Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  The point of it all from Collins’s view was to show how BJ had run up to that bathroom, and, as a trained medic with the navy, did absolutely nothing to try to save their lives or even check to see if they were still alive.

  As they continued, BJ talked about his marriage to Erika at its earliest stage, where they lived, and who was, essentially, wearing the pants. BJ had made a point during his direct to say Erika called most of the shots and he went along like some sort of trained minion. Collins was interested in this.

  “Now, you stated that Erika had emotional problems. She worried a lot, she was anxious, and she had what you described as obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you realize this before you got married?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t notice any obsessive-compulsive anxiety prior to your marriage?”

  “Zero.”

  BJ seemed comfortable in the witness chair. It’s generally rare for juries to get an opportunity to hear from a defendant; most defendants never take the stand in their own defense. BJ was that exception, however—the guy who believed, beyond anything else, he could do whatever it was he put his mind to. And here he was, faring pretty well, as the assistant state prosecutor threw him what were, at this point, softballs.

  BJ had an answer for every question. He was speaking his truth and it appeared genuine. Collins asked about Erika’s compulsion to contact him whenever he went out on SEAL temporary training duty and how that affected his performance. BJ described one time in Alaska when Erika showed up unannounced as he was out in the mountains, and she had called his platoon leader back in Virginia Beach and demanded that BJ be pulled out of the mountains because of an emergency.

  “Was it an emergency?” Collins asked.

  “No, it wasn’t,” BJ answered sincerely.

  Collins was certainly setting the stage for something momentous, but he never seemed to get there, at least not within the first ten minutes of his cross. It was more of just pointing out what BJ had already testified to, and hopefully making the jury keenly aware that there were two sides to every story.

  At one point, Collins asked, “I wrote this down—You testified, you said something like, ‘I wasn’t allowed to contact my family.’ That what you testified to earlier?”

  “Yes.”

  “And . . . did you have a telephone?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK, could you have picked up the phone and called your family?”

  “I could have, yes.”

  For any prosecutor worth his or her salt, the beginning of any great cross consists of pointing out the obvious, so there’s no confusion with the jury later on when the hammer drops.

  “I mean, Erika wasn’t handcuffed to you, was she?”

  “No,” BJ said, his voice beginning to crack.

  Then Collins went through several times when BJ was away from Erika and how he undoubtedly had access to a computer, telephone, pencil and paper, and BJ admitted, well, yes, of course he could have contacted his family.

  But he never did.

  “Did you allow Erika to control you to that extent?” Collins asked more forcefully.

  “I was just trying to make her happy,” BJ answered.

  “I understand, you know, I try to make my wife happy, too,” Collins said humorously, “but, come on, you’re a young man, in seemingly excellent health and condition. You had just gone through what we all have to know is some of the most strenuous training that our military can dish out—that SEAL training. And you graduated number one in your class. Is that correct?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “You’re the top man! And yet, I believe Erika is described as five foot six, one hundred pounds, and this woman could control you to that extent that she wouldn’t let you even call your mother?”

  Bernal sat there, waiting for BJ to answer: Come on, do you expect us to believe that shit?

  BJ was sweating. He was shifting in his seat. “Yes,” he said quietly.

  “What were you afraid she was going to do?”

  “She wasn’t going to be happy. I was trying to make her happy. It was extreme.”

  Collins had BJ describe how the anxiety Erika experienced and supposedly suffered from had this hazardously corrosive effect on the relationship. Through that period of the marriage, she had become addicted, essentially, to Xanax, according to BJ, and she would go through her prescriptions to the point where she needed to order more drugs over the Internet.

  But then, as things seemed to be going smoothly for BJ as he talked about Erika’s digression and the hell he went through living with her, Collins asked an important question—one that spoke of a man who was obviously not too worried at all about his wife’s behavior.

  “And it was during this time,” Collins said, slowly walking his way toward what was sure to be a climactic punchline, “when she’s having these anxiety problems, as you described them, these ‘mental problems,’ that you, sir, you went out and you bought her a .357 Magnum revolver.” He paused for a moment. “Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” was all BJ said.

  “Now, you’re quite familiar with guns, are you not?”

  “More than most, I guess.”

  Collins made a point to say that a .357 is a powerful handgun. Certainly not a weapon for a novice. And generally not the first weapon of choice for a female to begin a love affair with.

  For the next several moments, Collins questioned BJ about the photographs he and Erika took while they were in Ocean City. It was apparent from Collins’s tone that he was leading BJ somewhere else now. He showed a photo of Erika and BJ on the beach, both of them smiling, sunning themselves. It was merely hours after she had purportedly murdered the couple and he had dismembered them. It was a photo BJ’s lawyers had not shown the jury.

  “That was Sunday, correct?” Collins asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Right there,” Collins said in his deep voice as the next photo moved onto the screen, quite evidently meaning to emphasize the word as a photo of the victims’ remains appeared, “is the homicide of Martha Crutchley and Joshua Ford. How long after the murder of Martha Crutchley and Joshua Ford do you, sir, do you begin to dismember these bodies?”

  88

  On the Ropes

  The feeling in the courtroom after Scott Collins brought up the issue of dismemberment was shock and silence. BJ and Erika’s vacation went from the two of them having a grand old time, to some type of wild, ghoulish party of knives and blood and body parts. The juxtaposition of reality and what seemed like scenes out of a summer Hollywood slasher film was entirely apparent as jurors and courtroom watchers sat and, in their minds, went through Geney and Joshua’s final moments of life.

  They had been emotionally tortured.

  Threatened.

  They had been abused.

  Died painful deaths.

  They had plenty of time to think about the fact that they were likely never going to make it out of that bathroom.

  And their bodies—after death, the temple of their beings—had been appallingly mistreated and deformed.

  How could anybody put a bow on that part of this crime and try to minimize it?

  For all intents and purposes, BJ kept his responses to one plain level of emotion: he never broke down, got excited, or, for that matter, seemed at all remorseful. To BJ, in other words, those grisly murders were just part of another day in the life of living with Erika. And a major aspect of that sick life had included cleaning up a mess Erika had created.

  He was wrong to do it. He’d cop to that, BJ insisted.

  But he never killed anybody—that was his story, and he was sticking to it.

  When he finally spoke, BJ answered Collins’s question regarding how long he waited after the couple was murdered before dismembering them, saying, “I don’t know exactly when they were murdered.”

  Bernal was eagerly scratching out questions for Collins to ask and calling the prosecut
or over: No blood on the carpet . . . Bernal kept writing down and sliding the paper toward the prosecutor. Then he’d underline the “no blood” portion of the page, tapping on it with the tip of his pen.

  Collins never said anything about it.

  “What I was trying to get across to Scott Collins,” Bernal said later, “was that, in my opinion, from looking at all the evidence, the bathroom door had been kicked in and then Josh was shot in the head. That door had been kicked in so hard that the doorknob hit the corner of the wall when it opened. It hit it so hard that the knob dented the corner bead in about an inch to an inch and one half. The corner bead is a thin L-shaped metal strip that protects the integrity of the corner. There was no way Erika kicked that door in. BJ had to have done it, and if Josh was alive while that door was closed, BJ had to have been there when Josh was shot and killed. I kept writing notes to Scott Collins and telling him to talk about the door and the force needed to generate the type of damage caused by the doorknob. I know. There is not a doubt in my mind, that if that information had been presented to the jury, BJ would have been convicted of murdering Joshua . . . [but] for some reason, he just wouldn’t ask the question.”

  “Well” was all Collins said to BJ, going through a timeline of the night again, asking BJ a series of questions pertaining to times and places, where and when they were, and where they ended up. At one point, Collins changed his focus of the question and asked BJ why, if Erika had had such a tough time being separated from him, did she voluntarily get off the bus with Joshua and Geney—strangers—while BJ continued on to the Rainbow supposedly by himself? Without saying it, Collins was making a play that the state was not buying the story that BJ knew nothing about the murders.

  “I guess she was OK with the separation this time,” BJ said.

  “You guess she was OK with it?” He paused. “Oh . . . kay,” Collins said sarcastically, moving on to another topic.

  Collins next had BJ go through his complete story again. There was a lot of back-and-forth: yes, no, yes, no, maybe, I guess, if you say so. Most of it was on BJ’s part. He tried to come across as if he was holding his own, but Collins was chipping away at his story, piece by piece, with every question, not necessarily the answers BJ was giving.

  “So you go into the condo—” Collins said, describing how Erika had woken BJ up in the Jeep and told him there was a major problem upstairs.

  “Yes.”

  “—and you see what you describe as two dead people on the floor of the bathroom. Is that the upstairs bathroom?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “And where were these two dead people lying?”

  Details were important now. Every minor detail was a possible point to argue. In fact, something else Collins never brought up was that Erika—all one hundred pounds of her—had managed to kill a black belt in karate and his girlfriend. And she had walked away with absolutely no possible defense wounds of any type.

  “They were to the right, as you walk in.”

  Collins put a diagram of the bathroom up on an easel in front of the jury, facing BJ. He had BJ take a laser pointer and point out where, exactly, Geney and Joshua were lying on the floor.

  “OK, and how were they dressed?”

  “It was either their bathing suits or under garments—they were in shorts,” BJ said.

  “OK . . . and as a medic, an emergency medic corpsman, did you immediately go over to these people to check them to see if they were injured?”

  “I checked to see if they were alive, yes,” BJ said.

  “Did you look at them to see where their injuries were?”

  “No. They were both . . . obviously dead.”

  Collins wanted to know how BJ could be so sure.

  BJ said he just knew. There was blood in every nook and cranny of that bathroom. The floor. All over their bodies. The walls. The blinds.

  Everywhere.

  This—mind you—before they were cut.

  “Well, how can you be so sure? Why don’t you describe what you saw?”

  There was an objection.

  “Describe Joshua for us,” Collins spurted out, ignoring the objection.

  The judge allowed him to continue.

  BJ went quiet. “Um . . . uh . . . right here,” he said, using the laser pointer to show where Joshua was lying, “there were some drawers, and he was half slouched over with his back against these drawers.”

  But with all that blood? Bernal seethed inside, scribbling again on his notepad in big bold letters for Collins to see: BJ checked for life, walked through all the blood, yet tracked NO blood on the carpet or on the bed where he said he sat for 30 to 60 minutes before making his decision to help his wife?

  Why wasn’t Collins calling BJ on this point? Bernal wondered. The forensic team had not found one trace of blood on the carpets or the bed. What in the world was going on? Why wasn’t Collins taking his lead? Bernal was livid. He’s lying . . . , Bernal wrote out, again sliding the pad over to where Collins could see.

  “Was he sitting on the floor?” Collins asked, referring to Joshua.

  “Yes.”

  “Legs out in front of him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any obvious signs of injuries on his body?”

  “Yes, his head was very bloody.”

  “His head was very bloody. OK . . .”

  Bernal started writing again: We know Martha wasn’t shot; she was killed after Josh, but we don’t know how she was killed!!!

  Why wasn’t Collins asking these questions?

  “Yes,” BJ said.

  “And how did you ascertain that he was alive—did you check his pulse?”

  “Yes. They weren’t breathing, and they didn’t have a pulse.”

  Collins and BJ continued this rapid back-and-forth succession of questions and answers for a few more moments. Intensity was building.

  Then Collins wanted to know if BJ examined Joshua’s body for any wounds.

  “There was blood everywhere,” BJ said again.

  Come on, Bernal thought, perfect opportunity to ask about the absence of blood on the carpet.

  But Collins didn’t. Instead, as he tried to back BJ into a corner, pressuring him to answer more quickly, in a more detailed manner, maybe beginning to trip BJ up, the judge interrupted, “Is this a good time to break for lunch?”

  It was almost 12:30 P.M.

  Writing again, Bernal threw his pen down on the table.

  Lunch? No one had paid much attention to the time. Collins had mentioned at the start of his cross if this would happen, and bingo: he had BJ on the ropes, ready, he felt, to crack, and the judge was forced to break for lunch.

  “Yes,” Collins said reluctantly.

  89

  The Details of a Crime

  When they returned after lunch, BJ took the stand once again, and Collins tried to get back to where he had left off. But it was clear something had been lost in the disruption. Collins could spend the rest of the day and still not get that spark back, that natural tempo created by the facts emerging and momentum building on its own.

  Bernal and Collins talked it over during the break, and it was clear they viewed the way in which Collins should ask BJ questions much differently.

  What could Bernal do?

  A few questions into his postlunch cross, Collins showed BJ a series of photos of the lock picks he had used to break into Hooters. He asked BJ if those same lock picks were always inside the Jeep.

  “Yes,” BJ answered quickly, without thinking about his answer.

  “Are you a trained locksmith?” Collins asked.

  “No,” BJ said, almost laughing, “but I can pick locks,” he added braggingly. Some claimed BJ could pick any padlock made.

  Smartly, Collins pointed out the fact that inside the Jeep on the same night BJ said he had waited for Erika and eventually passed out—because he had been locked out of the condo: Erika supposedly had the keys and she was with Geney and Joshua—were three sets of lock picks.
The implication was fairly apparent, without Collins having to say it: Why hadn’t BJ, an expert lock picker by his own admission, picked the lock at the Rainbow?

  More than that: how had BJ gotten into the Jeep without keys? (There’s not a chance he had left that Jeep open, not with several weapons and other personal items stored inside.)

  But Collins didn’t ask. Even after Bernal suggested it.

  Collins went back to the line of questioning he had left off with, before lunch. A short while in: “You testified that you dismembered them, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, on the pieces of the bodies we did find, they were found disrobed. Did you also disrobe them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they were also found with no jewelry. Did you also take the jewelry off them?”

  “No.”

  “You did not?”

  “No.”

  “OK. Did anyone help you dismember them?”

  “Erika.”

  “Erika helped you dismember them. OK.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me,” Collins said in a rather demanding tone, “how do you dismember a body, sir?”

  BJ’s attorney objected.

  “Which part do you cut off first?” Collins continued after the objection was overruled by the judge.

  Bernal wanted the jury to understand what was an old trick that sociopaths often tried to use when they testified. Bernal knew because he had seen it countless times in an interrogation room, but also in a court of law. “There’s a thing called ‘limiting your involvement.’ Admit to the lesser crime to try and get away with the major crime.” He wanted Collins to walk along those lines with his questioning and stamp it into the jury’s minds: BJ was willing and able to admit his involvement so he could skate on the more serious charges.

  There was an awkward, eerie silence in the room at the moment Collins brought up the idea of dismemberment and how BJ had actually gone about it. No one wanted to hear it, and yet it was entirely relevant. The reality of the crime was that BJ and Erika, maybe one or both, had cut these two people up into twelve pieces. The jury deserved to hear from BJ the gruesome facts surrounding this particular part of the crime.