Cruel Death (17 page)

“I’m going to lay out,” Erika said. It was a bright and sunny morning. She wanted to work on her tan.

When BJ finished, he asked Erika what she wanted to do.

“Take me tanning,” she said. She had purchased a week’s worth of tanning at a local salon and didn’t, she later told police, “want to waste any of it.”

BJ sat at the table and smoked a joint.

And now he had the munchies.

“Let’s go to Hooters,” he suggested, “and get some wings.”

Erika went tanning while BJ went into the restaurant and ate himself a pile of hot wings and fries and drank a pitcher of beer. When she met up with him at the table after her tanning, BJ was white as a ghost. He looked pale and sick.

A moment later, he was vomiting.

Erika paid the bill and they left.

Back at the Rainbow, BJ slept off his high on the couch downstairs as Erika e-mailed a few people and took care of some business on eBay.

BJ was still out cold when she was finished. So Erika went over and shook him awake. “Can you get up, please? I would like to do something today.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . ,” BJ said.

After BJ collected his bearings, he told Erika he wanted to go over to the Greene Turtle, a local watering hole that served crabs and all sorts of different brands of beer.

“I saw a sign out front,” BJ said. “They have Guinness.”

As they walked into the Turtle, both stopped at the front door and marveled. There in front of them was a missing persons flyer asking for help in locating Geney and Joshua. In the surveillance videotape that police later viewed, they couldn’t believe it as Erika stopped, smiled, and proceeded on into the restaurant after looking at the photograph, like it was just another night out.

BJ took a look and followed behind.

They stayed at the Turtle for most of the night, Erika said, listening to the DJ, drinking, and snorting Xanax in the bathroom.

BJ was pretty wasted again, as was Erika.

When it came time to leave, Erika said, she “assumed” that they were going home to the Rainbow. She allowed BJ to drive. He could barely see two feet in front of himself, but she was no better.

As soon as she got into the Jeep, Erika claimed, she passed out.

While she was out cold in the Jeep, Erika heard banging on the window. She had no idea where they were.

“Get up,” BJ was saying. He was standing outside the Jeep. “We’re at Hooters.”

Erika was in and out of it. Her head was leaning against the window. BJ started pounding on the side of the door. “Get up. Get up. Come on.”

Erika said, “What?”

“Get your ski mask.” The Jeep was backed up to the Hooters gift shop, which is directly next door to the restaurant.

“BJ, are you crazy? Isn’t there an alarm?”

BJ had a green bag in his hand. “Take this,” he said as Erika got out of the Jeep. “No alarm. I already picked the lock. The door’s open.”

Erika looked over. Indeed, the door was wide open. What they didn’t know, however, was that the OCPD did routine patrols throughout the city all night long. Also, there was a silent alarm BJ had tripped.

Erika followed BJ into the gift shop and they began robbing the place: cigarettes, T-shirts, mugs, anything and everything they could get their hands on. Erika made trips back to the Jeep as BJ walked around the inside of the shop, pulling things out he wanted her to take.

Both were armed. BJ had his SIG SAUER in his shoulder holster, and Erika had her .357 in the crook of her back, tucked inside her pants.

34

Busted

Police officer Jason Hardt was employed by the Winchester Police Department (WPD) in Winchester, Virginia, about a four-hour, 225-mile ride directly west of Ocean City. During the early-morning hours of May 31, 2002, however, somewhere after midnight, Hardt was working his summer job as a seasonal police officer with the OCPD.

Like most seasonal cops, Hardt enjoyed the gig.

The beach.

The babes.

The surroundings.

The action.

Hardt was riding with OCPD officer Freddie Howard that night when they got a call to check out a tripped alarm at 123rd Street, which is downtown in a little strip mall.

“Hooters restaurant,” dispatch said.

As Hardt and Howard came around the corner and pulled into the parking lot, they noticed there was a Jeep Cherokee backed into a parking space in front of the Hooters store. Two people were in the process, it seemed, of burglarizing the place.

“Are they placing merchandise from the store into their vehicle?”

As the two cops pulled closer to the Jeep, the woman sat inside the Jeep in the passenger seat and didn’t move, while the male, attempting to get into the Jeep at that moment, stepped away from the door.

Erika and BJ. Caught in the act. Their reign of burgling Hooters restaurants all over Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware now apparently coming to an abrupt end.

Howard and Hardt got out of their vehicle quickly and told BJ not to move.

BJ stopped and put his hands up. “Can’t we just put the stuff back?” he said. “We stole it. We stole it. But we can put it back.”

For some strange reason, BJ thought he could talk his way out of it.

Howard immediately grabbed BJ by the arms and handcuffed him. After that, he patted BJ down and found his SIG SAUER semiautomatic handgun tucked into the front of his trousers, inside a holster. BJ was also wearing one of those vestment-type shoulder holsters. There was no second gun inside that holster, but BJ had placed two magazine clips, fully loaded, inside the holster.

The gun tucked into BJ’s waist was loaded. “It had a clip in it,” Howard later said, “and there was one [bullet] in the chamber.”

BJ Sifrit was armed and ready for a firefight.

The officers looked inside the Jeep and it was crammed with all sorts of Hooters merchandise and dozens of packs of cigarettes in display racks that BJ and Erika had obviously stolen. Another few minutes and they would have probably been long gone.

Howard asked BJ to have a seat on the ground in front of the store as Officer Hardt, meanwhile, went around to the other side of the Jeep. As he approached Erika, he noticed that she was leaning over to grab something inside the Jeep.

“Let’s see those hands . . . ,” Hardt said sternly.

Erika stopped.

“Exit the vehicle, ma’am. Show me your hands and get out of the vehicle—right now.”

Erika got out of the Jeep with her hands up. Hardt quickly handcuffed Erika and brought her around to the back of the Jeep.

As Hardt began to pat Erika down, he noticed that she had what appeared to be a Buck knife, the type that folds in half, clipped to the front left pocket of her blue jeans. As he worked his way around toward her back, he felt what he knew to be a handgun tucked nose-first in the crack of her ass.

Hardt slowly took the weapon out and placed it on the asphalt away from where they were now standing.

“Can’t we just . . . put this stuff back?” Erika asked pleadingly. “And you guys just let us go?” She was getting nervous. But no more so than any other suspect caught in the act of what was a class-A felony.

“What?”

“Can’t we just—”

Hardt paid her no attention, but instead instructed Erika to sit down by a brick wall near the store.

Officer Howard, certain that BJ wasn’t going to cause any trouble, began searching the inside of the Jeep more thoroughly. In the center console, he found a .45-caliber Heckler & Koch handgun, which was also fully loaded.

“Damn . . .”

Were Erika and BJ expecting some sort of shoot-out? They were certainly armed for it.

Underneath the gun was a lock pick, one of the tools BJ never left home without. Beside the lock pick were two ski masks and a pair of gloves.

At some point, while Hardt and Howard were analyzing the scene and making sure there weren’t any other people involved (accessories), Erika called Hardt over.

“Officer, Officer,” she said hurriedly.

Erika needed something. She was moving around and crying, and looked totally out of it.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I have . . . I . . . I have anxiety problems,” Erika said despairingly. “I haven’t taken my medication and I need it, and I need you to get it for me in my purse.”

Erika had been snorting Xanax all night long.

“Where is your purse?”

“In the front seat of the Jeep.”

By this point, there were other officers arriving on scene. One of the sergeants, Hugh Bean, had been called in. Hardt called him over to speak to Erika.

She told Bean the same thing, adding, “I need my Paxil and Xanax. It’s in my purse.”

“Where is it?” Bean asked.

“The front seat of the Jeep. I need those pills.”

From where he was standing, Bean looked over at the Jeep. With the light from the gift shop shining into the console area of the vehicle, along with his flashlight, Bean could see Erika’s purse sitting there inside the vehicle.

“I take it twice a day,” Erika said. “I had one this morning but missed my dose at ten tonight. Please.”

“OK, ma’am,” Bean said. “Just try to relax.”

“I’m having a panic attack . . . I need it!”

“Where, exactly, is the medication?” Bean wanted to know.

“Inside my purse, in a brown leather pouch inside the purse. The pills are in bottles, but they’re not labeled. I need a pink and [a] white pill.”

Bean walked over to the Jeep and began digging through Erika’s purse, searching for her prescription. Bean found the pink pill right away, but he couldn’t locate the white pill. In any event, regardless, Erika wasn’t getting any of these pills.

As Bean dug through Erika’s purse, he uncovered four spent .357 shells and one live round. It seemed strange that they’d have four spent shells hanging around in the Jeep.

“Huh?” Bean said to himself. “This is odd.”

Bean continued searching. He saw what he believed to be a change purse, a small zipper bag. After opening it, he located “several IDs.”

What is she doing with all of this stuff?

Bean was struck immediately by the photographs of the two people on the driver’s licenses he found inside Erika’s purse. He had been working on the night the missing persons case had been filed for Joshua and Geney, and as he sat there inside Erika and BJ’s Jeep, he remembered that he had filed some paperwork that night and happened to run into the flyer with Joshua and Geney’s photograph. All good cops—and Bean certainly could be included, with over twenty years on the job—keep their radar up all the time. They pay attention to what’s going on around them in the squad room. It takes a team to solve cases.

“If it wasn’t for Sergeant Bean’s awareness on that night,” Detective Scott Bernal said later, “this case may not have been solved.”

Bean continued looking. He found Joshua and Geney’s Social Security cards inside Erika’s purse, and a Bally Total Fitness Club ID with Joshua’s photograph on it.

That looks like . . . ,
Bean thought.

Sergeant Bean walked over to his car and got on the radio. “Get me the captain.”

When the captain came on, Bean said he thought he had found some information on a couple arrested for burglary that might have something to do with that missing persons case the OCPD had been investigating the past few days.

The captain told Bean what to do.

Bean called in the CID of the OCPD, got out of his car, and told his officers, “Shut this scene down.”

Detectives were on the way.

35

Hostages

Captain Jeffrey Kelcher took control of the investigation, calling in Detectives Richard Moreck and Scott Bernal, who already had been looking into the missing persons case of Geney and Joshua.

After going through the Jeep and putting together the connection between Erika and BJ and the missing couple, Kelcher told Moreck and Bernal that they needed to get over to the Rainbow Condominium and check things out there.

“Immediately,” he said. “They might be being held and might need medical attention.”

Before that, Bernal walked over to Erika and sat with her for a moment, first advising her of her Miranda rights.

Erika signed the form, saying she understood.

“Are you willing to speak to me without a lawyer?” Bernal asked.

“Yes,” Erika said.

He showed her where to sign.

“Where’d you and BJ meet Crutchley and Ford?” Bernal asked.

“I have no idea who or what you’re talking about.”

“OK . . . one more time . . . where’d you and your husband meet Crutchley and Ford? The two people whose identifications we found in your purse.”

Erika looked puzzled. “Not sure what you mean.”

Bernal went to his car and got a copy of the missing persons flyer.

“I never saw them before,” Erika said defiantly.

“Come on . . .”

“My husband might have put those IDs in my purse. And if he did, it was because he found them.”

“Why would you have spent bullet casings in your purse?”

For Bernal, who had worked several homicide cases before this one, it was rather obvious that two and two made four: spent bullet casings and IDs from a missing couple probably meant someone had been shot.

“My husband shot my gun and gave me the casings to show me how my gun worked.”

It seemed that Erika had an answer for every question.

With all the evidence the OCPD found inside the Jeep, it appeared to them that maybe Erika and BJ had taken Geney and Joshua hostage and were holding them at the Rainbow against their will.

Bernal was concerned. He and Moreck decided to head over to the Rainbow right away with a team to see what they could find.

36

There Are No Coincidences

State’s Attorney Joel Todd’s home phone was ringing. Although he didn’t know it yet, the OCPD was on the other end, calling with some news about the missing persons case that detectives had been investigating since the night Geney’s friend Gloria had called and reported Geney and Joshua missing. Leading up to Memorial Day weekend, 2002, Worcester County state’s attorney Joel Todd had been briefed about what had turned into a nagging, strange missing persons case the OCPD just couldn’t understand, or let go of. For locals, especially in law enforcement, Ocean City is a small region. For that reason, Todd told me later, “I am probably made aware of things more often than my counterparts are in larger metropolitan areas.”