Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  And so Todd and Collins were hoping that their potential group of jurors would not be intimidated or swayed in anyway by the obvious attempt Mitch, Cookie, and Erika’s camp had made to portray Erika as a nonthreatening college grad who had made some bad choices in life, but was, well, just an innocent little drama queen fighting for her freedom and identity back. After reading the long article, in which Erika’s entire academic career and sports life were chronicled, a person would think that Erika had gotten mixed up with the wrong guy in marrying BJ—and that alone had led to her troubles.

  Because of such news coverage, Todd argued (and Arcky Tuminelli subsequently agreed) that the trial should be held in an out-of-the-way location, where a potential jury pool would not be tainted one way or another. And so the judge eventually moved Erika’s trial to Frederick County Circuit Court, in Frederick, Maryland, about 180 miles, or three and a half hours, away from the scene of the crime.

  93

  Her Turn—Again

  Erika’s trial began on June 3, 2003. In his opening statement, Joel Todd attacked her character first, saying he and Scott Collins, “together, will be presenting the evidence against the defendant in this case, Erika Sifrit, who is accused of murdering, dismembering, and covering up the murder of Joshua Ford and Martha ‘Geney’ Crutchley, as well as the burglary of Hooters in Ocean City.”

  Todd then went into an apology he believed the state needed to make, considering that the evidence and photographs he was going to present throughout the state’s case were going to be graphic and horrific in nature. Or, as Todd put it, “gruesome and grotesque.” But it had to be done in the great order of justice. It was important for the jury to see the horror this woman had perpetrated.

  From there, Todd went through the case in chronological order, painting Erika as the diabolical, evil, twisted murderer he believed her to be. He spoke of how the state’s theory centered around a game Erika and BJ liked to play with couples they met, where the loss of Erika’s purse set in motion events that were beyond the realm of what any sane human being could imagine. Then he talked up an important point—something the jury would, Todd knew, take great pride in looking at closely and judging: how scared was Erika of her husband, truly, as she was likely going to undoubtedly argue?

  “Tuesday [after the murders] was a fun day for the defendant,” Todd said patronizingly, leaning on that aspect of his argument. “With little or no thought to the condition of the victims, our happy defendant plays miniature golf . . . and later she goes to Ocean City’s famous boardwalk.... Later that same day, in Lewes, Delaware, the defendant gets a tattoo . . . and that evening, she goes to Hooters, where she shows off her new tattoo and poses with the Hooters girls.”

  In all of these photos, in fact, the woman is smiling.

  Laughing.

  Drinking.

  Eating.

  Enjoying her life.

  They were devastating accusations. How could Erika claim BJ had made her participate in the crimes, and that he controlled her every move and she was terrified of him, if she was photographed hamming it up all over town after the murders? In fact, in many of the photos, Erika and BJ are holding each other, smiling, kissing, just happy to be alive.

  “On Wednesday,” Todd argued, “while our victims continue to decay, the defendant returns for fun to the boardwalk . . . followed by another feast of crabs . . . then another trip to Hooters . . . and another trip to Seacrets nightclub.”

  Todd explained Karen Wilson and her friend Todd Wright’s story of meeting up with Erika and BJ. It was a night that started out with a flat tire and ended in some sort of bizarre hunt—a gun pointed in their faces—for Erika’s belongings. And the entire time, Erika was supporting her husband. Why?

  Because she was the instigator of this deadly game.

  Watching from her seat in front of the judge, Erika sat comfortably and looked on with interest. Mitch and Cookie were sitting in back of their daughter, listening to every word carefully, holding hands, heads bowed at times, a grimacing look of disgrace and disgust on their ashen, tired faces.

  Todd used a computer-assisted slide show at times to support his argument, which his office had spent a considerable amount of time putting together. Against a magenta background, Todd cued photos of the gun and items found in Erika’s purse. He described their importance, implying sternly, with a tinge of sarcasm and anger, that some of the items were “morbid souvenirs” Erika had kept of the killings—especially Joshua and Geney’s driver’s licenses, which Erika—not BJ—had in her possession.

  “Her hobby,” Todd said, “was that she liked to collect things—anything, actually, to help the defendant look back and remember significant events in her life.”

  And these items, belonging to the victims, were relics to remind her of the night she and her husband had murdered and dismembered two human beings.

  Concluding his short opening a few minutes later, Todd said, “The bullets fired into the body of Joshua Ford, which took his life, were fired from a weapon removed from the possession of the defendant. At the conclusion of this case, I will ask you to return a verdict of guilty to all of the charges.”

  Tom Ceraso had been brought into the case as Arcky Tuminelli’s co-counsel. Now Ceraso stood and began to tell jurors that they shouldn’t take whatever the state’s attorney says as gospel. Think about BJ’s involvement. Think about the powerful and strenuous psychological training BJ went through as a SEAL. Think about how he had access to Erika’s gun and knife. Don’t just assume, because some prosecutor says so, that Erika is guilty based on what amounts to circumstantial evidence.

  Ceraso said he and Tuminelli would prove by the end of the trial that BJ killed Ford and Crutchley, using as evidence the statements BJ himself had made to others, as well as testimony from his trial.

  “We have this confession,” Ceraso hammered, “an absolute confession and concession on the part of Benjamin Sifrit.”

  There was a pause.

  Then, “He killed them. He butchered them.”

  Ceraso promised he would allow Karen Wilson to tell her disturbing story of BJ threatening her and her friend Todd with the same gun that killed Joshua Ford, and yet failed to explain how he and Tuminelli would prove such an accusation. Moreover, some of the defense’s most detrimental evidence, Ceraso said, would be BJ’s own testimony from his trial, in which he acknowledged and talked about cutting up the bodies of Ford and Crutchley. What more evidence did a jury need? Here was a man admitting how he had butchered these two people. In fact, Ceraso said, when asked under cross-examination about his role, the question framed as, “You did it, didn’t you?” BJ responded with a resounding “Yes.” Reading aloud from a transcript of BJ’s trial, before throwing it down on the table in front of him, Ceraso stared at jurors with a “can you believe this?” look.

  The questions on everyone’s mind as any murder trial begins are: Will the defendant take the stand? Will she raise her right hand and tell her story? All juries want to hear from defendants. They want to understand through the defendant’s eyes, responses, and body language what role—if any—she played, or didn’t play, in the purported crime.

  Either way, juries want answers.

  Ceraso hinted that Erika would possibly take the stand, although Arcky Tuminelli told reporters later that same day, referring to the same question, “I refuse to say yes or no.”

  94

  Pathology

  Joel Todd’s first witness was Dr. Adrienne Perlman, Delaware’s deputy state medical examiner (ME), who testified—same as she did during BJ’s trial—how she removed two bullets from Joshua Ford’s torso: one from the neck and one from the right side of his chest.

  Both wounds, the doctor said, “were fatal.”

  Crutchley’s death, Perlman told jurors, was a bit more complicated to theorize, and the method of murder was almost impossible to prove. The doctor couldn’t determine how Geney had actually died, since the only body part authorities uncovered wa
s her left leg, the ME said with a touch of disappointment in her academic-sounding voice.

  Erika sat and acted as if this gruesome discussion of body parts was routine and unaffecting, like maybe she was indifferent to it all. And this was, possibly, part of Tuminelli and Ceraso’s strategy: Erika should perhaps act as though she was emotionally immune to everything, emotionally uninvolved, and not invested in any part of it. BJ had warped her mind so badly, controlled her every move so tightly, and wound up her anxieties so profoundly, nothing shocked her anymore. She was a shell of a human being. She had turned into a robot, detached from society.

  On the other hand, Erika was running back to her cell writing salacious letters to her paper lover, Jimmy, depicting sexual fantasies and plans for the future.

  Two different people.

  It was a good way for Erika to approach the jury—the only problem, Todd had effectively argued in his opening, was that this was the way Erika acted, only when it suited her needs. Like now. In front of the jury.

  All other evidence available proved otherwise: Erika Grace Sifrit was a manipulator and chronic drug user, who, when she was married to BJ, thrived on good times, dark thrills, and obsessive behavior, which drove him out of the military.

  In any event, Erika sat stiffly, not showing much emotion one way or another, knowing that she faced a maximum penalty of life in prison with the possibility of parole on first-degree murder charges—not to mention a litany of additional charges, including theft, burglary, carrying a concealed handgun, and being an accessory after the fact. As Todd sat there next to Erika and her attorneys, doing battle against them, the state prosecutor was contemplating dropping these charges—even though the charges could add the potential of an extra twenty or more years behind bars for Erika.

  After Dr. Adrienne Perlman left the stand, Todd put on a few witnesses who were on the bus Geney and Joshua had gotten on in Ocean City on the day they met Erika and BJ. It was a good way for Todd to chronologically set up the narrative that ended Joshua and Geney’s lives.

  With lunch over, Todd had a friend of Geney’s explain to jurors how she began to be consumed with worry over Geney, when Geney failed to show up for work on that Tuesday after Memorial Day. This was a good way to begin to bring in the state’s parade of law enforcement witnesses to explain how it was that Erika and BJ Sifrit met up with Geney and Joshua—and eventually murdered them.

  95

  Pain and Loss

  Mark and Deborah Ford had lost a daughter to a supposed serial murderer in Cape Cod, who had allegedly beheaded the young woman and, some claimed, removed her heart. Eight months later, they got a call explaining that another family member, Joshua, had been the victim of a brutally savage crime, which seemed to be motivated by nothing more than the sheer thrill of the kill. This trial, at least to Mark and Deborah Ford, was a formality. They needed to see it all end. And being a part of it, in any capacity, was one way to accomplish that task and, with any grace, move on.

  As the afternoon wore on during this first day of the trial, Mark Ford was brought in—but not to carry on about how much tragedy had infested his life and how much he missed his brother and daughter. Sure, that was all true, and also part of his and Deb’s daily life story. It was there when they woke up, and there when they went to sleep. And the jury certainly knew it, just from looking at Mark’s face. The sadness and loss and compounded nature of the heartbreak he and his family had endured was evident there. But instead of talking about Joshua, and recalling memories of a lifetime, and imagining future memories that would never be, Joel Todd had Mark talk about the ring Erika had in her purse—with Joshua Ford’s blood on it—on the night she and BJ were arrested at Hooters. It was the same ring, in fact, that Erika wore in a few of those after-the-murder photos.

  During Mark Ford’s testimony, Todd projected a photo of the ring, asking Mark if he recognized it.

  “It’s my brother’s dragon ring,” Mark said.

  “Have you ever seen your brother wearing that ring?”

  “Many times.” The look on his face seemed to remind everyone that Mark would never see his brother wearing that ring again.

  After Todd asked Mark a few more questions—one about Geney and one about a photograph of Joshua and Geney, in which Joshua was wearing the dragon ring—Todd turned Mark over to Tom Ceraso.

  Ceraso didn’t move from his seat. “No questions, Your Honor.”

  Why attack a guy who had managed to go on in life after such devastating losses? What could be gained by such a thing?

  Rounding out the day for Joel Todd were three police officers who had been at the scene of the Hooters burglary. All three set the stage for BJ and Erika’s arrests.

  Throughout the day, it wasn’t the witnesses and testimony that caused the most watercooler discussion; it was the state’s exhibits Joel Todd and Scott Collins had presented to the jury. Todd had warned the gallery and the jury during his opening statement that it would be subjected to graphic photographs—and those images did not disappoint. The most ominous of the bunch was a shot of Joshua’s arm, cut off from the shoulder, sitting deftly on a medical examiner’s steel bench. It had been cleaned by the ME. Present in the photo were the remains—the results—of what Erika was being accused of, so graphic and sobering, Joshua’s tattoo so perfectly centered on the cusp of his bicep, his fingernails still intact and manicured. The image was so surreal it didn’t even look authentic. To sit and think that one human being had actually done this to another was stupefying and repulsive. The arm appeared to have been cut almost surgically off, whereas Joshua’s other arm, which jurors had also seen photos of, looked as though it had been cut and torn off like a chicken leg, with bits and pieces of flesh hanging from the shoulder area. Either way, the photos injected an amount of surrealism into the trial.

  Additional photos, which were not quite as shocking but carried their own weight as well, were of Joshua’s torso, which did not look human. It had started to decompose, and having been buried underneath garbage for most of the week, it took on a look of having been taken from a fire, which, of course, it hadn’t.

  Then there were the photos of how each body part had been uncovered in the landfill. Here were photos of the body parts just sitting, blending in with the garbage around them, as if they were props placed there by a key grip, or special-effects expert. Jurors could no longer look over at Erika and see an innocent bystander, someone whom BJ had forced to take part in such a crime. Because when you took these autopsy and crime scene and landfill photos and put them into the context of what transpired after the murders, you had to conclude that the same couple responsible for this terrifying tragedy of unspeakable proportions was the same couple photographed a day later playing miniature golf and eating hot wings and drinking beers, smiling and laughing and enjoying themselves. The juxtaposition of the unreal and the real was strikingly evident, some sort of lingering aroma in the air inside that stuffy courtroom.

  Indeed, no moral person there could deny how evil the people responsible for the remains of these crimes, seen in those photos, had to be.

  96

  The Setup

  The morning of June 4, 2003, began much in the same manner as the previous day had left off. Law enforcement witnesses came in and described how they had arrested BJ and Erika at Hooters, and through that seemingly routine collar, they made a discovery that had turned what was a common burglary case upside down. In fact, it was the discovery of the IDs that led the OCPD to believe Joshua and Geney were being held hostage at the Rainbow Condominiums. This seemingly routine arrest of two rather sloppy burglars turned out to be the beginning of the most horrifying case many of the detectives working it had ever investigated.

  As the trial moved forward, Erika took notes and conversed with Tuminelli and Ceraso as certain witnesses said things that she obviously disagreed with. And for what was the first time in almost two full days, Erika displayed a bit of emotion. Instead of it having been generated by graphic im
ages, or testimony about the horror, it turned out that Erika’s emotional display occurred only when she turned and stared at her parents, who were deeply moved by the proceedings, and mouthed, “I love you.”

  Erika and her parents were so close, and yet she couldn’t run into their arms and be coddled and comforted. According to one witness there in the courtroom sitting near her, Cookie bowed her head and wept softly, saying, “Why, why, why . . .” to herself. She couldn’t understand how this had happened to her baby.

  After six police officers took the stand and described how the investigation into a burglary turned into suspicion of murder, Todd called a bouncer from Seacrets who happened to be working on the night Erika and BJ showed up after the murders. The witness quickly identified a photograph of Erika and BJ in which Erika was supposedly wearing Joshua’s dragon ring. Then he testified how Erika had waved a gun willy-nilly and threatened to shoot him after he caught BJ trying to pick the lock on an automated teller machine (ATM) inside the bar.

  Tuminelli and Ceraso made a point to let the jury know (through cross) that there was no way anyone could tell for certain if it was actually Joshua’s ring in those photos, but the bell had been rung—and there was little Erika’s team could do to lessen the severity of the implication. Not to mention that the bouncer put the gun that killed Joshua in Erika’s hands, and describing her demeanor and aggressiveness, he made the assumption that this was one woman unafraid to wield or use a deadly weapon.

  Todd next called the tattoo artist who had inked the snake tattoo on Erika’s hip, allegedly on the spot where she had made the first cut on Geney, which BJ seemed to be so proud of. Todd used a photograph to show that Erika had a knife in her pocket on the day she got the tattoo, which was about forty-eight hours after the murders.