Cruel Death (14 page)

“I’m taking a shower,” he told Erika. “Then we’re packing up the Jeep and taking off.”

26

Dump Site

Erika claimed to have passed out in the Jeep on the way to the first dump site. She said she had snorted so much Xanax throughout the night and into the morning that it knocked her out. She and BJ had been up by this point for twenty-four hours. They were driving north on Route 1, heading toward the next major beach town, Rehoboth. It was a little more laid-back in Rehoboth. More private. Lots of supermarkets and large department stores. Residential neighborhoods.

BJ was thinking . . .
Dumpsters
.

When Erika woke up the first time, they were parked in the back of the Hotel Blue. “Where are we?” she asked, coming out of it, opening her eyes, looking around.

BJ got out. There were people around.

Then he got back into the Jeep. “We’re gonna keep driving.”

Erika went back to sleep.

It was a “considerable amount of time” before she woke up again, because Erika looked at the clock in the Jeep the second time she got up and about forty minutes had passed.

When she opened her eyes, the Jeep was parked. BJ was not in the vehicle by her side. Her heart raced for a moment. She looked around.
Where is he?

BJ was outside the Jeep putting everything into two different Dumpsters.

“Get your ass out here and help me!” BJ had yelled at one point, but Erika refused.

She said she never got out of the Jeep, and never helped him, but instead she lay back down and tried falling asleep.

After BJ was finished, he jumped back into the Jeep and started to drive. Looking both ways, pulling out of the back of the supermarket, he said, “You know where we are?”

“No,” Erika said.

“Delaware.”

“Oh.”

“We’re going to come shopping here tomorrow. I’m gonna bring you out here to the outlets.”

The trip would serve two purposes: he wanted to make sure the Dumpsters were emptied, he explained, and a good shopping excursion at the outlets was something Erika could probably use at this point.

As they drove, Erika began falling in and out of it again, still tired from her night of horror, and coming off so much Xanax and booze. She and BJ had been going in high gear for about eight hours, up all night.

At one point as they drove back to the condo, BJ looked at Erika, she later said, and, as calm as could be, he said, “I’ve never been that excited in my life.”

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“Sexually, you know.” BJ was referring to killing and then dismembering Joshua and Geney. It had stimulated him.

BJ had split up the bags and placed them into two different Dumpsters, each about forty yards apart from each other. He had even jumped inside the Dumpsters and sprinkled sloppy joe mix and various rotting foods over the bags so that no one got curious and opened up the bags.

Because he had worked at a grocery store when he was in high school, BJ knew that the large chain grocery stores emptied their Dumpsters two or three times per week. He knew that the particular Food Lion in Delaware he had chosen would be on the same schedule. He also knew that because rotten meat and other foods had been tossed out with regular garbage fairly regularly, the smell of the decomposing body parts wouldn’t cause anyone much concern. The smells were expected, in other words.

When they got back to their condo at the Rainbow, BJ said, “Let’s take a nap.”

He plopped himself down on the couch and slept for “three to four hours,” Erika later told detectives.

Erika had told BJ before his nap that there was no way she could clean up all the blood. He could sleep as long as he liked, but she wasn’t about to go upstairs again. It was too damn eerie and disgusting.

As BJ slept, Erika went into cleaning mode, which is something she did whenever anxiety hit, like hunger pains. She started rearranging and fixing things downstairs in the condo. She didn’t need sleep because she had slept pretty much the entire ride to and from the dump site.

When she was finished, she woke BJ up and told him, “You need to get this blood out of here. It’s starting to smell. It’s making me sick. You need to go up there and clean.”

BJ smoked some of the marijuana he claimed Joshua had brought to the Rainbow and then went upstairs and started the gruesome task of trying to get the bathroom to look normal again. To BJ’s delight, he and Erika still had almost the entire week left to their stay. The next couple expected at the condo wouldn’t arrive until the coming Saturday morning, about six days away.

Most of Joshua and Geney’s personal belongings had gone out with their bodies in the Dumpsters. But BJ, Erika later described, wanted to keep certain things for “trophies.” Their IDs and Social Security cards, especially. Seeing that BJ could use them in the future if he needed identification for “something illegal,” he had tossed them aside and kept them.

“He talked about [how] he wanted to wear the ring,” Erika explained. “He saved the bullet, which he wanted to make a necklace out of. . . .”

The bullet was from Joshua’s torso. According to Erika, BJ had carved the bullet out of Joshua so he could save it.

Later that day, they went to the local hardware store in Ocean City to buy cleaning supplies. The bags of supplies were heavy, and Erika said BJ made her carry them upstairs.

“You must understand,” she explained to Detective Bernal, “when we go for groceries at home, he goes grocery shopping with me and leaves eight bags of groceries in the car and goes upstairs and sits on the couch. Like, I carried all the cleaning supplies up to the bathroom, or they never would have gotten up there.”

Upstairs, BJ took a gallon of bleach and poured it all over the blood on the floor.

“That’s not going to do anything,” Erika told him.

“I know. They have that stuff that they spray to see if there’s blood.” It was almost a joke to BJ, she said. Like he was having fun with the entire idea of cleaning up the murder scene.

Later, as she was explaining this to detectives, Erika was laughing about the memory. “I’m sorry,” she said, “there’s nothing funny, but he dumped Clorox . . .” And she started laughing again.

“Clorox,” BJ had said, “will cover up DNA, but they’ll still be able to spray luminol and tell where the blood was.”

BJ then got down on his knees and started scrubbing the floor. He was kneeling in about an inch of blood—high as a junkie, Erika said.

Looking back up at Erika as she stood just outside the bathroom, he said, “Help me.”

“No way. I cannot clean up that amount of blood. You need to clean up the basics of it . . . the guts and the [leftover body] parts off the floor.”

Erika walked over to the toilet and vomited.

Every time BJ would “come down from his high,” he’d go back downstairs and smoke another joint.

Instead of helping BJ, Erika lay out in the sun on the balcony, making sure not to lose her tan. Back home, she went to the tanning salon every day. Why waste a moment in the sun—seeing they were in Ocean City already—and she was determined not to help BJ?

After a few hours, BJ was able to get the bathroom to a point where, Erika later described, “it looked like somebody had had a bloody nose or something. It didn’t even compare to what it had been.”

The next day, Tuesday, BJ and Erika went to the Home Depot and purchased paint and a new bathroom door and other supplies they needed to get the bathroom back to as normal as it was going to get—without gutting it and starting over. Any garbage they accumulated, bloody rags and paper towels and “body organs” and tissue and “guts,” as Erika called them, along with wood molding too darkened by blood to be painted over, were tossed into trash bags or put directly down the garbage chute in the condo’s main hall.

Throughout all this, Erika later insisted, BJ made her take photos, documenting the entire bathroom remodeling job. She said she was scared to say no to him, because he was acting so crazy. Looking back on the entire week, Erika, the scrapbook queen, had documented everything on film, even after the murders: the trip to Home Depot, everywhere they had stopped to eat or drink. And just about everything else they did together. In no way was she forced to take these photographs.

“And so you have to understand that this entire time everything he’s asking me to do, I’m—I’m incredibly frightened to even tell him no, because I’ve never . . . I’ve heard him say things and I’ve seen him do crazy things . . . I was snorting Xanax . . . I cannot even tell you how many.”

Still, looking at the facts, it’s hard to agree with Erika. In almost all the photos taken of them together (by a passerby or stranger they met up with and befriended) during this period (before and after the murders), they are smiling, hugging, and kissing. There are even photos of Erika eating chicken wings and drinking beers and playing miniature golf and getting a tattoo of a cobra on her hip, where BJ later said she had made the “first cut” on Geney (which she later backed up during an interview with a government agent). There’s one photograph of Erika and BJ each with a pile of crab legs in front of them—and this photo was taken about twenty hours after the murders.

While they were running around Ocean City like two newlyweds on their honeymoon, drinking and drugging and gorging themselves on all-you-can-eat crabs and pitchers of beer, Erika was wearing Joshua’s ring, a tiny little blood spot on the inside arc of it, on a chain around her neck. And Geney and Joshua’s IDs were in her purse. In no way was BJ forcing Erika to do any of this. Her own photographic documentation of the events before and after the murders, along with her behavior in the coming days, spoke to an entirely different scenario—one that put Erika Grace Sifrit at the helm of this ship, sailing her and BJ into a week of thrill-seeking madness, which they had both been leading up to for quite some time.

27

The Real Me

Questioning Erika, OCPD detective Scott Bernal had a tough time wrapping his mind around the idea that she was just some sort of innocent bystander who stood behind her violent husband because she was scared to death of what he would do to her. But as Erika talked about her marriage, which was based on lies and violence and threats, she explained that for her it was more than any of that—much more.

“Because I didn’t think that anyone else would want me,” Erika said when Bernal asked her why she had stayed in the abusive relationship, and why she never went to the police. “He loved me. He laid down with me at night. He worked with me. He, you know . . . Why would anyone else want me? I didn’t want to be alone.”

Erika further explained that “during that whole week, I was petrified of him. I didn’t know, day to day, what was going to happen after that week. . . .”

Erika and BJ’s crocodile was named Alabama. She loved having these types of reptiles in the house. BJ thought that snakes were “associated with the Devil,” Erika said, which was one reason why he enjoyed having them around.

Further along, Erika told a story about BJ, something he had once said regarding hurting people. There was a “true way” to hurt a person.

“If you want to hurt someone or there’s someone you hate,” Erika said, “you just go and kill their whole family so that they have to live without them, and you film it and you film you. . . . You film you torturing their family and then you mail them the tape, and they have to live without their family forever, and they have to watch the way that their family died—being tortured.”

28

Killer Wife

In the middle of their ten-day vacation in Ocean City, two days after they had spent the night partying with Geney and Joshua, murdering and dismembering them, BJ and Erika met up with a new friend, Todd Wright.

BJ and Erika had gone back to Seacrets, drinking and drugging and having a good time, on Wednesday afternoon, and found themselves there well into the night. Todd seemed pretty drunk, but he was fun. What had started as a day of just sitting outside in the sun, banging back beers and shots, had turned into a night of heavy and hard drinking with Todd.

Erika was acting crazy, BJ said later. Totally out of it. Their new friend, Todd, was even drunker.

At some point that night, well before midnight, one of the bouncers from Seacrets approached BJ and Erika and asked them to leave. Erika was out of control. Stumbling all over the place. Slurring her words. Laughing at people. There was one point where BJ had done a shot of tequila and vomited right there in the bar.

Erika broke out her camera and photographed it for a scrapbook she was going to make of the trip.

BJ had no problem leaving. They had been there for about ten hours already.

Erika snapped. She started yelling and screaming. Swearing. Spitting.

BJ walked over and restrained her. “I’ll kill you . . . ,” Erika screamed at one point as the bouncer began to now insist that they collect their belongings and get the hell out of the bar. As he did that, Erika took her gun out of her purse and began waving it around, saying, “I’ll kill you. . . . I’ll kill you!”

“Come on, Erika,” BJ said, “let’s go.”

“I stopped her,” BJ later recalled in court, “I mean, why not . . . of course I stopped her.”

The bouncer was prepared to call the police after catching BJ trying to pick the lock of a bank machine inside the bar. BJ, however, grabbed Erika as she was laughing and waving the weapon, pulled her away, and, with their new friend, Todd Wright, left the club.

29

Fish Tales

Near midnight, as Erika, BJ, and Todd were out on the road after leaving Seacrets, Karen Wilson (a pseudonym) was at home when she began receiving telephone calls—sixteen in all. It was Todd, her friend. He was “falling-down drunk,” Karen said later, and wanted her to meet him and his two new friends at another Ocean City bar. He just wasn’t sure which one.

“Stop calling me,” Karen said during one of the calls.

“Come on . . . ,” Todd said.