There we go . . . there it is . . . back to normal.
When she returned about fifteen minutes later, she was ready for a drink. She’d gotten that original buzz back and was feeling good. Geney, Joshua, BJ, and the newly met woman were still in line, but a lot closer to the door.
The woman whose male friend had left with Erika leaned over to BJ and asked him, “Doesn’t that bother you that your wife walked off with another guy like that?”
BJ didn’t have much to say.
Erika was getting restless again and said to the guy she had strolled off with, “Hey, she’s cute,” referring to the woman he was with. “She’s
really
cute.”
“This is my friend,” he said.
“She’s nice . . . cutie!” Erika said again.
As the woman listened to Erika, she felt that she was making a pass at her. It was “uncomfortable,” the woman said later, and would continue to be throughout the night as Erika continued making strange remarks to the woman. There was one time when Erika began rubbing the woman’s arm slowly, petting her sexily, saying, “Let’s go into the bathroom . . . me and you.”
The woman refused.
“Come on,” Erika demanded.
“No.”
Later, police would learn that Erika had dabbled in homosexuality, but it had always been in the context of her marriage. She claimed that BJ wanted to bring another female into the bedroom. He had gotten bored with their sex life, apparently. The deal was, however, that BJ could touch Erika; the other female could touch Erika; and BJ couldn’t touch the other female.
11
Don’t Shoot
After waiting for an hour in line, they were finally inside the club: dancing, drinking, drugging, and just living it up—the way that Erika had grown accustomed to over the past year.
Joshua had given BJ bus fare and BJ had responded kindly, per his promise, by buying Geney and Joshua a drink. Inside the club, lights flashed and pulsated in strobes all around them, the music of a DJ blared so loud you could barely hear the person next to you. Erika was nervous, cagey, and out of it, she claimed, after doing a shot of her favorite liquor, vodka. Watching her, Geney noticed how “out of it” Erika seemed. BJ and Erika were young; Geney certainly must have registered that. Both Erika and BJ were twenty-four years old. Hell, they were just kids, really. But still, there was something going on with Erika, Geney noticed. Throughout the night, Erika had been consumed with the idea of losing her high—or, rather, maintaining it. Even though she had snorted some additional Xanax outside while waiting in line, and more when she got into the club, Erika was preoccupied with keeping the party going. It wasn’t enough to do shots and beers.
She needed more.
She demanded more.
As the night progressed, at some point, Erika ordered more shots for everyone. This one must have been the tipping point, because Erika said later that she “blacked out” for a time after downing this second shot of vodka, but then she recalled BJ slapping her on the arm somewhere near midnight.
“How cool is that, girl, you got in here with your piece?” BJ said in a slur of words. “Some security they have here,” he said, laughing.
Geney was standing nearby. She had a quizzical look about her:
What’s he talking about?
she wondered.
BJ was referring to Erika making it past security with her .357 Magnum revolver—a gun Erika rarely left home without. There were four security guards at the door with wands.
Erika had made it past them all.
Indeed, there it was, tucked in her waistband, as if she were Annie Oakley. The way Erika talked it up, she was “Bonnie” to BJ’s “Clyde”—two names, in fact, Erika explained to Joshua and Geney, they had given to their pythons, one of which was back at the Rainbow right now. They had cobras, too. Even a crocodile. BJ had named the cobra Hitler, after one of his and Erika’s idols. In private, BJ had made no secret to Erika of the fact that he was a racist, according to what Erika later said. Erika would later refer to BJ as a control freak who had become mentally and physically abusive over the short span of their marriage. But tonight they were partners, living up to that “Bonnie and Clyde” image. Erika had laughed as she explained to Geney and Joshua how they had acquired the nickname.
Erika smiled at BJ’s announcement. Actually, it was more at the way in which he demeaned the security guards by suggesting that a woman like Erika could get a loaded weapon into a popular, packed nightclub.
“Yeah,” Erika said, stammering. “Imagine that.”
And yet, it was probably that innocent appearance of being so small and delicate that had allowed Erika to get the gun into the club to begin with.
Either way, Geney walked over to Erika. Geney was concerned. Worried about the gun. Geney liked to party. After all, she and Joshua were on a short vacation. But what type of people had they met?
Guns. Snakes. Crocodiles. Xanax. Hitler.
That’s one hell of a combination.
“Why would you have guns? Why would you need guns?” Geney asked Erika (who spoke in detail about this conversation later on to Detective Scott Bernal). Geney was referring to BJ’s gun, too.
Erika laughed, screaming over the loud music. “I’ve only had mine for a few months. It was a gift from BJ.”
Later, Erika was asked if it was customary for her and BJ to carry guns.
“Yes, I always carried my Smith and Wesson in my red Coach bag. I’m addicted to Coach! I even carry my pills and jewelry in a little Coach pouch inside my Coach bag.” BJ, she added, went for the more rugged, manly look, and carried his gun inside his waistband, or wore it on his side in a leather shoulder holster. But on the night they met Geney and Joshua, Erika said, she did have her .357 in the club. Being around BJ and his SEAL friends so often, Erika continued, had made her immune to the sight of weapons. “With me, it’s like, like, if I sat around with ten SEALs drinking in some bar, they all had weapons, and there’s ten pistols laying on the table. That’s just the way it is, you know—I got used to it.”
Joshua stepped in as Geney was asking Erika about the guns. He could tell Geney was getting worried.
“It’s no big deal, Geney,” Joshua said. “Don’t worry about it.”
They had a third weapon also.
“But that was in the Jeep,” Erika said later. “It never leaves the console of the Jeep.”
12
Natural Born Lovers
The Erika Sifrit of 2002 hanging out in Ocean City with her dishonorably discharged husband was quite a different person from the Altoona girl and basketball star back in the days before she met BJ. It was as if BJ had brought out all of Erika’s repressed nature and hidden evil desires. The intercourse between their personalities was charged with a doomed disaster. It was almost as if BJ knew there was a dirty girl in there somewhere that he could exploit and raise whenever he wanted her to come out. BJ loved it, of course. It fed his enormous ego. Yet, it also added to an underlying will he had developed, probably during his Navy SEAL training, to make the people around him believe he was this quietly tamed machine of power—that because he had made it through what some claimed to be the most rigorous military training on record, having graduated from the SEALs at the top of his class as honor man, BJ was somehow a different human being: stronger, able to conduct himself one way—and be totally planning something different in another.
A chameleon. Sneaky. A pragmatist.
Erika would later write to friends and detail her view of the marriage during this period. She said that her “final weakness,” when all was said and done, was that she
loved BJ more than life,
she penned.
He was her entire being.
Her lifeline.
Her inspiration.
Motivation.
There were times during the marriage, Erika went on to note, when they seemed to be at their best, working together as a fine-tuned machine. It was as if they had been living out some sort of fantasy.
One of their favorite films, Erika said, was
Natural Born Killers.
There was one time when Erika looked at BJ, and in a phrase that now sounded more clichéd than sincere or even sinister, said, “I would die for you, Beej.”
13
Hot Tub
Erika spent twenty minutes in the bathroom with Joshua inside Seacrets at some point that night. It was near the time the bar was about to turn on the lights and motion for everyone to get the hell out. Part of what would become known later to police was that Erika was famous for making dirty promises to the men she and BJ met at bars—that is, if they wanted to continue to party with a couple after the bar closed. Some detectives from the OCPD assumed Erika had made one of these same graphically sexual promises to Joshua when they were in the restroom together for that twenty-minute span. In one instance later that same week, Erika told a man that she and BJ met at a bar and were hanging out with, “Come back to our condo and I’ll let you do me in the ass. I like it. My husband wants to watch.”
BJ kept Geney busy while Erika was gone with Joshua. There’s no doubt that Erika asked Joshua if he and Geney “wanted to come back to our penthouse and hang out?”
The Rainbow.
Erika said she and BJ wanted to continue the party. It would be fun.
A dip in the hot tub.
Drinks.
Drugs.
According to Erika, Joshua mentioned something about having “some really good” marijuana back in his Atlantis room and he wanted to pick it up and bring it over to the Rainbow. On top of that, Geney and Joshua needed to pick up their bathing suits if they were all going for a romp in the hot tub.
“Sure,” Erika said, referring to stopping by the Atlantis. “Beej loves to smoke. I don’t. I hate it.”
So after Joshua and Erika emerged from the restroom, Erika later said, they grabbed BJ and Geney and decided to take the bus back to the Atlantis.
“My husband really jumped at the opportunity [to smoke weed], because I don’t smoke,” Erika later explained to Detective Bernal. “He loves to smoke it, because I don’t. . . .”
After getting off the bus, Erika, BJ, Joshua, and Geney went up to Geney and Joshua’s room at the Atlantis. After Joshua got his and Geney’s things together (his weed was in an Altoids tin canister), they walked along the beach back to the Rainbow, which was just a few city blocks away.
14
Stranded
According to BJ, only Erika, Geney, and Joshua got off the bus. He decided to take the bus back to the Rainbow and meet them there.
“I’m going back to the condo,” BJ said.
“We’ll meet you there, then,” Erika replied.
When BJ got to the Rainbow, he realized that he couldn’t get in. Erika had the keys.
“Shit.”
So, BJ said later, he waited by the door for a while.
“But it was uncomfortable.”
Sick of sitting on the concrete floor by the door waiting for Erika, he went downstairs and passed out in the Jeep Cherokee, which, he said, was unlocked.
15
The 130 Ways to Torture a Person
One of the main reasons Erika was so bold—so offensively oversexual and fearless when she and BJ went out on the town to drink or steal or just cause mischief a teenager would be proud of—centered around a feeling she had that he was paying very little attention to her anymore. It wasn’t even that they didn’t have sex anymore. It was that BJ, according to Erika, was more concerned with putting his wife down and demeaning her than he was with handing out compliments.
“I’m not a shy person,” Erika explained to Detective Scott Bernal. Her lawyer and the state’s attorney Joel Todd were also present during this same interview. “I talk to people at bars. I sit down beside someone at a bar, ask them how they’re doing . . . because I do not get that sort of attention from my husband. He’s not turned on by me. I’m not what gets him excited.”
Erika was embarrassed by the discussion. It was hard, she claimed, to talk about such intimate things with strangers.
“No, just tell,” her lawyer encouraged.
Erika stopped talking, looked over at her lawyer, and grimaced, whispering, “You know . . . you know—”
“No, it’s OK to tell them,” her lawyer said.
“We hardly ever have sex,” Erika said after a slight hesitation. “When we were first married, we did, but then it really slowed off to the point that I don’t even think we had sex while we were on vacation (in Ocean City).”
It was once or twice a month, Erika said,
if
she was lucky—and
if
she pleaded and pleaded with BJ for it.
“I would practically have to beg.”
The problem wasn’t her, however, she went on to explain. BJ had even told her one day what it was that was going on with him.
According to Erika, BJ told her, “Sex is not what excites me. It’s not what gets me off. If you want me to have sex with you, then fine. I’ll take the time out of my day, if that’s what I have to do to make you happy.”
She was curious, of course, as was the state’s attorney and Bernal. The questions then became: What excited BJ? What was it that stimulated this failed SEAL, who had been trained to kill with his bare hands and to get out of just about any situation he found himself in?
Erika said BJ had turned into the type of person who “swerved to hit animals on the road, instead of not to hit them.”
He was perpetually chasing a thrill.
Bernal asked Erika what else.
“BJ is the kind of person that, when he’s bored, he makes lists of, like, one hundred thirty ways to torture someone.”
Pen and paper.
Detective Bernal asked Erika for an example.
She spoke of BJ’s mistress, the woman from Arkansas that he’d had an affair with. To prove that this woman indeed had had an affair with BJ (he would not admit to it) and that she had no idea he was married, the woman had called Erika and told her intimate details about BJ that only someone who had slept with him would have known. The mistress also said BJ had a separate cell phone set aside just for her.