Cruel Death (20 page)

46

Let’s Make a Deal

The OCPD had Erika and BJ nailed on the burglary.
Literally
caught in the act. Erika was now saying, however, that it was BJ who had masterminded the entire Hooters burglary.

“OK,” Bernal said, “what about Crutchley and Ford?”

Erika quieted down. She was obviously distressed and emotionally unstable. She hadn’t slept much over the past twenty-four hours. Her dad had told her that an attorney was going to be in to see her as soon as he could get away from another case.

Hold tight. Don’t say anything else.

OCPD detective Brett Case was beginning to show up with Bernal during the times when Bernal started to put a bit of pressure on Erika. They knew Erika would crack. It was just a matter of time.

“BJ killed them,” she said at some point that afternoon. “I helped him dispose of their bodies.” She was crying hysterically. Erika was down below one hundred pounds, arguably borderline anorexic. Although, in a letter to a friend in the coming weeks, Erika would talk about how everyone thought she was anorexic, but she said her weight had nothing to do with her eating habits—that it was based more on her drug and drinking addictions. In any event, there was nothing left to Erika, essentially. Her face was skeletal and gaunt. Her cheekbones cut sharply. Her ribs were visible. Her once beautiful, kinky hair was matted and falling out. “I was downstairs,” she explained, when “it” happened, implying that she in no way witnessed the murders.

But didn’t “it” happen outside on the beach?

Erika was changing her story again.

Either way, she was not around when BJ killed them, she insisted.

“Do you mind showing us, then, where you helped him dispose of the bodies?”

Erika nodded yes, adding, “I will.” She seemed unsure, however, and made it clear that in exchange for this information, she wanted to be certain she wasn’t going to be prosecuted for the Hooters burglary.

Joel Todd allowed Case and Bernal to go back in and tell her, sure, they’d drop those burglary charges if she brought them to the bodies.

Case and Bernal got a car ready. Bernal wanted a female officer to ride with him and Erika. He didn’t want any trouble with Erika. Case would follow.

Within the hour, they were on their way.

Erika sat in front and directed Bernal where to drive. She again kept asking, “Do you like me? Am I pretty?”

“Erika, we need to focus on this.”

“Am I a bad person?”

“Where are we going, Erika?”

When they arrived at the second location, a Dumpster in back of strip mall near the condo, Erika appeared to be uncomfortable. This happened after going back and forth with Erika for some time, even once bringing her back to the station because she was talking in so many different circles. Erika finally told Bernal she would take him to the right Dumpsters. And here they were. Bernal was even inside the Dumpster himself, pushing garbage around.

But still, nothing.

Pissed off, he went back to his car, where Erika was waiting with another officer.

“What’s going on? You gonna tell us the truth here, or what?”

She didn’t say anything.

“What is it?” Bernal asked.

“This is it! He cut them into six pieces and put them into bags,” she yelled.

Bernal was astonished. Speechless at first.

“Can you please repeat what you just said?”

She repeated herself. Then, “Do you think I’m a bad person? I don’t know why BJ did this. I’m pretty sure this is the Dumpster. . . . I was pretty drunk. I don’t know.”

Bernal and Case went over to the Dumpster and opened it up. The Dumpster had garbage inside it.

They next drove into Delaware.

At one point, they stood in back of a small strip mall near several Dumpsters. Erika was looking across the street at a Food Lion parking lot.

“Why are you looking over there?” Bernal asked.

“No reason.”

“Was it here?” Bernal asked, frustrated. He was referring to where they were standing.

“No . . . I don’t think so . . . I don’t know . . . ,” Erika said.

Bernal drove Erika back to the OCPD. As they worked their way down Route 1, Bernal knew that Erika wasn’t being totally truthful with them.

“Listen, Erika, we aren’t playing the same game here. We know the bodies weren’t dumped there. Now, come on, where are they? When are you gonna start telling us the truth?”

“I’ll show you. They’re farther down into Delaware. I don’t know, I was sleeping.”

They drove.

“I played college basketball,” Erika said as they turned around and went on their way back to Delaware again. “Everybody loved me. I love BJ so much. Do you like me, Detective?”

“I have no reason not to, Erika, but we need to find these bodies.”

Here she is looking at double murder,
Bernal thought,
and she cares about what I think.

Just then, Bernal’s cell phone rang. It was Detective Richard Moreck. He had something. “It definitely happened in the bathroom of the condo,” he said. “We’ve confirmed that.”

Bernal hung up and continued driving. After a minute, he said to Erika, “You know, all you’ve done is ask me if I like you and how pretty you are and talk about your college basketball days. I want to know, what do you think of yourself?”

“Oh, me? I’m a great person. Everybody likes me.”

“Do you always try to do the right thing?”

“Yes. Always.”

“Then let me ask you, when in the hell are you going to stop lying to me? Do you think that I actually believe that this happened out on the beach? Do you think I know or don’t know that this happened in the condo? I’m curious what you think.”

“OK, OK, OK . . . it happened inside the condo, in the bathroom,” Erika finally admitted.

“Are you sure you threw the bodies in Dumpsters? I don’t want to be led on some wild-goose chase here. Are you sure your husband didn’t just toss them into a ditch somewhere?”

Erika turned red. Seething through her teeth, she lashed out at Bernal. “How fucking dare you! My husband would
never
. He would never throw a body in a fucking ditch. That’s how they found my friend Krista.”

“Krista who?” Bernal asked.

“Krista Ruggles.”

Bernal’s heart skipped a beat. He had not worked the case, but had heard enough about it to know the details. Krista was a friend of Erika’s who had been murdered in Ocean City. It was still an open case. But Erika’s reaction told Bernal that Erika was definitely involved in Geney and Joshua’s murders. He had hit a nerve.

Erika pointed out a Dumpster in the back of a grocery store, which was actually across the street from where she and BJ had put the body parts. The problem with this new location was that detectives found out that the garbage from this particular Dumpster, the one Erika was now lying (or was confused) about, had been dumped in two different landfills, which meant they’d have to search two separate locations.

47

The Great Pretender

According to several sources, throughout the weekend of June 1 and 2, Mitch Grace had a tough time stepping back and letting the attorney he hired to work on Erika’s case “do his job.” “Micromanage” is probably too strong a word to describe Mitch’s input; but for one, records indicate that he was calling Arcky Tuminelli all weekend, constantly asking what was going on and, at times, trying to direct Arcky regarding what to do next.

As he had promised, Arcky spent Saturday and Sunday finishing the brief he had due in another case. Late Sunday afternoon, however, he finally finished, e-mailed it, and then began to focus exclusively on Erika’s case. It was close to eight o’clock on Sunday night, June 2, when Arcky left his house outside Baltimore and headed south to Snow Hill, where Erika was being held in Worcester County Jail. Dealing with Mitch all day, and now into the night, had been difficult. But Arcky understood the guy was simply worried about his daughter. What father wouldn’t be? Arcky had been schooled in legal defense long enough to know how to deal with people like Mitch. The guy’s daughter was in jail facing serious charges—maybe even murder. He had every right to question and call on the man he had retained to represent her.

In learning more about Erika’s case, based on what Mitch had told him, Arcky was sure that Erika had said too much to the police already, sending them on a mission to find what she had admitted by the end of the weekend were “bodies and body parts,” as opposed to “missing people.”

Big difference.

By Monday morning, Arcky knew, dozens of cops would be searching dump sites in Maryland and nearby Delaware looking for the bodies, based on what Erika had been supposedly telling them. If the OCPD located Geney and Joshua’s bodies, any type of bargaining Arcky could possibly do for Erika was history. She would have no carrot left to dangle in front of the state’s attorney.

Still, everything depended on the assumption that Erika was telling the truth—which Arcky, as any good defense attorney would agree, wasn’t so sure about.

Arcky’s secretary had gotten the prosecutor’s name, cell phone, and home numbers. Worcester County state’s attorney Joel Todd was going to be prosecuting Erika and BJ, Arcky was told. Todd had been with the OCPD all weekend, advising and talking detectives legally through questioning Erika and BJ. Worcester County is located on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, tucked there in the armpit of southern Delaware.

Beyond being the president of the Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, and the onetime president of the local bar association, Joel Todd was a seasoned prosecutor with a terrific, almost ironclad, track record, Arcky knew. The guy was hard to beat in a courtroom, no doubt about it. In addition, Todd’s assistant, E. Scott Collins, was a hotshot veteran trial lawyer himself.

Completely bald (by choice, perhaps), wearing his glasses and speaking with just a touch of a Southern drawl, Joel Todd embodied the academic prowess and intellectual suave his job sometimes required. Todd had been the state’s attorney since 1995 and the assistant state’s attorney since 1985. His experience preceded him. He knew the ins and outs of Maryland courts, especially in his own county. If Erika Sifrit knew where to find the bodies of Geney and Joshua, Todd felt it was his duty, as well as his responsibility, to get that information out of her and bring those bodies back home to family members.

Arcky learned with a quick phone call to Todd that he was extremely interested in learning exactly where the bodies had been dumped. There was some indication by this point that Erika might have been lying about the locations she had taken detectives to earlier—and that she was playing games. This infuriated the police, of course, but they knew Erika was going to break down sooner or later. Otherwise, she would have done what BJ was doing: keeping his mouth shut. Little by little, as Bernal kept asking Erika questions, she started telling the truth.

Just that Sunday morning, for instance, Bernal had asked Erika, “If BJ told you to tell me where the two victims were tossed, would you do it?”

“Yes,” she said, “but I have to know what will happen to me. I have to be with my husband.”

“Not possible,” Bernal said.

“What can you do for me?”

After speaking briefly with Todd, agreeing to meet at the Worcester County Jail, Arcky called Mitch and told him he was on his way down to see Erika. Snow Hill, Maryland, Arcky explained, was a good three-hour trip from Baltimore.

He had better hurry. Because the more time the OCPD had with Erika, the tighter the noose around her neck was getting.

“We’ll meet you there,” Mitch said.

The Graces believed Erika had played no part whatsoever in the crimes. Whatever had taken place beyond the burglary was BJ’s doing. By this point, the newspapers were running with the story. It was being widely reported over the weekend that the OCPD had been searching for the bodies of a missing couple from Virginia. On June 1, that Saturday, the
Washington Post
published a story by reporter Jamie Stockwell under the headline
2 CHARGED IN KILLINGS OF MISSING VA. PAIR; PA. COUPLE ARRESTED
. The article explained the initial charges BJ and Erika faced:
. . . first-degree murder in the deaths of two Fairfax City residents who had been reported missing.
Jay Hancock, a spokesman for the OCPD, had released a statement on behalf of the OCPD, in which he said,
“Extensive blood spatter, spent shell casings, and what appears to be human tissue were found in the 11th-floor penthouse that Benjamin and Erica Sifrit of Altoona had rented at the Rainbow Condominiums.”

Those words, “human tissue,” sent shock waves throughout the community.

Mitch and Cookie were overwhelmed with disbelief, shock, and grief—suffice it to say—when reports that BJ and Erika could have been involved in dismembering two human beings started circulating. One former friend later said that Mitch was quickly soured by the media coverage. And later, he put others into that same box, making anyone, and everyone, who did not believe in his daughter into an enemy, saying, “Look, you take the media, lawyers, and investigators, put them in a brown paper bag, shake it up, dump it out, and you get the same thing! They all take your words and turn them into what they want them to sound like.”

Looking at Erika’s upbringing and background, the Graces had to think: How could something like this happen? How could Erika allow herself to get involved with this guy and end up in jail, facing such serious charges? The Graces had sensed a dark side to BJ the moment they had met him. There was always that strange gleam in his eye, that look about him that spoke of trouble. In no way did they want to believe that Erika could have had anything to do with what looked to be the most horrible crime imaginable. And yet, the truth was, no one really knew the horror that was about to be unearthed.

48

Hometown Girl

Erika’s old high-school friend and AAU basketball teammate Kristin Heinbaugh had worked for a local Altoona newspaper for quite a few years leading up to Erika’s arrest. Part of Kristin’s job was to monitor the wire stories and look for anything that would be of interest to local readers. By coincidence, Kristin had been working on an unrelated Ocean City, Maryland, murder story for quite some time. On that Friday afternoon, after BJ and Erika had been arrested and processed, as Kristin was putting together stories for the following day’s front page, her managing editor, who was standing in the middle of the newsroom, yelled over to her.