Cruel Death (2 page)

I dedicated this book to my agent, Peter Miller, president of PMA Literary & Film Management. Peter has been championing my career for years, and any success I achieve would not be possible (or worth much to me) without his guidance and friendship. Likewise, without the help of Peter’s assistant, Adrienne Rosado—well, I would be far less efficient.

Of course, none of this would be possible without my editor, Michaela Hamilton, who has been by my side for all ten books, or my family.

Law without a foundation in morality becomes injustice.

—Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI),
The Spirit of the Liturgy

Author’s Note

Throughout my years of writing true crime, I’ve always drifted away from the more gruesome cases. Granted, every murder is an act of evil; every untimely death a tragedy. But I have not waded in terribly bloody waters, if you will excuse my frankness. I have generally written about those murders we tend not to cringe at—those deaths that have been quick and rather painless.

That being said, as I began this book, I knew it would involve a certain amount of horror I had not yet covered: the brutal dismemberment of two human beings. What I
didn’t
know was that this act of savagery by the killers was only the tip of the iceberg. What I would uncover while researching and writing this book—some of which has not been yet reported—affected me in ways I had never experienced, in all my years reporting on murder. There were times when I had to leave the book alone for a day or two to catch my breath and think about things. Now and then, as you write these books day in and day out, you can get caught up to a point where some of what you’re doing doesn’t seem real. Sure, I used dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of court records, trial transcripts, photographs, police reports, military reports, depositions, interviews with the perpetrators, and scores of other documents to write this book. A process of which becomes, at times, like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. But here, within this case, the way the victims were treated before, during, and after death was so profoundly evil and cruel—there are not enough adjectives in the English language to describe the treatment these people received—that as I wrote about it, a part of me began to drift into a despair I had not experienced while writing true crime. It made for an incredibly bumpy experience—emotionally. There were days when I had to put this project aside—due to the graphic nature of what I had uncovered—and work on something else. There were also days when I thought I could not go back to it.

In the end, though, I am glad I did.

There are sections of this book family members of the victims should not read—parts of this case that were never made public. For some time, I weighed whether to include all of my findings in the text. I have left things out of this book that were not important to the story, the dynamic of understanding these crimes, or the psyche of the murderers. I wish certain things in this case did not happen and I didn’t have to report them. As a reporter, however, I believe that what I have included is imperative to the greater scope of these crimes; it allows us to take a deeper look into the most evil part of the human soul in order to recognize what some people are truly capable of.

My goal is always to tell the most complete, unreported story I can. In addition, it is a story that needs telling. If one person reads this book and understands that the strangers we meet at clubs and bars and out in society at various places and stages of our lives every day might not be who they claim to be, it was well worth the effort.

Part 1

Memories Are Like Raindrops

1

Ebb & Flow

It was midmorning, May 29, 2002, when Ocean City Police Department (OCPD) detective Scott Bernal took a call from Fairfax City, Virginia, police officer Mike Boone. Fairfax City was a good three-and-a-half-hour hike from Ocean City on a good day, without traffic. Although the OCPD routinely received calls from various police departments for different reasons, Detective Bernal sensed right away that this call had a different smell to it. Something, his gut instinct told him, was amiss.

“We have a woman whose coworkers are reporting [her] missing,” Boone said. “This woman never misses a meeting, apparently. She had a meeting scheduled with fifteen coworkers for yesterday at ten. She didn’t show up or call.”

“She came here?” Bernal asked, meaning Ocean City.

“Yeah, with her boyfriend. I called his employer. He hasn’t returned to work, either—and should have on the same day.”

Bernal took down a description of the couple’s vehicle. It was a red or maroon Acura with the recognizable license tag that few would have a tough time forgetting: GENEY C.

“Where are they staying?”

Boone said, “Atlantis Condominium.”

“Let me check it out.”

Bernal finished up what he was doing at the station house in midtown Ocean City and took off down the strip to check out the Atlantis.

There is a repetitive, soothing, and rhythmic flow to the steadiness and cyclical nature of ocean waves. No matter how high or low the tide, waves begin from an unknown, initial source out in the middle of the sea and ripple into shorelines around the world at a continuous, melodic pace, speeding up and slowing down. One can sit for hours and become mesmerized by their sheer beauty and elegance, while getting lost in the meditative genuineness, sound, feel, and even smell of simple seawater lapping against beach sand. Perhaps a gull or two squeaking in the remote background adds to the ambiance. But ask those who live for it, and you’ll hear about an unexplainable grace assigned to the ocean that they all crave: the one place where your troubles seem to melt into the salty foam left over along the shoreline after the baptismal power of the water fades into the wet sand.

How healing.

How omnipotent.

How uncomplicated.

Ocean City, Maryland, is one of those places along the East Coast where one can indulge in such summer splendor and magnificence. For some, though, mainly the younger crowd, Ocean City is more of “Party Town, USA,” where you can let your hair down when the sun sets, violently crack crab legs with wooden mallets, and party at any one of the scores of nightclubs and seaside bars located along “the strip,” or as Random McNally deems it, “the Coastal Highway.” In fact, the one day of the year that almost every bar owner, resort keeper, hotel manager, and seasonal worker waits for is the Friday before Memorial Day. This is the day when summer unofficially begins, and tourists and beachgoers and partiers and graduates start filing into town: to spend money, sun themselves, dance, drink, eat, and hang out poolside. Interestingly, between Labor Day (September) and Memorial Day (May), Ocean City is home to about twenty-five thousand people. Just a normal community of working-class folks, who love living by the sea. Yet between those two summer holidays, the number of people fluctuates from 250,00 to 500,000, depending on weekend weather.

Thus, the summer season becomes the time of the year in Ocean City that perhaps only one group of professionals in the region do
not
look forward to: the OCPD, which itself doubles in size during this same period.

2

Intuition

OCPD detective Scott Bernal did not always see himself as a cop in Ocean City, Maryland. The Brooklyn-born, Queens-bred transplant had followed family down into what he calls “good old boy” country, where it’s not at all that easy to fit in. Still, at about six feet, 220 solid pounds, the stocky detective with the unmatched New “Yawk” accent had weathered the licks his adversaries had tossed at him, putting together a solid record as a hungry detective looking to serve the community. It was that veteran, seasoned experience prowling Ocean City’s streets and solving cases for all those years that led Bernal to believe that something had happened to the missing female from Fairfax City. Not necessarily her boyfriend, but for the woman—Bernal sensed something was out of place.

As Bernal pulled onto 103rd Street, 10300 Coastal Highway, and saw the maroon Acura with
GENEY C
on the license plate just sitting there by itself in the parking lot of the Atlantis Condominium complex, he had a sinking feeling about the situation. It was the way the car was parked. Bernal could tell it hadn’t been driven for quite a while. Beyond that, every parking space in the front of the building was empty—except for the last space, where that maroon Acura was just sitting. There was nothing all that peculiar about it. It was just the car’s presence, Bernal said later. It spoke to him. That same uneasy feeling you get sometimes when you walk into your home and you just
know
someone has been inside.

As Bernal got out and checked around the outside of the vehicle, he could tell it hadn’t been moved. The tires alone had sediment and leaves and sand on all sides.

What’s going on here?
Bernal considered.

So he called in for another officer to accompany him into the condo itself. He didn’t want to enter the room alone. He needed someone with him, just in case he ran into a situation.

Born exactly one week and nineteen years apart, nearly two decades of life and experience had separated thirty-two-year-old Joshua Ford and his fifty-one-year-old live-in girlfriend, Martha Margene “Geney” Crutchley. Yet, that division of time did little to diminish the love and respect they shared for each other. Joshua and Geney liked to have fun, but at the same time they were committed to their devotion to each other. Photographs of them depict what appears to be an old married couple lapping up the wonder years of their lives together, planting trees and making faces into the camera lens, raking leaves in the yard of the spacious Fairfax City home they shared, or just sitting, holding each other in supple grace that a park bench brings, happy in the delicate way love had entered and then
changed
their lives.

Joshua and Geney met at a Christmas party in Boston in 1999, but they had lived together since April 2001 in a modest home in a suburban Virginia hamlet located just on the outside boundary of the Beltway in Washington, DC. Joshua had been torn by love once already; he had a six-year-old son he adored, born from a first marriage, and an ex-wife who spoke nothing but good things about him. They liked each other still, Joshua and his ex-wife. It was just that their marriage, a high-school romance, wasn’t in the cards, and they understood love’s way. Still, Joshua’s “whole world,” a family friend later told a newspaper reporter, “spun around” his son, and his ex-wife allowed him to see the child anytime he wanted.

For Joshua, a mortgage banker, and Geney, an insurance executive accountant working with a company in Chantilly, Virginia, there was never a second thought when it came to dropping everything, leaving the fast-paced pool of economics they swam in all week, and, on a Friday after work, heading off to the beach. Living near such an abundance of ocean real estate, the hardest part about planning a weekend getaway was choosing the spot. In some respects, the move to Virginia for Joshua, away from most of his family in Boston, had been a reprieve. Just last year, in October 2001, a terrible tragedy had struck the Ford family. Joshua’s brother, Mark Ford, got a call from law enforcement that his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Kelly, who had been missing for eighty days after leaving a Massachusetts rehabilitation center, and never being heard from again, had been found. Her headless body, buried in a shallow grave along the Cape Cod shoreline, was discovered by a passerby. Her heart had been cut out. Police had no suspects in the murder, but suspected the murder to be the work of a serial killer. Mark Ford and his wife Deb, like Joshua and the rest of the family, had been left to wonder what animal would do such a thing to an otherwise beautiful, helpless, innocent young woman with so much life ahead of her. But the Ford family went on in the face of such heartbreak. Lived life. Loved one another. Carried on best they could.

It was Saturday, May 25, 2002, just four days before Detective Scott Bernal took that call about Geney, when Joshua and Geney decided to take their first weekend trip of the new summer season to Ocean City, a 175-mile journey due east of their Virginia home. It was a long trip, but then Memorial Day weekend was the first blowout of the summer year, and, like many, they had an extra day off. Both had been expected back at work on Tuesday, May 28. In fact, Geney had that planned meeting, which Officer Mike Boone had mentioned to Bernal, scheduled with her staff at ten o’clock that morning. Geney and Joshua had planned a relaxing weekend together. They could party a little, sun themselves, eat some great seafood, then hit the road late on Monday afternoon after all the holiday weekend traffic had somewhat dissipated.

As Bernal waited for a fellow officer before going into Geney’s room, he spoke to a manager on duty. It appeared that Joshua had rented the room at the Atlantis, a twenty-story high-rise located directly on the beach at 103rd Street, smack in the middle of the “strip,” with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and postcard bay views on the other. In walking distance from the Atlantis was the Coastal Highway, where any number of nightclubs and bars and seafood and steak house restaurants were dotting the strip. It was the perfect location to celebrate summer.

Mini golf.

Batting cages.

Moped, bicycle, and boogie board rentals.

T-shirt factory outlets.

Taffy stores.

The popular restaurant chain Hooters was down the block, as was the glorious Rainbow Condominiums, with the Seacrets nightspot a five-minute, two-mile ride, or half hour walk south. Traveling throughout the resort town, however, was not going to be a problem: just a small fare allows you to ride the bus anywhere you want to go. And if you were planning on drinking, the bus was a smart move. DUI and other alcohol-related arrests made up a large percentage of summer citations and court appearances.