Cruel Death (21 page)

“Kristin, hold off on A-1, we have an Altoona couple arrested for murder in Ocean City, Maryland.”

“OK,” she said, and went back to searching the wire for any information about the crime. She had been working on that other story for so long, Kristin just assumed that her editor was referring to the same thing.

Kristin had no idea what Erika’s married name was, but she did know that not a lot of women with the same first name spelled it with a
K
. It was rare to see that name. As she sat and watched the wire, the Associated Press ran a few sentences by:
Altoona couple, Erika and Benjamin Sifrit, arrested for double murder. . . .

Huh?
Kristin thought.
That’s odd. I cannot believe this . . . but I don’t know any other Erika with that spelling.
She double-checked.
Yup, it is Altoona/Duncansville.
Erika and BJ’s apartment was actually in Duncansville. Not many people knew that.

But Kristin did.

There’s no way—this
cannot
be her!
she thought.

Kristin picked up the telephone and started calling old friends to see if anyone knew Erika’s married name.

Nobody did.

As the day went on, Kristin kept checking the Associated Press photo wire, hoping the OCPD would release a mug shot of the couple.

And then, sure enough, there it was: a mug shot of Erika and the man Kristin had seen her with at the mall a few years back.

“I was . . . I don’t know,” Kristin said later, “shocked. Speechless, actually.”

She printed the photograph out and walked over to her managing editor and stood in front of him.

“What?” he said after Kristin didn’t say anything.

By now, she was shaking, “trembling so bad,” she recalled, “that I was unable to pick up my hand” and show him the photograph.

“It’s Erika Grace,” Kristin told her editor. “Mitch Grace’s daughter.”

Everyone in town knew Mitch Grace.

“Oh, my goodness,” her editor said, looking at the photograph, “you’re right!”

Kristin turned and walked back to her desk. She was so nervous, she said, and shocked that it was actually Erika in that photograph, her nose started to bleed.

“I was a mess,” she said later. “I just could not fathom it. And as more of the case came out, I thought, ‘OK, I still believe that it was his [BJ’s] influence.’ But apparently, as I would learn, she thrived on all of this. They had, we found out, committed a lot of burglaries around the Duncansville area, and throughout the entire county, actually.”

This reaction echoed throughout the small community of which Erika had been a part for her entire life. Last everyone knew, Erika was a history major who graduated from a fairly decent college in Virginia. She was a local business owner. The daughter of one of the region’s best known contractors. She had grown up with a silver spoon. Now everyone was supposed to believe she had taken part in a double murder and actually had a hand in dismembering two people. None of it added up.

49

Hubris

Part of what the OCPD had uncovered at the Rainbow, inside Erika’s cache of photographs, proved that she had planned on perhaps putting together some sort of scrapbook representing all of her and BJ’s criminal activities throughout the years. Among the photos, detectives were puzzled by several pictures of the inside of a house outside Altoona. The photos were from a night when BJ and Erika met some dude at a local bar and ended up going back to his house to play some pool and have a few drinks. While BJ kept the guy busy, Erika searched throughout the guy’s house, checking things out, no doubt to see if he had anything worth thieving. Well, lo and behold, Erika took a series of photos in just about every room she entered. In one, she was smiling, sitting on the guy’s toilet.

After they left the house, later that night, BJ and Erika went back. BJ was on his knees, picking the front door lock of the same guy’s house. Either Erika and BJ were too drunk to realize it or they hadn’t even thought about it, but the guy was home while they were trying to break in. Then again, maybe that was part of the game? Perhaps BJ and Erika, not getting anything out of breaking into retail stores and Hooters, wanted to up the ante and try it while someone was home?

As BJ was picking the lock, the dude opened the door and pointed a shotgun at his head. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Oh,” BJ said, startled, “we forgot some things from earlier and wanted to retrieve them.”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

50

Circumspect

Arcky Tuminelli’s niche was federal court. That was where his experience and skill in the courtroom was able to shine. Still, the Sifrit case was something Arcky saw as a challenge. As he viewed it, Erika was a “highly motivated, driven, accomplished athlete, intelligent,” and not necessarily the type of person, with her background, that you would see involved in such a disturbing case. Arcky knew bad people. He sat across from them at conference tables in prisons and in courtrooms. He knew the smell of evil. In Erika Sifrit, at least during the early portion of the case, Arcky didn’t see any of it.

Arcky was a philosophy major in college. Law wasn’t even part of his outlook at the time. In fact, a decade after high school, college wasn’t even in Arcky’s plans. He had grown up in Baltimore, in the northwest section of the city, not too far from where the famous Preakness horse race is run every year—and he didn’t go back to school until he was twenty-eight.

From Arcky’s standpoint, Erika’s case posed some significant legal challenges right out of the box, which he needed to get a handle on immediately if he was going to be of any help.

“You had what appeared to be a double murder,” Arcky later explained, “by two people who—not knowing much about either one of them as I drove south—I believed, at least in Erika’s case, appeared to be from this really stable,
good
family. This wasn’t your typical murder case. There was something odd about it. Benjamin was the first in his class with the SEALs. Both of them were very interesting people. And then you have a suggestion that something happened with the bodies. So, in that sense, as a lawyer, as a trial attorney, it was unique. I’ve had murder cases—a number of death penalty cases, in fact—but never with facts lining up like this.”

And so as he drove from Baltimore on that Sunday night, June 2, Arcky thought about the case. The plan was to meet up with Erika, Mitch, Cookie, and, eventually, Joel Todd and OCPD detectives that night. As he looked at Erika’s background, nothing made sense to Arcky.

The hum of nighttime driving on a Sunday, when the roads are mostly clear, can do a lot for preparing the mind. Arcky began to analyze what he had been told. From what he understood, he could see BJ involved in the murders. A crazy SEAL, discharged from the service after a court-martial, had maybe gone nuts and snapped. It happened. The SEAL training alone, most people knew, was enough to make any good man crazy.

Yet, the delicate image Mitch and Cookie had painted of Erika didn’t fit into that insanity mold that seemed to fit the particulars of what was beginning to look like a truly horrible crime.

Something was missing.

“And the more I learned,” Arcky said later, “the more interesting and complicated it all became, which was the challenging aspect of it all.”

Nevertheless, regardless of what Erika had told her parents or even the police, Arcky believed he was in a good position. Erika apparently had some information that the state’s attorney wanted. Arcky could use it as a bargaining chip, if nothing else, and possibly save Erika a lot of trouble down the road.

Inside the jail, near 11:00
P.M
., Arcky got settled in one of the visiting rooms. He knew that Joel Todd and a few OCPD detectives were at the jail already, and had been questioning Erika most of the day. But before he sat down with Todd, Arcky needed to speak with Erika alone. He wanted her take on what had happened.

Tossing his notebook on the table, Arcky looked up and saw that the guards were bringing Erika in. She looked disheveled: crying, shaking, entirely unraveled.

Looking at her, Arcky was surprised by how thin Erika appeared.

They sat and talked. Within an hour, Arcky was aware of the details regarding what had happened the previous Friday night, and some of what took place over the weekend, when Erika and BJ were taken into custody. According to court documents (Arcky would not talk about anything he and Erika discussed), he was made aware of how Erika had spoken to detectives regarding where the bodies were dumped, and that BJ had murdered Joshua and Geney without her knowledge.

Of course, all of this information was contingent upon the idea that Erika was telling the truth. And Arcky certainly had no reason
not
to believe her. She seemed sincere. Mitch and Cookie, pretty shaken up by the entire incident, were upstanding people. They had reputations.

The irony in the case was tremendous. Had Erika and BJ simply left town—which they were scheduled to do earlier on the day they were caught burgling Hooters—they might have never been arrested, or even questioned about the disappearance of Joshua and Geney. But here they were: in jail, facing murder charges.

“Yes, I was there . . . but Benjamin did this,” Erika told Arcky at one point, according to court documents. “I didn’t know anything about it or that it was going to happen.”

Arcky was being told that Erika had had nothing whatsoever to do with the murders, but had, in fact, helped her husband clean up the mess and dispose of the bodies.

As her lawyer, Arcky was equally concerned about
any
role Erika might have played in the crimes. OK, she wasn’t there. She claimed not to see BJ kill the couple, but she
knew
they had been murdered, and, moreover, she had helped BJ, according to what she had told police already, get rid of the bodies. By themselves, those were pretty serious charges.

“I went with him when he disposed of the bodies,” Erika confirmed.

Arcky wrote it down on his notepad, saying, “Listen, what these people are really,
really
interested in is where the bodies are.”

Arcky had stepped out and spoken briefly to Joel Todd and several of the investigating detectives. He could tell from the conversation that they didn’t necessarily believe Erika, especially Brett Case and Scott Bernal. She had taken detectives to two Dumpsters, where she said she had helped BJ dump the bodies. But detectives were under the impression that she wasn’t being totally truthful.

Because of this, Arcky made it clear to Erika that if she came clean and was willing to cooperate, he could possibly cut her a deal.

A sweet deal, at that.

In turn, Joel Todd would probably want to use Erika as a witness in BJ’s potential trial, and if all went as expected, Erika wouldn’t face prosecution herself for the murders.

Erika indicated that she understood clearly what Arcky was telling her.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Arcky said later, “she understood.” Both Scott Bernal and Brett Case backed this up.

What was strange was that Erika had negotiated a deal already with the state’s attorney through the detectives, before Arcky had even arrived. It was back on Friday night and early Saturday morning. She had made a promise to receive immunity from the burglary if she showed detectives where she and BJ had dumped the bodies. Why she tossed only the burglary on the table was the question no one could really answer.

“Apparently,” Joel Todd said later, “she wanted to shoulder all the blame on Benjamin and get herself out of trouble completely. I recall when Detective Bernal came to me with her proposal, my response was ‘I’d gladly trade a burglary for a homicide.’ I’m like, ‘Give me some information about these murders and I’d be glad to drop the burglary charges.’”

Why was Erika so concerned about receiving immunity from the burglary? A Hooters burglary was nothing compared to double-murder charges—the least of her problems, in other words. Apparently, Erika wasn’t worried about any potential murder charges. It was as if she didn’t think she needed to protect herself from those charges in any way whatsoever. And yet, after Arcky arrived and explained things differently, it was clear that she needed to rethink that earlier position.

And then the idea came up that Erika had not given detectives the right information, anyway. So perhaps she
did
know what she was doing when she cut that earlier deal and then lied to police about where she and BJ had dumped the bodies.

As would be the case in the coming days, it would be clear that it wasn’t what Erika had said to detectives that mattered most. It was, instead, what she
hadn’t
told them that was going to be of immediate concern.

51

Unfathomable

Detective Scott Bernal had gone in to see Erika periodically throughout that weekend. His goal was to see if she wanted to talk. He had to keep making himself available. There was one time when he was interviewing Erika with Joel Todd and Arcky present and Erika said something that in Bernal’s almost twenty years of law enforcement he had never heard, and would most likely never hear again.

“After he cut Geney’s head off,” Erika said of BJ, “he—he . . . he put her head up on the corner of the tub, like propped it up, and then he had intercourse with her corpse.”

Bernal studied Erika while she told this horrific story, as she went into great detail. She also said that BJ needed a certain type of stimulation to get him excited, and this was it, she said, killing people and chopping them up.

Bernal watched her body language as she told the story.

“It was the same as when she had told me other things of which I
knew
to be truthful.”

52

Just Another Roll of the Dice

Sitting with Erika, Arcky explained the situation in the simplest terms he could manage. From a legal perspective, two facts remained certain where it pertained to what he could do next: One, there was a double murder that somehow involved BJ and Erika. Two, Arcky had no idea, at this point, what the actual facts were surrounding those crimes. The truth of the matter was, Erika had told several different versions of one absolute: Geney and Joshua were dead, their body parts placed in two separate Dumpsters. Beyond those two knowns, there was a litany of unknowns.