Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  And then she started taking speed pills to curb her appetite. Incidentally, in her letters to Jimmy, Erika goes on for page after page regarding being fat. She talked about how she had no tolerance for fat people. That she couldn’t understand how fat people could stand all that extra weight, and she would never allow herself to get that way. Not once while telling Jimmy about her feelings regarding overweight people did she ever say that BJ had forced her not to eat.

  “It got to the point,” BJ told the jury, “where she would follow me to these places of training.” He said it was not something that the navy was happy about; spouses weren’t supposed to follow SEALs around the country. Rather, they were supposed to show support by staying home and accepting that this was the life they had chosen.

  But Erika could never do that.

  There was one time in 2000 when BJ was sent to Alaska for mountain training. On the day he was slated to leave for the mountains, Erika showed up unexpectedly at his room, he said, on the Alaskan base.

  Basically, according to BJ, before he met Erika, his “life was the navy SEALs.” But after he married her, “I ended it.”

  If what BJ said on the stand was true, he had “acted out” in the SEALs in order to get discharged more quickly because Erika was acting so crazy. When the lawyer she hired for BJ had made it clear that an administrative discharge would take four to five months, Erika went ballistic and had an “episode.” (You can assume this included the day she pulled a handgun on Elizabeth Sifrit, BJ’s mother.)

  “After you got married . . . ,” Burton Anderson continued, “how did it affect your relationship with your family?”

  “Get ready to object,” Joel Todd whispered to his co-counsel, Collins.

  “Were any restrictions placed on the contact you had with your mother, father, and family?”

  “Yes.”

  No objection yet . . .

  “Tell us about that.”

  “I wasn’t allowed . . . My family welcomed Erika, but she didn’t get along with them.”

  Without an objection, they then discussed BJ and Erika’s scrapbooking business and how BJ had obtained his weapons under legal permits. General stuff. Nothing earth-shattering. BJ’s lawyers were laying out his life. However, as his testimony continued, it became clear that BJ was pushing the entire blame—for his own social and psychological meltdown—on Erika, placing the complete context of his life spiraling out of control on an obsessive-compulsive wife who couldn’t stand being without him.

  As BJ sat and described for the jury his life with Erika, he managed to begin talking about “that night” in Ocean City, which had landed him on the witness stand. In not so many words, he described a wife who was totally out of control from the moment they arrived in Ocean City.

  Xanax.

  Booze.

  More Xanax.

  More booze.

  She had walked away from him with another man while they were waiting in line to get into Seacrets, BJ said.

  Then he talked about meeting Martha “Geney” Crutchley and Joshua Ford.

  From there, BJ described how they all left Seacrets together—which would become the one major difference in their stories: BJ said he went to the Rainbow while Erika, Geney, and Joshua stopped at the Atlantis. It was then that BJ said he arrived at the Rainbow by himself, only to realize he was locked out of the room. Because he had no key, BJ testified, he said he “pass[ed] out in the Jeep downstairs in the parking lot.”

  85

  The Blame Game

  Sitting nimbly on the witness stand, telling his version of the story, BJ Sifrit was fairly believable and certainly sure of what he was saying. As he was “passed out” in the Jeep downstairs in the parking lot of the Rainbow, waiting for Erika to arrive with Geney and Joshua, BJ told jurors, he was startled awake by Erika.

  She was frantic. Banging on the window. Yelling.

  BJ hadn’t realized it, but he had been asleep for hours.

  “What . . . what is it?” BJ said, coming to, waking up from what he described as nothing short of an alcohol-induced coma. He’d had countless “Long Island Ice Teas” that night, he said. How many was anybody’s guess, but surely in the double digits. BJ couldn’t recall what time Erika had woken him, “but it was still dark outside.” The sun hadn’t yet come up.

  “We have to get out of here,” Erika supposedly said.

  “What?” BJ was still trying to figure out what was going on.

  “We have to leave,” Erika said again, forcefully this time, demanding.

  Surprising to BJ, Erika was not overly emotional. She wasn’t calm and collected, either. But unlike what would be a normal routine he had come to know when she started panicking, she wasn’t acting crazy and out of it. “She was upset,” BJ explained, “but she wasn’t hysterical.”

  “Come on, get up,” she said.

  “Why? What’s wrong?” He was rubbing sleep from his eyes.

  “We have a problem.” Erika started mumbling at this point. Saying all sorts of things that didn’t make any sense whatsoever to BJ, who could tell that something terrible was wrong; he just didn’t know what. He had never seen Erika act this way.

  “Why? Why do we need to leave?”

  Erika was making it clear that she wanted to get out of town. Not just leave the condo. Leave the state. Get the hell out of Ocean City as fast as they could.

  Erika said something that BJ had a hard time registering. “I didn’t believe her,” he testified. “I didn’t know what to believe. I was still half asleep.”

  “Why weren’t you there for me . . . ?” Erika started screaming. “Why, Beej? Where were you?”

  “What?”

  “Why, why, why, Beej? Why weren’t you there for me? I needed you! Where were you?” Erika was getting more animated and excited by the moment.

  Then she started talking so fast, and making so many different accusations, that BJ hardly had a chance, he explained, to get a question or comment in.

  So he got out of the Jeep. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

  Erika hesitated at first.

  Then she followed behind him.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Nothing.

  They took the elevator.

  BJ walked into the condo first. Erika was in back of him. He went upstairs and into the bathroom. Looked down on the floor.

  “There were two dead people in the bathroom,” BJ told jurors. “The people we met on the bus.”

  Joshua Ford and Martha “Geney” Crutchley.

  BJ said he bent down and checked both their pulses as he had been trained by the navy.

  “Joshua Ford looked like he had been shot in the head,” BJ explained. “I don’t know . . . about Martha Crutchley . . . but they were both covered in blood.”

  If you are to believe what BJ testified to in court, he then walked out of the bathroom and went into the bedroom nearby and sat on the edge of the bed, dropped his head into his hands, and began thinking: What do we do now? Two dead people. My wife obviously responsible for these deaths. What is the right thing to do?

  Beyond that, What in the world had happened up here while I was passed out downstairs in the Jeep?

  Had Erika snapped? Had she just shot the two of them in cold blood without rhyme or reason? What the heck had happened?

  In what seemed like thirty minutes of pure silence, BJ said he sat and contemplated what he could do, calculating the options he believed he had in front of him.

  I can either help, or not help, my wife. Abandon her and not go to the police, or just go to the police.

  In helping her, BJ knew, he understood that meant “covering up the murders.”

  BJ stood up and walked around the bedroom for a moment, and then, after sitting and thinking it through, he decided on the best way out of it all. During this entire time, Erika sat near him without saying a word.

  And so a husband had made a decision to help his wife cover up two murders.

  The onl
y way in which BJ had known to dispose of dead bodies was what he had been taught. Standing over Geney and Joshua, wanting to help his wife in whatever way he possibly could, BJ said later, he decided to do the only thing he knew how.

  Dismember them.

  After disposing of the bodies in trash bags and tossing them in several different Dumpsters in Delaware, Erika and BJ went back to the condo to begin the process of cleaning up the scene and enjoying the remainder of their vacation.

  86

  Whose Idea Was It?

  As BJ sat on the witness stand after explaining to the jury that his wife had killed Geney and Joshua, his attorney asked whose idea it was to dismember the bodies. The idea was for the jury to hear from BJ how that entire scenario played out—regardless of how much it would likely alienate each juror. Yes, BJ Sifrit was culpable. Yes, BJ had made a decision to help his wife cover up two murders. And yes, BJ had deliberately and callously taken a knife, cut those bodies up, and placed them in bags and disposed of them in Dumpsters.

  But no, BJ Sifrit was adamant, he did not kill those people. His wife did.

  “It was my idea,” BJ told the jury, to help his wife try to get away with murder.

  “Were the bodies placed in trash bags?” his lawyer asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What’d you do with the body parts after you put them in trash bags?”

  Save for a cough here, and a throat clear—ahem—there, a silence had overtaken the courtroom during this exchange. This quietness had not been present since the start of BJ’s trial. People were dumbfounded and in shock. How could you? How dare you? How awful!

  BJ’s voice sounded scratchy and torn. “I threw them away,” he said, referring to what he had done with the body parts. There was a touch of remorse present in his inflection: Was it genuine? Real? Or was BJ very good at what he did?

  Beyond that, there was a certain sincerity in BJ’s voice as he testified under direct examination, which was hard to dismiss.

  BJ’s attorney showed the jury several photographs of BJ and Erika taken throughout the week in Ocean City after the murders. In all the photos, Erika appeared happy-go-lucky, smiling, partying, just having a ball. On the other hand, in the photos BJ’s lawyers presented, BJ looked dark and torn up and totally out of it. His face was sunken and morose. He wore sunglasses in many of the photos, hiding the true nature of what he had done.

  Showing BJ a photo of himself and Erika from that week, his lawyer asked BJ to explain.

  BJ said, “That’s me, but I was not happy that week.”

  “The person standing there (in that photo) is the same person in this courtroom today?”

  “No,” BJ said softly, in almost a whisper, looking down toward the floor.

  “Why not?”

  He paused. Thought about his answer. “Because I shouldn’t have done it. I should not . . . should not have helped her.”

  Near the conclusion of BJ’s direct examination, his lawyer led him down a path of questioning that seemed to answer some of the questions the jury might have when they began to deliberate. One included the testimony of Karen Wilson, which seemed to prove BJ had bragged to her in some respects about killing “those people.”

  “Now,” his lawyer asked, “did you confess to [Karen Wilson] on that Wednesday night that you had killed two people in that condominium apartment?”

  “No, I didn’t,” BJ said stoically, without reservation.

  A few questions later, “What was your plan with Erika in respect to . . . she’d killed two people, BJ, what were you going to do?”

  “Well, I was trying to get through the week. I was drinking a lot. Umm . . . I realized that things were going to have to change when we got back to Pennsylvania.”

  “When [and if] you got back [home], what changes, what plans, were going to be made, BJ?”

  “Well, I had tried for three years to make things work between us, but it just wasn’t working. There was just no way I was going to stay married to Erika.”

  “Your involvement in this dismemberment, the accessory after the fact (one of the charges), why did that occur, BJ?”

  “It was a bad decision.”

  “Did you kill Joshua Ford?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Did you kill Martha Crutchley?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  After asking BJ several more questions, most of which centered around common things he and Erika had shared—cell phones, cars, etc.—his lawyer asked, “Were there any colors not allowed in your house, BJ?”

  “Yes.”

  “Objection, Your Honor . . . relevance?” E. Scott Collins said sharply.

  A brief sidebar was called. Judge Weinstein put his hand over the microphone and asked BJ’s lawyer in a whisper, “Is this a racial thing?”

  “Huh?” the lawyer said, surprised by the judge’s question.

  “Are we getting into a racial thing here?” the judge asked.

  “No, no, no,” the lawyer said. “The color purple wasn’t allowed in the house because it was the favorite color of BJ’s ex-girlfriend.”

  The judge laughed. “Oh, go ahead and ask it.”

  When BJ was finished explaining how Erika would not allow the color purple in their apartment, his lawyer said he had no further questions.

  With that, E. Scott Collins stood up, flattened out the front of his suit coat, checked his tie, cleared his throat, and said, “This is going to take a while, Judge. . . .” It was a pleasant way to suggest a break for lunch now, so he wouldn’t have to stop once he got started.

  “Well, let’s get going, you have fifty minutes [until lunch],” the judge said, sitting back, waiting for Collins to begin.

  87

  Showdown

  Going into BJ Sifrit’s case, Scott Collins and Joel Todd knew that convicting BJ was going to be an uphill battle. After all, BJ hadn’t said a word to police. As soon as the cuffs were squeezing his wrists after he and Erika were pinched at Hooters, BJ went into prisoner-of-war mode and clammed up.

  Name, rank and serial number.

  “We had him dead to rights on the burglary,” Joel Todd later told me, “and probably the accessory after the fact—there was no way those bodies could be removed without him knowing or participating—but that’s it. Everything else was her (Erika).”

  The other obstacle the prosecution faced was Secret Service agent Carri Campbell’s interview with Erika and the statement Erika had made during her pre-polygraph interview, which had not been allowed into the trial. “Everything she said about him would be considered hearsay,” Todd said.

  The one thing the prosecution had to get across during the cross-examination of BJ Sifrit was that he not only helped his wife dispose of the bodies, but he also helped his wife kill Geney and Joshua. Part of it was a game that either Erika, BJ, or the both of them, had played on people: hide the purse and make an accusation of theft.

  And the penalty for losing that game?

  Your life.

  Karen Wilson had made that perfectly clear already with her testimony.

  BJ didn’t look so comfortable up there, now that Scott Collins, who spoke with a deep Southern drawl that echoed throughout the small courtroom, was facing him. It was 11:42 A.M. when Collins began. Detective Bernal sat next to Collins, his trusty white pad in front of him, ready to remind Collins of those little details that only a detective who had investigated the case could.

  “Mr. Sifrit,” Collins asked, “when you married Erika Grace . . . where were your parents, your family, living?”

  “The Midwest.”

  “Iowa?”

  “Wisconsin . . . I think.”

  “You think? Are you sure?”

  “No, they move a lot.”

  Next, Collins pecked away at how Erika reacted to, as he put it, “married life.” It was clear from BJ’s earlier testimony that Erika hadn’t taken to married life all that well. In fact, it was easy to prove that Erika’s psychological behavior seeme
d to spiral out of control once she and BJ, three weeks after meeting, got married.

  BJ agreed.

  Then Collins moved into BJ’s training as a SEAL. He made the jury aware that BJ had been expertly trained to “blow up things.” More than that, he brought out BJ’s qualifications as a skilled marksman.

  “Expert shot, is that right?” Collins asked, flipping through his notes. His voice varied from sarcastic to sentimental. Facetious is probably too strong—but Collins made no secret about his loathsome feelings for BJ Sifrit and his understanding that BJ was on that witness stand for one reason: to save his own ass.

  “Yes, yes,” BJ said hurriedly, referring to his marksmanship abilities.

  “Now, you said you came to view the body as a machine—is that correct?” BJ had testified on direct that while training to save his military fellows out in the field, he was told to view humans as machines he was there to fix so “it” could go back out into the field and continue to fight.

  “Yes, yes.”

  “And, per your training, as a trained . . . as battlefield experience, if a person is injured or has a gunshot wound, what is the first thing you do?”

  “It depends on the situation,” BJ said after some confusion, and an objection by one of his lawyers. “If you’re on a battlefield, you’re probably going to want to return fire. After that, if you can get to the person without getting injured, then you’d assess your situation.”

  “You assess their condition, which means you check them for injuries, bullet holes . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “You look them over real carefully, correct?”

  “If you want to save their life, you’d need to, yes.”

  Over the course of the next few minutes, Collins had BJ establish that he also had hands-on experience in New York City training with EMTs during real-life trauma situations.