Cruel Death

by M. William Phelps

  The letter was an outline and reminder of the activity that [Laurie] had seen BJ do.

  Again, wink-wink.

  Erika was royally pissed off that she had nothing to show for bringing the cops to the bodies, and here she was sitting in jail—the nerve of those people—and BJ was not five hundred yards away in the same jail, and Guess what . . . I got nothing for all the info I gave them, she wrote.

  Well, now she was taking her life back. She was going to explain what Laurie needed to say and when she needed to say it, along with whom she needed to say it to.

  Home-court advantage . . . , she authored.

  Judges, prosecutors, and the politics of the system were all the same: out to get Erika.

  But, like I said, you never got this letter . . . , she wrote.

  From there, Erika spent page after page, even bulleted and numbered sections, explaining to Laurie what Laurie knew, how Laurie was supposed to phrase it, and how Laurie was going to help Erika get out of prison.

  Once again, it was all BJ’s fault. He was the abusive husband: Remember?

  You didn’t hear it from me.

  BJ was the racist.

  Not me.

  Remember?

  BJ was the one who caused me to get an abortion.

  Remember?

  BJ was the one who could kill people.

  Not me.

  Remember?

  Erika also told Laurie a story that she claimed happened a few weeks before they had left for Ocean City. BJ had suggested that they try to have another baby.

  Already tried that, Erika said she told him.

  No, have the baby, BJ supposedly suggested, get an insurance policy of $1 million, and then, according to what Erika was telling Laurie to remember, BJ would kill the child so they could collect on the insurance.

  Remember when he said he would kill his mother if he ever saw her again? . . .

  Erika asked questions. Regarding a penchant for anxiety in high school, she wanted to know if Laurie remembered her having it.

  Of course not.

  Then there were a series of other questions painting BJ as the abusive husband who had pushed Erika into a life of crime. Erika, of course, gave Laurie the answer to all of the questions: yes.

  Near the end of the letter, Erika launched a “poor me” diatribe regarding how she didn’t deserve to be in prison, and how they were best friends now and that Laurie could help her if only she followed these felonious directions.

  You can’t get into trouble . . . , Erika promised in writing. She admitted that she could spend the rest of her life in jail and that this letter is not exactly legal.

  In her next letter, Laurie was angry. She didn’t want anything to do with being given directions to testify in court.

  Sorry, Erika wrote later, my life is over and I just need help.

  82

  Brutally Honest

  In March 2003, Detective Scott Bernal took a phone call from Joel Todd regarding a conversation Todd had recently had with Mitch Grace.

  “Mitch wants to turn over some military items BJ left at the house.”

  Bernal explained that he and Detective Richard Moreck were heading to Altoona the following day to interview former Sifrit friends and neighbors. They’d stop by and pick it all up. Apparently, there were some explosives involved.

  While in Altoona, Bernal and Moreck met up with Lisa Campfield (a pseudonym), one of Erika’s former childhood friends. Lisa was a bit frightened of the police presence.

  “No need to be afraid,” Bernal assured her. They just wanted to talk.

  “Have you visited with Erika since her arrest?” Moreck asked.

  “No . . . ,” Lisa said, but it was clear she had something on her mind—something was bothering her.

  “Have you spoken with her on the telephone?”

  Lisa hesitated. “Yes, I have.”

  “Tell us about what she’s been saying,” Bernal suggested comfortingly.

  “Well, I’m going to be brutally honest with you,” Lisa began.

  Bernal and Moreck looked at each other. “Go ahead, of course.”

  “Erika told me during our phone conversation that BJ made her cut Crutchley’s head off.”

  Silence.

  “Continue,” Bernal said.

  “BJ also made her watch as he masturbated over her body.”

  “What did you say?”

  Lisa went quiet.

  Bernal said, “Did I hear you correctly: are you telling us that Erika cut off Crutchley’s head?”

  “No, I said that BJ made her watch as he cut off Crutchley’s head.”

  “What else?”

  Lisa confirmed the “rat in sulfuric acid” story. She said she was there that day, in back of the LA Weight Loss Center, next door to Memory Laine, when she saw smoke coming from a little bucket. “What’s that?” she asked BJ. The bucket had a horrible smell to it.

  “I put a live rat in the bucket of acid to see if it would dissolve its bones.”

  83

  Break These Chains

  There had been a legal argument over whether BJ was going to be allowed to sit in court with or without being bound by shackles and handcuffs. During a motions hearing, Joel Todd and E. Scott Collins brought out the fact that BJ had tried—rather successfully—to pick the lock of his cell.

  BJ had been put in a holding tank one afternoon and the actual lock on the cell was broken, so guards put a chain and sturdy padlock on the door. Well, as the guards were busy doing whatever it is guards do, BJ went to work on the lock, picked it, took the chain off, opened the door, and went back to lying down on his cot.

  “What BJ was saying,” someone close to the case later told me, “was ‘Hey, show me a little bit more respect than that. I can get out of here if I want to.’”

  This episode, Todd and Collins argued, was a good indication that BJ Sifrit was a risk and had a tendency to want to “get away.” And yet, as jury selection began on March 31, 2003, in Montgomery County Circuit Court, in Rockville, Maryland, there sat BJ, up front, in his plush dark suit, neatly pressed, without handcuffs.

  By the day’s conclusion, twelve jurors and four alternates had been picked from a small pool of 243 potentials. In the end, it wasn’t as hard as everyone had at first expected to find good men and women to hear BJ’s case.

  State’s Attorney Joel Todd had an uncanny way about him, which spoke of a more Southern, hard-nosed prosecutor. Yet, he was also a gentle man with an enthusiastic eye, not to mention brawny passion, for justice. For Todd, the blame for Geney and Joshua’s gruesome deaths could be spread equally between Erika and BJ. He didn’t necessarily see one as being more guilty than the other. “It was, somehow,” Todd told me later, “just a bad combination. I suspect if she’d never met him, she’d [have] been fine; and if he’d never met her, he’d be fine. But somehow the combination of the two of them was just”—and he stopped for a moment and thought about how to phrase it, searching for just the right words, finally settling on—“. . . just awful.”

  Todd was born and raised in Worcester County. He ended up in Florida at Nova Southeastern University (NSU) doing his law school undergraduate work, but he quickly fell back into his roots in Maryland when he graduated from law school.

  “My first job after law school,” Todd said, “was for the Worcester County Circuit Court as a law clerk.” The same court where he was now preparing to go after BJ Sifrit, along with the help of E. Scott Collins. Still, becoming a prosecutor in a busy district was not necessarily Todd’s ambition as a young legal grad. “I had envisioned myself as becoming a real estate lawyer, doing real estate settlements and land development work—that kind of stuff.”

  Working for the circuit court as a law clerk, however, sitting in on trials, changed Todd’s mind rather quickly, and showed him, essentially, where the action was. Pushing real estate documents and counting beans in an office all day soon took a backseat to a more dramatic, animated life of arguing felony cases in
front of a jury. It just seemed to suit his personality a little more.

  And so Todd went into private practice and learned rather quickly after his first wife had triplets that paying the bills was going to be tough on his meager private-practice salary. But as luck would have it, a job as a deputy state’s attorney opened up in Worcester County, and it was paying more than Todd had yet made in the private sector. The job also offered health benefits for his young family. So he applied, and as he humbly put it, “I was fortunate enough to get the job.”

  Nine years later, when the seat for state’s attorney of Worcester County was vacated, Todd ran for office and was elected.

  That was 1995.

  Any career has bumps, any profession has its ups and downs. For Joel Todd, anytime you go into court, you run the risk of losing. “As a prosecutor, I have never [seen] myself as someone in the business of getting convictions, but as someone who is in the business of doing justice. If I have a defendant that I have doubts about whether he is guilty or not, I drop those charges. The last thing I want is to have somebody behind bars and I am not sure if he’s innocent or guilty.”

  On the other hand, when Todd felt he was going after someone who was, beyond a doubt, guilty: “I’m going after that person full steam ahead.”

  84

  A SEAL Finally Squeaks

  Opening statements took up most of Tuesday morning, April Fool’s Day, 2003. Joel Todd stood and, addressing the jury, promised to bring in a star witness to explain how BJ “confessed” to putting bullet holes in a bathroom door, which eventually led to the murder of a couple.

  BJ’s attorneys told jurors the state had no such evidence—that the case against their client was, at best, circumstantial. No jury was going to buy the notion that BJ Sifrit killed these two people. It was Erika all the way. Yes! She was the mastermind. This guy here, this former navy SEAL who had finished at the top of his class, went along with the cover-up of this terrible tragedy only at the behest of—and to protect—his wife.

  But BJ Sifrit was no killer.

  On April 2, the state put on ballistics and DNA experts, who tied the weapon used in the murders to the Sifrits, and the blood and tissue on the bullets found on the kitchen table, along with all the blood in the bathroom, to BJ and Erika Sifrit and Martha “Geney” Crutchley and Joshua Ford.

  The following day, April 3, Joel Todd questioned his “star witness,” Karen Wilson, who told her story of having gone through what she called “a living nightmare.” She was terrified and feared for her life that night. She believed BJ when he said he was “ridding the earth of bad people.” He had brandished a gun. He had walked around the condo like a drunken cowboy looking to kill someone. He had threatened her.

  Wilson’s story was compelling, if not chilling. No one could deny her that. But BJ’s attorneys pointed out rather emphatically—trying to trip her up on details—that when the rubber hit the road, jurors were either going to believe that BJ confessed to Wilson or not. Going back and forth. Restating the obvious, trying to shake the woman was going to do nothing but delay justice. It was yes or no. There was no variable. No middle ground.

  Most of Thursday and Friday were eaten up by the state concluding its case with Charles Atwood, a former navy SEAL friend of BJ’s, who described how he and BJ were buddies who liked to meet up at bars and take a little man time together. Yes, they talked about how to kill, and then dispose of a body. Yes, they joked about murder for hire. But it was over beers and watching strippers. How many guys talked about vile and violent things while drinking beers and handing out dollar bills to naked women? In the real world, men called this blowing off steam. How was a good time at a strip joint part of such a diabolically violent murder plot?

  With their questioning of Atwood, BJ’s lawyers seemed to insinuate it wasn’t.

  After the weekend, on Monday, April 7, Burton Anderson, BJ’s court-appointed attorney, made it clear that his client was going to take the stand to explain to jurors his version of what had transpired that night. The newspapers had had their opportunity to tell the story. Joel Todd his. Erika hers.

  Now it was BJ’s turn.

  Before the former SEAL took the stand, however, his mother, Elizabeth, reluctantly walked forward, her head bowed, tissues ready, there to retrieve a bit of BJ’s humanity back from the vultures who had been pecking away at it. The media had turned the guy into a monster. Some sort of vicious, bloodthirsty killer who had absolutely no value for human life. Elizabeth needed to give her son an identity beyond being accused of such a hideously gruesome crime.

  Answering those first few standard questions, Elizabeth came across as sincere and entirely credible. Her tone was obvious. What had happened? How had her boy’s life turned into a made-for-TV movie of the week?

  With genuine tears and anguish in her tired voice, Elizabeth went on to speak of a boy she watched grow into the perfect young adult, achieving goals the other kids around him rarely even thought about. When BJ left for SEAL training, his parents were, of course, proud of him. BJ would make it. She was certain of his abilities and never doubted for a minute he would graduate with honors. After he left, BJ stayed in touch with the family as much as the navy allowed, which turned out to be almost every other day. It wasn’t until Erika came along, Elizabeth Sifrit testified, that BJ started to drift away and soon stopped calling home altogether.

  Elizabeth and Erika did not like each other—that much was evident from Elizabeth’s tone on the stand, and also in the letters Erika wrote to Laurie and Jimmy. There was never a time when the two of them went out shopping together and “did lunch” and talked like a mother- and daughter-in-law. And that relationship they shared—however brief it was, Elizabeth made clear—indicated the instability of the woman, who had become ever more obsessive and hard to deal with as time went on.

  When it was his turn, BJ sat next to the Sixth Judicial Circuit Court judge Paul H. Weinstein and held up his hand; then he recited the “nothing but the truth” oath.

  BJ sat calmly and, in his surprisingly soft and almost effeminate inflection, began to tell his story. You’d think a man of BJ’s caliber would speak deeply and aggressively, but BJ spoke warmly, with affection and poise.

  “He had a squeaky voice,” one detective later observed. “It was striking the first time we heard it, because you’d expect a manly tone out of such a person.”

  Detective Scott Bernal sat next to Collins and Todd and watched every move that every witness made. Taking notes, in big bold letters on white notebook paper, he wrote out questions and comments for the lawyers to consider.

  As Burton Anderson questioned BJ, the young former SEAL talked about growing up in Iowa and Minnesota, and then moving to Texas at age fifteen. He recalled being the big brother to a sister he loved. After high school, BJ didn’t stick around town and kick beer bottles into the curb and work at the local hardware store. Instead, BJ left for the navy immediately, answering an inner call to serve his great nation and fellow countrymen. It was the SEALs from day one, BJ said. He had an “ambition,” he explained, to become a military man. A drive. A great desire he couldn’t really explain. He knew the twenty-five-week training, including seven days referred to as “hell week,” would test his emotional and physical reserve, strength, and abilities. But he had been bred from tough genes and was confident, even back then, that he could endure anything he was faced with.

  As his testimony steered into the training part of his naval service beyond SEAL school, BJ began to lay the foundation for an argument of a delicate man being put through some of the most taxing emotional training the military had to offer—forever on the verge of collapsing into a robotic human being capable of just about anything. It was a good frame of reference for the jury to mull over: “The navy had screwed me up and I snapped.” He never said it, but it was the SEAL training that had a profound effect on the way his mind worked later on. It was almost as if he was apologizing for the gruesome nature of the crimes he was being accus
ed of, saying that he had been trained not to feel (and definitely not to think) about the horror men could do to one another.

  And then came this new woman in his life, Erika Grace—and everything changed the moment he met and—three weeks later—married her.

  “How would you describe your relationship with your family . . . during the first three years of your naval career?” Burton Anderson asked his client about fifteen minutes into BJ’s direct testimony.

  “Very close,” the former SEAL said, sounding confident and believable.

  “This three-week relationship before you got married, are you able to tell us what the attraction was?”

  “I guess, I don’t know . . . Every relationship starts out good.”

  It was a sound point.

  A few questions later: “Did Erika’s obsessive-compulsive anxiety disorders have an impact on your naval career?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury how that impacted your naval career.”

  “She couldn’t handle me being away, and that was made clear right from the beginning.”

  From there, BJ and his attorney discussed where BJ was stationed with Erika, and how often she made mention of him going away to places he couldn’t tell her about. Typical for a SEAL, he was away three hundred or more days per year—and it could be anywhere—in training.

  All that SEALs did was train. And when they were finished, they trained some more.

  Burton Anderson asked BJ how Erika reacted when he went away and she didn’t know what he was doing or where he had gone. BJ wasn’t allowed to tell her where he was going for training.

  “She had emotional breakdowns,” BJ explained. “She’d stop eating. Not be able to function. Not be able to go anywhere [or] do anything.”

  It had always been rumored that BJ had been the one to “make” Erika watch her weight. Erika maintained that it was BJ who forced her to starve herself in order to stay rail thin. This was abuse perpetrated by BJ, she claimed, that had turned into an eating disorder, bulimia. But here was BJ giving his version of those same stories: it wasn’t him, after all, he claimed, but Erika herself who had refused to eat when he was away.