July twenty-third, however, show otherwise.”

  Erika had changed her story. Not once, but time and again.

  Erika’s trial was scheduled for December 2, but Arcky told reporters outside the courthouse after the motions hearing that he was seeking a postponement based on the “extensive publicity” surrounding both cases. More than that, Arcky said, “I’ll be asking that my client’s trial be moved outside Worcester County.” There was no way, Arcky maintained, that Erika could get a fair trial in any courtroom near Ocean City, seeing that the case had generated so much publicity—most of which pointed a guilty finger at BJ and Erika.

  Regardless of what happened during the hearing, many were now well aware of the fact that innocent little Erika Grace Sifrit, who had been paraded in various news stories surrounding the case, up until this point, as some sort of golden child, whose family and friends could not ever place her in the role of a potential killer, had had a much more significant part in the murders and dismemberment than she had originally admitted.

  The tide had changed.

  76

  The PI

  Mitch and Cookie Grace were beside themselves with pain, dread, and disappointment. They had expected at some point that their daughter would be released on bond and back home working on a defense for what would be the fight of her life.

  But that never happened. Erika was denied bond and her trial date was postponed until June 2003.

  And to their credit, Mitch and Cookie, every week, drove the eight hours down to Maryland from Pennsylvania, stayed in a hotel, and visited with Erika. Meanwhile, however, as Arcky began to build a case for Erika, Mitch hired a private investigator without, according to Arcky, telling him. Arcky didn’t find out until the guy was running around interviewing people and doing nothing more than eating up—some close to the case later said—Mitch’s money.

  “Look,” Mitch later said, “Arcky told me that at some point we would need private investigators, and so I hired them and sent them to see Arcky to see what needed [to be] done.”

  Arcky saw this differently, saying, “That’s bullshit. Of course, Erika, Mitch, and I understood that if a plea agreement could not be worked out, we would eventually need an investigator. If I had been involved in hiring an investigator, it would have been someone I was familiar with in the Maryland area. Without any knowledge or input on my part, Mitch announced to me that he hired [this guy] and a former police officer as investigators. After my initial introduction to [this guy], a short time later he called me. He advised me that after talking to Mitch, he would be traveling to Virginia to conduct some interviews. I told him it might make sense to wait to see, if after the polygraph was done, we got a plea agreement from Joel Todd. I mentioned that it did not make sense to spend Mitch’s money on interviews in Virginia, if there would not be a trial. [This guy’s] response was ‘You’re on my dime. It’s none of your fucking business how Mitch spends his money.’ With that, he hung up on me. He later called me back after speaking to Mitch and told me he was going to Virginia to conduct the interviews. [This guy] later suggested that Mitch hire a DC lawyer (an acquaintance of his) to take over Erika’s case. Mitch informed me of this, since he was considering hiring a lawyer to work with me. . . . [This private investigator] remained part of Mitch’s team until [he] was barred from visiting Erika after she and [this guy] were observed fondling each other in the visiting room.”

  According to reports, the PI was kicked out of Worcester County Jail when guards caught him and Erika in an awkward position. Sure, this spoke to how inadequate, perhaps, the PI was as an investigator. But what did it say about Erika? She had claimed she couldn’t live without BJ, that her entire life had revolved around the guy. She even said that BJ had controlled her and that she could do nothing without his order. But here she was, not six months after being arrested, caught in a compromising position with a private investigator her father had hired.

  “What was clear with Erika and her family,” one source told me, “is that the legal system is not a system where culpable people get punished. It’s a system where, they believe, if you have a good enough attorney and you pay him or her enough money, that no matter what the case is about, or what the hearing is about, you can always win.”

  It’s not about justice; it’s about winning at any cost.

  “We would do everything we can to help our daughter,” Mitch Grace told me more than once.

  Part of Erika’s downfall was that she expressed a sense of hubris in that she believed, said one source close to her during this period, that “all she had to do was walk in there and pass that polygraph.”

  As time and the courts had proven, however, that just wasn’t the case.

  Mitch and Arcky ran into each other outside the Worcester County Jail one day after a brief hearing on Erika’s behalf. Mitch looked distressed. Everything that could have gone wrong, it seemed, had. Mitch had no more answers. He wasn’t ready for a trial, but what else could he do? His daughter was facing the rest of her life behind bars. If nothing else, he could feel good in knowing that Arcky had at least gotten the death penalty taken off the table. Nothing could change that. With a case like this, Arcky knew, considering all of the gruesome aspects of it, if it had been a death penalty case, a jury would likely have no trouble sentencing Erika to death after understanding what she had taken part in—suffice it to say that the OCPD crime lab had photographs depicting the horror Erika and BJ had purportedly perpetrated.

  “Look, Arcky,” Mitch said, smoking a cigarette outside near a tree. “I think this is all my fault and your fault that it happened the way it did.”

  Someone needed to be blamed.

  Arcky was overwhelmed with confusion and dismayed by the comment. “What’s my fault and your fault, Mitch?” He didn’t understand. Had he misunderstood the guy?

  “We didn’t do a good enough job making Erika understand that she had to tell you the truth.”

  There was a pause. Arcky looked up in the air and sighed. “Mitch, that’s crazy. Erika’s not a child. She knew. It’s not your fault. And it’s not my fault. We both impressed upon her as much as we could the necessity to tell the truth to us, and she didn’t. Don’t tell me it’s my fault.”

  “Well . . . ,” Mitch started to say.

  “Hey, I’m not done talking here. I don�
��t know what the hell else I could have done.”

  By the end of the conversation, Mitch and Arcky agreed to disagree on the issue of who was to blame for Erika’s downfall. What else could they do? Arguing about it would not ease the situation or help Erika.

  Water under the bridge.

  77

  Letters

  Erika couldn’t simply sit, accept the idea that she had to prepare for the fight of her life, and wait for the chance to speak her truth during trial. Instead, she had to go and get herself involved in a maelstrom of controversy once again. As the date for BJ’s trial drew closer, Erika began writing—and once she started, she had a hard time letting up.

  Letter after letter after letter.

  Erika had been receiving fan letters from around the country: other inmates in prisons and pen pals. Friends and family also wrote to her. For the most part, Erika didn’t answer the letters, especially those from admirers and criminals.

  One of the first letters Erika answered during that first summer she spent behind bars was full of an obvious “poor me, poor me” rhetoric she had seemingly spent some time working out. Erika was writing to an old friend from high school she had stayed in contact with, but with whom she had recently lost touch. She viewed the old friend, she said in her first letter, as always more “popular and pretty” than Erika believed she herself ever was. She claimed it was BJ who changed her and that God would somehow, someday, show the world the truth about what had happened inside room 1101.

  She was confident in what Jesus Christ was going to do for her.

  It was as if each letter was designed to lay a further foundation for Erika’s future defense. Erika seemed to be grooming potential character witnesses, not realizing, perhaps, that Detective Scott Bernal was monitoring each letter that went in and out of the prison. Bernal would get Moreck, his boss, and Brett Case together and read each letter aloud.

  In the next letter to the same friend (whom we’ll call “Laurie”), who was now receiving calls from Erika, too, Erika wrote, I had nothing but the most love [for BJ] . . . and now he’s framed me. She wondered if God had put [me in prison] to get me away from BJ. Had it been some sort of universal master plan she had no control over?

  In August, Erika explained to Laurie, she was receiving letters from guys all over the country, but that she never wrote back. Instead, she read the letters and “laughed.” She claimed every one of them wanted something from her, namely, “paper sex—no joke!”

  From there, Erika wrote about her living conditions: I stink, my cell stinks. She wrote how there was shit & boogers & food on the walls. Her mattress was full of holes, and with about 18 million other people’s hairs . . . it is so gross.

  I did not kill them, she wrote, regarding Geney and Joshua. And never fired her gun. It was a setup on BJ’s part from the moment they met Geney and Joshua.

  Erika said she was sure of it.

  Throughout the summer, the letters were a way for Erika to ladle on as much self-imposed sympathy as she could. Every topic she wrote about turned out to be about her. The letters had very little to do with Laurie’s life. If it wasn’t about the medication Erika was “forced” to take, it was the food she could no longer stand to eat, or the “Miller Lite” beers she couldn’t drink. In every letter, Erika began with how much weight she had lost since writing the previous letter: Down to 95 pounds.... Then 90. As she carried on and on about how much she had learned from being part of the judicial system as a prisoner, not once did Erika ever say she felt sorry for the victims. She claimed not to have had anything to do with the homicides; yet she showed absolutely no emotional connection to Geney or Joshua, other than to put them into the predicament she faced or the context of her prison life.

  And then, by the fourth letter to Laurie that summer, Erika was laying it on with a fervency that was so obvious it’s hard to imagine how Laurie didn’t see through the transparency of it all. Erika was now ending her letters: Well, I’m off now to go read the Bible and pray to God. . . . Love always, your sister forever, Gracey.

  Erika explained that BJ had promised that if she ever thought about betraying him, she had better think twice, because he would “bury me alive after torturing me.” But he was in prison now, she was assured, and couldn’t hurt her anymore—that is, of course, besides framing her for double murder.

  It was after about a half-dozen letters when Erika began to tell Laurie that it was probably best if Laurie “flushed the letters” down the toilet after reading them.

  You know, just in case.

  And then, when she felt confident she could trust Laurie completely, Erika began to open up about what was going on in her head regarding the murders. Erika said she had totally given up on BJ and stopped writing to him. She wanted to think of BJ as her loving husband and remember him through the trips they had taken down to Chile. They had climbed volcanoes and drove for hours listening to Bon Jovi, Erika explained. It was an easy image to digest, she wrote, as opposed to seeing BJ covered in blood with a knife in one hand and a limb in the other.

  Regarding that “trip” to Chile, this author asked detectives if they believed BJ and Erika might have gone down there to begin some sort of killing spree. In Erika’s writings about that period, she was preoccupied with the feeling of how free they were there, to do whatever it was they wanted. She seemed to view the trip as a period in her and BJ’s marriage when they truly bonded.

  “We thought the same thing,” one detective told me. “That they had maybe committed murder in Chile. We did some checking, but it was difficult. We didn’t get too much assistance from the Chileans. I’ll say this, however, I still think BJ killed a homosexual male in Pennsylvania.”

  That case was closed. There’s another man in prison serving time for it.

  78

  Flashbacks

  According to Erika, the most vivid flashbacks she’d ever had—when the murders began to haunt her dreams—began in late summer or early fall 2002. She had been experiencing daydreams, as she called it, for about a week, she explained to Laurie.

  It was Joshua.

  In one flashback, Joshua was “very handsome,” Erika explained: Dressed well, great body—black belt [in] karate, 30 years old. Joshua wasn’t dead in Erika’s dream. He and Erika, as sick as it sounded, were together, boyfriend and girlfriend, she envisioned. They were at a “club”; Geney and BJ were not even in the picture. There was no concept of them at all. So she didn’t feel as if she was cheating on BJ. Everything was OK. Life was great. She said she didn’t “understand the feelings” she was having for Joshua: I feel like I am in love with him & want to be with him. She was fixated on the fact that in her dreams Joshua thought she was beautiful, and that BJ had never looked at her the way Joshua did. She dreamed of Joshua putting his hands all over her (BJ never did that, she said) and dancing with her (unlike BJ), and telling her how pretty she was and how much she meant to him.

  While in prison for the possible murders of Joshua and Geney, as well as taking part in dismembering their bodies, Erika Sifrit was having dreams about one of the victims taking her and riding off into the sunset into a fairy-tale life.

  For some, it was nearly incredible to think that this was the same mind claiming not to have had anything to do with these horrible crimes.

  79

  Love (Jail) Birds

  Erika wrote to Laurie and told her about a “pen pal” in a nearby prison who had written to her. She said she had received about “twenty letters” from the guy, but had answered only one—so far. This man, whom she described as a 6’5”, lanky and handsome black guy, had played college basketball and was not interested in her life of crime (like everyone else), but rather in her basketball career.

  Jimmy (a pseudonym) hit at the core of Erika’s ego: her famed basketball career. He knew exactly how to approach her. For Erika, Jimmy was the first inmate she had heard from who could actually spell, she explained to Laurie: Unlike 99% of inmates, he has a college education....


  This impressed Erika immensely. She wrote that the guy was a genuine gentleman who never spelled a word wrong.

  Between June and late November 2002, collected all together into one neat package, the letters Erika had written to Jimmy—stacked up, about two inches’ worth— became a manifesto describing a fantasy life Erika now wanted to share with Jimmy.

  Over the course of the first few letters, Erika talked about her likes and dislikes; it sounded like they were out on some sort of a blind date. She carried on about her reptiles. Jimmy had shared with her that he had a child, and Erika said “my kids” are snakes and crocs. She said she had even walked her two crocs, Clarence and Alabama, whom she had named after her favorite characters in her favorite movie of all time, True Romance. This film is a 1993 violent saga, written by Quentin Tarantino, that starred Christian Slater as a comic book lover who falls for a prostitute (Patricia Arquette) and “rescues” her from her pimp, steals five million dollars’ worth of cocaine, then runs off on a violence-fueled rampage cross-country. Much like Erika’s life with BJ, the film is an unconventional love story revolving around drugs and murder, as two people seem to be taken in by how exhilarating violence and lust can be when mixed together.

  After talking about her reptiles, Erika moved on to her love of tattoos and the beach and being “as tan as I can be.” All of her tattoos meant something, Erika said, but she didn’t go into what, exactly.

  Within a month, using her best gangsta grammar, Erika was calling Jimmy her “luv-a.” And, in one letter, she told him that she was going to spend an entire Saturday night writing to him.

  Erika told Jimmy she wanted to wear a “belly shirt” for him so he could put his hands all over her “tummy and back.” She liked to wear backless shirts, she wrote, because the back . . . is the sexiest part of the female body.