Cruel Death (8 page)

Erika found out this was true.

But he still would not admit to the affair.

“So what does BJ do?” Erika told Bernal, shaking her head in disbelief. “He gets on the computer. He sends her an e-mail and it says—again, forgive my language—‘Hey, bitch, you better tell my wife I never fucked you. . . . ’” Erika went on to say that BJ promised the mistress that if she didn’t call Erika and tell her it was all a lie, he would drive down to Arkansas and “amputate your bastard kids with a butcher—with a butter knife” and then “board up the windows and doors” and torch her house down. He signed the e-mail, “Your worst enemy, BJ.”

That e-mail, according to a naval investigation report I was able to obtain, was the beginning of the end for BJ Sifrit and his relationship with the military, along with several incidents involving cars, foul language, and threats.

Erika talked about what truly turned BJ on: getting chased by the police. He would actually instigate pursuits with cops. BJ drove a hot rod, a bright orange (with black stripes) 1972 Chevelle, all decked out. It was a fast car, a muscle car. He was your typical gearhead. There was one time, Erika recalled, when she and BJ were cruising down the main strip in Virginia Beach, Pacific Avenue.

“It’s like a strip,” she explained, “where you cruise, like, twenty miles an hour.”

BJ spotted some cops hanging around a 7-Eleven convenience store. He pulled up. Revved the engine. Then pulled the car up in front of the cruiser and took off like a racing flag had been waved, burning rubber, leaving a trail of smoke behind him.

“He did that purposely?” Bernal asked when Erika was finished telling the story.

“I’d say weekly.”

“Why do you think?”

“Because that’s what got him off: to outrun police.”

There was another instance—the episode that solidified BJ’s ousting from the navy—shortly after Erika’s father bought her a new Audi. Erika and BJ had met up with two of his friends, who had spent the day drinking at a bar. They were afraid of getting popped for a DUI and getting expelled from the navy, so BJ offered to follow them back to the base.

“They were swerving and Beej sees a cop, so he’s afraid they’re going to get pulled over, plus he wants the rush,” Erika said. Not to mention that he was living up to his true SEAL reputation of protecting your fellow men at any cost.

BJ got into the left lane of a two-lane, thirty-five-mile-an-hour road. His plan was to make himself noticed by the cop—BJ was heading straight into oncoming traffic.

“All the cars coming toward us,” Erika explained, “are going into the trees and bushes and onto the other side of the road.” By this point, BJ was pushing the Audi to speeds of 125, 130, Erika insisted.

The cop was close behind.

Erika was screaming, “Slow down . . . Beej,” tightly gripping the dashboard. “Stop, you’re going to kill us.”

Then she peed in her pants.

And grabbed the keys out of the ignition, which slowed the car instantly, thus propelling her head against the dashboard.

BJ was convicted in a Norfolk, Virginia, courtroom on a variety of charges. But, because he was a SEAL, some later asserted, he was given a slap: community service.

This was one of the only times, Erika remembered, that BJ had ever gotten caught.

Erika finished this portion of her interview with a story that spoke to BJ’s bigotry and staunch hatred toward any other race besides his own. They’d be driving around, Erika explained, and BJ would say, “Hey, let’s go shoot us a nigger.”

“What?”

“No one will ever know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ve
got
to kill someone,” BJ told his wife, “where there’s no motive.”

BJ was saying that it was the toughest murder for investigators to solve because there was really no reason for the person to have been killed.

“Let’s go down to the ghetto,” he continued saying to Erika, “and shoot us a nigger. It’ll be really fun.”

“No! I want to go home. Let’s go home.”

Erika admitted that there was a time when she and BJ liked to snort cocaine. It was approximately the end of the year 2001, when she and BJ went out one night to buy come coke. They were in Altoona. BJ found some woman, Erika explained, and made the buy.

When they got back to the apartment and set up the lines, BJ was the first to snort.

The coke burned his nose something terrible. Made him cough and choke.

It was Ajax. They had been ripped off.

BJ couldn’t let it go, Erika said. He had to do something about it.

BJ left the house. Went to the “cement store,” Erika said, “and bought a big . . . five-gallon” bucket of acid.

In order to see if the acid would indeed melt away the drug dealer’s body after he killed her, BJ took one of the rats they fed to their snakes. He placed the rat, alive and kicking, inside the acid bath. There was a smile on BJ’s face, Erika said.

A day later, the rat was just about completely gone.

16

Control Freaks

Erika called home one night in 1999 after she met BJ. She wanted to speak to her dad. According to Mitch, Erika explained that she and BJ were
thinking
about getting married.

“Erika,” Mitch explained, “why would you ever do that? You’ve known him for what, a few weeks? Why would you even
consider
doing that, honey?” Mitch was perplexed. This wasn’t the daughter he knew. “If you’re that intent on getting married, live with him for a while and find out who he is.”

Mitch’s astute point was centered on the notion that you not only have to love someone to get married, you also have to
like
the person. You don’t marry someone because you have fallen in love with him. People fall in love every day. And people also fall out of love every day.

That old cliché has some wisdom to it: get to know each other first.

“No, I won’t do that. I won’t live with someone without marrying him,” Erika said sharply, subtly using religion as an available crutch to go through with something she obviously had already done.

And that was the end of the discussion. Mitch never heard anything else about the subject until Erika brought BJ home one day to Altoona and introduced him as her husband.

It was just one of those nights that newly married Erika was at home in the apartment but feeling especially down. She wanted more from her husband already. By now, she knew BJ a little bit better. She was scared to push BJ in any direction. Scared, not of him abusing her—but of losing him. Their first year together had been “exciting,” she later explained to a government agent. “We did cocaine and ecstasy five days a week,” she admitted.

One party after the other.

Coke. Sex. Bars. Booze. Wild nights.

Being married to a SEAL was fun and exhilarating for the first twelve months, but was this it? Erika wondered. Routine, sporadic sex, drugs, and then waiting for your husband to return from wherever the navy had sent him this time around. She wanted more out of life.

As the marriage seemed to burn itself out, and running from the cops after initiating high-speed chases wasn’t satisfying BJ’s thrill-seeking nature, BJ and Erika began burglarizing Hooters restaurants and small businesses and retail stores in and around Altoona. They’d even started a side business on eBay selling the hot merchandise. Erika later said in letters that she was making up to $2,500 per week selling the stolen items—and loving every minute of it.

Erika not only participated in the burglaries, but she loved the high of being able to break into an establishment and steal things at will. It gave her a sense of power, authority.

Still, there had to be more to this guy.

More to life.

More to being married.

BJ shocked her one night, Erika later said. “I want kids,” he said. It was out of the blue. She had no idea he was even thinking about it.

She was pleasantly surprised. “Kids?”

“Yeah. I want you to get pregnant.”

What a turnaround. Overnight, the guy had gone from a criminal to someone who wanted to become a parent. This wasn’t the BJ she knew. But then maybe he was ready to settle down and change. By now, BJ had already been discharged from the military. They had opened Memory Laine, their scrapbooking business. Save for the thieving and drugs, one could say, they were living a fairly contemporary married life.

But both were obviously bored.

It didn’t take long. That first month passed and Erika missed her period. She was ecstatic. Maybe this was it? Maybe BJ was destined to become a father and everything would take on a new significance. She could live like her parents. Erika was not just an only child; she was the only child in the family. No cousins. Erika beamed with the glow of being a new mother. She was five feet six inches, plus, with BJ on her all the time about her weight, she had whittled herself down to almost nothing at ninety-five pounds. So, after three and a half months, she stood one night in front of a mirror and had herself a moment. BJ wasn’t home. She relished having the child. It was going to be magnificent.

Wonderful.

She hadn’t known it, but it was just what she had wanted.

In between her third and fourth month (Erika couldn’t recall the exact time when she was asked about it later), BJ came home with several of his SEAL buddies one night. They were drunk. BJ had “this look” on his face. He wanted something.

What have I done?
Erika thought immediately.

“I don’t want kids,” BJ came out and said. “You thought I wanted to be a dad? You stupid whore. I don’t want no kid.”

Erika was confused. “You
what
?”

“You heard me. Get rid of the kid.”

She started crying. She knew it wouldn’t do anything. But she couldn’t help it.

“Beej—”

“Either we get it out, here and now—I’m going to dig it out of you with a coat hanger—or you go to the clinic in the morning. Your choice.”

BJ walked away.

Enough said.

No more discussion about it.

The following morning, BJ drove Erika down to the local clinic and she got the abortion. It was one of the hardest things she had ever done. She had taken a life. The baby had been alive that morning, kicking and moving in her womb, and now it was gone. Dead. Just a piece of garbage in some medical disposable waste site. They didn’t even know what it was: boy or girl. And now they never would.

The abortion issue had never meant much to Erika. Heck, since she’d married BJ—who absolutely disbelieved in and despised God and religion altogether, shunning and exclaiming that Jesus Christ was a fake and a fraud—Erika hadn’t even thought about it much. But here she was, heading home after aborting her child, knowing exactly what all those women before her had gone through. Later, she would get a tattoo of a cross on her stomach to pay homage to the child.

On the way home from the clinic, Erika later explained to a friend in a letter, she sat with her head down on BJ’s lap and he petted her hair as he drove.

I was 100% sedated . . . ,
she wrote.

“It’s OK now, Lainey,” BJ said. He was rubbing her ears and talking sweetly. “You passed the loyalty test. Everything is going to be OK.” He said he was going to “take care” of her now that she had proven her devotion to him. He had to “make sure” that she would “pass the test” and because she had, she would “be his wife forever.” It was why he had to do it, BJ explained.

“Everything’s gonna be OK now, Lainey.”

When he returned home one afternoon shortly after that, BJ saw that Erika had a sad look about her face. She was hurt. How could he be so coldhearted and cruel? What had motivated him to manipulate her to such an extent?

“Why?” she asked him.

According to what Erika later recalled, BJ said, “I never wanted a kid to begin with, Lainey. I just wanted to see how far you would go for me.”

From BJ’s perspective, Erika had perhaps passed the ultimate test. He knew now that he could trust her. He could ask of her the most intimate, the most personal, and the most horrible of things to do, and even though she might kick and scream, he understood that she was loyal and would likely do whatever he asked.

Now, that’s one story of the abortion. A friend of Erika’s tells a completely different version of this event in Erika’s life.

BJ had lived in North Carolina with some friends, a SEAL buddy and his wife. For a while, even after they were married, Erika lived with them. But they had, according to the friend, “moved out by this point.... We had heard they were having problems and she had been causing him a lot of problems by then with the military, calling his command and getting in his business.”

BJ’s SEAL buddy’s wife was pregnant. Erika knocked on the door one day to have a chat with her. She had just been to her therapist, she said, whose office was close by.

Erika’s pupils were so dilated, the friend recalled, you could barely see the color of her eyes.

“I just wanted you to know that I was pregnant and we (meaning she and BJ) decided that I should get an abortion. He’s been doing so much coke (cocaine) and I’ve been popping so many pills, it was better this way.... It probably wouldn’t be safe for me to have a baby.” She even said she’d just discussed it with her therapist, and the doctor agreed.

“Well,” the friend said, “you did the right thing. Don’t feel bad about it.”

Was this Erika covering for her husband’s craziness? Her friend didn’t think so. Erika seemed fairly sincere that day.

“The only people that truly know what happened are them.”

17

“911 . . . ?”

If what Erika later said is true, sometime around 2:30
A.M
., Joshua, Geney, Erika, and BJ walked along the beach up to the Rainbow Condominium and entered room 1101, BJ and Erika’s spacious, elegant flat, after stopping at the Atlantis, where Geney and Joshua were staying.

When they first got inside, Erika later explained, Geney and Joshua were overwhelmed by how nice the place was.