Cruel Death (6 page)

They decided to call the store Memory Laine. It was a play on Erika’s middle name, Elaine, for which one of her nicknames, Lainey, had been designed around (the other being Gracey).

Memory Laine was perfect. The two of them together all day in the store. What could be better? Husband and wife and their own business.

BJ later said that it was Mitch who financed the entire store: “I had no money.”

There was a day after BJ and Erika had moved into their own apartment just outside Altoona and began running Memory Laine when Mitch asked BJ to go hunting with him. A boys’ weekend in the woods, with campfires and beers and guns. “Testosterone City.” Male bonding. They needed to get to know each other. They hadn’t really talked much. And Erika was so crazy about this guy she had married after knowing him for only a few weeks, Mitch wanted to get to know him. Kind of accept BJ into the family.

BJ was thrilled. Growing up in Iowa as a young boy, he had hunted with his father in the Midwest. Pennsylvania had some of the best big-game hunting in the region. BJ had already gotten all his gun permits squared away in the state. There was nothing stopping him.

“No,” Erika said (according to BJ). She was firm.

“What? Why not?” he asked. “It’s your father.”

“I don’t want you away from me for that long.”

“A few days, Erika,” BJ said. “That’s all.”

“No, no, no.” She was hysterical. Panicking. Crying and yelling.

“So I never went,” BJ said later.

If you ask Mitch Grace about this particular event, he recalls the proposed hunting trip a bit differently.

“I really did not hunt much,” he said later. “They (Erika and BJ) were only here one year . . . and he was sick the whole week before [hunting season] and could not go to work.”

As they started living together, Erika and BJ began to learn of each other’s little quirks and habits. Living outside Altoona was the first time, really, that they had stayed in the same home, together, for an extended period of time. Throughout their first few years of being married, before BJ had gotten himself tossed out of the navy, he was always traveling with the SEALs and training in some far-off place. Now they were together.

BJ soon suggested that Erika get a gun. A Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. It was versatile, easy to load and use, BJ explained. Erika generally kept it in an ankle or waistband holster, maybe in her purse. Maybe she’d put it in the crook of her back down into the crack of her ass, but the point was, BJ said, she always had the gun on her.

Beyond the gun, it was jewelry, many later said, that excited Erika more than anything else. She was “obsessed” with not only the Coach handbag she kept most of her jewelry in, but diamonds were what she wanted. This was something, no doubt, she had learned from her mom, who was also a jewelry fanatic, according to several sources. So much so, Detective Scott Bernal told the author, “that when we went into the Graces’ home to talk to them, there were these glass jewelry cases all over, like the ones you’d see in a jewelry store.”

Then there was Erika’s closet full of Hooters clothing and memorabilia, which Erika obsessed over.

“She had quite a collection,” BJ remarked. “She probably had over one hundred, maybe over two hundred, [Hooters clothing items].”

Erika had a fetish, no doubt about it, which included a proclivity for anything with the Hooters trademark symbol on it. And it would be that desire to acquire as much Hooters merchandise as she could, and likely boredom on BJ’s part after being expelled from his lifelong dream of being a SEAL, that would soon send Erika and BJ out on the town at night to indulge in what had become their new hobby after moving outside Altoona.

Burglary.

It was such a high for BJ to break into a store and steal, Erika later told Detective Scott Bernal, that he generally got an erection from it and masturbated afterward.

“He just didn’t want to have sex with me after a while,” she said. “Maybe once a month. But this [stealing] began to get him off.”

Part II

Snakes, Crocodiles, Drugs, Murder

9

Pill Snorter

It was near noon when Erika and BJ Sifrit left for Ocean City, Maryland, on Saturday, May 25, 2002, from their apartment outside Altoona, Pennsylvania. Erika had just finished a nail-grooming appointment at the local salon, and she and BJ took off in their Jeep Cherokee immediately after. It was a bit odd that Erika and BJ had a Jeep Cherokee—because they also drove an Audi. Cookie and Mitch Grace drove an Audi and a Jeep Cherokee. As much as Erika had said later that she despised her parents’ storybook marriage and close friendship, she was certainly doing her best to mimic every little nuance of it.

That Saturday had been a summerlike morning. From the moment the sun rose, it was hot and sticky. As Erika strolled out of the nail salon into the waiting Jeep, she caught a glare from the sun against her already heavily tanned face. She and BJ were ready now to head south-east, toward Ocean City.

To drink.

And drug.

And do whatever else had given them that thrill both had been chasing lately by breaking into Hooters restaurants and retail stores of all types—a thrill, however, that the burglaries just weren’t satisfying anymore.

Erika had some Xanax and Valium on her. She still had several hundred pills left over from a gross of about three hundred that she said she had purchased in South America. It was a good thing. Erika was into snorting Xanax these days. Just popping a few pills with a beer wasn’t doing it anymore.

“We bought them in Chile,” Erika later told Scott Bernal. “They were like ninety for a dollar. . . . My doctor at home had gotten word from my mother that my husband and his . . . friends had taken all of what my doctor prescribed me, so he refused to prescribe me anymore.”

She’d packed the pills in her Coach purse before they left the apartment that morning. Erika was crazy about her purse, not to mention the jewelry inside it that she had collected and usually kept with her wherever she went. Jewelry and the finer things in life had made the difference to Erika: Some said she relished in gloating over what others couldn’t afford. She got off on the fact that she had it and others didn’t.

“Stop and get some beer,” Erika told BJ as they headed out of town on the freeway.

“Yeah,” BJ said excitedly. BJ was drinking more these days. Any chance he could, really. Stuffing that dream of his deeper down into an abyss of alcohol and criminal behavior.

They stopped at a gas station about halfway between Pennsylvania and Ocean City, and Erika picked up a twelve-pack of Bud Light. They could get more when they arrived in Ocean City.

Bottoms up!

As BJ drove, Erika popped two Xanax and washed them down with a slug of her Bud Light.

After the long ride down Route 1, part of which went alongside the Delaware coastline, in through Rehoboth Beach and onto the Ocean City strip, BJ parked the Jeep, then hauled their baggage up to the top-floor penthouse, room 1101, inside the Rainbow Condominiums. He would have made Erika do it, she later claimed, as he generally made her do most of the heavy lifting around the apartment back home, but he was excited to get up in the room and party, and so he helped.

The room was spectacular. A friend of Mitch’s owned the building. Mitch and his company had done some of the construction work. Anytime Mitch (or Erika and BJ) needed the room, Mitch picked up the phone.

When they got into the room, BJ filled the fridge with more beer, broke out Erika’s Xanax, and crushed it up on the glass table, just beyond the kitchen. Erika, kneeling over her husband with a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill in hand, started the party all over again.

BJ didn’t want any. He was more of a joint-and-beer man.

The view from the penthouse’s balcony was magnificent: something out of a magazine.

Coastline for miles.

Sand.

Surf.

The infamous Ocean City Boardwalk.

What more could they ask for? What a life. BJ smiled at his wife. When he was feeling good, BJ and Erika got along well. One could say with certainty that Erika was frightened of BJ on some levels. On others, Erika was the yin to BJ’s yang.

“Dynamite” was how one source described BJ, “but Erika was the wick.”

“Without her, he would have been fine. And without him, she would have been fine,” said another source close to the case. “Together, though, watch out. Something happened when they were together.”

Indeed, Erika and BJ were like a virus, feeding off each other’s weaknesses, while using each other’s strengths to manipulate situations to get what they wanted. Staying at the Rainbow, which was then one of the higher-quality condominiums on the Ocean City strip, turned out to be one of those perks BJ had enjoyed in marrying Erika.

At one time, Mitch Grace had a large company. He’d started the small construction business a few decades ago and it had grown into a massive workforce of over 150 employees through its first incarnation, but then “averaged about seventy-five for about ten years,” Mitch said later, “and now [2007] with our need for finances at its worst, I am hoping to get back up to fifteen [employees] in the spring [of 2008].”

Mitch’s company had built the likes of high-rises and hotels and office buildings up and down the East Coast.

No sooner had BJ unpacked and chopped a few lines of Xanax for Erika to snort, when she said, “I want to go to Hooters, Beej.”

BJ smiled.

Erika collected Hooters waitress tank tops (which customers couldn’t buy) like baseball cards.

“I had some of them with me,” she said later, “and I wanted to go there and see if they would trade me. I didn’t have one from Ocean City yet, so the first place we went was to Hooters.”

At Hooters, BJ and Erika had two pitchers of beer and some hot wings.

“Hey,” Erika said to one of the waitresses, “where can a girl go for a good time around here?”

The waitress thought about it. “Seacrets.”

BJ and Erika looked at each other. Smiled. Seacrets it was.

So they drove the Jeep back to the Rainbow and boarded the bus out front, where they ran into Joshua and Geney, who paid their fare, and headed off together to the hottest nightspot on the strip, Seacrets.

10

Everyone Has Secrets

The line to get into Seacrets was out the door and around the corner. After one of them in Erika and BJ’s party—which included Geney and Joshua, and now another couple they met on the bus ride over—walked up and asked, the bouncer said it would be an hour, at the least, before they got in.

“I would much rather have just gone to a hole-in-the-wall,” Erika explained later. “But we were obligated to buy them (Geney and Joshua) a drink.”

It was that deal BJ had made on the bus: pay our fare and we’ll buy the first round.

Funny, they had burgled scores of restaurants and retail stores by this point in their marriage, but Erika said later that they were “obligated” and maybe even afraid to burn this couple out of a few bucks.

So they stood in line and waited.

Erika became quickly irritated and impatient. As she later put it, “I was losing my high.” She had snorted some Xanax before leaving Hooters, but now Erika was worried that if she didn’t get into the bar soon, that high she had worked so hard to maintain throughout the evening would be lost. On top of that, the Xanax “intensified the alcohol,” she explained. “It just gives you a different high.”

And she was craving it.

Erika had started taking the Xanax after BJ had “an affair on me,” she claimed. “And then I started having depression, anxiety attacks, panic, symptoms of obsessive-compulsive [disorder], so my psychiatrist prescribed me Xanax. . . .” She insisted that it was BJ who suggested she snort and take them with booze. He was the one who introduced her to a more intense and a more animated high than simply popping them with a few beers.

One of the other couples standing in line waiting to get into Seacrets besides Joshua and Geney, a couple who had gotten off the bus with them, had taken a walk to a local liquor store and had come back with a six-pack of pony beers.

“You want one?” the guy asked Erika, BJ, Geney, and Joshua.

Erika spoke up, “Yeah, thanks.”

No one else was interested.

“No problem,” the guy said.

“Hey, you want to go with me over there,” Erika said to the guy, pointing. She made a gesture with her hand to her nose, giving the impression that she wanted to duck out of line and snort some drugs.

“No,” the man said.

“Come on,” Erika insisted.

“No!”

So Erika grabbed him by the crook of his arm, latched her arm around his, and pulled the man away from the line.

“I’m going around the corner over there,” she shouted as Joshua, Geney, and BJ waited, watching her leave. Erika was pointing again to an area near the beach. No one would see her. It was dark out by now. She could zip in between a few cars or the Dumpster and blast a few lines of Xanax with her new friend by her side.

“I’ll be back,” she said, and took off with the new guy.

To BJ, it didn’t matter. (“I liked to let her do what she wanted. It didn’t bother me,” he said later.)

Erika saw it differently. Ever since BJ had cheated on her in October 1999, not even a year into their marriage, she had gone off the deep end when it pertained to doing what she wanted. Erika had found e-mails between BJ and his lover, which explicitly detailed the relationship. She followed him. She had heard him on the telephone talking to the woman, who lived in Arkansas. It was a one-night stand BJ had while on SEAL maneuvers, but turned into a six-week Internet romance when he returned home. Erika said the woman started calling and e-mailing her, which sent her into a “diagnosed serious depression.” She couldn’t even get out of bed at times. Yet, even with all that evidence against him, Erika said, BJ would “not admit to it, because he has no sense of guilt or remorse.”

Erika walked around the corner of the building, found an out-of-the-way space where no one would see her, and snorted some Xanax.