Cruel Death (26 page)

As the pre-polygraph interview continued, after telling Secret Service special agent Carri Campbell a story of how BJ had asked her to get pregnant, only to turn around and demand she abort the child or he would cut it out, Erika began to reflect on that night in Ocean City when she and BJ met Geney and Joshua.

Down the hall, like an expecting father, Arcky Tuminelli was staring at his watch, waiting and wondering. Arcky had no idea that as he sat and waited with E. Scott Collins, Erika was confessing to the entire crime, beginning with how and why she and BJ ended up going to Ocean City, Maryland, that week. Moreover, even if Arcky felt like walking in on the interview to see what was going on, he couldn’t. If he barged into the interview and stopped it, Joel Todd could tear up the deal, which was what he probably wanted to do, anyway. And anything Erika had said during the time she was speaking with Carri Campbell would then be written into a report.

As Erika sat, talking to Campbell, a terrifying picture regarding her version of the events that took place in room 1101 emerged. As Campbell listened and her colleagues wrote down what Erika said, it seemed as though Erika was unleashing a great weight from her shoulders.

An enormous monkey.

She began with a breakdown of her criminal life with BJ. As Erika explained, she and BJ’s crime spree had begun back on April 4, 2002. Erika said she started participating in what she called “B and E’s” with her husband, seemingly against her better judgment and even will. Before she got involved, Erika said, BJ would “pick locks at ATMs and other locations” just for the fun of it. Some called BJ an expert lock picker. Erika was more concerned about her role in these crimes than their nature, however. For example, she said they were at a reptile show once and BJ broke into an LA Weight Loss Center while she was passed out drunk in the car. There was another time when, again, she claimed to be passed out in the car in Duncansville, close to where they lived at the time, when BJ robbed a Nextel store.

Still, that was the beginning. Over the course of several weeks after this, or the “next five B and E’s,” Erika said, she committed those herself. It was a rush. She got off on the notion of breaking into a building and robbing the store blind, then turning around and selling the items on eBay. The more she did it, the more she wanted to do it.

“He picked the locks and I ran in, making several trips inside the store, back to our Jeep Cherokee, until it was full,” Erika said. BJ would be the lookout. They’d use extremely expensive walkie-talkie radios—which they stole, of course—to communicate while Erika was inside the establishment doing the job. It was as if they were living out some sort of wild Hollywood fantasy.

Bonnie and Clyde.

“Did you two have code words, or anything?” Campbell asked.

“‘It is good,’” Erika explained. She’d be inside the business or store and BJ would be guarding the entrance, looking out for people. The all-clear sign was “It is good.”

The look in her eyes as she talked about the crimes: Erika was transfixed by the way in which she and BJ had broken into so many different stores and never got caught. She ticked them off, as if talking about a tour they had gone on: Cost Cutters in Altoona; Sports Nutrition in the same Orchard Plaza strip mall, where her scrapbook store was located; the Top Ten Tanning Salon in Duncansville; and “two heavy-duty supply stores,” but she had trouble recalling the names, one in the Blockbuster Plaza in Altoona and the other in Johnstown (both burgled on the same night).

Now, that was a real rush: two in one night.

The Sports Nutrition store was an interesting choice, seeing that, under BJ’s direction, Erika stole cases of Yellow Jackets (over-the-counter speed pills). She said BJ had fed them to her “so I wouldn’t eat.”

The life of a prolific thief and scrapbooking business owner was getting to Erika, however, she admitted. She and BJ were getting tired. They worked all day at the store and then went out at night and stole things. The speed stopped working. They were burning a candle. BJ was even sleeping inside the scrapbook store during the day so he could rest up for a night of crime.

“I needed a vacation,” Erika explained to Campbell.

The drugging and drinking weren’t helping, either.

“Your dad can get us a room in Ocean City,” BJ said one afternoon. It was close to the Memorial Day holiday. The thought perked Erika up a bit.

“Yeah—”

“We can do some serious B and E’s there,” BJ suggested. Murder wasn’t part of the plan, Erika claimed. They had intended to go to Ocean City and steal as much as they could.

Erika smiled. She liked the idea.

They’d sold some goods on eBay recently and had a lot of cash lying around.

“We take cash with us,” BJ said, “so we don’t have to use credit cards and leave a trail.”

“No one can trace us,” Erika said.

66

Snakes on a Plane

According to what Erika was now telling Carri Campbell, she, Joshua Ford, Geney Crutchley, and BJ sat around the living room of their condo after leaving Seacrets together and walking the beach back to room 1101. Geney and Joshua had stopped by their room on the way to the Rainbow to pick up their bathing suits, in case they decided to take a romp in the hot tub. Joshua had also, Erika claimed, picked up some marijuana. As Geney, BJ, and Joshua sat around the living room, Erika explained to Campbell, and “smoked some weed,” she walked out onto the balcony of the condo and shut the door behind her. She needed a moment to herself. That Saturday, May 25, 2002, had been a long day of partying. All those drugs. All that booze. Up. Down. In and out of it. Erika was tired and burned out. On top of that, she wanted to make a phone call to a friend. It was either that, someone close to her later suggested, or she was setting up an alibi for herself, knowing exactly what she and BJ had planned for Geney and Joshua in the coming moments.

Erika’s “friend” Brian (a pseudonym) lived in Florida. A popular exotic-reptile trader, with an upstanding reputation on the Internet, Brian would meet Erika and BJ at various reptile trade shows up and down the East Coast so Erika and BJ could pick up whichever reptile they had previously ordered. Brian later said that he and Erika communicated daily—by telephone and/or e-mail—for a spell of time when she was in a buying frenzy. Brian was well-liked by his customers. He’d taken photos with the likes of
Snakes on a Plane
movie star Samuel L. Jackson and successful film director Quentin Tarantino. If you wanted a crocodile, cobra, turtle, or any number of hard-to-find exotic reptiles, Brian was definitely the go-to guy.

In the scope of their relationship, however, Brian and Erika had met only two times, and BJ was present during both business meetings. Still, in a series of e-mails between them leading up to Memorial Day, it was clear that Erika had a crush on the guy, and he was not doing much to push her away. In fact, in one e-mail exchange, Erika had apologized to Brian for calling the previous night. She said she hadn’t even recalled the phone call because she was so high. Apparently, Brian’s wife answered a few times and there were some words exchanged. Erika had even told Brian at one point that she and BJ were at a bar they had just been kicked out of after she fell off a bar stool and her .357 Magnum slid out of her purse when she fell. After the incident, she called Brian and told him about it, adding that she and BJ were on their way to “do a specific heist.”

It was 2:26
A.M
. when Erika made the first call to Brian on that night when Geney and Joshua were in the other room with BJ. According to what Erika later said, she had called Brian to let him know that she was in Ocean City. It was late, she realized, but Brian was one of those guys she felt she could bother at any time of the night (although Brian said that their relationship was strictly professional), even if she hadn’t spoken to him for a while. (“I had a little crush on him,” Erika admitted to Carri Campbell, “even though I knew he was married.”)

“Hi,” Erika claimed she said when Brian picked up the phone. Although half asleep, Brian recognized who it was.

“It’s late,” Brian said groggily (according to Erika). “What are you doing?”

“I know . . . sorry.”

“Call me back in the morning,” Brian purportedly said.

As Erika started to talk, she could hear Brian’s wife in the background saying something. Then the phone went dead, she claimed. (“[Brian’s wife] had unplugged the line,” Erika told Carri Campbell.)

According to Brian, however, the phone call went a little differently. He said his phone rang and he picked it up saying, “Hello? Hello?”

But nobody was there.

Phone records prove this call lasted five seconds.

A minute later, Brian’s phone rang again. This time, he said, he knew who it was because his caller ID had picked up the number. “Hello . . . ?” he said again, but there was no one on the other end of the line.

That call, Brian said (and his phone records back it all up), lasted four seconds.

Why?

Because “I unplugged the phone,” Brian later testified under oath.

Later in the week, Erika had called again. It was Wednesday night, Brian later told police, somewhere around midnight.

“I really need to talk to you. . . .”

“What?”

“I really need to talk to you,” Erika said. “I met—BJ and I met—this guy at a bar. We went back to his place. BJ passed out. This guy . . . umm . . . he did some personal harm to me . . . and I really need to speak with someone about it.”

“Call the police.”

“I called 911. They called me a liar. They said I was drunk and fooling around. They didn’t do anything.”

“OK. You need to wake BJ up. Call the police and tell them what happened.”

“Keep this between just us, OK? I don’t want BJ to know.”

The next day, Erika called Brian back. “I told BJ. We went looking for the guy. Thank God he left town. BJ was going to do something terrible to him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d have killed him.”

67

Déjà Vu

After the phone call to Brian, while Geney and Joshua were with BJ in the other room, Erika claimed she walked from the balcony to the kitchen to get “beers for everyone.” Leaving the balcony, she closed the sliding glass door behind her, then passed by where BJ, Geney, and Joshua were sitting on the couch in the living room and smoking a joint.

“I wanted to be hospitable,” she told Campbell, referring to making her guests feel comfortable by offering them a drink.

When they entered the Rainbow that night, Erika recalled to Campbell, she had placed her pocketbook on the kitchen table. She remembered this distinctly as she now walked back by that same table after making the phone call to her friend Brian. The only difference was that the pocketbook had been moved by someone (not her, she later claimed) and was now sitting on the backrest of the couch—which she thought was rather odd.

As she stood thinking about it for a moment in whatever drug-induced, cloud-of-alcohol haze she had been in after nearly twenty hours of drinking and drugging, the fact that someone had touched her purse without her knowledge began to bother Erika, she said.

So she picked it up and unsnapped the front flap.

“My jewelry and pills,” she later explained to Campbell, “were missing.”

And that, Erika now claimed, set off the beginning of the end of Joshua Ford and Geney Crutchley’s lives.

68

“People with Diseases”

As they sat and listened to Erika describe what was a complete narrative account of the night, it was something Carri Campbell and, most certainly, Joel Todd, Arcky Tuminelli, and anyone else involved in the case had never expected to get out of a pre-polygraph examination. But Erika sat and talked openly about the details, as if she were reliving the night all over again.

As Campbell listened carefully, one thing became fairly obvious as Erika kept talking her way through the night: she hadn’t yet made a connection between her and the murders. Thus far, she was putting all the blame on BJ, carefully telling a story that had BJ initiating the entire violent night—that is, until Erika spoke a few words that told Carri Campbell the lie detector test was never going to take place.

The comment came during a point in Erika’s story in which she said Geney and Joshua were locked in the bathroom upstairs. BJ had walked over to Erika and asked, she recalled to Campbell, what to do now that they had two people locked in their bathroom—two people he had, in fact, just pulled a gun on. Erika had gone through and explained that BJ had pulled out his gun and threatened Geney and Joshua, asking them where Erika’s jewelry was and why Erika’s purse had been moved. It was after that, Erika explained, that Joshua and Geney ran into the bathroom and locked the door behind them to hide from BJ.

Now, according to what Erika was saying, BJ had gone to her and asked what she wanted him to do with Geney and Joshua. That it was entirely up to her.

Erika thought about it. Then, “Just fucking do it,” Erika said, explaining to Campbell what she had told BJ that night.

“Huh?” Campbell responded.

“Now you have me on murder?” Erika asked as she sat there telling Campbell what happened.

“What do you mean by ‘Just fucking do it’ and ‘just do it’?” Campbell asked. She wanted to be sure she understood exactly what Erika was saying.

Erika paused. Then, “I meant, ‘Just
kill
them.’”

In other words, Erika was now claiming that she had given BJ the order to shoot Joshua and Geney. To murder them.

Campbell asked Erika the same question
ten times,
she later wrote in her report of the conversation,
and her answer was always the same.

Except one time. Erika had changed it up a bit, saying, “I meant, ‘Kill them.’ I knew he wanted to.”

“How could you know that?” Campbell asked.

Erika then proceeded to explain the remainder of the night.

“I knew he wanted to kill someone, because he asked me just two weeks ago if he could kill my family,” Erika said to Campbell. “He wanted to kill my parents, both nannys and pappys (grandmothers and grandfathers), and even a wealthy aunt. He was going to do it in the middle of the night and leave for Argentina. Then I, being the sole heir to all the money, would fly over and meet him. . . .”