Cruel Death (38 page)

Two different people.

It was a good way for Erika to approach the jury—the only problem, Todd had effectively argued in his opening, was that this was the way Erika acted, only when it suited her needs. Like now. In front of the jury.

All other evidence available proved otherwise: Erika Grace Sifrit was a manipulator and chronic drug user, who, when she was married to BJ, thrived on good times, dark thrills, and obsessive behavior, which drove him out of the military.

In any event, Erika sat stiffly, not showing much emotion one way or another, knowing that she faced a maximum penalty of life in prison with the possibility of parole on first-degree murder charges—not to mention a litany of additional charges, including theft, burglary, carrying a concealed handgun, and being an accessory after the fact. As Todd sat there next to Erika and her attorneys, doing battle against them, the state prosecutor was contemplating dropping these charges—even though the charges could add the potential of an extra twenty or more years behind bars for Erika.

After Dr. Adrienne Perlman left the stand, Todd put on a few witnesses who were on the bus Geney and Joshua had gotten on in Ocean City on the day they met Erika and BJ. It was a good way for Todd to chronologically set up the narrative that ended Joshua and Geney’s lives.

With lunch over, Todd had a friend of Geney’s explain to jurors how she began to be consumed with worry over Geney, when Geney failed to show up for work on that Tuesday after Memorial Day. This was a good way to begin to bring in the state’s parade of law enforcement witnesses to explain how it was that Erika and BJ Sifrit met up with Geney and Joshua—and eventually murdered them.

95

Pain and Loss

Mark and Deborah Ford had lost a daughter to a supposed serial murderer in Cape Cod, who had allegedly beheaded the young woman and, some claimed, removed her heart. Eight months later, they got a call explaining that another family member, Joshua, had been the victim of a brutally savage crime, which seemed to be motivated by nothing more than the sheer thrill of the kill. This trial, at least to Mark and Deborah Ford, was a formality. They needed to see it all end. And being a part of it, in any capacity, was one way to accomplish that task and, with any grace, move on.

As the afternoon wore on during this first day of the trial, Mark Ford was brought in—but not to carry on about how much tragedy had infested his life and how much he missed his brother and daughter. Sure, that was all true, and also part of his and Deb’s daily life story. It was there when they woke up, and there when they went to sleep. And the jury certainly knew it, just from looking at Mark’s face. The sadness and loss and compounded nature of the heartbreak he and his family had endured was evident there. But instead of talking about Joshua, and recalling memories of a lifetime, and imagining future memories that would never be, Joel Todd had Mark talk about the ring Erika had in
her
purse—with Joshua Ford’s blood on it—on the night she and BJ were arrested at Hooters. It was the same ring, in fact, that Erika wore in a few of those after-the-murder photos.

During Mark Ford’s testimony, Todd projected a photo of the ring, asking Mark if he recognized it.

“It’s my brother’s dragon ring,” Mark said.

“Have you ever seen your brother wearing that ring?”

“Many times.” The look on his face seemed to remind everyone that Mark would never see his brother wearing that ring again.

After Todd asked Mark a few more questions—one about Geney and one about a photograph of Joshua and Geney, in which Joshua was wearing the dragon ring—Todd turned Mark over to Tom Ceraso.

Ceraso didn’t move from his seat. “No questions, Your Honor.”

Why attack a guy who had managed to go on in life after such devastating losses? What could be gained by such a thing?

Rounding out the day for Joel Todd were three police officers who had been at the scene of the Hooters burglary. All three set the stage for BJ and Erika’s arrests.

Throughout the day, it wasn’t the witnesses and testimony that caused the most watercooler discussion; it was the state’s exhibits Joel Todd and Scott Collins had presented to the jury. Todd had warned the gallery and the jury during his opening statement that it would be subjected to graphic photographs—and those images did not disappoint. The most ominous of the bunch was a shot of Joshua’s arm, cut off from the shoulder, sitting deftly on a medical examiner’s steel bench. It had been cleaned by the ME. Present in the photo were the remains—the results—of what Erika was being accused of, so graphic and sobering, Joshua’s tattoo so perfectly centered on the cusp of his bicep, his fingernails still intact and manicured. The image was so surreal it didn’t even look authentic. To sit and think that one human being had actually done this to another was stupefying and repulsive. The arm appeared to have been cut almost surgically off, whereas Joshua’s other arm, which jurors had also seen photos of, looked as though it had been cut and torn off like a chicken leg, with bits and pieces of flesh hanging from the shoulder area. Either way, the photos injected an amount of surrealism into the trial.

Additional photos, which were not quite as shocking but carried their own weight as well, were of Joshua’s torso, which did not look human. It had started to decompose, and having been buried underneath garbage for most of the week, it took on a look of having been taken from a fire, which, of course, it hadn’t.

Then there were the photos of how each body part had been uncovered in the landfill. Here were photos of the body parts just sitting, blending in with the garbage around them, as if they were props placed there by a key grip, or special-effects expert. Jurors could no longer look over at Erika and see an innocent bystander, someone whom BJ had
forced
to take part in such a crime. Because when you took these autopsy and crime scene and landfill photos and put them into the context of what transpired
after
the murders, you had to conclude that the same couple responsible for this terrifying tragedy of unspeakable proportions was the same couple photographed a day later playing miniature golf and eating hot wings and drinking beers, smiling and laughing and enjoying themselves. The juxtaposition of the unreal and the real was strikingly evident, some sort of lingering aroma in the air inside that stuffy courtroom.

Indeed, no moral person there could deny how evil the people responsible for the remains of these crimes, seen in those photos, had to be.

96

The Setup

The morning of June 4, 2003, began much in the same manner as the previous day had left off. Law enforcement witnesses came in and described how they had arrested BJ and Erika at Hooters, and through that seemingly routine collar, they made a discovery that had turned what was a common burglary case upside down. In fact, it was the discovery of the IDs that led the OCPD to believe Joshua and Geney were being held hostage at the Rainbow Condominiums. This seemingly routine arrest of two rather sloppy burglars turned out to be the beginning of the most horrifying case many of the detectives working it had ever investigated.

As the trial moved forward, Erika took notes and conversed with Tuminelli and Ceraso as certain witnesses said things that she obviously disagreed with. And for what was the first time in almost two full days, Erika displayed a bit of emotion. Instead of it having been generated by graphic images, or testimony about the horror, it turned out that Erika’s emotional display occurred only when she turned and stared at her parents, who were deeply moved by the proceedings, and mouthed, “I love you.”

Erika and her parents were so close, and yet she couldn’t run into their arms and be coddled and comforted. According to one witness there in the courtroom sitting near her, Cookie bowed her head and wept softly, saying, “Why, why, why . . .” to herself. She couldn’t understand how this had happened to her baby.

After six police officers took the stand and described how the investigation into a burglary turned into suspicion of murder, Todd called a bouncer from Seacrets who happened to be working on the night Erika and BJ showed up
after
the murders. The witness quickly identified a photograph of Erika and BJ in which Erika was supposedly wearing Joshua’s dragon ring. Then he testified how Erika had waved a gun willy-nilly and threatened to shoot him after he caught BJ trying to pick the lock on an automated teller machine (ATM) inside the bar.

Tuminelli and Ceraso made a point to let the jury know (through cross) that there was no way anyone could tell for certain if it was actually Joshua’s ring in those photos, but the bell had been rung—and there was little Erika’s team could do to lessen the severity of the implication. Not to mention that the bouncer put the gun that killed Joshua in Erika’s hands, and describing her demeanor and aggressiveness, he made the assumption that this was one woman unafraid to wield or use a deadly weapon.

Todd next called the tattoo artist who had inked the snake tattoo on Erika’s hip, allegedly on the spot where she had made the first cut on Geney, which BJ seemed to be so proud of. Todd used a photograph to show that Erika had a knife in her pocket on the day she got the tattoo, which was about forty-eight hours after the murders.

It was that same knife, Todd was going to prove, Erika had in her pocket on the night she was arrested.

The same knife used to cut up Geney and Joshua.

Near the end of the day, OCPD detective Clinton Chamberlain talked about some of the hard evidence the OCPD had collected. For Tuminelli and Ceraso, it was one thing to have the brother of a murder victim identify a ring owned by the victim, which the perpetrator had been allegedly carrying, and then later wore around her neck. But it was quite another to have an opinion of the same piece of evidence given by a law enforcement official.

“You can’t say that the ring that is shown here,” Ceraso asked, pointing to one of the photos in which Erika had the ring supposedly around her neck, attached to a cross, “is
that
ring, can you?”

“Not positively,” Chamberlain replied.

97

Subtlety

The following morning, June 5, a Thursday, went pretty much along the same pace for Joel Todd. He presented a series of crime scene techs first, who came in and explained how they had collected evidence and what they had found. Throughout this, Todd had to be careful. Crime scene evidence wasn’t the glorified, dramatic, state-of-art science portrayed on television. Crime scene investigators (CSIs) didn’t bombard a crime scene with high-tech gadgets out of the future: they still did things, in many instances, the old-fashioned way—on their hands and knees.

To bore a jury and to bog down a trial with all of the mumbo jumbo that goes along with the scientific study of evidence under a microscope, and collecting it from doorknobs and carpets and grout lines, might slow the state’s momentum considerably. The way in which Todd called these witnesses, however, perfectly outlined how monotonous a process crime scene investigation truly was in the real world: There were fingerprint specialists and serology techs and fiber and hair analysis experts. All of whom, however, came in and sat for no longer than ten minutes each, focusing their testimony on one specific aspect of their job, rather than every little shade and tone each had sketched during his or her part of the investigation.

It was a brilliant move on Todd’s part.

When Todd was finished with his science experts, he called Detective Scott Bernal, who was, Todd himself later said, the one detective who had led the charge against Erika and BJ from the moment Geney and Joshua were reported missing. Surprisingly, though, Todd didn’t have much for the veteran detective, other than having Bernal testify that he believed it was Erika’s voice on the tape of the 911 call made that night from the Rainbow suite.

Ceraso stood when Todd finished and asked, quite simply, “I think . . . you’ve never heard Erika Sifrit’s voice over the phone, am I right? Other than on the tape?”

“That’s correct.”

A few questions later, “I have nothing further.”

OCPD detective Brett Case came in next and talked about his adventure on Monday, June 3, 2002, as he and scores of other officers went to the landfill in Delaware to begin the search for Joshua and Geney.

“We all routed there at seven
A.M
.,” Case said, referring to the landfill. “We went over some preliminary instructions, safety concerns, certain things like that, and got the troops up to the top, top of the landfill, and we began to search with some heavy machinery and personnel.” He said they started to actually begin digging through the tons and tons of garbage around 9:30
A.M.
, which was, looking at it from the scope of the ground, no different than searching for one specific pebble in a pile of topsoil. The landfill was immense, some 571 acres of timbered wetland. Each “cell” of the landfill was about forty to fifty acres in size. A cell is one small segment of land that makes up the whole. Laying it out like a grid, they searched certain cells, one at a time.

That search, Brett Case said, went on for twelve hours.

In what must have been divine intervention, Bernal and Case later said, within only a short period of time, an excavator picked up a bucket load. “The third scoop of trash,” Case added with the same shock he had experienced on that day, “[had] unearthed what appeared to be a human leg.”

Todd showed a photo of the leg.

“OK, and what was the next item you located?”

“We located a large duffel bag, dark-colored duffel bag, and this zippered-type duffel bag. Contained in that was a yellow hotel-style blanket and a torso of a human being.”

Todd was smart to present “facts” of the case, which could not really be disputed. These were aspects of an investigation that added up to murder when put together.

Utter silence filled the room as Todd presented this disturbing image of what was left to Joshua Ford’s torso.