Cruel Death Read online

  “Lainey, give me your gun!” BJ said again more forcefully.

  “Beej, I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  “Fuck it. If you’re not going to give it to me, I’ll get it myself.”

  Geney was beginning to cry and shake. Joshua was standing tall and firm. According to Erika, she stood motionless, afraid of what would happen next if she handed BJ her gun.

  So BJ grabbed the gun off the shelf near the headboard of the bed and began pointing it at Joshua. Waving it around. Walking around him.

  “When he took that gun,” Erika later explained, “I knew he was going to kill them.”

  18

  “Guilty Pleasures”

  Erika once confided to an Internet friend, a pharmacist she had met on eBay while selling some of the merchandise she and BJ had stolen, that she absolutely loved “tragedy theatre plays,” Arthur Miller and the like. “Chilean wine, beer and vodka” were her drinks of choice. She didn’t know the guy all that well and felt funny describing what she called “guilty pleasures,” but what the hell! She considered his being a pharmacist very “sexy,” and said she felt comfortable opening up to him.

  Erika said she couldn’t get to sleep at night without having at least one glass of Chilean wine “B4 bed.” She also liked her “sex anyway, every way.”

  I’ll try anything once, she wrote.

  Apparently, she was bored with her marriage. While BJ was off playing military guy, here was Erika telling a stranger what she liked to do in bed. It hardly played into her later story that she was heartbroken and totally out of her mind whenever BJ went away.

  Men in uniform and men on Harley-Davidson motorcycles turned her on, as did cleaning the house naked.

  Sleeping naked, always.

  Watching porn and going to strip clubs.

  Lots and lots of mirrors.

  Eating hot wings and getting really messy.

  She explained that she loved feet and tanning every day. She liked to straighten carpets when she saw that they were out of line. She had been diagnosed with OCD, Erika explained, and was taking a mixture of Paxil and Xanax to fight off the urges to preoccupy herself and her life with everything. For example, before she left the apartment she and BJ lived in outside Altoona, Erika had a system to check and make sure the doors were locked. She would twist the upper door lock nine times and the lower lock twelve times every day, rechecking each. It really wasn’t about locking the door, but more about the number of times she checked the locks that made her feel confident the doors were secure. What was more, she would walk around the kitchen and check the oven and the doors of other appliances before leaving the house, constantly worrying that she had left the stove or another appliance open or on.

  BJ picked up on this behavior soon after they started living together. According to some who knew Erika, it wasn’t long before BJ began the process of using Erika’s insecurities and disorders against her. He’d wait until she got to work, for instance, knowing it would drive her mad and ruin her day, Mitch Grace later said, and then ask Erika, “You sure you locked the doors?”

  “What?”

  “I think the doors might be open.”

  “Huh?”

  “Maybe the oven is on, too.”

  It got to a point where Erika would call her father just about every morning and ask him to drive by the apartment to check the locks. Mitch had done it those first few times. But after a while, he said, it got to the point where it became a waste of time, so he lied about doing it to pacify Erika and her demons.

  19

  The Abuse Excuse

  Whereas Erika certainly had her hang-ups, it seemed they fueled the passively sinister character stirring in BJ during the early stages of the marriage. For one, there’s no doubt that BJ Sifrit had a death wish. He wasn’t afraid of doing just about anything. He’d routinely antagonize people from different races and ridicule people with disabilities. He and Erika would be driving around town, Erika at the wheel, and BJ would stick his head out the window and pull out Erika’s .357 Magnum and shoot up a street sign or, especially, a stop sign.

  Then they’d both have a laugh about it.

  Two rebels. Erika was at BJ’s side by this point. The baby incident was in the past. She’d gotten that cross tattoo and was done with it. If she couldn’t beat BJ and turn him into the ideal husband—the white-picket-fence life she’d always dreamed of. She might as well join him.

  And that’s exactly what she did.

  But during their second year of marriage, BJ became abusive, Erika later told a government agent. What first started out to be mild comments about her weight, or a jab about what she wore, evolved into BJ focusing his insults on specific areas. For one, BJ liked to tease Erika about her hair. Because it was kinky and tight and short, he’d often pull her aside and say, “Nigger hair.”

  Erika took it. Said nothing.

  They’d be out and Erika would be hungry and BJ might refuse her food, calling her “fat ass” and “overweight.”

  According to Erika, he was molding the perfect woman that other men would not be attracted to. Short hair. Skinny as an anorexic. Feeble and quiet. What man would want her? She’d be all his.

  But then, in another interview months later, Erika would tell a completely different story, saying that BJ wanted absolutely nothing to do with her: sexually, romantically, emotionally. He was a shell of a man. Quiet and passive.

  When the insults started to bounce off her, and she became immune to them, Erika later insisted, BJ began “to smack me around a lot,” she said.

  “You’re a cool wife,” he said one night, “for going to strip clubs with me.”

  For BJ, strip clubs were, in fact, a place to kick back, relax with a few beers, and stare into the nothingness of a fantasy. When he met up with his SEAL friends, the strip club was the ideal spot to catch up, or just blow off some steam. There was one night when BJ hooked up with his SEAL friend Charles Atwood (a pseudonym). They were in Virginia Beach. It was 1999, shortly before BJ had even met Erika. BJ still had a good standing with the navy. Atwood and BJ were in SEAL Team 2; both had been stationed at Virginia Beach together. According to what Atwood later said in court, he and BJ were great friends.

  “One of the closest friends I had on the SEAL team.”

  Atwood was feeling down on this night. He and his wife had just split up and he needed to talk to a friend. BJ had always been there for his fellow SEALs. All SEALs supported one another and backed one another up. BJ encouraged his friend to talk about what was bothering him. SEALs stuck together. If there was anything he could do to help, consider it done.

  “Maybe I should send you to go whack my wife,” Atwood told BJ jokingly.

  BJ laughed. “Sure!”

  “What’s the going rate, anyway?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—twenty . . . thirty thousand dollars.”

  “I’ll send you down there to get rid of her, and I’d be up here for a good alibi.”

  They chuckled. Had a good laugh. Clanked beer bottles.

  “It was a ‘joke,’” Atwood later remarked. Nothing more. He was upset. He was having a beer with a friend at a strip club. They were both SEALs at the time. (Atwood would later be discharged himself, like BJ, but under far different conditions: “other than honorable” (OTH), stemming from an incident where Atwood pulled a few bulletproof vests out of a trash bin on base and sold them.)

  About a half hour into the conversation, the two men started talking SEAL stuff. SEALs are known as an elite group of military men trained to “kill and destroy.” It’s part of what they do and what they are trained (for as long as thirty months) to do under any conditions. Inherent in the secretive nature of conducting covert missions, which some might think only happen on Hollywood soundstages, is learning how to sneak up on an enemy and annihilate him. Then remove his body and get rid of it.

  Whenever SEALs get together, Atwood later explained in court, they generally talked about things that might make
the average person uncomfortable at the least, appalled and suspicious at the most. As BJ and his friend talked, they began discussing the best way to get rid of a body after making the kill. They’d moved on, apparently, from killing problem wives and were now focused on what to do with the body postmurder.

  “We got into the topic of how to dispose of a body, involving laying down plastic on the floor, and that’s where you would take the body and then quarter it,” Atwood said in court, “and then remove the body in bags.”

  After taking a pull from his Bud Light, Atwood said, “I tell ya, BJ, I’d dump the corpse into the ocean.”

  Far out to sea. No one would ever find it. It seemed like a logical thing to do. Something that anyone might come up with after a round of beers.

  BJ smiled. He had a more elaborate plan, he said. Something that took more guts, but was ironclad, he claimed, when it came to the authorities ever finding the body.

  “What’s that?” Atwood wondered.

  “Well,” BJ began, “I’d lay out plastic on the floor, then I would perform the dissection there with a knife, quarter the body or bodies, cutting off the legs, arms, and head. Then I’d wrap those pieces of body parts in bags and put them in different Dumpsters throughout the month, or to different Dumpsters throughout the city to avoid detection.”

  It was a bizarre comment, but then talking about the disposal of corpses was unusual talk to begin with, so Atwood really didn’t think anything of it then. It was just the way SEALs talked outside the job. A way they dealt, essentially, with killing as a profession.

  20

  “I’m Sure in My Brain . . .”

  With Erika’s .357 Magnum in hand, BJ pointed the barrel at Joshua and then Geney. After thinking about it for a moment, he said, “Take off your clothes.”

  “What . . . come on . . .” Joshua pleaded.

  “Take off your fucking clothes, I said,” BJ murmured through clenched teeth.

  So Joshua and Geney obliged.

  When they were naked a moment later, BJ asked both of them: “Do you want to die?”

  And so as Erika explained it, when her husband pointed her gun at Joshua and Geney, and began barking out orders, she knew—right then and there—that he was going to kill them. It was something, she said, he had been talking about for some time: killing a fellow human being. It was as if their whole lives together had led up to this one moment. All those times they sat at home and watched True Romance and Natural Born Killers, bored with domestic life, had come down to this one moment.

  “Oh, my God,” Erika claimed to have said at this point. “I had no idea what was going on.”

  Yet, instead of running out of the condo and trying to find someone to stop her husband, Erika said she froze, and didn’t know what to do.

  Erika went through their clothes, she said later, thinking it would pacify BJ and lull him into a calmer mood, and that maybe she’d find the jewelry and the situation would resolve itself.

  “I just kind of kicked their clothes around to make BJ think I was looking for the shit,” Erika told a government agent. “But didn’t really, because I knew it wasn’t in their clothes.”

  Of course not. They had been wearing bathing suits. They had never left the apartment. Where in the world did BJ or Erika think they had stashed the merchandise? Besides, why would Erika even say this? How did she know the jewelry wasn’t in their clothes?

  “It’s not here, Beej,” Erika said.

  “Son of a bitch,” he seethed.

  “Why are you doing this?” Joshua said. Same as BJ, Joshua was a military man. He had spent eight years in the army, traveling as far as Korea. At six foot one, he wasn’t a small dude by any means. He had a black belt in karate, yet was never one to flaunt it or brag about what he could do. As two military men, Joshua and BJ were far different, however. Joshua had gotten out of the army with an honorable discharge; whereas BJ, it was well stated, had gotten into some serious trouble and, after a court-martial, pleaded guilty to a litany of charges. In fact, one report said that back in October 2000, BJ was convicted at “a special court-martial of two charges of going AWOL, three charges of insubordination, one charge of drunken or reckless driving, and one charge of wearing unauthorized insignia.” Based on those charges, BJ was given a bad-conduct discharge, three months’ prison time, forfeiture of his $600-a-month pay, and a reduction in rank. After an appellate review, the navy issued a notice that BJ’s discharge had been finalized. Later, however, BJ would say he did it all—staged the crimes—for Erika’s sake because she couldn’t survive in the world without her hubby next to her all the time—and the navy was interfering with that. It was best for both of them if he left the navy.

  As Joshua and BJ stood, toe to toe, BJ had that crazy, drunken, evil gaze in his eyes, Erika later speculated: Make a move and I’ll kill you! He had crossed a threshold, for sure. And once BJ set his mind on something—especially where pride, ego, and crossing him were involved—there was no turning back until he felt confident the situation was under his control.

  “I’m sure in my brain,” Erika said later, speaking of that moment, “he’s gonna go crazy. He’s gonna do something fucking crazy, because he doesn’t care about the shit that’s missing. He was jumping at the opportunity to whack somebody. He’s always wanting to kill somebody, ‘Let’s do this, let’s do that.’ So I’m freaking out because I know . . . I almost know what’s coming.”

  Geney grabbed Erika by both her arms and started shaking her, according to what Erika later told the government agent, saying, “We didn’t take your stuff. . . .” Geney sounded sincere. She was begging Erika to believe her. “We’d never do that.”

  BJ started to laugh.

  “We’ve been good to you guys all night,” Geney continued. “We paid your bus fare.... We’re drinking.... We’d never do that stuff to you.”

  BJ was thinking again. Erika could tell. He had something on his mind. He was quiet. The wheels were spinning.

  After a few intense moments of uncomfortable silence, BJ finally said, “Get in the bathroom,” using the gun as a wand to direct Geney and Joshua toward the door.

  Joshua and Geney started toward the bathroom—and then ran as BJ hurried after them. But Joshua was quicker and managed to get himself and Geney into the bathroom first, slamming the door shut behind them, and then locking it before BJ had a chance to catch up.

  21

  Military Man

  BJ was the oldest of Elizabeth Sifrit’s two children (he has a younger sister). By the time he met Erika, BJ’s parents had been married for close to twenty-eight years. BJ grew up in the Midwest—Iowa and Minnesota—but during his sophomore year of high school, the family uprooted because of his dad’s job and moved just outside Houston, Texas. At Cypress-Fairbanks (Cy-Fair) High School, whose school motto seemed to fit with BJ’s future, “Bobcat Fight Never Dies,” BJ was a competitive swimmer. He was not a lazy kid and often had several jobs: YMCA swimming instructor, grocery store worker, lifeguard.

  One job BJ took to, like a shark to blood, was when he worked for a locksmith. He just seemed to relish the work. A friend said that she was once locked out of her house, her new key wouldn’t work. It took BJ just a few minutes and he had the key fixed. Friends described coming home and finding BJ sitting on their couch, watching television. “He could get through any lock.”

  BJ’s mother and father—good, hardworking people, according to those who knew them—adored their son and thought he was the model child.

  “His parents were great people, as was his sister,” said a former friend. “They had a very good relationship with BJ, that was obvious.”

  During his senior year, eighteen-year-old BJ decided he wanted to pursue a life in the military. At first, he wanted to join the marines, an admirable profession only the “few and the proud” were able to make a career out of. BJ’s personality seemed to juxtapose perfectly with the marine’s “Semper Fidelis ” motto, loyalty and commitment, or, “Always fa
ithful.” This phrase summed up the drive and dedication BJ had in his heart at the time. He wanted to serve. He wanted to make a difference. He wanted to earn his liberty for his country. The military was the best place to sustain that compulsion and, at the same time, fulfill what is a noble vocation. Yet, as he thought about it and discussed it with his mother, father, and recruiter, the navy seemed to be a far better fit for BJ’s character. Sure, he’d make a hell of a marine, but after getting very high scores on his recruiting tests, it was made clear to BJ and his family that he had qualified for SEAL training if he opted for the navy—in particular, a nuclear-engineering program the navy was offering then.

  BJ did his basic training outside Chicago in Great Lakes and then shipped out to field training in Coronado, California, just outside San Diego. It was here where BJ endured the rigorous twenty-five-week conditioning program any future SEAL is required to complete. Many drop out at this point; this is the period of the training that separates, as SEALs like to say, the men from the boys. In fact, out of the 160 candidates enrolled in BJ’s class, he and only seventeen additional recruits would ultimately graduate. BJ was named honor man of the class, a position designated by the group commanders to the top performer of the class. So dedicated and tenacious, BJ had not only made it through hell week and the rest of SEAL training, but he had finished on top. Several of BJ’s former SEAL peers later reported that he could spend all night drinking at a bar, get home at 3:00 A.M., sleep for two hours, show up for drills, and have no trouble running ten miles and completing the day’s maneuvers. Meanwhile, some of his SEAL peers, heading off to bed at 8:00 P.M., eating rice cakes and drinking energy shakes, had trouble keeping up after five miles.

  For BJ, indeed, it was mind over matter. He had read that the powerfully dedicated mind could accomplish anything—and he proved it.

  After SEAL graduation on August 15, 1997, BJ was sent to his first SEAL platoon in Norfolk, Virginia, where he kept in close contact with his mother, father, and sister, flying home any chance he could and, if not, calling nearly every other day, just as he had in San Diego.