Cruel Death (16 page)

“It had what appeared, to me, to be a bullet hole in the door,” Karen said later, recalling that moment when she saw the door for the first time. “But I didn’t realize it was a bullet hole until later, when things began to make more sense.”

30

Purse Strings

BJ came upstairs as Erika and Karen were searching for Erika’s purse and suggested that someone go down and look in the Jeep. Standing there and thinking about it for a moment, Karen knew Erika’s purse was not in the Jeep.

“We couldn’t have gotten into the condo without her keys, which were in her purse,” she said.

Indeed, Erika had opened the door to the condo. To do that, Karen remembered specifically, Erika had to go into her purse to find the keys.

Nonetheless, Karen and Erika went downstairs under BJ’s persuasive urging and began digging through the Jeep. By now, Erika was frantic.

Hysterical.

Manic.

She needed to have that purse. It was as if losing it had sobered her up completely. She was in a seemingly possessed state now, wildly running around, mumbling things to herself, stressing to Karen that there was nothing more important than finding the purse.

After not finding it in the Jeep, Karen and Erika rushed back upstairs. Karen walked in first. Looking toward the stairs leading up to the bedroom and bathroom, where the hot tub was located, she saw BJ and Todd standing there on the small landing. BJ was standing in back of Todd. He had a weird look about him. Cocky and peculiar, like he knew something that no one else did.

Karen looked at BJ closer. Inside the front of his trousers, he had a large handgun tucked into his pants.

It startled her.
What is this?
Karen hated guns of any sort. How did a gun become part of this night all of a sudden?

Karen was not one to react with great drama to situations that terrified her, she later explained in court. So she said nothing and instead continued hunting for the purse. And as they turned over couch cushions and looked behind appliances once again, BJ walked up to Karen and grabbed her by the face with his large hands and pulled her, nose to nose with his face, as if he was about to kiss her. But the force he used and the agility of the gesture made her aware that it wasn’t meant to be comforting or even erotically romantic.

“It’s very,
very
important that we find
this
purse,” BJ said stoically, with as much fear as he could manage to put into the words. He seemed stone-cold sober. Intimidating and frightening. There was no doubt, Karen now knew, that BJ needed to recover his wife’s purse, or there was going to be a major problem.

More than that, Karen had a sinking feeling as BJ held her face in his hands that he was now implying that she or Todd had stolen the purse.

“BJ, look, there’s no reason for me to take her purse,” Karen said as BJ released the firm grip on her face. “I helped you put your vehicle back on the road.... I’m not a liar or thief.”

BJ reminded her that it was
very
important to him and Erika that they locate the purse. Nothing else mattered at this point.

Furthermore, there was nothing she could say to change that.

“Why would I steal it? I have my own money,” Karen said.

After a while, they were all upstairs near the bathroom. BJ was getting angrier by the moment. Stomping around. Mumbling things to himself. Making sure Karen and Todd were well aware of the fact that he had a gun. He’d take the gun out and hold it for a time, then put it back into his trousers. Todd was standing by Karen’s side.

Erika was rubbing her head. Thinking. Not saying anything. She and BJ and Geney and Joshua were in this same predicament, not even five nights ago, and she knew how that night had ended. Yet she stood and she didn’t say a word as BJ worked himself into a state she knew would ultimately lead down one road.

“If you’re ripping us off,” BJ said in a terse, harsh, threatening tone, “we’ve had
other
people try ripping us off. If you’ve ripped us off as the
other
people who were here, I’ll do the same damn thing to you that I did to them.” BJ was now staring at the bullet hole in the bathroom door, which they were all standing near. The danger was clear. “These people,” he continued, “were bad people.... I’m ridding the earth of bad people. They came into
my
place and ripped
me
off! No more will they do that.”

Karen and Todd would die the same way as the other couple had, BJ implied, if it turned out that they were thieves. According to what Karen later said, BJ wanted to make it clear that there was a price to pay in
his
world for thieves and liars.

A deadly debt.

At this point, BJ had his gun in his hand, but, Karen said, he never pointed it directly at her or Todd. He waved it around and used it as an instrument of intimidation. Just the sight of it was enough to quiet Karen and Todd down.

BJ became calm for the moment and ordered everyone to get back downstairs and continue searching.

“Now!”

After they spread out, Karen noticed that Erika was in the bathroom by herself, so she worked her way into the same room and cornered Erika. She wanted to talk to her privately about her concerns. This wasn’t right. BJ walking around the house with a gun, threatening everyone. Maybe, Karen thought, if she just spoke to Erika, woman to woman, Erika could “get a handle on BJ.” Maybe she could even talk some sense into Erika about what was happening. It seemed to Karen that Erika could perhaps tell BJ what to do and he’d oblige. Like she held some sort of power over him.

“Hey,” Karen whispered, “I don’t like to be around guns. They scare me. They make me really uncomfortable. I’ll do whatever I can to help you find your purse, but you’re going to have to ask BJ to put that gun away.”

Erika walked out of the bathroom without saying anything. It was as if she didn’t care, or didn’t even hear her. And when she ran into BJ in the living room a moment later, Erika patronizingly said loud enough so everyone could hear, in a whiney type of voice, mocking Karen, “BJ, can you
please
put your gun away?”

Then Erika laughed.

“She spoke very nonchalantly,” Karen recalled later, “like it was nothing for him to be holding this gun like this.”

BJ put the gun back into the front of his pants. “Keep looking,” he said.

A while later, as they searched every nook and cranny of the suite, Karen was in the front bedroom frantically searching, when she heard a loud voice coming from another room.

“Oh, look . . . what . . . I . . . found. . . .”

Karen walked out of the bedroom and saw that BJ had pushed a cushion from the couch forward and pulled the purse out.

Thank goodness it was over. The purse had been in the couch the entire time.

Or had it?

Although Karen was thrilled, the find made little sense to her. Karen had looked in that same area of the couch several times. Inside and out. She’d turned up nothing.

31

Guns Don’t Kill People . . .

Erika and Todd went out onto the balcony on the first level of the condo and sat down on the lawn furniture to chill out for a while after the stress of finding the purse was over.

Karen and BJ sat down at the glass table, off the kitchen. The table was large, with four chairs. In the middle was a wicker basketlike pot with sand and seashells. You could look down through the center of the table into it. The atmosphere in the condo was a bit more calm, now that BJ had located the purse. As they got settled at the table, BJ asked Karen, “So why are you so afraid of guns?”

Karen didn’t hesitate. “Nobody likes a gun pointed at them, you know.”

Who could argue with such a statement?

BJ kind of laughed a little bit. He was thinking how to answer. Then, “Well,” he said, “guns are portrayed as bad on television. Most people don’t understand how they work.” BJ pulled himself closer to the table, took the gun from his waistband, placed it on the table in the middle of the two of them, and started to take it apart. “Let me show you how this works,” he said. “This is a SIG SAUER nine millimeter. It’s my gun.” BJ then got up and went into one of the other rooms and pulled out Erika’s .357 Magnum and placed it on the table beside his, adding, “This is a revolver. . . .”

Karen could have cared less. She didn’t like guns. Did the guy not get it?

As they sat and talked, BJ took the Altoids tin on the table in front of him and a bag of cigarette tobacco next to it and opened both. He explained there was marijuana in the tin. Then he started to mix the two—the marijuana with the tobacco—into a rolling paper he had cradled into a V in one hand. As he was rolling the joint, he said, “This is a little gift left over by the people who were here the other night.” He gave Karen an eyebrow raise.

Karen knew who BJ was talking about when he said “the people,” because, she recalled in court later, “he had made several references throughout the night regarding two people being over to [the condo] a night or two [before].” These were the people he needed to “rid the earth of,” he had made a point of saying throughout the night.

On the glass table to the left of where BJ was sitting was a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill and what appeared to be some white lines of powder, which Karen took to be cocaine. BJ cleared up the confusion.

“Xanax,” he said. “Lainey has an anxiety disorder, but she prefers to snort it.”

Erika and Todd had come back into the condo by this point, and Erika asked BJ to get some pills out of her purse and crush them up. After doing that, he called Erika over, but he never touched the Xanax himself.

Erika bent down, snorted a few lines, came up, and smiled. Then she sat on BJ’s lap.

Todd was standing in back of where Karen was still sitting.

“We need to go have some sex,” BJ said, kissing Erika, grabbing at her.

OK,
Karen thought,
that’s my cue to leave! It’s been an exciting evening, but . . . time to go
.

Karen stood up, turned to leave, and said, “Do you want me to take Todd with me or leave him here?”

It appeared the party was just getting started again.

“You can leave him here,” Erika said.

“Fine,” Karen answered.

With that, she said good-bye, walked out the door, got into her car, and left.

As Karen made her way back toward Delaware, just a few blocks from the Rainbow, her cell phone rang.

Now, who could that be at this hour? It was pushing 3:00
A.M
. Karen needed to get home.

“Why’d you leave me here?” Todd said.

Karen wanted to wring his neck. “You were taking too long—”

“Pick me up.”

“You’ll have to meet me on the street. I’m not going back up there.”

Karen turned around. When she got to the Rainbow, Todd was outside, stumbling around. She got him into the car—and he quickly passed out.

The following morning, Karen got on a plane for Hawaii and tried to forget about the ordeal, having no idea of the horror she and Todd Wright had narrowly escaped. In fact, it wouldn’t be until she returned to the mainland ten days later that she learned what Erika and BJ might have done to her and Todd, had BJ not found that purse.

Part III

Oh, the Mistakes We Made

32

Missing

Martha “Geney” Crutchley was “very punctual,” her friend Gloria Bancroft (a pseudonym) later explained to police. “I was the one that was late, and if I was five minutes late, she’d call me.”

It wasn’t that Geney was anal about people always being on time; it was more that she was concerned something had happened if someone showed up late to a meeting or a dinner date.

An underwriter, like Geney, Gloria had worked with Geney at an insurance company outside Fairfax City, Virginia, for the past five years. Not only was Geney a good friend of Gloria’s, but she was also her manager. The weekly departmental meeting on Wednesday morning, May 29, 2002, had come and gone, and Gloria was getting concerned. Geney was never one to miss that meeting—not ever. In fact, so punctual was Geney that in all the years Gloria had worked with her, Geney had not only never missed a meeting, but she had never been late.

Gloria had spoken to Geney on the previous Friday as Geney and Joshua made their way to Ocean City. It was a quick call, Gloria later said.

“How’s everything going?” Geney wanted to know, meaning at work. Then, “Are you coming to Ocean City to meet us?”

Gloria had mentioned something about maybe meeting up with Joshua and Geney at some point that weekend.

“No, I can’t,” Gloria said. “Sorry, I have something I need to do.”

It was the last time Gloria spoke to Geney.

When Geney didn’t show up for work, and there was no answer at her house, Gloria and a friend took a ride over to Geney’s mother’s house to see if she knew anything, or if she had possibly heard from Geney and Joshua.

She hadn’t.

So Gloria and Geney’s mother started calling friends.

No one had heard from Geney.

Or Joshua.

“We got really nervous,” Gloria later explained.

Feeling that she had to do something, Gloria mapped out the way to Ocean City and began calling hospitals along the route Geney and Joshua would have driven. She thought maybe Geney and Joshua had gotten into a car accident.

But she ran into one “no” after another.

So Gloria contacted the Virginia State Police (VSP). A trooper told her to call her local police department, and she ended up filing a missing persons report with the City of Fairfax Police Department.

Late into the evening on Wednesday, Gloria ended up talking with someone at the OCPD and then giving a detective there a photograph of Geney and Joshua. “So they would find them and bring them home,” Gloria later said. That was Detective Scott Bernal, who was on the case.

33

Greene Turtle

On Thursday, May 30, 2002, BJ and Erika woke up and decided that they had better get that door fixed and painted. BJ had purchased a new door at Home Depot already, but it needed to be painted and hung. Time was getting short. A new couple would be checking into the room on Saturday.