A pair of killers were reportedly on the prowl to kill again following the 2002 slayings of two tourists in Maryland.
Married couple Erika and Benjamin “BJ” Sifrit were accused of luring Joshua Ford and Martha “Geney” Crutchley into their rented Ocean City penthouse after a night of partying at the bar during Memorial Day weekend. The victims were later reported missing, and after a series of events, their partial, dismembered remains were discovered in a Delaware landfill, according to Washington D.C.’s WTOP News.
“This was nothing more than a thrill-killing,” Judge Paul Weinstein told BJ Sifrit during sentencing. “You’re a butcher. You cut these people for no good reason.”
The double murder was featured in two original Oxygen series: Season 6, Episode 11 of Snapped and Season 11, Episode 2, of Snapped: Killer Couples, both of which are now available to watch on Oxygen and Peacock.
Who was Erika Sifrit?
Erika Sifrit (née Grace), who was 24 when the murders took place, came from a wealthy family in the Altoona, Pennsylvania area. Her father was a well-known contractor, and her mother was a homemaker.
In high school, Erika Grace excelled in varsity basketball and rode on a partial athletic scholarship to Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
As covered in Snapped, her family even had an indoor basketball court constructed inside their home to aid in her athletic pursuits.
However, those closest to Erika Grace claimed she struggled to make friends and lived with severe anxiety and O.C.D. (obsessive compulsive disorder). Ocean City Police Detective Scott Bernal cited an “inferiority complex” when speaking to Snapped: Killer Couples producers.
In her senior year, before graduating with a history degree in 2001, Erika Grace met BJ Sifrit at a bar. It was a whirlwind romance, and within weeks of meeting, the pair married.
They would later refer to themselves as Bonnie and Clyde, according to The Washington Post.
Who was Benjamin “BJ” Sifrit?
BJ Sifrit — who, like his wife, was 24 when the murders took place — was born in Iowa and frequently moved around the Midwest and Texas because of his father’s job as a business executive, per The Washington Post. He enrolled in the U.S. Navy, having spent his high school years as an avid swimmer and lifeguard, rising to the top of his class as a Navy SEAL, as previously reported.
However, despite his military achievements, BJ Sifrit was also known for his temper. According to The Washington Post, he was kicked out of the SEALs program due to multiple traffic violations and other misconduct offenses in Virginia Beach and, at some point, he had a large swastika tattooed onto his chest.
As detailed in Snapped: Killer Couples, he was still in the military when meeting Erika Grace at a bar. After only three weeks of dating, they headed to Las Vegas and eloped.
Erika Sifrit battled with insecurity and followed her new husband on deployment. Detectives said she was “very jealous” and, against the Navy’s rules, she followed her new groom to Alaska, where he was stationed for cold-weather training.
Erika Sifrit’s move earned BJ Sifrit probationary status, and he was transferred to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. But, according to those speaking on the Oxygen original series, he struggled to balance his military career with his new wife’s neediness, ultimately choosing to drop out of the Navy to join Erika Sifrit in the Altoona area.
Benjamin and Erika Sifrit’s life as a married couple
In Pennsylvania, Erika Sifrit’s parents helped them open a scrapbooking hobby shop called Memory Laine. It supported the wife’s impressive collection of Hooters restaurant-themed memorabilia, something others called “a fetish,” as well as their profitable eBay sales of collectibles.
“I’d never seen anything like it,” Det. Bernal told producers of Erika Sifrit’s reported Hooters obsession.
After marriage, Erika Sifrit bought her husband a handful of pet cobra snakes, which they named Bonnie, Clyde, Hitler, and H.I.V., part of a growing interest in disturbing preoccupations. As their romance continued, the pair found a common bond in substance abuse. Witnesses later testified they were heavy drinkers and snorted anti-anxiety medication, according to The Washington Post.
For Memorial Day weekend in 2002, they decided to hit the beach resort town of Ocean City on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, just south of the Delaware state border, host to many nightlife visitors escaping in the summertime.
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Who were victims Joshua Ford and Martha Crutchley?
Joshua Ford was a 32-year-old insurance underwriter from Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Norfolk State University in Virginia before doing a stint in the U.S. Army, according to The Washington Post. Martha Crutchley, nearly 20 years Ford’s senior, came from Cunningham, Kansas, and also worked in insurance out of Chantilly, Virginia in Fairfax County.
Crutchley and Ford met at a Christmas party while she was on a business trip in Boston. Both had been married once before, and each one had a child.
The couple lived with one another in Fairfax County for about one year before heading to the popular tourist destination.
Interestingly, Ford’s niece, 23-year-old mother Kelly Ford, became a high-profile case after her headless body was discovered in a shallow grave on Cape Cod, according to The Portsmouth Herald. As of the writing of this article, her murder remains unsolved.
Mark Ford, who was Kelly Ford’s father and Joshua Ford’s brother, told the outlet after the Ocean City murders, “We push forward. We’re a strong family.”
The Sifrits tied to Crutchley and Ford’s disappearances through ID cards
On Saturday, May 25, 2002, Crutchley and Ford met the Sifrits on a bus headed to the nightclub Seacrets. According to the OC Today-Dispatch, the four partied at the bar before the Sifrits invited the Fairfax County residents back to their rented penthouse at the Rainbow Condominium Complex, staying until the early morning hours of May 26.
Loved ones reported Crutchley and Ford missing to Virginia authorities after Crutchley missed a work meeting that Tuesday. Soon, Ocean City officials were tasked with searching for the couple, finding their belongings in their oceanfront rental unit, but there was no sign of the couple.
Missing person flyers were posted around the boardwalk town, and, according to the Today-Dispatch, the Sifrits continued their vacation as though nothing happened, reportedly “unfazed” when seeing the posters throughout the week.
Still, nothing connected the Sifrits to the missing couple until early on Friday, May 31, 2002, when Erika and BJ Sifrit were arrested for trying to reportedly steal $5,000 worth of items — including cigarettes and Hooters T-shirts — from a Hooters restaurant in Ocean City, according to The Washington Post. As told in Snapped: Killer Couples, they frequently broke into Hooters restaurants and other businesses to steal items for their Pennsylvania-based business.
Police in Pennsylvania previously suspected them of a string of burglaries where about $50,000 worth of dietary supplements and beauty supplies had been stolen, according to The Washington Post.
But on the attempted Ocean City burglary, authorities found Erika Sifrit in possession of a knife and .357 Magnum snub-nosed revolver, and BJ Sifrit in possession of a knife and 9mm handgun. At the scene, Erika Sifrit began suffering what appeared to be a panic attack, requesting police go through her purse to get her anti-anxiety medication.
Inside the handbag, officers found four spent shell casings, one live round, and the identification cards of Crutchley and Ford.
A later search of their rented penthouse yielded photographs belonging to the missing couple and a key to their oceanfront condo. Furthermore, a bullet on a table inside the penthouse contained Joshua Ford’s blood and tissue.
The Sifrits murdered Crutchley and Ford after a miscommunication
The Sifrits were detained on burglary charges and questioned about the couple’s disappearance. Although the husband refused to cooperate with investigators, Erika Sifrit admitted that they invited Crutchley and Ford to the penthouse before she misplaced her handbag.
The Sifrits accused their guests of theft, prompting BJ Sifrit to draw a gun and threaten both, according to Erika Sifrit’s statements. Under the threat of death, Crutchley and Ford were forced to strip naked to prove they had nothing to do with the purported theft before running away and locking themselves in the bathroom.
BJ Sifrit kicked the door down and fatally shot each victim, Erika Sifrit told detectives.
Erika Sifrit claimed her husband then dismembered the bodies and placed the victims’ parts in various containers, garbage bags, and military bags. Together, they discarded the parts in a dumpster behind a Food Lion grocery store in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, about 30 miles north of Ocean City, according to The Washington Post.
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Parts of the bodies, including Crutchley’s leg and Ford’s torso, were discovered on June 3, 2002 at a Sussex County landfill, per the Ocean City outlet.
Shortly after the murders, but before the Sifrits’ attempted burglary arrest, Erika and BJ went to great lengths to cover up their crimes. On Thursday, May 30, 2002, they visited a local Home Depot and purchased a new door to replace the one BJ reportedly broke down at the penthouse, according to the Today-Dispatch.
For her cooperation, Erika Sifrit was granted immunity from murder charges if she complied with a lie detector test and led authorities to where they dumped the body parts. However, during a polygraph test prep on July 24, 2002, she confessed to having more of a role as previously led on, according to the Today-Dispatch. New revelations included her stabbing Crutchley after Crutchley had been shot.
Murder charges were then back on the table.
BJ and Erika Sifrit convicted following 2003 trial
Both were convicted in connection with the murders, but not to everyone’s satisfaction.
BJ Sifrit was tried first, beginning on March 31, 2003. But since Joshua Ford’s partial remains did not provide a cause of death, and because the .357 bullets containing the victim’s DNA actually belonged to Erika Sifrit, BJ Sifrit was acquitted of charges related to Ford. For Crutchley’s death, however, he was connected because the missing woman’s body had not been connected with Erika Sifrit’s gun.
A jury found him guilty of first- and second-degree murder in connection with Crutchley’s homicide, and he was sentenced to 38 years behind bars, as previously reported by Oxygen.com.
At sentencing, Judge Paul Weinstein said it was “one of the few instances” in his 20 years that he disagreed with the verdict, according to WTOP News. The judge said he’d written a note to oppose BJ Sifrit’s parole, should he live to see it.
During Erika Sifrit’s trial, prosecutors provided photos of the memorabilia collector wearing Joshua Ford’s ring around her neck, which helped a jury convict her of first-degree murder for Ford’s homicide and second-degree murder for Crutchley’s homicide.
Part of Erika Sifrit’s trial included the testimony of Melissa A. Seling, according to The Washington Post, who claimed that on May 29, 2002 — three to four days after the murders — she and a friend met the Sifrits at an Ocean City bar. As with the Crutchley-Ford double homicide, they were invited back to the Sifrits’ penthouse as guests and were soon accused of stealing Erika Sifrit’s purse.
Again, BJ Sifrit drew a gun and demanded answers, but in Seling’s case, the friends were able to make it out alive.
“He became very, very angry,” Seling testified, according to The Washington Post. “He said … if we ripped him off like the other people who were here, he would do the same thing to us that he did to them — referring to the bullet hole in the door.”
Ultimately, Erika Sifrit was sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years.
Where are the Sifrits now?
BJ Sifrit became eligible for parole after serving half of his sentence in 2017 but elected to postpone the hearing, according to The Maryland Coast Dispatch. He went before a parole board in 2022 and was denied, continuing his sentence at the Roxbury Correctional Institute in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Erika Sifrit continues to serve her life sentence at the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women in Jessup, Maryland, according to government records reviewed by Oxygen.com.
In 2010, BJ Sifrit filed for divorce on the grounds that his wife was a “convicted felon,” according to The Baltimore Sun.
Learn more by watching the cases on Snapped and Snapped: Killer Couples, available to watch now on Oxygen and stream on Peacock.
