Cruel Death (24 page)

Leaving Joel Todd’s office, Erika was confident she could pull off the polygraph. She had secrets, sure. But somewhere in her twisted mind, she believed she could contain them and get through that all-important polygraph.

59

The Right Button

Inside Erika and BJ’s condo, detectives uncovered one of Erika’s scrapbooks that proved to be quite telling in its own way. Being in the scrapbooking business, Erika had documented a better part of her life with BJ. It was as much her job to scrapbook as it was a hobby and something she enjoyed doing.

On one page of a book detectives took during the search, a few photographs of Erika and BJ struck them as particularly odd. BJ, for one, appeared younger and more boyish. He didn’t have that gruff, military look to him. He was even smiling in several of the photos. Erika also looked content. She was a normal weight for her size, smiled genuinely, and looked comfortable next to her husband. You might even take a leap and suggest that they appeared to be in love.

Erika had titled the page in big bold letters at the top:
MARYLAND,
along with the subtitle
You are my sunshine.
It was a play on words, obviously. The “you” was Benjamin, of course. In her synopsis of the trip she and BJ had taken, Erika marked the date
May 2000,
and the reason for the trip to Ocean City that particular summer: to take a friend of hers she called “Becky,” Erika’s aunt, along with two of her aunt’s friends, down to the seashore for a quiet getaway. They had all stayed at the Rainbow.

In reading this, the minutia of the trip didn’t matter much to detectives. But it was what happened when Erika and BJ were in Ocean City that seemed to ring a familiar bell. Erika had documented on the page how she, BJ, and her aunt went shopping in Rehoboth at the outlet stores. After a long day of browsing through racks of overpriced sweaters and designer blue jeans, they all went out to eat. Where else? Hooters, of course, a favorite spot for Erika and BJ. After eating wings, they decided to walk around a muscle car show the restaurant was having in the parking lot.

It was a cold weekend,
Erika wrote, which sent them looking for something to do indoors. The car show was boring, anyway, she added.

At a nearby tattoo parlor, BJ and Erika wanted to get some “new ink.” Yet, once they got inside the parlor, Erika wrote, she had to back out. She didn’t have any money. Nor did she have her wallet. In realizing this, she wrote, she
accused some girls [inside the tattoo parlor] of stealing my wallet when I really had left it at the Rainbow!

It was a joke. Blaming the girls for thieving her purse when she knew where it was all along.

When Erika got back to the condo, she called her father. “I cannot find my purse.” She was hysterical, her father later told me. She was convinced that someone had actually stolen the purse.

“Calm down,” Mitch Grace told his daughter. “I’ll check into it.”

Mitch called condo management and had “everyone looking” for Erika’s purse, he said.

After quite a spectacle of searching high and low, someone recovered the purse under a couch cushion inside the condo living room—now a familiar place for detectives. BJ had stayed in the background and watched the day unfold. He saw how obsessive Erika had become when she realized her purse was missing. She freaked out. According to some, this was when BJ began to understand that by the simple act of losing her purse, Erika had exposed herself. She had become unnerved to the point of mayhem. Losing something was one of Erika’s many buttons BJ began to understand that he could push.

Another was the telephone. BJ would be in Memory Laine reading a magazine, Mitch Grace later said, or just hanging around, and the telephone would start ringing. Erika would be with a customer or just busy doing any one of the thousand things she had to do in the store every day.

Hearing the phone ringing in front of him, however, BJ would not budge.

“He could be sitting within arm’s reach of the phone,” said Mitch, “and he would just let it ring and ring and ring, because he knew it would get to Erika.”

60

Training a SEAL

There was a time after BJ graduated from SEAL school, while living near Virginia Beach, when he and Erika weren’t yet seeing each other regularly. Erika had met BJ by this point and had fallen for him—and had perhaps even become obsessed with him. But BJ had other plans: he was focused on SEAL training and his career. Erika wouldn’t take no for an answer when BJ told her he really didn’t want to get involved. They were out with a few other couples having some beers.

“Sorry,” BJ said. “I want to focus on my training and military career.”

Erika didn’t say anything.

She refused to take no for an answer.

Before Erika met BJ, she had been dating another man. According to sources, the man had finally had enough of Erika’s obsessive behaviors and possessive nature and told her to forget it. The relationship had run its course.

Erika wouldn’t accept the breakup. She
couldn’t
accept it.

So she got up, former friends said, walked over to a brick wall outside the bar, where they had all been hanging out, and began ramming her forehead into the wall.

“No, no, no, no . . . ,” she kept saying.

Rejection was not easy for Erika Grace to swallow. She had left Pennsylvania as, essentially, the star of her hometown—a basketball superwoman.

Everybody’s hero.

In college, however, rejection began: She wasn’t the luminary anymore, but more of an average student and average ball player. In a sense, Erika didn’t know how to react to rejection.

“Come on,” the crowd said. “Stop that.” She was beginning to bleed.

Erika continued.

And continued.

Until her head was bleeding profusely.

The cops were called.

According to witnesses, one of the officers asked, “What’s going on here?” after rolling up to the scene outside the bar.

“She’s upset,” someone said.

According to law enforcement, this same scene played out again with BJ sometime later, when he decided after meeting Erika that they had no future. At first, seeing how badly bruised and bleeding Erika was, police thought BJ had been beating on her. But they split them up, asked some questions, and BJ was told to take Erika home.

They had known each other only a few days then.

As BJ’s friends got to know Erika more intimately, she began to express a part of herself that was quite odd, said one former acquaintance.

“Erika wanted what she wanted—and that was that.”

She was possessive, yes indeed, but there was another side to Erika that shocked one friend. It began at the beach. They had all decided to go to the beach one day, to kind of accept Erika into the group as BJ’s girl. After all, they were married. This same friend had dropped Erika off at the airport, in fact, to head off to Las Vegas.

“She mentioned nothing to me about going there to get married.”

Anyway, they were at the beach one day and Erika told a story. She was partying down in Ocean City with some girlfriends a few years back, she said. They were drinking, doing pills, having a ball. “Yes,” that friend said, “I knew Erika was into drugs before she met BJ.”

“Listen,” Erika said, “we’re down there in Maryland and one of my friends gets into a car with this stranger, this guy she just meets, and takes off.”

According to what Erika said, that friend was then raped by this guy.

What startled Erika’s new friends—BJ’s people, if you will—as they sat there on the beach, listening to Erika tell this story, was her reaction to the rape. “I guess that’ll teach her not to get into the car with strangers again,” Erika supposedly said, reacting to her friend’s rape.

“It was very blasé the way she went about saying it.”

One of the women there listening was a criminal defense attorney. The woman looked at the other friend as Erika spoke and they both popped their eyes out, like,
Huh? That’s a bit weird—to have a reaction like that.

“You’d think someone would tell a story like that with a bit more sympathy in their voice.”

From then on, the former friend continued, Erika was “like psycho for BJ, crazy jealous.”

BJ’s sister came down to visit him once when they were living together in North Carolina with these friends.

Erika was jealous of BJ’s sister and the time that he was spending with her.

There was one time when BJ hadn’t seen his friends for six weeks; he was out on a training exercise with the SEAL team. When he returned, they all met up at a local bar.

“Hey, BJ,” said his friend’s wife. They gave each other a little hug. She kissed him on the cheek. “Welcome home, soldier!”

Erika was standing nearby.

She flipped out. “Never touch him. Never speak to him again.”

61

Hide in Plain Sight

At one point, Erika had told Detective Scott Bernal that she had photographed BJ holding up Geney and Joshua’s heads; his face was painted with blood, and he sported a throbbing, enormous erection. She said she had used a digital camera and mailed the card file back home with some of her other stuff. BJ wanted to send the photos to his SEAL buddies when they got back.

Bernal wasn’t so sure if it was just a story, or if Erika was telling the truth. So Bernal and his boss, Richard Moreck, headed north to Pennsylvania to search Erika’s apartment.

The Graces had put all of Erika’s belongings into storage containers. They had emptied the apartment of everything and placed all of it, Bernal said later, into these containers and then into a storage shed in back of Erika’s grandmother’s property.

“Somebody knew what they were doing in storing that stuff there,” Bernal said. “This became a nightmare for us to obtain a search warrant.”

This story was worth checking out, however—no matter what the OCPD had to go through to get that search warrant.

After spending the day securing the search warrant, while going through one of the containers, looking for a digital camera or card file, Bernal noticed out of the corner of his eye that Mitch Grace, who was there watching their every move, had picked something up out of a container and had quickly put it in his pocket.

Bernal grabbed Mitch by the wrist harshly. “Hey, whatever you put in your pocket, if it’s a weapon, move your hands back slowly.”

Maybe it was the card file they were looking for?

Mitch had what Bernal described as a “kid caught with his hands in the cookie jar” look about him. He was scared. He took his hand out of his pocket and raised both arms.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

Bernal told him to put it on the table.

It was a marijuana pipe.

“What do you think . . . ,” Bernal said. He was dumbfounded by what Mitch had done. “We’re here, Mitch, searching for evidence of
murder
. Do you think we give a
shit
about some pipe with pot residue inside of it?”

Mitch didn’t say anything.

“Mitch’s mind-set,” Bernal remarked later, “was always protect, protect, protect. That’s where his mind was. He had no sense of where things began and where things ended. And to think, Erika did this to the poor guy. She destroyed that family.”

62

The Test

Joel Todd called Arcky Tuminelli and made it perfectly clear that it was time to get on with the polygraph. It had been almost a month since that rather illuminating meeting and interview with Erika had taken place in Joel Todd’s office. In order for what was officially now known as the “Memorandum of Understanding” agreement, which Arcky and Joel had drafted back in June at midnight in Todd’s office, to be put into full effect, the polygraph needed to be completed.

“Let’s go, Arcky,” Todd said.

By now, the OCPD had forensically identified the torso, arms, and leg they had uncovered in that Delaware landfill as a match to Joshua Ford and Geney Crutchley. The state’s attorney needed to get the case moving along. This had been a horrific crime, of which the media was buzzing around the periphery, wondering what was going on. Todd’s community wanted answers, not to mention the family members on Joshua and Geney’s sides. Beyond that, a preliminary ballistics report confirmed that the bullets recovered from Joshua’s decomposed torso were fired from the gun Erika Sifrit had in her possession on the night she was arrested with BJ in the parking lot of Hooters.

If Detective Scott Bernal and Joel Todd were betting men, their money was on the fact that Erika was holding on to more secrets than she was willing to reveal. A polygraph, although not a legal means of truth-telling, was a good barometer to begin the process of where to take the investigation and prosecution next. But they needed to get Erika into that chair and get those wires strapped to her arms and chest.

Arcky met with Erika and her parents. It was showtime, he explained.

“Look, what happened is not something that’s very helpful,” Arcky said, referring to when Erika had withheld that information about the second couple from him, especially when it seemed so vital to her future defense. Not to mention why she would surprise Arcky with it. A
second
couple? Two people who actually lived to tell their story. Witnesses the state’s attorney and OCPD detectives had already located and interviewed. “You’re telling me I can trust you, and I didn’t know about this?” Arcky explained later. He was upset that by withholding what was crucial information, Erika seemed to have deliberately tricked him.

What else was she withholding?

Addressing Mitch, Cookie, and Erika, Arcky was clear about where they now stood: “If there is anything
else
that you are not telling me, you need to explain to me now what it is. I cannot protect Erika if I don’t know what the hell is out there.” Arcky felt as if he’d had this conversation with Erika and her parents a hundred times already.

“OK,” Erika replied. “I know. I understand.” There was nothing else, she said.