True Crime Campfire - For the Thrill of It: Killer Couple BJ and Erika Sifrit, Pt 1

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

In May of 2002, a couple on vacation went missing from the beach town of Ocean City Maryland…and what began as a missing persons investigation soon morphed into one of the most bizarre, most disturbing double murder cases in the area’s history. The killers’ names weren’t a mystery for long. They were a young married couple with their whole lives ahead of them. The puzzle was their motivation to brutally kill two total strangers, while on a beach vacation. Before they met and married, these two seemed to have their lives on track. He was a rising star in the Navy. She was a straitlaced, high-achieving former college basketball queen with dreams of becoming a lawyer. But when they got together, it was like ammonia and bleach—a toxic cloud that would envelop everyone around them. Including two innocent people who didn’t yet know they existed. Join us for part 1 of this horror movie come to life. Sources:Cruel Death by M. William PhelpsA&E's "American Justice," episode "Thrill Kill Couple"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In May of 2002, a couple on vacation went missing from the beach town of Ocean City, Maryland. And what began as a missing person's investigation soon morphed into what was. one of the most bizarre, most disturbing double murder cases in the area's history. The killer's names weren't a mystery for long.

They were a young married couple with their whole lives ahead of them. The puzzle was their motivation to brutally kill two total strangers while on a beach vacation. Before they met and married, these two seemed to have their lives on track. He was a rising star in the Navy. She was a straight-laced, high-achieving, former college basketball queen with dreams of becoming a lawyer. But when they got together, it was like ammonia and bleach, a toxic cloud that would envelope everyone around them, including two innocent people who didn't yet know they existed. This is for the thrill of it, killer couple, BJ and Erica Seifrit.

So, Koeh. For this one, we're in the touristy beach paradise of Ocean City, Maryland, May 31st, 2002. It was a little after midnight when police got a call about a silent burglar alarm going off at a Hooters restaurant on the strip. Nothing to get too excited about. A lot of times these calls ended up being false alarms or just a couple of teenagers playing a prank. But when the officers rolled up on the scene, they caught their thieves red-handed, walked right up on a couple of young 20-somethings, a man and a woman, carrying piles of. hooters merch out of the restaurant gift shop and loading it into the back of a jeep. Good job, guys. Real subtle. I can see y'all got a real ninja thing going on. When Officer Freddie Howard hopped out of his squad car and was like, hey folks, what's you doing?

The male half of the couple tried to talk his way out of it. Like, okay, okay, you got us. Why don't we just put all this stuff back and call it a night? But Officer Howard was, unsurprisingly, not into that idea. And within a minute or two, he and his partner had the two Hooters enthusiasts handcuffed and sitting on the curb. They were a married couple, BJ and Erica Cyfert, and already the two patrol cops were starting to suspect there was something off about them. When they frisked them before plopping him down on the curb to search the Jeep, the officers had found weapons. A loaded Sig-Sour handgun shoved into the waistband of BJ's pants, plus a shoulder holster with two clips of ammo and a buckknife and handgun on Erica. There was a third gun in the center console of the Jeep, a 45, also loaded. And under the 45 was a lockpick kit, two ski masks and a pair of gloves.

There were some flex cuffs in the backseat, too. These people were armed to the teeth, carrying burglary tools and masks. Clearly, these two were into some shady shit. While BJ sat casually with his hands cuffed behind his back, looking like a guy who'd been to this rodeo before, Erica was starting to lose her shit a little bit. She looked like she was probably high, and she was crying and fidgeting. Officer, she said to one of the cops, I have anxiety problems.

I need my medication. Can you get it out of my purse? It's on the front seat of the Jeep. Well, a cop is not usually going to pass on a chance for permission to look in a suspect's purse, so he went and got it out of the Jeep. And as he dug around in the bag, looking for a prescription bottle, he found four spent 357 shell casings and a pair of IDs. One for a Joshua Ford and one for a genie Crutchley. Those names tickled something at the back of his brain,

and as he continued to root through the purse, he found more. Social Security cards in both of the names, a gem membership card for Joshua Ford, and a silver ring with a tiny fleck of red that looked suspiciously like blood. The investigator stared at the picture on the gem membership card, and finally, it clicked. Oh, my God. He reached for his radio.

I need the captain here, he told Dispatch, right now. We might have something on that missing couple. Josh Ford and Jeannie Crutchley. A happy couple, very much in love and with lots of family and friends who love them too. They'd come to Ocean City for the Memorial Day weekend, just like thousands of other tourists. And then they hadn't shown up to work on the Tuesday after the holiday. Their car was still parked at the Atlantis where they'd been staying, and their room looked like they'd just stepped out for a quick dinner.

Their families and friends had spent the past few days in hell, waiting for news, their minds twisting into all kinds of awful possibilities. And the Ocean City PD had sent a be on the lookout to all their patrol officers with a missing persons flyer. We have to give a shout out to Sergeant Hugh being here because if he hadn't spotted those IDs and remembered the names, we might not be sitting here talking about this right now and no one would have gotten justice. So good on you, Sergeant Bean. As officers rushed their suspects back to the police station for questioning, more patrols hauled ass over to the place where the cyphrates were staying, the rainbow condominiums. The flex cuffs and that spot that looked like blood were making everybody very nervous.

What if these two had Josh Ford and Jeannie Cretley held captive? Guns drawn, the investigators burst into the fancy penthouse condo the cyphers were staying in. And everything seemed pretty quiet. They went room to room. upstairs and down, clearing the place. It was a little bit of a letdown. Nothing seemed out of place. The only weird thing at first was the big igloo cooler on the floor of one room.

When they glanced inside it, expecting to see melted ice and beer, they saw a pair of ginormous six-foot snakes coiled up in there. The Cyphrit's pets, who I'm sure were sweet babies and deserved much better than these two doorknobs. Absolutely. We'll learn more about the snakes in a little bit. So that was a bit odd, not illegal, just odd. I know snakes generally don't need a lot of room, but don't they need like a heat lamp? Like a good environment? I don't know.

But then, just as they were about to leave, one of the investigators spotted two spent bullets on the coffee table, all mangled up for making contact with something. And then they saw something that made their blood freeze. Next to the bullets was a stack of photographs, and on top of the pile was a picture of Josh Ford. and Jeannie Crutchley, smiling and holding up drinks. Ugh. Time for a search warrant. Back at the police station, detectives Rick Morrick and Scott Bernal were getting two very different responses from Erica and BJ.

BJ, who by now they knew was a former Navy SEAL, was basically just chilling and giving them nothing but name rank and serial number. When they pressed him, he just said, talk to my wife. She knows what's going on. Okay. Erica, on the other hand, was a ball of nerves. First, she denied even knowing Josh and Jeannie. Well, why do you have their IDs in your purse, then?

My husband must have found them or something, and put them in there. Uh-huh. That sounds legit. Yeah, I know my husband's always just putting stuff in my purse without me knowing about it. Good Lord. When there's an active missing person's investigation, the main goal is to find the missing people alive. And at this stage, that's what the detectives were really hoping for. They pressed Erica.

look, we found their picture in your condo. We know you know them, and you need to tell us where they are right now. Later, Detective Bernal told the TV show American Justice, quote, it was like pulling teeth with this girl. She didn't give you anything until she thought you had something or you knew it already. Finally, Erica admitted that she knew Josh and Jeannie and that they had been to the condo, but she wouldn't say when they were there or why. When Detective Bernal asked her to put a percentage on the likelihood that Josh and Jeannie were still alive, Erica said, 50-50.

Huh? What does that mean? As the detectives tried every tactic they could think of to get Erica to cough up the truth, CSIs descended on the condo where she and BJ, and the snakes, had been staying for the past week. Very quickly, they could tell that something very, very bad had happened there. For one thing, they noted, that the bathroom door seemed to have been completely replaced, switched out for a new one that didn't quite match the other doors in the apartment and freshly painted. In a

utility room, they found a bunch of home repair stuff, what the cipherets must have used to replace and paint the bathroom door and a ton of cleaning supplies. Drain cleaner, stuff like that. And they found a monster stash of drugs, speed and Xanax pills they'd later discover that the

cyphlets had bought down in Chile and smuggled back home. and inside the bathroom signs of murder were everywhere on the wall they found a drop of blood still tacky and dripping down toward the floor when they ripped out the vanity they found

more blood that had seeped in underneath the tile grout was stained dark brown with it there were smears all down the side of the vanity clear signs of a struggle and in the tub drain this is so awful a piece of bloody human scalp

with dark hair still attached There was more blood, hair, and human tissue stopping up the lint trap in the dryer, and a big dark stain on the mattress in the main bedroom. What the hell happened in this place? And why? And most importantly, where were Joshua and Jeannie? But let's put a pin in that for a few minutes. Who are BJ and Erica Seifred and what brought them to this moment, sitting in separate interrogation rooms under suspicion of murder? Nobody in either of their lives would ever have predicted this in a million years. Erica especially. She grew up Erica Grace, the only child in a wealthy family in Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania. By almost all accounts, her parents, Mitch and Cookie, pretty much centered their entire lives around her,

gave her everything any kid could want, and supported her in everything she wanted to do. But interestingly enough, Erica doesn't seem to see it that way. She told crime writer M. William Phelps that she'd grown up really jealous of her parents' tight relationship with each other. My father lived for my mom, she said. They had a close relationship. I always felt like a third wheel. Now, granted, we weren't there, so we can't really speak to whether this is true or not.

But based on how Erica is with her husband later, I'm guessing that those feelings were definitely real. Even if they weren't really justified or rational. I mean, it seems weird to be mad that your parents are in love with each other, right? But whether it was because of Erica's jealousy of her parents, relationship or her dad Mitch's tendency to put a lot of pressure on her to be the best at everything, Erica developed a psyche that was wound up tighter and a pissed off rattlesnake. Erica was a great student, the type to get mad if somebody asked to copy her homework. Nerd.

But her main thing was basketball. She was great at it, a star on her high school team. Her dad was so committed to making sure she got as much playing time as possible that he actually picked up the entire family and moved him to a different. town, just so she could go to a school where the coach would give her what Mitch wanted. This pissed off a lot of the other players and their parents, according to a former teammate, and I bet it did. But no doubt about it, Erica was obsessed with being the best at her sport. Mitch hired her a private coach, and she'd spent hours and hours and hours drilling,

getting her moves perfect. Now, some people would call that dedication. Others would call it obsession and a desperate fear of not measuring up. Either way, it's a good recipe for getting burned out and injured. Absolutely. Oh, yeah. It sounds like Erica struggled with anxiety in one form or another pretty much her whole life. She eventually developed some symptoms of OCD, like checking and rechecking door locks and oven knobs before she could leave the house. Yeah, been there, done that, bought the cognitive behavior therapy.

Oof, yeah. I used to have to take pictures of the stove before I left the house. I've left work before because I was like, I think I left the stove on, even if I have hadn't cooked that day. Oh my God, that's really, I never thought of taking pictures. Well, see, we didn't have smartphones back then, though, when I was going through the worst of this. But that would have really saved me a lot of, yeah, it's great.

Yeah, my therapist suggested it. I was like, huh, great, going to do that. That is very smart, yeah. I think a lot of talented people have been in a situation where you're a big fish and a small pond in high school. Then you get to college and you're not quite so special anymore. That's what happened to Erica. don't get me wrong. She was a very talented basketball player. It's just that at college, she wasn't

the only one or the best one. And for somebody wound as tight as Erica, that's going to be a problem. Listen, I've played sports all my life. I've known Erica's all over. And the minute that they are not the best player on the field, on the court, you know, on the track, it, they kind of have to have a meltdown. Yeah. So her anxiety started to ramp up. It came out in various ways, the little ritual, and eventually the drugs. Erica was a fan of Xanax in particular, and she liked two snort it. Not the prescribed method, obviously.

She liked Speed 2, a fedra, those yellow jacket things you can get at the vitamin store. Lots of controversy around those. And then there was the guy she dated in college before she met BJ. Erica got obsessive about him, fast, and as it would with most men,

it scared him right off. He told Erica she was coming on too strong for him. He wasn't ready for anything this serious and he broke it off. Erica did not take it well. She flipped out in front of him and a bunch of other people and started repeatedly banging her forehead into a wall. Oh my God. Erica wanted what she wanted. A friend later told crime writer M. William Phelps and our good friend, um one. We love him. Um one. Yeah, I call him M. because of the M. William. His book is terrific. It's called Cruel Death. And you should definitely read it. Yes.

Her friends were getting increasingly disturbed by her behavior. She seemed reckless. At one point, Erica went down to the beach for a weekend with some friends, and one of them was sexually assaulted by a man they met there. It was horrible, but when Erica told her other friends about it, she said, I guess that'll teach her to get into a car with a strange man. Not a trace of empathy. Yikes.

What a peach, right? She met BJ Seifred the summer before her senior year in college. Some of her friends have said publicly that this was a turning point for Erica, that before she met B.J, she had dreams and goals like going to law school. But after she met him, they went down the drain. But you get a slightly different picture from Emily and Phelps' book. To me, it seems like Erica was already starting to lose her grip, and B.J. just added gas to the fire. Yeah. Who knows where the truth is, somewhere in the middle, maybe.

But it definitely seems like the two of them were a match made in hell. B.J. grew up in Texas and a close-knit middle-class family. He has a sister. He's tight with his parents. When Erica met him, he was already a Navy seal and a rock star at it. Top of his class, all that. And for once, this is true. Like, he was genuinely in the military. This is not a, this is not a lie. Yeah, he wasn't lying. Yeah, I was shocked when I heard this story. I was like, wait, I'm waiting for the reveal that he wasn't a seal. No, he really was. That's too funny. You were just expecting it to be made of. Yeah. I can see why we've been burned too many times. Too many times. Yeah. Now, you might know, seal training is no joke. That shit is brutal. But BJ excelled at it and everybody figured he was on track for a stellar military career. Much like Erica's friends, BJ's friends have told various interviewers that he was a stand-up dude before he met Erica, shy around women. Never violent, never the type to raise his voice. Yeah, that's that'd mean you can't be a psychopath, y'all.

plenty of dangerous people know how to keep it under wraps when they have to. So I don't buy it for a second that BJ was Mr. Wonderful until Erica came along or vice versa. Okay, they're both assholes and you're going to find that out soon enough. Yeah. So she and BJ met at a party, hit it off, etc. Erica was more interested in a capital R relationship than he was at first. He wanted to concentrate on his Navy SEAL training. But as we've seen, our girl Erica is a determined little gremlin. She kept at him. Eventually, B.J. told her to slow her role a little bit, and he got a taste of the same scary shit she'd thrown at her last boyfriend, started banging her head into the wall in front of B.J. and everybody else at the bar they were drinking at, and somebody

called the cops. Now, for a lot of us, that would have been the end of that, in no uncertain terms, but B.J. kept coming around. My theory is, he realized she had a weak spot he could exploit, and for B.J., that was more attractive than anything else. else she had to offer. They got real codependent real quick. Erica was insanely possessive. BJ had a few close female friends, and if one of them came up to him in a bar to give him like a hug or something, Erica would kirk out in epic fashion. She'd scream at him. Don't you ever, ever touch him again. Don't even look at him. I swear to God, she said, don't even look at him. His friends were not allowed to look at him. Holy shit, get some help. And I guess B.J.

or Beech, as Erica called him, was just like, hell yeah, give me some more of that. Jesus, just like you go out to a bar with your friends and you got to put blinders on like a horse or else she's going to wig out. Did you just touch that girl's hand? She's the bartender, Erica. She was just handing me a beer.

Sounds like fun. But I honestly think he got off on it. BJ was big into loyalty and he had his own very specific definition of that. BJ and Erica just seemed to bring out the recklessness and rebellion in each other. The first example of this might be that in August of 1999, three weeks after they started dating, they flew off to Vegas and got married.

Three weeks. Another one of those where the Brita filter in the fridge is older than the relationship. And yes, we know that's worked out for some of y'all. And I'm genuinely happy for you. That's awesome. But like, in this case, no. Yeah. Yeah, no.

These two saw the communist parades worth of red flags about each other. and thought it was just out there celebrating their love. Erica and Beech didn't tell anybody about this, of course, and when their friends and families finally found out, their reactions were pretty predictable. Especially when Erica told them she'd married the guy on a dare. I shit you not. He dared it.

He dared me. What was I supposed to do? Say no. Marry me. I bet you won't. Exactly. That's literally what she told us. Like, eh, it was a dare. One of Erica's friends was a little disturbed when she ran into Erica and BJ at the mall one afternoon and saw how skinny Erica had gotten, how different she looked. She was always real kind of preppy and, you know, like high achiever, high school girl, like, you know, wealthy family.

And now she was dressing really different and she had tattoos for the first time. She'd never been into like bad boys. And here was this dude who like, like, like, like, Like, you'll see pictures of BJ. Like, I don't have to explain it. You'll see what I mean. And when Erica introduced BJ and the friend tried to make conversation, BJ just, like, barely nodded to her and then just walked off. Just totally uninterested, totally rude.

It gave Erica's friend a bad feeling. And there were plenty of reasons for bad feelings, despite BJ's Navy SEAL credentials and all. I'd say he had a dark side, but I feel like BJ's pretty much just all dark side. once you scratch the surface just a little. For one thing, his belief system was pure garbage. He had a big old swastika tattoo on one peck, copied after the dude in the movie American History X.

Fucking nerd. He liked Hitler. Liked him so much that when he and Erica adopted a couple of big six-foot pet snakes, they named one of them after the furor. Named the other one, HIV, by the way. Ooh, so edgy guys. We're all really impressed. I feel like Varg Vekernus would, like,

like that. I was just thinking it. It's like it's like fuck Nazi summer. Like fuck off Nazi summer. We're going hard on the Nazis this summer. I'm here for it. I'm here for it. Instead of hot girl summer, it's like kick a Nazi dumb summer. Punch a Nazi summer. Here's my thing. Like edgy people like this almost never have personalities or talents of their own. Like perpetual class clowns even after the final bell is wrong. Yeah. They had a pet crocodile too, by the way. I'm assuming it must have been a baby, but I think there are like some small species of crocodile. Anyway, they're huge assholes. They should not have had that. No. And BJ liked thrills. He loved baiting cops into high-speed chases. You know, just a fun,

innocent little hobby like you do. Scared the shit out of his friends a few times with his drive-in, and they could see the effect it had on him whenever he did it. It was just pure adrenaline high. He was happier than they'd ever seen him flying down the road at 110-mine hours per hour with the cop flying after him. He loved to outrun him. Falls on the way, campers, and I don't know about you, but it always seems like I'm twice as busy then. And if your schedules as hectic as mine, you need some healthy, convenient meal options, right? We've got you covered. America's number one ready-to-eat meal kit gets you fueled up fast with dietitian-approved

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That's code TCC50 at FactorMeals.com for 50% off. And look, you might feel bad for Erica sometimes when we get to the way B.J. treated her. And I get that. But just in case you're tempted to cut her too much slack, keep this in mind. Later, when a detective asked her about B.J.'s swastika tattoo, this is what she said. Thanks to M. William Phelps for the quote. I read him Hitler's biography. We both agree with Hitler's beliefs. So, yeah. This girly pop is reading Hitler's bio to her shit-stained husband before bed every night. How cozy. And he didn't make her do that.

She said she in Beage both agreed with Hitler's beliefs. So basically what I'm saying here, folks, and forgive me for getting a little philosophical on you here, is fuck this done. bitch. Yeah, I mean, you know, my husband reads me Terry Pratchett books every night. This is just warped. A couple months into the marriage, there was already trouble in paradise. BJ cheated on Erica, and she found out about it. And in true BJ fashion, he didn't apologize or beg for forgiveness.

He was just kind of like, yeah, that happened. Whatevs? Don't let it bother you. But as you can imagine, it did bother Erica, just a little bit. She'd already elevated wild-eyed bunny-boiling possessiveness to an art form, and this did not help. She got to the point where she could hardly stand to let BJ out of her sight. One time, he was 10 minutes late coming home because he and one of his seal friends were looking at the friend's new gun, and Erica threw a fit like a pissed-off three-year-old, through frozen pizzas all over the kitchen,

screaming, where were you? Where were you? Ten minutes late. Yikes. Yeah, I mean, God, is 10 minutes even enough time to cheat? Like, I guess you could do a quick little stand-up slam-bam in the supply closet or something, but it's not going to be much fun for crying out loud, 10 minutes. Calm down. And after a while, Erica's need to be all up in BJ's grill at all times,

started to put his military career in danger. Now, up to this point, BJ had been an absolute rising star with the Navy SEALs. But when you're in that light of work, sometimes you're in that light of work, sometimes you have to be gone from your family for a while, and you can't tell them where you're going. Erica found this unacceptable. And she'd throw such an insane fit every time it happened that eventually she and BJ developed a special code language so he could let her know where he was stationed on covert missions, where he was supposed to keep it secret.

Yeah. Not a great way to protect our national security, dipshit. One time, while BJ was on a training mission and Alaska, Erica flew out there to see him. BJ snuck her into his room, and BJ was a corpseman, so he had a medical bag in his room that had some serious drugs in it, including morphine. And when they caught him and Erica in there together, that medical bag was sitting right out where it wasn't supposed to be.

I suspect he could have gotten into mega trouble right then and there, but probably because BJ was such a respected seal, he just got told off by his superiors and warned not to do this dumb shit again. So Erica put up with BJ's military career for about a year and change, but after a while her separation anxiety or separation panic, you might even call it, was getting to be way too much for both of them. So in the summer of 2000, in a stunning display of codependency so toxic it could have doubled as a weapon of mass destruction, they came up with a plan to get BJ kicked out of the seals. Now understand what I'm saying to you here. not a plan to get him out of the military through the proper channels, a plan specifically to get him kicked out,

because that would get him out quicker. Erica had ants in her pants to start a scrapbooking shop, and she wanted, needed, old beege at her side. Who better to help stalker moms pick out fancy paper and stickers than a Navy seal with a Hitler fetish and his unhinged insanely jealous wife? Great plan, sis. Whether BJ was all in on this little,

caper or secretly resentful of it, he definitely gave it 100%. One day, he just walked off the base without leave, a big illegal deal. And when his sergeant confronted him about it the next day, B.J. looked him dead in the face and yelled, fuck you! Another time, he bowed up on the same sergeant, getting up in his face like he wanted to fight him, saying shit like, ah, you're all talk and no show. And then he just walked off base again, met up with Erica outside, and went God knows where until the next morning, at which time he whipped out his cell phone on base, which you're not

supposed to do. When a superior officer told him to put it away, he busted out the trusty old fuck you again. Damn, son. Not the way you're supposed to act in an elite branch of the military. And it got even worse. Another time, BJ refused to stop for the Marines at the gate when he left the base for an errand. He just hauled ass right past him as fast as he could floor it. The dudes at the gate had to hurl themselves out of the way to avoid getting turned into roadkill. B.J. ended up in the brig. While he was in there, B.J.'s mom flew out to help Erica hire him an attorney. According to M. William Phelps, these two ladies got into a bit of a scrap. B.J.'s Mom felt, correctly, that Erica was the one landing him in all this trouble with the seals, and now Erica

was trying to boss her mom-in-law around about how to deal with the situation. B.J.'s mama was not happy, and she let Erica know it. And Erica responded like any calm, rational person would. She pulled a gun on BJ's mother. Poor woman had to lock herself in the guest room and call the cops. I have no idea what came of that, but holy shit. So, anyway, Erica and BJ's shenanigans got them exactly what they wanted in the end. Court-martial and dishonorable discharge. Congrats, I guess. And I think this story is crucial. It's actually one of the reasons I decided to make this a two-part episode, just so I could get into the details of this. Because one of the big issues in this case is how involved was Erica in these murders?

Did BJ just scare her into it? Was she afraid of him? And I think that this story shows two things. One, that they're both capable of staggeringly fucked up judgment. And two, that Erica was very capable of leading BJ around by the nose when she wanted to. By all accounts, BJ loved being a Navy SEAL was a big part of his identity. It was where all his friends were. He'd wanted to do it since he was a kid. So for him to give that up to appease his wife's insecurities, that's a big deal to me. And don't misunderstand what I'm saying, okay? I don't think he did it in any kind of selfless way. I think he was addicted to Erica, just like she was addicted to him, just in a different way. I think he got off on how obsessed she was with him. I think she was feeding his drive to chase after the

darkness because he knew she was willing to go there with him. And that was intoxicating. I think at the end of the day, it was more tempting to him than the seals. It offered more of what he was craving. And there were hints, even before this, about what that was. Some of his Navy SEAL friends have talked about how BJ really loved talking about how he'd get away with murder. Grusome stuff, laying down a plastic tarp, cutting up the body, stuff that's going to seem a lot like foreshadowing once we get to the end of this story. After BJ's dishonorable discharge, he and Erica moved back to Pennsylvania and Erica's parents ponied up the cash for the scrapbooking store. Mitch and Cookie had a bad feeling

about BJ from day one, but they wanted to set their daughter and her new hubs up for success. It went about as well as you'd expect, which is to say it didn't do great. I mean, it's going to be a struggle to make a scrapbooking store a success anyway, but Erica and BJ weren't natural business people. Erica did work hard at it, but BJ mostly just hung around the place and scared off customers. Sometimes he'd fall asleep on the floor. Oh, great. That's just what you want to see when you come in for some like scrapbooking materials. Is it like giant tattooed Navy seal of sleeping on the floor? Probably reeking of alcohol. Great job. They were drinking a lot in their off hours. Collecting exotic reptiles, including the crocodile,

a girl they named Alabama. They loved watching movies like natural-born killers and true romance about Bonnie and Clyde-style couples. But their marriage was starting to hit the skids. BJ knew about Erica's OCD, obviously, and he'd need to let her all the time about it. Like, they'd be at the store, and he'd just lean over all casual and say, Hey, did you leave the door unlocked? I think you might have. I think the oven might be on.

Erica would freak out and have to go home and check. or call Mitch and make him do it. Her dad eventually just started lying to her and saying he checked. He knew he didn't need to. It was just BJ torturing her for fun. And he started putting her down all the time about her looks, making fun of her curly hair, calling her fat ass, which if you've ever seen pictures of Erica is just beyond bizarre.

Erica said later that she thought he was trying to make her hate herself so she'd think no other men would want her. Yep. He cheated on her again at some point too, which hit her so hard she started seeing a psychiatrist. Erica had various ways of coping with her anxiety. Xanax was a big one. Mitch and Cookie's wedding present to Erica and BJ,

once she bothered to tell them they'd actually gotten married, was a trip to Chile. I'm assuming they didn't know the main reason Erica and her hubs were so keen to go down there, to buy Xanax in bulk and smuggle it back to the States. She was starting stuff like her plane was going down on a daily basis. She was also obsessed with the... luxury shopping. She loved coach bags and diamonds especially, and she liked to carry all her fanciest jewelry around with her in her favorite coach purse, which would stress me the hell out,

but whatever. It's also very like toddler-esque. Have you ever met a toddler with a purse and they just like have all their favorite things in it? Yeah, for sure. You know what I mean? Like that's exactly what it's like, it's like a Barbie and like a teddy bag. Yeah, I think she is actually really immature, so that tracks. And like, what if you left it somewhere? I know. I lost my wallet for 15 minutes yesterday. I was driving all over, all over Eden trying to figure out what to do. One of Erica's biggest obsessions, for some reason, was Hooters merch. Now, for our campers outside the U.S., Hooters is a restaurant chain that sells beer and chicken wings

and hires voluptuous ladies to serve them in tight t-shirts and short shorts. A restaurant train, if you will. Good times. Yeah. The wings are actually pretty good. I hate to say that. No, it's true. They have good fries too.

Most Hooters'es have a gift shop attached where you can buy t-shirts, beer mugs, keychains, whatever, with the Hooters logo on them. And Erica collected the shit in bulk. I'm not sure when the turning point came from watching movies about criminal couples to becoming one themselves. But at some point, in the midst of all this, trying to keep the shop afloat, dealing with BJ's cheating and Erica's freakouts, our dynamic duo started committing burglaries together. Maybe it was meant to be a bonding experience, a sort of gangster marriage retreat for the two of them or something. I don't know.

But what I do know is that Altoona, Pennsylvania started seeing a whole rash of sort of weird break-ins. A vitamin store here, a sports supply store there, and hooters. Lots and lots of hooters. The stuff stolen would be strange, not high dollar stuff, more like trinkets. Yellowjackets, speed pills, hooters, t-shirts, stuff like that. BJ was an expert lockpick, and he'd break into the place and stand lookout

while Erica slipped in and grabbed the stuff. They'd bought walkie-talkies just for the purpose. They had code words. It is good meant the coast was clear. That's such a weird one. It is good. One night, they did two of these in the same night. They called them Bionese.

Like their initials? God, I fucking hate them. I didn't even notice that. Breaking and entering. B.J. and Erica. Yeah. It's... B&E. You know that's what it was. They're so stupid. Also, be more imaginative, imaginative on code words. It is good. Like, oh, it's all good. No. Like, not even, it's good. It is good. Like, flying half a lumps means the coast is clear. Like, what? Exactly. I know. It's a bit. They're terrible. I mean, look at what they named their

stakes for God's sakes. These aren't creative people. Now, at first, Erica was just kind of going along with it for BJ's sake. She'd always had a tendency to do that, even back in high school. She wouldn't be the one to suggest skipping class, but if her friends pressured her to do it, she'd join in. She had a hard time saying no. So that's probably what this was at first. But after a while, even Erica admits she got a major rush from stealing. The threat of being caught and the not being, the thrill of getting away with it, selling the stuff on eBay for 100% profit, money she could then use to buy more coach bags and jewelry and pills. Eventually, Erica was all in. And it wasn't just businesses they were interested in burgling. Later, after the disappearances of Joshua Ford and Jeannie Crutchley

in Ocean City, investigators went through Erica's scrapbooks, and they found one series of picks that confused them at first. It was just a bunch of pictures of the inside of somebody's house, not Erica and BJ's place. In one picture, Erica had taken a mirror selfie of herself, grinning and sitting on the toilet in the bathroom. The rest of the picks were just rooms, empty of people. As the investigators flipped through them, it finally dawned on them what they were looking at. Erica was casing this place,

taking pictures of stuff she and BJ could steal. And lo and behold, they eventually found the guy who owned the house in the pictures, and he had quite a story to tell. Erica and BJ had met him out party in one night and gone back to his place to play pool and drink. the guy later realized that while B.J. kept him busy at the pool table, Erica disappeared for a while. That's when she must have taken the pictures. Later that same night, the stude had caught B.J. and Erica red-handed, trying to pick his front door lock. He threatened them with the gun and told him to get the fuck out of there, and they did. B.J. tried to play it off, like, oh, we just left something here and we were going to get it and leave. And our method of doing that is to pick your lock while you're sleeping. But of course, the guy who owned the house knew exactly. what was going on here. They were trying to break in and steal shit while he was home. So God knows what would have happened if he hadn't caught him at it and scared him off.

Creepy. And a sign, I think, that their need for thrills was escalating. But at the same time, Erica wasn't really happy. She got off on the burglaries, don't get me wrong, but she wasn't feeling as connected to her man as she wanted to. She didn't trust him not to cheat on her, and it was driving her anxiety through the roof. But then BJ did something that Erica never would have expected. Now content warning on this next park, so I know it's hard for some people to hear about reproductive troubles, okay? So if that's you, you might want to skip the next minute or so. One night, BJ sat her down and said, hey, let's have a kid. I want you to get pregnant. She couldn't believe it. It didn't really seem like him, but she was excited. She'd been feeling

restless lately, despite how much fun she was having with the Bonnie and Clyde stuff. She wanted a deeper connection with B.J. She wanted more out of life. This could be exactly what she needed. So they tried. And it didn't take long, not even a month. Erica was excited to show B.J. her positive pregnancy test, and B.J. seemed over the moon, too. She started to feel calmer, more comfortable in her own skin. She daydreamed a lot about being a mom. Started kind of nesting around the apartment, planning out the baby's room and all that stuff. But then, one night, just a couple of weeks past her first trimester, B.J came home late with some of his seal friends. He was drunk and in a mood, angry. Erica was like, hey, what's wrong? I don't want any kids, B.J. blurted out. You actually thought I wanted a kid? I don't want no kid. Get rid of it. Erica was stunned. She thought he was happy about the baby. The last thing she wanted was to terminate the pregnancy. She cried, tried pleading

with him, but B.J.'s eyes went dark. You're going to get rid of it, he said, or I'm going to dig it out of you. Oh, my God. And the next day, he drove her to the clinic. She cried all the way back home, but BJ was pleased. Remember how we said BJ had his own definition of loyalty? Well, this was his way of testing Erica, as he told her. How far would she go for him?

He needed to know that. Now he did. He seemed happy. Proud of her. And eventually, Erica managed to convince herself that she was okay with it too, that it bonded them closer together. She'd proven herself to her man. So, yeah. This is the guy all his friend said was a stand-up dude until he met Erica. Right. That said, it's worth noting that there is another version of this story. According to crime writer Emily and Phelps, he spoke to one of

Erica's friends about the pregnancy, and this friend said that Erica just presented it to her like, I was pregnant and I'd been doing so much Coke and Xanax that we decided I should probably get an abortion. The friend said Erica seemed genuine when she said it. She didn't get a sense that there was anything more to the story than that. Which version is the truth? We can't know for sure. I have no doubt B.J. Seifert is an abusive piece of shit. I think he did emotionally abuse Erica,

and I think her anxiety made her a prime candidate for that kind of abuse. Yeah, and y'all know I have nothing but empathy for people in abusive situations because I was in one myself for years. I went through some serious shit. so I get that it wrecks your head. Right, but what it can't do is justify murdering two people. We can't let Erica off the hook in the story, and you'll see that even more in part two. Okay, so by now we've got a guy who's given up his career in the Navy to be with his wife full-time.

We've got a woman who may have terminated a wanted pregnancy to prove her loyalty to her husband. Stakes are high, and they're about to get much higher. After all the burglarizing and marital stress and the business stress and everything, Erica and BJ were starting to feel like they needed a vacation, or maybe a working vacation. Erica's parents owned a luxury condo at the Rainbow Condominiums Complex in Ocean City, Maryland. They could stay there for free, and they wouldn't have to use a credit card or leave any paper trail. They'd be untraceable. Not long before the trip, Memorial Day weekend of 2002, Erica called up her friend Bryant,

tell them about their plans. She says they were planning a specific heist, but she didn't specify what exactly. Later, she told investigators that they were planning to break into as many places in OC as they could. Now, maybe that was the only plan. I don't know. But I do know that they brought zip ties with them, and multiple guns, and a knife. I mean, it seems clear that Erica and B.J.'s need for thrills had been escalating for a while now. I wonder if robbing Hooters gift shops just wasn't cutting it anymore. And I think that thrill was part of what bonded them together, and I think they were addicted to each other,

and that might have been a big part of it too. By the time BJ and Erica loaded up the pet snakes and set off for Ocean City, they'd already proven that they were ride or die for each other. And they were about to prove that they were willing to take that further than anyone would have ever predicted, even in their darkest nightmares. So we're going to leave it there for part one, campers. You know, we'll have part two for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire.

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