Cruel Death (33 page)

Most of Thursday and Friday were eaten up by the state concluding its case with Charles Atwood, a former navy SEAL friend of BJ’s, who described how he and BJ were buddies who liked to meet up at bars and take a little man time together. Yes, they talked about how to kill, and then dispose of a body. Yes, they joked about murder for hire. But it was over beers and watching strippers. How many guys talked about vile and violent things while drinking beers and handing out dollar bills to naked women? In the real world, men called this blowing off steam. How was a good time at a strip joint part of such a diabolically violent murder plot?

With their questioning of Atwood, BJ’s lawyers seemed to insinuate it wasn’t.

After the weekend, on Monday, April 7, Burton Anderson, BJ’s court-appointed attorney, made it clear that his client
was
going to take the stand to explain to jurors his version of what had transpired that night. The newspapers had had their opportunity to tell the story. Joel Todd his. Erika hers.

Now it was BJ’s turn.

Before the former SEAL took the stand, however, his mother, Elizabeth, reluctantly walked forward, her head bowed, tissues ready, there to retrieve a bit of BJ’s humanity back from the vultures who had been pecking away at it. The media had turned the guy into a monster. Some sort of vicious, bloodthirsty killer who had absolutely no value for human life. Elizabeth needed to give her son an identity beyond being accused of such a hideously gruesome crime.

Answering those first few standard questions, Elizabeth came across as sincere and entirely credible. Her tone was obvious. What had happened? How had her boy’s life turned into a made-for-TV movie of the week?

With genuine tears and anguish in her tired voice, Elizabeth went on to speak of a boy she watched grow into the perfect young adult, achieving goals the other kids around him rarely even thought about. When BJ left for SEAL training, his parents were, of course, proud of him. BJ would make it. She was certain of his abilities and never doubted for a minute he would graduate with honors. After he left, BJ stayed in touch with the family as much as the navy allowed, which turned out to be almost every other day. It wasn’t until Erika came along, Elizabeth Sifrit testified, that BJ started to drift away and soon stopped calling home altogether.

Elizabeth and Erika did not like each other—that much was evident from Elizabeth’s tone on the stand, and also in the letters Erika wrote to Laurie and Jimmy. There was never a time when the two of them went out shopping together and “did lunch” and talked like a mother- and daughter-in-law. And that relationship they shared—however brief it was, Elizabeth made clear—indicated the instability of the woman, who had become ever more obsessive and hard to deal with as time went on.

When it was his turn, BJ sat next to the Sixth Judicial Circuit Court judge Paul H. Weinstein and held up his hand; then he recited the “nothing but the truth” oath.

BJ sat calmly and, in his surprisingly soft and almost effeminate inflection, began to tell his story. You’d think a man of BJ’s caliber would speak deeply and aggressively, but BJ spoke warmly, with affection and poise.

“He had a squeaky voice,” one detective later observed. “It was striking the first time we heard it, because you’d expect a manly tone out of such a person.”

Detective Scott Bernal sat next to Collins and Todd and watched every move that every witness made. Taking notes, in big bold letters on white notebook paper, he wrote out questions and comments for the lawyers to consider.

As Burton Anderson questioned BJ, the young former SEAL talked about growing up in Iowa and Minnesota, and then moving to Texas at age fifteen. He recalled being the big brother to a sister he loved. After high school, BJ didn’t stick around town and kick beer bottles into the curb and work at the local hardware store. Instead, BJ left for the navy immediately, answering an inner call to serve his great nation and fellow countrymen. It was the SEALs from day one, BJ said. He had an “ambition,” he explained, to become a military man. A drive. A great desire he couldn’t really explain. He knew the twenty-five-week training, including seven days referred to as “hell week,” would test his emotional and physical reserve, strength, and abilities. But he had been bred from tough genes and was confident, even back then, that he could endure anything he was faced with.

As his testimony steered into the training part of his naval service beyond SEAL school, BJ began to lay the foundation for an argument of a delicate man being put through some of the most taxing emotional training the military had to offer—forever on the verge of collapsing into a robotic human being capable of just about anything. It was a good frame of reference for the jury to mull over:
“The navy had screwed me up and I snapped.”
He never said it, but it was the SEAL training that had a profound effect on the way his mind worked later on. It was almost as if he was apologizing for the gruesome nature of the crimes he was being accused of, saying that he had been trained not to feel (and definitely not to think) about the horror men could do to one another.

And then came this new woman in his life, Erika Grace—and everything changed the moment he met and—three weeks later—married her.

“How would you describe your relationship with your family . . . during the first three years of your naval career?” Burton Anderson asked his client about fifteen minutes into BJ’s direct testimony.

“Very close,” the former SEAL said, sounding confident and believable.

“This three-week relationship before you got married, are you able to tell us what the attraction was?”

“I guess, I don’t know . . . Every relationship starts out good.”

It was a sound point.

A few questions later: “Did Erika’s obsessive-compulsive anxiety disorders have an impact on your naval career?”

“Yes . . .”

“Tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury how that impacted your naval career.”

“She couldn’t handle me being away, and that was made clear right from the beginning.”

From there, BJ and his attorney discussed where BJ was stationed with Erika, and how often she made mention of him going away to places he couldn’t tell her about. Typical for a SEAL, he was away three hundred or more days per year—and it could be anywhere—in training.

All that SEALs did was train. And when they were finished, they trained some more.

Burton Anderson asked BJ how Erika reacted when he went away and she didn’t know what he was doing or where he had gone. BJ wasn’t allowed to tell her where he was going for training.

“She had emotional breakdowns,” BJ explained. “She’d stop eating. Not be able to function. Not be able to go anywhere [or] do anything.”

It had always been rumored that BJ had been the one to “make” Erika watch her weight. Erika maintained that it was BJ who forced her to starve herself in order to stay rail thin. This was abuse perpetrated by BJ, she claimed, that had turned into an eating disorder, bulimia. But here was BJ giving his version of those same stories: it wasn’t him, after all, he claimed, but Erika herself who had refused to eat when he was away.

And then she started taking speed pills to curb her appetite. Incidentally, in her letters to Jimmy, Erika goes on for page after page regarding being fat. She talked about how she had no tolerance for fat people. That she couldn’t understand how fat people could stand all that extra weight, and she would never allow herself to get that way. Not once while telling Jimmy about her feelings regarding overweight people did she
ever
say that BJ had forced her not to eat.

“It got to the point,” BJ told the jury, “where she would follow me to these places of training.” He said it was not something that the navy was happy about; spouses weren’t supposed to follow SEALs around the country. Rather, they were supposed to show support by staying home and accepting that this was the life they had chosen.

But Erika could never do that.

There was one time in 2000 when BJ was sent to Alaska for mountain training. On the day he was slated to leave for the mountains, Erika showed up unexpectedly at his room, he said, on the Alaskan base.

Basically, according to BJ, before he met Erika, his “life was the navy SEALs.” But after he married her, “I ended it.”

If what BJ said on the stand was true, he had “acted out” in the SEALs in order to get discharged more quickly because Erika was acting so crazy. When the lawyer she hired for BJ had made it clear that an administrative discharge would take four to five months, Erika went ballistic and had an “episode.” (You can assume this included the day she pulled a handgun on Elizabeth Sifrit, BJ’s mother.)

“After you got married . . . ,” Burton Anderson continued, “how did it affect your relationship with your family?”

“Get ready to object,” Joel Todd whispered to his co-counsel, Collins.

“Were any restrictions placed on the contact you had with your mother, father, and family?”

“Yes.”

No objection yet . . .

“Tell us about that.”

“I wasn’t allowed . . . My family welcomed Erika, but she didn’t get along with them.”

Without an objection, they then discussed BJ and Erika’s scrapbooking business and how BJ had obtained his weapons under legal permits. General stuff. Nothing earth-shattering. BJ’s lawyers were laying out his life. However, as his testimony continued, it became clear that BJ was pushing the entire blame—for his own social and psychological meltdown—on Erika, placing the complete context of his life spiraling out of control on an obsessive-compulsive wife who couldn’t stand being without him.

As BJ sat and described for the jury his life with Erika, he managed to begin talking about “that night” in Ocean City, which had landed him on the witness stand. In not so many words, he described a wife who was totally out of control from the moment they arrived in Ocean City.

Xanax.

Booze.

More Xanax.

More booze.

She had walked away from him with another man while they were waiting in line to get into Seacrets, BJ said.

Then he talked about meeting Martha “Geney” Crutchley and Joshua Ford.

From there, BJ described how they all left Seacrets together—which would become the one major difference in their stories: BJ said he went to the Rainbow while Erika, Geney, and Joshua stopped at the Atlantis. It was then that BJ said he arrived at the Rainbow by himself, only to realize he was locked out of the room. Because he had no key, BJ testified, he said he “pass[ed] out in the Jeep downstairs in the parking lot.”

85

The Blame Game

Sitting nimbly on the witness stand, telling his version of the story, BJ Sifrit was fairly believable and certainly sure of what he was saying. As he was “passed out” in the Jeep downstairs in the parking lot of the Rainbow, waiting for Erika to arrive with Geney and Joshua, BJ told jurors, he was startled awake by Erika.

She was frantic. Banging on the window. Yelling.

BJ hadn’t realized it, but he had been asleep for hours.

“What . . . what is it?” BJ said, coming to, waking up from what he described as nothing short of an alcohol-induced coma. He’d had countless “Long Island Ice Teas” that night, he said. How many was anybody’s guess, but surely in the double digits. BJ couldn’t recall what time Erika had woken him, “but it was still dark outside.” The sun hadn’t yet come up.

“We have to get out of here,” Erika supposedly said.

“What?” BJ was still trying to figure out what was going on.

“We have to leave,” Erika said again, forcefully this time, demanding.

Surprising to BJ, Erika was not overly emotional. She wasn’t calm and collected, either. But unlike what would be a normal routine he had come to know when she started panicking, she wasn’t acting crazy and out of it. “She was upset,” BJ explained, “but she
wasn’t
hysterical.”

“Come on, get up,” she said.

“Why? What’s wrong?” He was rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“We have a problem.” Erika started mumbling at this point. Saying all sorts of things that didn’t make any sense whatsoever to BJ, who could tell that something terrible was wrong; he just didn’t know what. He had never seen Erika act this way.

“Why? Why do we need to leave?”

Erika was making it clear that she wanted to get out of town. Not just leave the condo. Leave the state. Get the hell out of Ocean City as fast as they could.

Erika said something that BJ had a hard time registering. “I didn’t believe her,” he testified. “I didn’t know what to believe. I was still half asleep.”

“Why weren’t you there for me . . . ?” Erika started screaming. “Why, Beej? Where were you?”

“What?”

“Why, why, why, Beej? Why weren’t you
there
for me? I needed you! Where were you?” Erika was getting more animated and excited by the moment.

Then she started talking so fast, and making so many different accusations, that BJ hardly had a chance, he explained, to get a question or comment in.

So he got out of the Jeep. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

Erika hesitated at first.

Then she followed behind him.

“What is it?” he asked.

Nothing.

They took the elevator.

BJ walked into the condo first. Erika was in back of him. He went upstairs and into the bathroom. Looked down on the floor.

“There were two dead people in the bathroom,” BJ told jurors. “The people we met on the bus.”

Joshua Ford and Martha “Geney” Crutchley.

BJ said he bent down and checked both their pulses as he had been trained by the navy.

“Joshua Ford looked like he had been shot in the head,” BJ explained. “I don’t know . . . about Martha Crutchley . . . but they were both covered in blood.”

If you are to believe what BJ testified to in court, he then walked out of the bathroom and went into the bedroom nearby and sat on the edge of the bed, dropped his head into his hands, and began thinking:
What do we do now? Two dead people. My wife obviously responsible for these deaths. What is the right thing to do?