Cruel Death (4 page)

“What about Joshua?” Bernal asked. They were in Bernal’s office.

“I know,” Case answered, shaking his head. It pained them, of course, to think it was possible. To think that Joshua had done something to Geney, especially after talking with friends and relatives and hearing how much they loved each other. That tape from the Greene Turtle proved they were close that night. Not at all at odds.

But Case and Bernal had been on the job long enough to know that people snapped. People could turn at the drop of a hat. A seemingly “nice guy” could be a vicious killer, and nobody would ever know it. Still, Case and Bernal were also smart enough to know that there was no reason to go broadcasting their theory to the families or the media.

But truth be told, Joshua Ford needed to be looked at more closely.

“I spoke to the families and friends,” Bernal told Case. “I’ve learned some ‘things’ about Geney and Joshua and what they were getting into.”

“Well, let’s keep it to ourselves,” Case said, “and continue looking.”

5

New York Born and Bred

Detective Scott Bernal spoke with what can only be described as a hybrid of a Queens, New “Yawk,” accent flavored with a slight seasoning of living on the cusp of the South for the past fifteen years. For Bernal, it was the marine uniform he had seen a soldier wearing one day that spawned a burning desire to don it himself.

“It was a challenge,” Bernal recalled of that time in high school when the bug of the military bit him. “I like challenges. That’s all me.”

Bernal was the first to admit that he was a streetwise, undisciplined kid from the streets of New York when he entered the U.S. Marines. Fighting and gangs were just a way of dealing with life on the streets of Queens. He’d punch and kick his way to school, trying to protect that dollar he kept in the bottom of his Chuck Taylor high-top Converse sneakers, which were often torn from his feet and stolen along with his lunch money. He dabbled in petty crimes. And then something happened.

It was 1977. Bernal and his family moved, from the city to, of all places, Germantown, upstate. Germantown Central High School. It was a culture shock. On his first day, he wore a Black Sabbath T-shirt. His new English teacher took one look at the shirt and sarcastically said, “Black Sabbath? What is that? The gang you were in?”

At first, Bernal thought she was kidding.

She wasn’t.

It was tough adjusting from city life to the country. There was a little girl who used to live in the house the Bernals had purchased who started hanging around (she had moved behind the Bernal house). One day, she ran up to Bernal and his brother, Kevin, crying and screaming. “The Rochas are coming.... The Rochas are coming to get me.” The girl was maybe eight years old. Kevin and Scott thought there was some sort of gang after the girl. Not knowing how many there were, Scott and Kevin went outside to confront and possibly fight them.

It turned out that the “Rochas” were nothing more than three dark-haired Italian sisters who walked from uptown to downtown to cause mischief. In the end, the Rochas were the biggest gang Germantown had to offer. Deanna, Geney, and Theresa Rocha turned out to be some of the best friends Scott and Kevin ever had.

Life changed for Bernal once he got inside the confines of the military. It took only a few days, he later said, and the marines broke the cocky, tough-guy attitude he had gone in with. “In a few days, all I was saying was ‘Sir, yes, sir!’”

Bernal graduated from the marines on the corps’ birthday celebration, November 10, 1981. Not only did he excel in the military, but he graduated honor man, a distinction he had never known to be achieved by any other military person he had met before. Upon graduation, Bernal traveled the world. Back in the States during the mid-1980s, having served the Marine Corps as a military policeman (MP) throughout much of his career, it wasn’t such a tough decision for him when it came to choosing a more focused career path.

“I cannot say enough about my brother, Kevin, who was also in the Marine Corps,” Bernal reflected, “as far as being an example to follow. . . . If it wasn’t for [having] him to follow, I’d be dead or in jail. I credit him for me going into the Marine Corps, and then later for becoming a cop.”

As Bernal began to learn more about Geney and Joshua, talking about the case with colleagues, more bizarre scenarios became possible, but not very probable. When you’re a cop investigating a missing persons case involving adults, no theory is out of your wheelhouse. No end result too far-fetched to consider. For one, it was entirely plausible from a cop’s viewpoint, as Bernal and his partner and colleague, Brett Case, had discussed at length, that Joshua had done something to Geney and then had taken off somewhere by himself—on the run, so to speak. Maybe there had been an accident and Joshua had panicked and booked to New Jersey or Georgia or Florida.

It all had to be checked out.

“This theory was nothing that we were sticking to or focusing exclusively on,” Bernal said later (and Brett Case agreed), “but it was a possibility and it had to be looked into.”

The OCPD began distributing missing persons flyers to area businesses and police departments, hoping that some sort of information would send them in a direction. Any direction. Bernal faxed the flyer to several police departments in the local area of the OCPD, hoping to get some sort of hit or lead.

An anonymous tip.

Anything.

“Because right now, nothing is happening,” Bernal said.

This was all about change, however, in a dramatic unfolding of events that no one could have predicted or ever seen coming.

“Divine intervention,” Case said. Bernal nodded his head, agreeing. “Someone bigger than ourselves was helping us with this investigation. We
all
believed that.”

“The things that happened,” Bernal added, “should not have happened the way they did.”

Every case for detectives has some sort of shit luck associated with it. But this missing persons case, Bernal and Case insisted, wasn’t about luck.

“It was about someone upstairs,” Case said, looking above, “helping us along the way, pointing things out to us.”

The Criminal Investigation Division (CID) of the OCPD, as a working police force, had gone through some remarkable changes over the years. Two detectives, good guys who were great cops, Case and Bernal later said, had up and quit one day. Not because the job got to be too much. Or they had gotten better jobs somewhere else.

None of that had made a difference in these decisions.

Both had, in fact, been
called
into a new vocation, literally: the seminary.

Both detectives had left the department to become priests.

6

Third Wheel

During the summer of 1999, Virginia Beach, Virginia, was an exciting place to be for a kid born outside Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania, a small, working-class community of people who grew up in town and never left. By contrast, Virginia Beach was bright, cheerful, contemporary, full of kids and military families from all over the country. Tourists mingled about, looking for good times, while college kids frolicked on the beaches, drinking beers and playing volleyball; and what was mainly a blue-collar community of military families, looking to make a go of it in life, hummed along in the background.

During the summer of that year, twenty-one-year-old Erika Grace was in Virginia Beach, about 150 miles from her dorm at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, sunning herself, having some fun in the sand with friends. Erika was all about looking her best, even if the image she had of herself—which she rarely shared—was flawed, corrupted, or disrupted in any way by her own issues of self-worth and lack of personal confidence. Whatever Erika did—be it basketball or her own business or her studies—was never good enough for her own needs; she always felt she could do better, do more and be more successful.

As a kid in Roaring Spring, Erika Grace was well-liked and thought of as someone who had been given things others were never going to get, said an old friend. One might expect that Erika, as an only child, had every opportunity handed to her, or maybe she was the “light” of her parents’ eyes. Sure, the Graces had the big brick house, or “mansion,” as Erika herself would later call it, with the plush green golf course grass, the nice cars in the driveway, and all the latest gadgets and “things” to keep up with the Joneses; but according to Erika years after she left college, “I always felt like the third wheel.” It was her parents’ attitude toward her, Erika explained to a government agent, that was hard to deal with. Erika’s dad, Mitch Grace, was authoritative and intense where Erika’s basketball potential was concerned, Erika suggested. Others placed Mitch in the caring and coddling mold—a father who gave his only daughter whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted it. Owning a business afforded Mitch the opportunity to tell people what to do. Erika’s mother, Cookie, was the trophy wife in a certain way. She was pretty, like her daughter. Cookie could shop all day, if she chose, but instead wanted to be by Mitch’s side. There was a bond between her parents so tightly wound, Erika later explained, that as the years passed, Erika felt she could never wiggle her way in between them. It was something that bothered Erika immensely, she said, and as she grew up, that confusion blossomed into full-blown resentment.

“My father lived for my mom,” Erika later told a government agent interviewing her. “They had a close relationship.” That connection was so strong, Erika went on to note, it “could not break.”

During Erika’s teen years, Mitch uprooted his family and moved them from Roaring Spring to Hollidaysburg, where he built what is a ten-room, two-story redbrick home with a swimming pool in the back and an indoor basketball court in the garage—all for three people. Erika wanted more playing time on the basketball court in school and on her AAU pickup team, and wasn’t getting it in Roaring Spring. So instead of fighting with the coaches (which Mitch often did), he moved the family to a town where he knew Erika could get all the playing time she wanted.

“The other parents were always getting mad,” said one of Erika’s former teammates, “because she always had the most playing time. It wasn’t fair.”

In Hollidaysburg, things were much different. Mitch coached her team and stood, every night, on the balcony above the home basketball court as Erika shot free throws and practiced layups. He hired a coach to teach her moves that others were blown away by. Erika would work and work and work, Mitch later said, until she got the move exactly how her private coach had wanted it. Later, in letters to a friend, Erika called this private coach her “soul mate,” saying that there was no other person in the world who understood her like this guy did.

On many nights, Mitch would spend hours rebounding for Erika as she pitched shot after shot. The Graces wanted Erika to enter college under a full scholarship. Erika had the talent to run any top college basketball program in the country from the point guard position. But, unfortunately, she didn’t have the one thing Mitch couldn’t buy her with all the money he had: the height.

Growing up, watching what many later described as a “fairy-tale marriage” unfold before her, Erika herself later claimed that it set forth a model she believed she needed to mimic as she set out into the world looking for a man. Later, Erika said that she hoped “her own marriage would be” like her parents’ had been. That was her representation. She held on to that image: a fantasy that her life needed to follow along the same path as her parents, or she was doomed to fail.

Erika was the first one to admit that her “parents, grandparents and aunt had a lot of money. I was a ‘material girl.’”

“Her family,” a former friend later speculated, “was upper-class, very well-off. She had the all-American life. Good parents who adored her and were involved in her life. They took care of her.”

Mitch was a “very nice” guy, said another family friend. “Awesome, really. Both of her parents were. Her mother was more strict than he was, which caused some problems in the family.”

In what many described as a materialistic, privileged existence, Erika Grace had grown accustomed throughout her youth and early adult life to these circumstances. Before she ended up at the University of Mary Washington, Erika was thought to be a “gifted” basketball player in high school and with the AAU teams she played for. But once she got out into the world of collegiate athletics, out of that small-town bubble of rural Pennsylvania, she was more or less slightly above average, rather than outstanding. That was why, most likely, Erika Grace got into Mary Washington on only a partial scholarship, and her life, shortly after entering college, began a slow descent.

7

Star Athlete

Kristin Heinbaugh grew up in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, and ended up, like a lot of her friends, staying in town after high school.

“It’s home,” she said later. “I like it here. What can I say?”

Located in Blair County, Hollidaysburg is approximately seven miles south of Altoona, a much larger and more populated city. Not much has changed in Hollidaysburg since a census had been kept, beginning in 1910. In fact, the town had grown from 3,734 residents at the turn of the century to only 5,368 in 2000, which was not that big of a difference in the scope of what amounted to almost one hundred years. With coal, iron ore, and gan-ister secreted in the earth surrounding Hollidaysburg, it’s not the natural material the earth yields that many associate with the town. Situated on the outer perimeter of town is an area known as Ant Hill Woods, which is famous for its colonies of ants.

For a few years Kristin and Erika were on opposing basketball teams, each going to different high schools. Like Erika, Kristin had a knack and passion for basketball. A few area coaches, however, including Mitch Grace, “rounded up,” Kristin said, the best players in the region to form an AAU pickup team. The team traveled and played in Pittsburgh and tournaments all over the United States, eventually ending up at the nationals in Utah one year. As they traveled together and became closer, Kristin got to know Erika fairly well. She saw a different side of her—that part of a child only her friends get to see. The one most kids keep hidden.