Beyond that,
What in the world had happened up here while I was passed out downstairs in the Jeep?
Had Erika snapped? Had she just shot the two of them in cold blood without rhyme or reason? What the heck had happened?
In what seemed like thirty minutes of pure silence, BJ said he sat and contemplated what he could do, calculating the options he believed he had in front of him.
I can either help, or not help, my wife. Abandon her and not go to the police, or just go to the police.
In helping her, BJ knew, he understood that meant “covering up the murders.”
BJ stood up and walked around the bedroom for a moment, and then, after sitting and thinking it through, he decided on the best way out of it all. During this entire time, Erika sat near him without saying a word.
And so a husband had made a decision to help his wife cover up two murders.
The only way in which BJ had known to dispose of dead bodies was what he had been taught. Standing over Geney and Joshua, wanting to help his wife in whatever way he possibly could, BJ said later, he decided to do the only thing he knew how.
Dismember them.
After disposing of the bodies in trash bags and tossing them in several different Dumpsters in Delaware, Erika and BJ went back to the condo to begin the process of cleaning up the scene and enjoying the remainder of their vacation.
86
Whose Idea Was It?
As BJ sat on the witness stand after explaining to the jury that his wife had killed Geney and Joshua, his attorney asked whose idea it was to dismember the bodies. The idea was for the jury to hear from BJ how that entire scenario played out—regardless of how much it would likely alienate each juror. Yes, BJ Sifrit was culpable. Yes, BJ had made a decision to help his wife cover up two murders. And yes, BJ had deliberately and callously taken a knife, cut those bodies up, and placed them in bags and disposed of them in Dumpsters.
But no, BJ Sifrit was adamant, he did not kill those people. His wife did.
“It was my idea,” BJ told the jury, to help his wife try to get away with murder.
“Were the bodies placed in trash bags?” his lawyer asked.
“Yes.”
“What’d you do with the body parts after you put them in trash bags?”
Save for a cough here, and a throat clear—
ahem
—there, a silence had overtaken the courtroom during this exchange. This quietness had not been present since the start of BJ’s trial. People were dumbfounded and in shock.
How could you
?
How dare you
?
How awful!
BJ’s voice sounded scratchy and torn. “I threw them away,” he said, referring to what he had done with the body parts. There was a touch of remorse present in his inflection: Was it genuine? Real? Or was BJ very good at what he did?
Beyond that, there was a certain sincerity in BJ’s voice as he testified under direct examination, which was hard to dismiss.
BJ’s attorney showed the jury several photographs of BJ and Erika taken throughout the week in Ocean City after the murders. In all the photos, Erika appeared happy-go-lucky, smiling, partying, just having a ball. On the other hand, in the photos BJ’s lawyers presented, BJ looked dark and torn up and totally out of it. His face was sunken and morose. He wore sunglasses in many of the photos, hiding the true nature of what he had done.
Showing BJ a photo of himself and Erika from that week, his lawyer asked BJ to explain.
BJ said, “That’s me, but I was not happy that week.”
“The person standing there (in that photo) is the same person in this courtroom today?”
“No,” BJ said softly, in almost a whisper, looking down toward the floor.
“Why not?”
He paused. Thought about his answer. “Because I shouldn’t have done it. I should not . . . should not have
helped
her.”
Near the conclusion of BJ’s direct examination, his lawyer led him down a path of questioning that seemed to answer some of the questions the jury might have when they began to deliberate. One included the testimony of Karen Wilson, which seemed to prove BJ had bragged to her in some respects about killing “those people.”
“Now,” his lawyer asked, “did you confess to [Karen Wilson] on that Wednesday night that you had killed two people in that condominium apartment?”
“No, I didn’t,” BJ said stoically, without reservation.
A few questions later, “What was your plan with Erika in respect to . . . she’d killed two people, BJ, what were you going to do?”
“Well, I was trying to get through the week. I was drinking a lot. Umm . . . I realized that things were going to have to change when we got back to Pennsylvania.”
“When [and if] you got back [home], what changes, what plans, were going to be made, BJ?”
“Well, I had tried for three years to make things work between us, but it just wasn’t working. There was just no way I was going to stay married to Erika.”
“Your involvement in this dismemberment, the accessory after the fact (one of the charges), why did that occur, BJ?”
“It was a bad decision.”
“Did you kill Joshua Ford?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Did you kill Martha Crutchley?”
“No, I didn’t.”
After asking BJ several more questions, most of which centered around common things he and Erika had shared—cell phones, cars, etc.—his lawyer asked, “Were there any colors not allowed in your house, BJ?”
“Yes.”
“Objection, Your Honor . . . relevance?” E. Scott Collins said sharply.
A brief sidebar was called. Judge Weinstein put his hand over the microphone and asked BJ’s lawyer in a whisper, “Is this a racial thing?”
“Huh?” the lawyer said, surprised by the judge’s question.
“Are we getting into a racial thing here?” the judge asked.
“No, no, no,” the lawyer said. “The color purple wasn’t allowed in the house because it was the favorite color of BJ’s ex-girlfriend.”
The judge laughed. “Oh, go ahead and ask it.”
When BJ was finished explaining how Erika would not allow the color purple in their apartment, his lawyer said he had no further questions.
With that, E. Scott Collins stood up, flattened out the front of his suit coat, checked his tie, cleared his throat, and said, “This is going to take a while, Judge. . . .” It was a pleasant way to suggest a break for lunch now, so he wouldn’t have to stop once he got started.
“Well, let’s get going, you have fifty minutes [until lunch],” the judge said, sitting back, waiting for Collins to begin.
87
Showdown
Going into BJ Sifrit’s case, Scott Collins and Joel Todd knew that convicting BJ was going to be an uphill battle. After all, BJ hadn’t said a word to police. As soon as the cuffs were squeezing his wrists after he and Erika were pinched at Hooters, BJ went into prisoner-of-war mode and clammed up.
Name, rank and serial number.
“We had him dead to rights on the burglary,” Joel Todd later told me, “and probably the accessory after the fact—there was no way those bodies could be removed without him knowing or participating—but that’s it. Everything else was her (Erika).”
The other obstacle the prosecution faced was Secret Service agent Carri Campbell’s interview with Erika and the statement Erika had made during her pre-polygraph interview, which had not been allowed into the trial. “Everything she said about him would be considered hearsay,” Todd said.
The one thing the prosecution had to get across during the cross-examination of BJ Sifrit was that he not only helped his wife dispose of the bodies, but he also helped his wife kill Geney and Joshua. Part of it was a game that either Erika, BJ, or the both of them, had played on people: hide the purse and make an accusation of theft.
And the penalty for losing that game?
Your life.
Karen Wilson had made that perfectly clear already with her testimony.
BJ didn’t look so comfortable up there, now that Scott Collins, who spoke with a deep Southern drawl that echoed throughout the small courtroom, was facing him. It was 11:42
A.M.
when Collins began. Detective Bernal sat next to Collins, his trusty white pad in front of him, ready to remind Collins of those little details that only a detective who had investigated the case could.
“Mr. Sifrit,” Collins asked, “when you married Erika Grace . . . where were your parents, your family, living?”
“The Midwest.”
“Iowa?”
“Wisconsin . . . I think.”
“You think? Are you sure?”
“No, they move a lot.”
Next, Collins pecked away at how Erika reacted to, as he put it, “married life.” It was clear from BJ’s earlier testimony that Erika hadn’t taken to married life all that well. In fact, it was easy to prove that Erika’s psychological behavior seemed to spiral out of control once she and BJ, three weeks after meeting, got married.
BJ agreed.
Then Collins moved into BJ’s training as a SEAL. He made the jury aware that BJ had been expertly trained to “blow up things.” More than that, he brought out BJ’s qualifications as a skilled marksman.
“Expert shot, is that right?” Collins asked, flipping through his notes. His voice varied from sarcastic to sentimental. Facetious is probably too strong—but Collins made no secret about his loathsome feelings for BJ Sifrit and his understanding that BJ was on that witness stand for one reason: to save his own ass.
“Yes, yes,” BJ said hurriedly, referring to his marksmanship abilities.
“Now, you said you came to view the body as a machine—is that correct?” BJ had testified on direct that while training to save his military fellows out in the field, he was told to view humans as machines he was there to fix so “it” could go back out into the field and continue to fight.
“Yes, yes.”
“And, per your training, as a trained . . . as battlefield experience, if a person is injured or has a gunshot wound, what is the first thing you do?”
“It depends on the situation,” BJ said after some confusion, and an objection by one of his lawyers. “If you’re on a battlefield, you’re probably going to want to return fire. After that, if you can get to the person without getting injured, then you’d assess your situation.”
“You assess their condition, which means you check them for injuries, bullet holes . . .”
“Yes.”
“You look them over real carefully, correct?”
“If you want to save their life, you’d need to, yes.”
Over the course of the next few minutes, Collins had BJ establish that he also had hands-on experience in New York City training with EMTs during real-life trauma situations.
The point of it all from Collins’s view was to show how BJ had run up to that bathroom, and, as a trained medic with the navy, did absolutely nothing to try to save their lives or even check to see if they were still alive.
As they continued, BJ talked about his marriage to Erika at its earliest stage, where they lived, and who was, essentially, wearing the pants. BJ had made a point during his direct to say Erika called most of the shots and he went along like some sort of trained minion. Collins was interested in this.
“Now, you stated that Erika had emotional problems. She worried a lot, she was anxious, and she had what you described as obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
“Yes.”
“And did you realize this
before
you got married?”
“No.”
“Didn’t notice
any
obsessive-compulsive anxiety prior to your marriage?”
“Zero.”
BJ seemed comfortable in the witness chair. It’s generally rare for juries to get an opportunity to hear from a defendant; most defendants never take the stand in their own defense. BJ was that exception, however—the guy who believed, beyond anything else, he could do whatever it was he put his mind to. And here he was, faring pretty well, as the assistant state prosecutor threw him what were, at this point, softballs.
BJ had an answer for every question. He was speaking his truth and it appeared genuine. Collins asked about Erika’s compulsion to contact him whenever he went out on SEAL temporary training duty and how that affected his performance. BJ described one time in Alaska when Erika showed up unannounced as he was out in the mountains, and she had called his platoon leader back in Virginia Beach and demanded that BJ be pulled out of the mountains because of an emergency.
“Was it an emergency?” Collins asked.
“No, it wasn’t,” BJ answered sincerely.
Collins was certainly setting the stage for something momentous, but he never seemed to get there, at least not within the first ten minutes of his cross. It was more of just pointing out what BJ had already testified to, and hopefully making the jury keenly aware that there were two sides to every story.
At one point, Collins asked, “I wrote this down—You testified, you said something like, ‘I wasn’t allowed to contact my family.’ That what you testified to earlier?”
“Yes.”
“And . . . did you have a telephone?”
“Yes.”
“OK, could you have picked up the phone and called your family?”
“I could have, yes.”
For any prosecutor worth his or her salt, the beginning of any great cross consists of pointing out the obvious, so there’s no confusion with the jury later on when the hammer drops.
“I mean, Erika wasn’t handcuffed to you, was she?”
“No,” BJ said, his voice beginning to crack.
Then Collins went through several times when BJ was away from Erika and how he undoubtedly had access to a computer, telephone, pencil and paper, and BJ admitted, well, yes, of course he could have contacted his family.
But he never did.
“Did you allow Erika to control you to that extent?” Collins asked more forcefully.
“I was just trying to make her happy,” BJ answered.
“I understand, you know, I try to make my wife happy, too,” Collins said humorously, “but, come on, you’re a young man, in seemingly excellent health and condition. You had just gone through what we all have to know is some of the most strenuous training that our military can dish out—that SEAL training. And
you
graduated number
one
in your class. Is that correct?”