Cruel Death (32 page)

“Why not?”

“Well,” Mitch explained, “your friend parked in that no parking zone, which told me a lot about his ability to follow rules.”

BJ smiled coyly. “No kidding . . .”

“It also showed me that he’s probably lazy, too, because he didn’t want to walk from the parking lot into the store.”

BJ walked away.

As the next week unfolded, it was clear to Mitch that BJ had derived something from the conversation. Because for every day he showed up at the store afterward, BJ parked on that same yellow line, in the no parking zone. He never said anything. He just parked his car and went into the store as a normal course of his day. Mitch noticed it immediately, but didn’t say anything—that is, until he couldn’t take it anymore.

“BJ, can you stop parking there!” Mitch said one day after about two weeks. Then Mitch grabbed BJ’s keys and moved the car.

BJ never said a word. He was testing Mitch. Seeing how far he could push him. Seeing how Mitch would react.

There was another time, Erika later explained to a pen pal, when BJ was outside the store looking in through the window. Erika was busy doing something and hadn’t noticed two customers in the store. As BJ watched, he apparently spied them shoplifting several small items.

Finishing up what he was doing outside, BJ walked into the store, locked them all inside, and then pulled out his gun.

Walking around, waving the weapon, he told the couple, who were pushing a stroller with a child, to put everything on the counter.

They were terrified.

“Put it on the counter and pay for it all,” BJ insisted, Erika later said.

“What?”

“You wanted it—well, you’re going to buy it all now.”

Erika further explained that the couple was down to “pennies” in the bottom of the woman’s purse to pay for it all.

81

Dead Serious Talk

Erika was in a terrible spot—being in prison and not being able to control her life outside the barbed wire. She had put so much trust in her lawyers, and they were doing all they could, but now she apparently felt that the only way out of this mess was to take control of things herself.

Writing once again to Laurie, her friend from high school, Erika began a letter with
DEAD SERIOUS TALK,
written in bold letters at the top of the page. Erika was livid. It was
time,
she wrote,
to start fighting fire with fire.

In her nondescript, wink-wink type of tone, she wrote to Laurie that she
never wrote this letter....
She asked Laurie to “memorize” and then “tear” it up.
Flush it down the toilet,
she penned, whatever Laurie had to do to get rid of it. A trash bin wouldn’t work, Erika said. Then,
You’re my girl.

The letter was an outline and reminder of
the activity that
[Laurie]
had seen BJ do.

Again, wink-wink.

Erika was royally pissed off that she had nothing to show for bringing the cops to the bodies, and here she was sitting in jail—the nerve of those people—and BJ was not five hundred yards away in the same jail, and
Guess what . . . I got nothing for all the info I gave them,
she wrote.

Well, now she was taking her life back. She was going to explain what Laurie needed to say
and
when she needed to say it, along with whom she needed to say it to.

Home-court advantage . . . ,
she authored.

Judges, prosecutors, and the politics of the system were all the same: out to get Erika.

But, like I said, you never got this letter . . . ,
she wrote.

From there, Erika spent page after page, even bulleted and numbered sections, explaining to Laurie what Laurie knew, how Laurie was supposed to phrase it, and how Laurie was going to help Erika get out of prison.

Once again, it was all BJ’s fault. He was the abusive husband:
Remember?

You didn’t hear it from me.

BJ was the racist.

Not me.

Remember?

BJ was the one who caused
me to get an abortion.

Remember?

BJ was the one who could kill people.

Not me.

Remember?

Erika also told Laurie a story that she claimed happened a few weeks before they had left for Ocean City. BJ had suggested that they try to have another baby.

Already tried that, Erika said she told him.

No, have the baby, BJ supposedly suggested, get an insurance policy of $1 million, and then, according to what Erika was telling Laurie to remember, BJ would kill the child so they could collect on the insurance.

Remember when he said he would kill his mother if he ever saw her again? . . .

Erika asked questions. Regarding a penchant for anxiety in high school, she wanted to know if Laurie remembered her having it.

Of course not.

Then there were a series of other questions painting BJ as the abusive husband who had pushed Erika into a life of crime. Erika, of course, gave Laurie the answer to all of the questions: yes.

Near the end of the letter, Erika launched a “poor me” diatribe regarding how she didn’t deserve to be in prison, and how they were best friends now and that Laurie could help her if only she followed these felonious directions.

You can’t get into trouble . . . ,
Erika promised in writing. She admitted that she
could spend the rest
of her life in jail and that
this letter is not exactly legal.

In her next letter, Laurie was angry. She didn’t want anything to do with being given directions to testify in court.

Sorry,
Erika wrote later,
my life is over and I just need help.

82

Brutally Honest

In March 2003, Detective Scott Bernal took a phone call from Joel Todd regarding a conversation Todd had recently had with Mitch Grace.

“Mitch wants to turn over some military items BJ left at the house.”

Bernal explained that he and Detective Richard Moreck were heading to Altoona the following day to interview former Sifrit friends and neighbors. They’d stop by and pick it all up. Apparently, there were some explosives involved.

While in Altoona, Bernal and Moreck met up with Lisa Campfield (a pseudonym), one of Erika’s former childhood friends. Lisa was a bit frightened of the police presence.

“No need to be afraid,” Bernal assured her. They just wanted to talk.

“Have you visited with Erika since her arrest?” Moreck asked.

“No . . . ,” Lisa said, but it was clear she had something on her mind—something was bothering her.

“Have you spoken with her on the telephone?”

Lisa hesitated. “Yes, I have.”

“Tell us about what she’s been saying,” Bernal suggested comfortingly.

“Well, I’m going to be brutally honest with you,” Lisa began.

Bernal and Moreck looked at each other. “Go ahead, of course.”

“Erika told me during our phone conversation that BJ made her cut Crutchley’s head off.”

Silence.

“Continue,” Bernal said.

“BJ also made her watch as he masturbated over her body.”

“What did you say?”

Lisa went quiet.

Bernal said, “Did I hear you correctly: are you telling us that Erika cut off Crutchley’s head?”

“No, I said that BJ made her watch as
he
cut off Crutchley’s head.”

“What else?”

Lisa confirmed the “rat in sulfuric acid” story. She said she was there that day, in back of the LA Weight Loss Center, next door to Memory Laine, when she saw smoke coming from a little bucket. “What’s that?” she asked BJ. The bucket had a horrible smell to it.

“I put a live rat in the bucket of acid to see if it would dissolve its bones.”

83

Break These Chains

There had been a legal argument over whether BJ was going to be allowed to sit in court with or without being bound by shackles and handcuffs. During a motions hearing, Joel Todd and E. Scott Collins brought out the fact that BJ had tried—rather successfully—to pick the lock of his cell.

BJ had been put in a holding tank one afternoon and the actual lock on the cell was broken, so guards put a chain and sturdy padlock on the door. Well, as the guards were busy doing whatever it is guards do, BJ went to work on the lock, picked it, took the chain off, opened the door, and went back to lying down on his cot.

“What BJ was saying,” someone close to the case later told me, “was ‘Hey, show me a little bit more respect than that. I can get out of here if I want to.’”

This episode, Todd and Collins argued, was a good indication that BJ Sifrit was a risk and had a tendency to want to “get away.” And yet, as jury selection began on March 31, 2003, in Montgomery County Circuit Court, in Rockville, Maryland, there sat BJ, up front, in his plush dark suit, neatly pressed,
without
handcuffs.

By the day’s conclusion, twelve jurors and four alternates had been picked from a small pool of 243 potentials. In the end, it wasn’t as hard as everyone had at first expected to find good men and women to hear BJ’s case.

State’s Attorney Joel Todd had an uncanny way about him, which spoke of a more Southern, hard-nosed prosecutor. Yet, he was also a gentle man with an enthusiastic eye, not to mention brawny passion, for justice. For Todd, the blame for Geney and Joshua’s gruesome deaths could be spread equally between Erika and BJ. He didn’t necessarily see one as being more guilty than the other. “It was, somehow,” Todd told me later, “just a bad combination. I suspect if she’d never met him, she’d [have] been fine; and if he’d never met her, he’d be fine. But somehow the combination of the two of them was just”—and he stopped for a moment and thought about how to phrase it, searching for just the right words, finally settling on—“. . . just awful.”

Todd was born and raised in Worcester County. He ended up in Florida at Nova Southeastern University (NSU) doing his law school undergraduate work, but he quickly fell back into his roots in Maryland when he graduated from law school.

“My first job after law school,” Todd said, “was for the Worcester County Circuit Court as a law clerk.” The same court where he was now preparing to go after BJ Sifrit, along with the help of E. Scott Collins. Still, becoming a prosecutor in a busy district was not necessarily Todd’s ambition as a young legal grad. “I had envisioned myself as becoming a real estate lawyer, doing real estate settlements and land development work—that kind of stuff.”

Working for the circuit court as a law clerk, however, sitting in on trials, changed Todd’s mind rather quickly, and showed him, essentially, where the action was. Pushing real estate documents and counting beans in an office all day soon took a backseat to a more dramatic, animated life of arguing felony cases in front of a jury. It just seemed to suit his personality a little more.

And so Todd went into private practice and learned rather quickly after his first wife had triplets that paying the bills was going to be tough on his meager private-practice salary. But as luck would have it, a job as a deputy state’s attorney opened up in Worcester County, and it was paying more than Todd had yet made in the private sector. The job also offered health benefits for his young family. So he applied, and as he humbly put it, “I was fortunate enough to get the job.”

Nine years later, when the seat for state’s attorney of Worcester County was vacated, Todd ran for office and was elected.

That was 1995.

Any career has bumps, any profession has its ups and downs. For Joel Todd, anytime you go into court, you run the risk of losing. “As a prosecutor, I have never [seen] myself as someone in the business of getting convictions, but as someone who is in the business of doing justice. If I have a defendant that I have doubts about whether he is guilty or not, I drop those charges. The last thing I want is to have somebody behind bars and I am not sure if he’s innocent or guilty.”

On the other hand, when Todd felt he was going after someone who was, beyond a doubt, guilty: “I’m going after that person full steam ahead.”

84

A SEAL Finally Squeaks

Opening statements took up most of Tuesday morning, April Fool’s Day, 2003. Joel Todd stood and, addressing the jury, promised to bring in a star witness to explain how BJ “confessed” to putting bullet holes in a bathroom door, which eventually led to the murder of a couple.

BJ’s attorneys told jurors the state had no such evidence—that the case against their client was, at best, circumstantial. No jury was going to buy the notion that BJ Sifrit killed these two people. It was Erika all the way.
Yes!
She was the mastermind. This guy here, this former navy SEAL who had finished at the top of his class, went along with the cover-up of this terrible tragedy only at the behest of—and to protect—his wife.

But BJ Sifrit was no killer.

On April 2, the state put on ballistics and DNA experts, who tied the weapon used in the murders to the Sifrits, and the blood and tissue on the bullets found on the kitchen table, along with all the blood in the bathroom, to BJ and Erika Sifrit and Martha “Geney” Crutchley and Joshua Ford.

The following day, April 3, Joel Todd questioned his “star witness,” Karen Wilson, who told her story of having gone through what she called “a living nightmare.” She was terrified and feared for her life that night. She believed BJ when he said he was “ridding the earth of bad people.” He had brandished a gun. He had walked around the condo like a drunken cowboy looking to kill someone. He had threatened her.

Wilson’s story was compelling, if not chilling. No one could deny her that. But BJ’s attorneys pointed out rather emphatically—trying to trip her up on details—that when the rubber hit the road, jurors were either going to believe that BJ confessed to Wilson or not. Going back and forth. Restating the obvious, trying to shake the woman was going to do nothing but delay justice. It was yes or no. There was no variable. No middle ground.