Cruel Death (25 page)

It was July 24, 2002. Erika was driven in a white van over to where the polygraph was going to be conducted inside the OCPD. In the agreement Tuminelli had written with Todd, he made a point to insure that the polygraphist conducting the interview was to be an outside party, meaning someone from the federal end of law enforcement. An agency neutral to the case. Smartly, Arcky didn’t want an OCPD detective to get Erika in the hot seat and begin to work on her. Erika had to feel comfortable. The questions, which Arcky had been given before the test, turned out to be more or less what he had expected. They were centered on the deaths of Geney and Joshua, but they also touched on the year 1999, before Erika had met BJ:

1.
Are the lights on in this room?

2.
Concerning the deaths of Geney Crutchley and Joshua Ford, do you intend to answer each question truthfully?

3.
Prior to 1999, did you spread lies or vicious rumors?

4.
Did you shoot a gun at any of those people?

5.
Prior to 1999, did you think about hurting anyone and not do it?

6.
Did you cut on any of those people?

7.
Are you now sitting down?

8.
Prior to 1999, did you lie to a person in a position of authority?

9.
Prior to 1999, did you threaten anyone with physical harm?

10.
Are you in Ocean City, Maryland?

Joel Todd had agreed to this stipulation. The FBI said it would never polygraph a witness if it wasn’t involved in the case. So Arcky went to someone he knew in the Secret Service and asked if he could find an agent to do the job.

The Secret Service provided the perfect agent, an unthreatening female agent who was noticeably pregnant at the time.

63

Door Problems

OCPD detectives were tracking down every possible lead. What impressed Joel Todd later was that the OCPD had located, at one time or another, just about every person in the background of every photograph Erika had taken over the course of her trip to Ocean City over that Memorial Day week. This had eaten up a lot of the OCPD’s time, and some of the detectives were quite outspoken in their disagreement with being asked to do this by their boss. However, they did it without question.

Since one of the photos depicted BJ at Home Depot, detectives found customers in line with BJ and Erika. Clerks and managers. One woman distinctively remembered meeting Erika in line one day during the middle of that week. She said BJ was “carrying a money . . . like a deposit bag.” He didn’t say much while waiting in line. But the woman that BJ had been with—“Yup, that’s her,” the witness had said after looking at a photograph of Erika—had said plenty.

Erika was carrying a triangular-shaped piece of wood. The woman asked what it was for.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” Erika said, smiling, “that’s all that’s left of my door.”

Erika and BJ had broken off a piece of the upstairs bathroom door in the condo to bring into the store so they could match paint colors.

“That must have been some party,” the woman said to Erika.

BJ had walked off.

Erika had a good laugh after she heard the comment, adding, “I
guess
you could . . . call it that.”

When the clerk didn’t have the exact color BJ and Erika needed, Erika asked for a phone book. BJ had returned. He had a brand-new wooden door in his hands, but it needed to be painted.

“Hey, you know where this Lowe’s is in Delaware?” Erika asked the woman. “Can you give us directions?”

“That’s pretty far away. I don’t know that you want to go there. It’s over near the outlet stores in Rehoboth.”

Erika beamed. Said it would not be a problem. “We were just in Rehoboth. . . .”

64

Truth or Dare

Having the Secret Service conduct the polygraph was something that gave Arcky Tuminelli a bit of comfort on a day that was filled with frayed nerves and anxiety, to begin with. Arcky felt that if Erika went into the interview and answered those questions just as they had talked about beforehand, all would turn out just fine. Joel Todd would be satisfied, the agreement would be consummated, and perhaps Arcky could begin to work on getting Erika out on bond and then structuring a solid defense.

Throughout the days leading up to the polygraph, Mitch Grace demanded constant feedback from Arcky regarding every nuance of the case. Both Mitch and Cookie were driven by the idea that once Erika passed the polygraph, she was coming home. It seemed they were under the impression—and Mitch later agreed with this—that once Erika passed that test, she was as good as out on bond.

After talking with Joel Todd and one of the Secret Service agents, Arcky met with Erika and asked her one more time if there was
anything
that she hadn’t told him. Now was the time to come out with it. Arcky made that perfectly clear, he later said.

Erika reassured him that she had nothing to hide. She was ready.

Arcky could renegotiate a deal for Erika at any time, essentially. The only time it would be too late to go back to the bargaining table would be
after
the polygraph—especially if Erika didn’t do as well as she expected.

Erika and BJ had been in jail for nearly two months by this point. Just about every time Arcky met with Erika, she’d generally cry her way through the conversation. Here was a rich girl, if you will, from an upscale community in an extremely suburbanized part of Pennsylvania. Petite, fragile, and rather unassumingly shy and quiet, she was locked up with what were hardened criminals—of which, Joel Todd and the OCPD certainly believed, she was one. Erika herself had gone on and on in letters to a friend about the conditions she had faced in prison: not being let out of her cell, the rats, feces everywhere, vomit, the smells, the urine, the dirty showers.

It was not a nice place to be.

Many who spoke to Erika during this period, however, believed the crying and “poor me” aspect of Erika’s demeanor had little to do with the situation she faced behind bars, but had more to do with the predicament she faced in a court of law. One of the stories Erika had told OCPD detectives included a desire on her part to stop the inevitable. There was a point during that awful night, Erika explained to the OCPD, when she, BJ, Joshua, and Geney were getting along rather well, but then BJ “flipped out,” she claimed, “and accused [Geney] of stealing [my] pocketbook.” Geney and Joshua were locked in the upstairs bathroom by that point. BJ was standing outside the door, according to Erika, pacing, stomping around, wondering what to do. Erika told Bernal that she had run downstairs and had searched the living-room area, hoping to find the pocketbook so she could calm BJ down. He was supposedly incensed and getting violently angry. She knew how BJ could get. She understood what he would do, so she desperately searched for the purse, fearing the worst if she didn’t find it.

“That was
one
story,” Bernal said later. “We heard so many versions of it, we had no idea what to believe anymore.”

Which was where the polygraph came into play.

“The bottom line,” Arcky said later, referring to the polygraph test, “was that if that test came out that she was not being deceptive, Erika would not be prosecuted for murder. It wouldn’t matter what Joel Todd or the detectives believed. They wouldn’t be able to prosecute her under those charges. . . .”

It was as simple as that.

Joel Todd had made it clear that without a doubt he believed that Erika had had more to do with these crimes than she had been claiming. And although BJ was the obvious muscle behind the crime spree the duo had been engaged in for the past two years (burglaries and now double murder), Erika was an important motivating factor and a driving force behind the behavior.

It was just before 10:00
A.M
. when Secret Service agents Carri Campbell and Bill Doyle said they were ready for Erika. They, of course, read Erika her Miranda rights and asked if she understood that the polygraph was voluntary. They were in a small interrogation room at the OCPD. Arcky Tuminelli and Assistant State’s Attorney E. Scott Collins were waiting down the hall. It was going to take a while. Several hours, in fact. Joel Todd was in his office next door. Scott Bernal and the other detectives were in another part of the same building.

“Yes, I understand,” Erika said. She appeared more confident and less dramatic than she had previously. She even showed poise. Arcky Tuminelli, Bill Doyle, Carri Campbell, Detective Bernal, and, from the Forensic Division, Jack Johnson, the Secret Service special agent in charge, had all been present when the forms were signed to conduct the test.

Carri Campbell was pregnant. It was most obvious. She would be asking the questions, while Doyle and Jack Johnson sat nearby and conducted the actual test. Erika took one look at Campbell and smiled. There was a built-in rapport there almost immediately. By 10:03
A.M
., they were sitting down, comfortable, ready to begin. All Secret Service polygraphs start with a medical questionnaire, then proceed with a personal history questionnaire. Erika sat, pen in hand, and took her time answering each question. As she did this, she started to talk to Carri Campbell about her life before marrying BJ, and also her relationship with him afterward. Erika seemed forthcoming for some reason—as if she wanted to talk. No one had yet asked a question.

Campbell wasn’t going to stop Erika from talking. Obviously, Erika felt at ease and needed (or wanted) to unload a few things before the actual polygraph started.

So be it,
Campbell thought.

After talking a bit about her mother and father’s deep bond to each other and how it affected her upbringing (Erika said she often felt left out), Erika asked Campbell, “Have you seen my jewelry that the police had in their inventory room?” It was as if Erika felt she was going to walk out of the jail later on that same day and wanted the jewelry back as soon as she was finished with the test. She sounded almost cocky, like she’d had some sort of plan all along and it was almost completed.

“Yes,” Campbell said, “I am aware of what is in inventory.”

“Oh good!” Erika exclaimed happily. “I miss that shit and I really want my diamonds back.”

It was odd that Erika was sitting, preparing to take a polygraph regarding a case where a double murder had been committed—and the bodies had been dismembered and tossed in a Dumpster like trash—and yet, she was concerned about her diamonds. If nothing else, the question told Campbell and the others where Erika’s priorities were.

A pre-polygraph interview is an important aspect of any polygraph examination. It establishes a melodic, conversational tone between the examiner and the examinee. They begin to trust each other and develop a way to communicate that the machines begin to pick up on. It is extremely important for the examinee, being that a polygraph is based on the nervous system and blood pressure. As they spoke, Campbell and Erika became more appreciative of each other’s lives. Erika began to talk about where she met BJ and how they had run off to Las Vegas together to get married, describing that first year of their marriage as “exciting” and full of partying “five days a week” with “cocaine and ecstasy.” The way Erika described the drug abuse, it was as if it was a stage every marriage went through.

“It was the second year,” Erika said at one point, “when I started to fear him.”

“Oh, really?” Campbell responded. “How so?”

Erika talked about how BJ, a nonbeliever, dragged her kicking and screaming “away from God.” She had grown up Lutheran, Mitch said later. They weren’t ultrareligious, but they believed in God and Jesus Christ and had attended church at times.

“We didn’t celebrate Christmas,” Erika said, “because BJ didn’t believe in Jesus.”

As Erika opened up more about her marriage, she said, “Beej never gave me a present until April this year, when he bought me a Smith and Wesson .357.”

In doing this, Erika had admitted to a government agent—perhaps without even realizing it—that the gun that killed Joshua and Geney was indeed hers.

“No kidding. Wow,” Campbell said, encouraging Erika to continue.

“Yeah,” Erika piped in, “it’s the same weapon Beej used to shoot Josh.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I never even fired the gun since I’ve owned it.”

“Not once?”

“Beej was trying to frame me by using that gun, you know.”

And so as the conversation continued, it seemed at first that Erika was laying the foundation for her defense. Sitting there, calmly talking to a Secret Service agent, she may have been thinking the entire time that she was getting one over on the agent. Maybe she could lay out her side of this story and push all the blame on BJ.

Yet, Erika was about to drop a bombshell—something that would stop the interview in its tracks.

65

Her (Latest) Story

There is no doubt that Erika Sifrit was the flame in the Grace household. As Erika was unable to accept magazines in the jail where she was being housed, her mother would sit in front of the wire mesh that separated them and hold up a current issue of
Vogue
or
Vanity Fair
and turn the pages slowly for Erika, several jailhouse sources said. She and her mother would not marvel at the articles, but rather at the jewelry ads. Erika was a jewelry addict; into and out of her college years, she could not go without expensive, over-the-top diamond rings, necklaces, and bracelets. Jewelry was one of those luxuries Erika
needed
to have. And the anecdote of Erika sitting with her mother, both of them staring at the magazine while Erika sat behind bars, is a metaphor, essentially, for how strong the attachment was between the Graces and their only child. And yet, Erika herself was about to jeopardize any chance the Graces had of saving their child.