Cruel Death (5 page)

Erika didn’t have the height, so she stuck to point guard position. She had a great jump shot when it was on, but for the most part, point guard was not a position that suited Erika’s personality.

“She was never aggressive,” Kristin remembered. “No, she was, I guess you could say, always more passive.” Point guards generally run the show, flipping up fingers, calling out play numbers, and charging at opponents.

Not Erika.

“She kind of kept herself around the three-point line, which was her best shot.”

More than that, though, Erika Grace was always very thin, fragile, and petite. Just a tiny thing. If there was a rush for a loose ball, Erika might go for it, but she hardly ever came up out of the tussle with the ball. That size would later hamper her ambitions—or maybe Mitch’s ambitions—of Erika being an all-American women’s college basketball star playing for a Big East or Pac-10 team.

Off the court, Erika was shy. Not so much around her close friends, but whenever a stranger came to pass or a boy came near, Erika backed away. Furthermore, she wasn’t one to ever instigate a conversation with someone she didn’t know, or even introduce herself.

During her high-school years in the mid 1990s, Erika was not a socially active teenager, as most of her friends were. At parties, for example, Erika was the girl in the corner by herself: shy and standoffish. She had boyfriends, sure. But not many. When there was booze around, Erika was afraid to indulge. The first one, in other words, to step up and say, “We shouldn’t be doing that.”

There was one afternoon in high school when a friend tapped Erika on the back, trying to get her attention. She was standing by her locker. The bell had rung. It was that frantic three minutes in the hallway before the next bell and you were reprimanded for being late to class.

Erika turned. “What?”

“Can we copy your homework?” the friend asked. Erika was the smart one of the bunch. She never had much trouble with the curriculum. Getting honor grades seemed effortless.

“No,” Erika said. She was adamantly against anyone looking at her work and using it. She had done the labor of the homework. She had stayed up late and paid the price. She couldn’t stand lazy classmates.

“Come on, Erika.”

“No!”

And that was it.

But when Erika went to class, her friends, if they needed her homework to cover themselves, broke into her locker instead and took it, anyway. Realizing this, Erika, of course, could do nothing.

And this is how Erika Grace’s life would continue: she’d say no to things, get into a tug-of-war, and then eventually give in to them or do nothing to stop them from happening.

Back then, Erika had kinky brunette hair. Hundreds of coils of naturally tightly wound hair that other girls might have paid lots of money to have done at a salon. She was attractive in a simple, unadorned, librarian type of way. As far as confidence, Erika knew she was good on the basketball court and displayed poise and attitude. When it came to school and socializing, though, she was intimidated. Because of this, she was always “hard on herself,” a friend later claimed.

“I think maybe because of how hard her parents were on her. They were supportive, definitely supportive, but Erika, as an only child, was always pushed
very
hard.”

As far as following the kids into bad behavior, “I could tell,” another friend recalled, “that she really only drank [alcohol] in high school to fit in. When we went on trips . . . and would sneak alcohol into our rooms, she wouldn’t participate.”

Levelheaded Erika.

Afraid of the consequences.

Scared of how one mistake might affect her future.

But more than anything else, afraid to let down the two most important people in her life—her parents—and of not living up to the standards expected of her. In many ways, Erika Grace was a parent’s dream child. Born in the image of goodness and wholesomeness, with a father who could give her anything she wanted. Erika yearned to impress her parents. She desired to be the person they had taught her to be: caring and honest, hardworking, and able to take care of herself.

“I’m surprised she wasn’t voted most likely to succeed, in high school,” Kristin Heinbaugh said.

As Mitch Grace put it later, a hard-work ethic was in the Grace bloodline; Mitch didn’t expect any more from his daughter than she could give, on or off the basketball court.

“I was a construction foreman at age twenty,” Mitch told this author, “job superintendent at twenty-one, and started my own business at twenty-two.”

Regarding the notion of being hard on Erika and pushing her, Mitch believed he was just being a dad.

“Have you ever worked for anyone in an authority position who was
not
authoritative? . . . I learned to be a take-charge-type person. I am not a good follower. I would not be a good assistant coach. So, yes, I was probably too bossy about basketball issues [with Erika], because, without realizing it then, if I would just ask, ‘Do you want to play in this or that?’ I now feel she wanted to, but if I mentioned it, she probably felt that I
wanted
her to. . . .”

In addition, whatever Mitch did in life, he put his heart and soul into, whether digging a trench on the job, coaching a basketball team, or supporting his family. For this, some later said, Mitch had gone too far with Erika and was too intense with his pushing basketball on her.

On the other hand, hindsight, Mitch said, was always going to give people what they believed to be a clearer picture of any situation. If nothing had ever happened to Erika, no one, in other words, would have ever accused Mitch of going overboard with his raising her to be an overachiever.

“Intense? If there is anything worth doing,” Mitch recalled, “it’s worth doing to the best of your ability. . . . I always felt Erika could do anything she worked hard enough to do. I loved basketball too much and still do. I love coaching, which I quit [in 2002] because I did not feel I could do it to my best [ability]. I loved watching her play. I never missed a game.... I guess, looking back . . . you realize the big things you worried about every day in life were
nothing
. They were so little and really unimportant . . . . I know for a fact that when people are in a situation . . . people will look back and say a lot about you, things that are only highlighted because of this [new] situation, and meant nothing before. Most people will not speak up to say something good, but their memory gets great about adversity.”

8

The Ghost Husband

They’d lost touch since high school, but one day in 2001, Kristin Heinbaugh was at the local Altoona mall when she ran into Erika, her mother, Cookie, and Erika’s new man, Benjamin Sifrit. Erika and BJ had met during the spring of 1999, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, at a bar. They exchanged names, but it went nowhere.

It was BJ; he wasn’t interested. He had been focused for most of his adult life on his career as a U.S. Navy SEAL and, upon meeting Erika, had a vision of what he wanted to do in life—which did not include a wife.

A few months later, in late July, however, BJ and Erika ran into each other again at a SEAL party and began a more “steady relationship,” as BJ later called it. Two weeks after that, Erika and BJ were in Ocean City, New Jersey, where they met up with Mitch and Cookie for the first time. Erika looked happy in the photographs she took of the trip, as did BJ, who was smiling and cuddling Erika close to him. They were already talking about getting married, but they weren’t sharing the news with anyone.

“Hey, how you been, Erika?” Kristin asked, walking over, noticing Erika and Cookie just browsing in the mall. The guy with Erika, Kristin noticed, looked strangely uninvolved with the chance meeting. He was looking around, surely indifferent to the conversation. Erika smiled. Kristin could tell she thought it was great to see an old friend. A touch of what her old life used to be like was there in front of her and it gave Erika a jolt or even a sense of comfort. Since leaving college and hooking up with BJ, Erika had been running on empty; becoming, some later said, in just over a few weeks after meeting him, dangerously obsessed with the guy to the point where she was going out of her mind.

“What have you been doing with your life, Erika?” Kristin asked. Erika didn’t look so good. Skinnier than she had ever been. Quite gaunt and tired.

As they started talking, BJ drifted away from the group without saying anything. It was odd to Kristin that he never stuck out his hand to introduce himself, or even acknowledged that he was with Erika.

A ghost, essentially.

It was uncomfortable. BJ had “no desire,” Kristin later recalled, “to meet.” It was weird, too. He was so into
not
wanting to be noticed that his behavior actually stood out. Unlike a bored husband whose wife is off rummaging through clearance racks inside a department store, BJ walked away without saying a word, but making it known that he wasn’t interested in socializing. It made Kristin feel as though she didn’t matter to the guy. Uneasy. Like maybe she had done something wrong.

“He could have cared less,” she remembered.

Erika was the type of person who her friends thought would have wanted a glorious, over-the-top wedding, seeing that she was daddy’s girl, and her daddy had lots of money to make the day as special as she wanted. Mitch even later told the author that he had always dreamed of walking his girl down the aisle and giving her the wedding of her dreams. On top of that, one would think Erika would want both her parents, along with her large family (some of whom had lots of money) and friends, to see her get hitched.

Instead, Erika ran off to Las Vegas and married BJ at the Silver Bell Wedding Chapel in Clark County. The Reverend David King, a retired minister, oversaw the five-minute ceremony. When they returned, Erika transferred all her classes to Virginia Beach, Virginia, and moved off campus and into where BJ was stationed with the SEALs in North Carolina. Soon after that, the navy sent BJ to Arkansas until January 2000, so they hadn’t really lived together until later. When they did start actually living together, BJ began to notice that the woman he had married on a whim, essentially, was not the woman he was now living with.

In his absence, another person had emerged.

“She worried,” BJ later said in court. “She had obsessive compulsive disorders and anxiety problems.”

And it started to drive him crazy.

Later, when friends looked at the guy she had actually chosen, they couldn’t believe it. Erika was not into the “rough and tough” guys, said a friend. Back in high school, she was more of the type to go after the nerdy guys who fit with her more conservative nature. A man like BJ—gruff, strong, quiet, intense, and into all things military, obviously not cut from the same cloth—was a strange choice for a mate.

But then again, as Kristin Heinbaugh stood and spoke to Erika in the mall that afternoon, it hit her that she really didn’t know Erika anymore. She hadn’t hung out with her for years. People change. Sometimes for the better.

Sometimes for the worse.

Erika was a woman now. She was no longer that basketball star kid everyone talked about and Kristin had played with.

“Married,” Erika said to Kristin that day in the mall after Kristin asked what she had been up to.

Erika stuck out her hand to show off the wedding band.

Kristin couldn’t believe it. How come she hadn’t heard about the wedding? No notice in the newspaper?

Surprised, Kristin asked, “Married?”

“Yeah, on a dare,” Erika responded, laughing, watching BJ out of the corner of her eye as he sauntered around the mall by himself.

“He dared you to run away and get married?”

“Yes.”

“Where’d you two meet?”

“At a party.”

As strange as all this may have sounded to Kristin, Erika had gone as far as to bring BJ home once after they had gotten married, but she did not tell her parents what she had gone and done. It was only the second time Mitch and Cookie had ever met BJ. It wasn’t until months later that Erika made the announcement. Shortly afterward, Mitch and Cookie put up the money to buy Erika her own business: a one-stop shop for all things associated with creating a scrapbook. The store, located in that same Altoona mall where she ran into Kristin that day, opened April 2001. There was talk about Erika opening the store in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where she and BJ first lived after getting married (and Erika had gone to college). But after spending some time in the area and scoping it out, Erika and BJ found other scrapbooking stores already up and running.

“So they came back here,” Mitch explained to this author, “and found no other store . . . here and decided to open. [It was] nice to have her close [to] home, certainly.”

Regarding a later assumption that Mitch fronted the money to Erika in order to keep her close to him and Cookie, so he could keep an eye on her, he said, “[It’s] possible that I influenced that decision.”

It wasn’t a conscious decision on his part, in other words, or some sort of devious plan to keep his grown daughter near home, Mitch insisted. It was more of, “What father wouldn’t want his children near him?”

For BJ, it was a move he needed to make for Erika’s sake, he later explained. After being discharged from the navy under serious charges, and a slew of rather odd circumstances that he and Erika had found themselves in with the navy, Mitch financed a “two-month trip” for him and Erika to South America—a trip Erika later admitted to police that had been fueled by her growing addiction, at the time, to Xanax and Valium, which she and BJ had bought by the drawerful down in South America and smuggled back home. When they returned in late 2000 from that trip, Erika demanded they move to Altoona and, moreover, open a business together, so she could be with BJ 24/7.

BJ wanted to get a job outside the home, he claimed.

“But if I was to leave the house eight hours a day,” he said later, “either somewhere where she couldn’t be close by, she would have panic attacks.” The only thing that would solve the problem, BJ explained, was if they worked together every day.