Benjamin and Erica Sifrit were joined together in unholy matrimony, exchanging vows to love, cherish, and murder. Police say the husband and wife were thrill killers in the making, trolling the trendy bars in the vacation hamlet of Ocean City, Maryland to quench their thirst for blood.
“This is a very law-abiding county,” an official remarked. “We don’t have this kind of thing here.”
By all accounts, the 23-year-old couple seemed to be a typical middle-class married pair set to succeed in anything they wanted to do in life. After all, Benjamin was a former Navy SEAL who was number one in his class.
“As a youngster in high school, he won all kinds of awards on the swim team,” a source noted. “And there’s one thing about Ben that rings true when you look at his life, and that’s that whatever Ben put his mind to, he masters.”
Erica graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in history and political science from Mary Washington College, and she was a high school basketball star. Her father even built Erica an indoor basketball court so she could practice anytime she wanted.
“One of the things that Erica used to do was she wouldn’t go in for dinner unless she hit 10 free throws in a row,” an acquaintance recalled. “So, she would push herself. Her father would push her. So, there was this relationship between dad and daughter that Erica was going to be somebody in sports when she got older.”
They met in her senior year of college. Three weeks later, the lovers eloped to Vegas. She was deliriously happy about their quickie wedding, and in her scrapbook, Erica exclaimed, “Best decision I have ever made.” In another excerpt, she wrote, “You are my sunshine.”
Through rose-colored glasses, the newlyweds appeared to be the all-American couple, captured in photos dressed to the nines for a dinner cruise. But dark secrets fueled their marriage. The seemingly upstanding former Navy SEAL had actually been court-martialed for going AWOL and insubordination, his life entering a downward spiral after getting booted out of the military. Erica’s petite size dashed her hoop dreams of turning pro. She opened her own scrapbook store, indulged in prescription drugs, and developed another rather bizarre infatuation.
“Erica develops an obsession with Hooters memorabilia,” an investigator explained. “They both begin to break into Hooters all over the place.”
“I always describe those two as like hypergolic rocket fuel,” an observer noted. “By themselves, they’re no problem. But when you put them together, they explode.”
“They just bang,” another added. “They hit it off. One feeds the other’s ego. And as lovers, non-stop. As friends, they’re inseparable.”
“As drinking buddies, wow, do they party,” a commentator remarked.
Investigative journalist M. William Phelps, the true crime author of Cruel Death, which details the Sifrits’ lives, agreed they were indeed a lethal cocktail.
“As drug buddies, boy, do they start doing some serious drugs,” Phelps said. “And mainly, it’s pills and cocaine. That’s what their love is.”
“She did have a jealous streak when it came to her husband, yes,” a source confirmed. “Very, very possessive.”
The Sifrits were always looking for another thrill to keep the party going. Soon, they were about to up the ante and get their kicks by killing.
“Murder became another drug for them,” Phelps observed. “Because the cocaine, the pills, the drinking, it wasn’t working anymore for them. Even the sex wasn’t working for them.”
The Sifrits went on a week’s oceanside vacation and soon locked in on their prey: insurance executive Martha Jean Crutchley and her boyfriend Joshua Ford, a mortgage banker.
“Joshua is from Boston, a young guy, young 30s, just divorced,” a friend described. “Jeanine is older, early 50s, and they hit it off. And they just, they just loved each other, you know? They weren’t married, but Joshua and Jeanine were living together. They started a home, they were gardening, they were doing everything couples do that are in love.”
Jeanine and Joshua met the Sifrits on the shuttle bus to the popular seaside bar, Seacrets.
“Joshua Ford offered to pay their bus fare because they didn’t have the right change,” an investigator recounted. “And they said, ‘Well, we’ll buy you a drink at Seacrets,’ where they were all going. I think they got together as two couples that met and sort of hit it off.”
Jeanine and Joshua had no clue that they were about to raise a glass and party with two homicidal maniacs.
“And they start to have a party at Seacrets,” a source continued. “They say, ‘You know what? Why don’t you come up to the condo with us? We’ll continue this party after the bar closes. We got a hot tub, we got some weed, we’ll have a couple of drinks, and we’ll get to know each other.'”
“Do you think that there was a promise of sex?” an interviewer asked.
“There was something that lured them there, yeah,” came the reply. “I would think it was sex, yes.”
“And maybe drugs?”
“Yes.”
It was here in this freewheeling party town of Ocean City, Maryland, boasting breathtaking vistas of the Atlantic Ocean, that Erika and Benjamin Sifrit were about to play out their ultimate sick fantasy. The couple zeroed in on Jeanine Crutchley and Joshua Ford at the party bar called Seacrets. The victims were lured back to the Sifrits’ luxury penthouse with promises of a good time.
“It just turned into a disaster,” a commentator noted.
“Benjamin was the stick of dynamite and Erica was the match,” another added.
The raw evil of the Sifrits was about to explode. What followed was a horror show. Music was playing, the drinks were flying, and they were all in the hot tub, having a ball. Then, something happened. Erica got out of the hot tub, went upstairs, and began to scream.
“Where’s my pocketbook?” she shouted. “Somebody took my pocketbook.”
Right away, Benjamin Sifrit got up out of the tub, retrieved his .357 Magnum, and pointed it. He started waving it around, demanding, “Where’s my wife’s pocketbook? Which one of you took it?”
In a twisted move, Erica called 911, claiming Jeanine and Joshua had stolen her purse. The audio captured the voice of a stone-cold killer:
“Lexington 911, do you have an emergency?” the dispatcher asked.
“Yes, I have an emergency at my apartment,” Erica said. “Um, there are people in my house who I don’t know and my purse is suddenly missing and I’m afraid I’m going to have a robbery here.”
“Okay, people in your apartment at this time?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll connect you to the police. Stay on the line.”
“Hey,” Erica muttered aside.
“What?” a voice responded.
“I’m, I’m upstairs in the bedroom where they don’t know,” Erica whispered.
“Okay, I’ll connect you to the police. You can tell them, okay?” the dispatcher instructed.
“Okay.”
The call transferred to the local authorities.
“Lexington City Police.”
“Hello,” Erica said. “There are people in…”
The phone call suddenly cut out before the police could obtain the address, and the officers never responded.
“All they’re doing is messing with these people,” an investigator observed. “That’s what they’re doing. They’re playing a game. It’s another thrill for Ben and Erica.”
Now, the true horror began. Joshua ran into the bathroom with Jeanine and slammed the door shut. But Erica smelled blood. She leaned around from the balcony where she could see the couple cowering through the bathroom window. The Sifrits were a tsunami of evil, and nothing could stop them now.
“Really, Erica and Benjamin at this point have gone out of their minds,” a commentator explained. “They’re locked in this game, this thrill ride that they want to go on, and the two victims in all of this are in the bathroom now. Erica looks in the bathroom to tell Ben when to fire the weapon. Ben fires the weapon and it goes right through Joshua’s head and drops him immediately.”
Ben then kicked in the door. Jeanine Crutchley was crouching under the vanity.
“She’s terrified,” a source said. “Her lover, the man that she lives with, this beautiful person has been shot dead. For what? For nothing.”
Her pleas for mercy were too little, too late. The psycho killers cut her down.
Maryland Deputy State’s Attorney Scott Collins noted that the thrill-kill couple was now facing the task of getting rid of the evidence—two bloody bodies in their penthouse with no place to hide them.
“It’s Memorial Day weekend,” Collins explained. “There’s 100,000 other people in Ocean City. You’re on the top floor of a 20-some story condo and you have two dead bodies. You can’t throw them over your shoulder and take the elevator down to the parking lot.”
The Sifrits came up with a plan to remove their victims piece by piece.
“He had no choice,” an investigator stated. “They had to dismember these bodies to get them out of there.”
“They were literally dismembering these people inside that penthouse condo?” the interviewer asked.
“Yes,” the investigator confirmed.
Ocean City Detectives Brett Case and Richard Mork later visited the high-rise where the Sifrits butchered Jeanine and Joshua.
“What else is eerie about this case?” the interviewer inquired.
“Just the lack of remorse or at least the lack of concern,” Detective Case replied. “That each day for the suspects after the commission of the crime was just another day in their life, happy-go-lucky, smiling, enjoying Ocean City, and going about their business as if nothing ever happened.”
The body parts were placed in garbage bags and carted down to their Jeep Cherokee. They crossed from Maryland into Delaware and disposed of Jeanine and Joshua’s remains in dumpsters, which ultimately wound up in a massive Delaware landfill.
“What do they do next?” the interviewer asked.
“They go out and they play miniature golf,” came the response.
The maniacal couple took a break to smile for a selfie only hours after the slaughter. A close look at the photograph revealed a shocking detail: hanging from the chain around Erica’s neck was Joshua’s ring, still caked in his own blood.
While the Sifrits were snapping selfies around town, friends of Jeanine and Joshua were starting to worry and wonder what had happened to them.
“It wasn’t like them to just vanish,” a friend remarked.
“Not only was it out of character,” another remembered, “as I recall, she had never missed a day of work in 20-some odd years.”
They had vanished, and the cops were frantically trying to find them. The Ocean City Police Department wasted no time printing out flyers and posting them all over the beach town. While law enforcement desperately searched, Erica and Benjamin were busy covering their tracks. Surveillance footage captured Benjamin buying a new bathroom door at Home Depot to replace the one destroyed by a bullet hole. They also grabbed cleaning supplies to scrub away the ocean of blood in the bathroom. However, police say the Sifrits weren’t finished; they were gearing up for another thrill kill.
“After the cleanup was complete,” an investigator revealed, “they actually had another couple that they brought up to the condominium and played the same type of scenario with that couple.”
This second couple, Melissa Seath and Justin Todd Wright, escaped by the skin of their teeth. One possible reason the Sifrits let them leave was simply that they ran out of time and had to return home. Another theory suggests the couple left the premises before things could get completely out of control.
“And it was only by the luck and the grace of God,” a commentator noted, “that the two people that they accosted the second time late in the week were able to get out of there with their lives.”
The Sifrits had pulled off their first thrill kills together. The dismembered bodies had been stuffed in trash bags, their final resting place a garbage deposit miles away. The perpetrators were convinced that cops would never connect them to the disappearance of Jeanine Crutchley and Joshua Ford.
“This is their last, the last time they were seen alive,” an officer said, gesturing to the missing person posters.
If that was not enough, Erica kept a scrapbook of their evil handiwork, boasting that they were the modern-day Bonnie and Clyde while showing off souvenirs of their crimes.
“To scrapbook your life is one thing,” M. William Phelps observed, “but now she wants these victims of murder that she perpetrated to be part of her. She wears a necklace with one of the rings taken from one of the victims. It’s still got blood on it. The knife she used to dismember these people is tucked in her pocket. It still has flesh and blood on it. It’s one of the most horrific crimes I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen everything.”
“They were certain they’d gotten away with it,” an investigator added. “They were certain they got away with murder and they went right back to what they were normally doing, which was petty crimes, if you will, compared to what they had done.”
But it was Erica’s freaky fetish for Hooters memorabilia that ultimately led to their arrest. Just as they were high-tailing it out of town, the couple made one last pit stop to break into a closed Hooters restaurant. They tripped the store’s silent alarm. Police rushed to the scene, believing they had just caught two burglars, not two thrill killers.
Erica’s defense attorney, Arcangelo Tuminelli, noted that after Erica was caught, she panicked at the scene.
“Coming out of Hooters, she became very panicky,” Tuminelli said, “and asked the police officer for some Xanax that she said she needed that was in her pocketbook.”
That specific moment broke the case wide open.
“So, the officers obliged,” a detective explained, “but they’re going to look through the purse first. In doing so, they see five spent rounds of .38 ammunition. And next to that are two identification cards for Virginia driver’s licenses for our two missing people.”
“Your two missing people,” the interviewer repeated. “So, at that point…”
“At that point, the hair stands up on the back of your neck,” the detective recalled. “In the car with the Flexicuffs were gloves and masks. If it wasn’t for that moment he saw those licenses, he remembered the photos, he remembered the lookout, and he knew it was the missing people.”
“And this is Joshua Ford’s ring,” the interviewer noted, looking at evidence photos.
“You can see it in the police photograph of her sitting there on the curb,” a source pointed out. “Is that knife. On her neck is that ring.”
If it had not been for the missing person flyers and a police lookout alert sent out only hours earlier in the day, the Sifrits would have faced only burglary and theft charges. Worse, they would have been free to kill again.
“Do you believe they had an appetite to kill?” the interviewer asked.
“I do,” an investigator replied. “I believe if they weren’t stopped on this one, there were definitely more to come.”
Following their apprehension, Erica attempted to shift the blame entirely.
“Erica had told us, of course, that Benjamin did it,” a detective stated. “And that’s where she came up as the innocent, abused wife with this crazy monster that’s killing and dismembering people.”
In her recorded audio statement to the police, Erica played the role of a frightened witness to the killings:
“Yes, you’re friends,” Erica told the interrogators. “I definitely would not want him to know that I was here talking to you. And if I go up and testify and for some reason you guys don’t get him locked up, my family will end up like Joshua and Jeanine.”
“Dead,” an officer added.
Erica then recounted how she claimed her husband, Benjamin, killed Joshua Ford in their penthouse bathroom.
“He made them strip at gunpoint,” Erica said on the recording, “and I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ I was like, had no idea what’s going on. And he told me that Josh said, ‘I was in the army, you were in the navy, why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?’ And B.J. said that he looked him in the face and he said, ‘See you later.’ He shot him in the head.”
Cops were not buying her tangled tales one bit. They knew she was in the thick of it and was the one conducting the carnage.
“Jeanine had not been shot yet,” Erica continued during the interrogation. “She was just whimpering and she curled up in a ball and he missed her the first time. And the second time he hit her right here.”
For the record, she gestured at her left chest.
“She had curled up behind Joshua’s body,” Erica murmured. “I feel like I’m getting like really panicked.”
“Do you need, do you need to take a break?” the investigator asked.
“Uh-uh, I’m okay,” Erica replied.
“All right.”
“B.J. told me she was just whimpering like a baby,” Erica added.
Erica acted as though she were completely appalled by all the gore.
“What do you see in the bathroom?” the investigator questioned.
“It looks like a battle or film,” Erica described. “There’s blood completely soaked everywhere. There are spots that if you stepped, it would splash. There were puddles of blood.”
She claimed that while Benjamin was butchering the bodies in the tub, she remained downstairs.
“I’m laying downstairs and I’m like curled up on the couch, just petrified,” Erica claimed. “And I hear him say, ‘Come up here.’ I go up there and he’s like, ‘Take my picture.’ And he’s holding their heads.”
“Josh’s head in one hand and Jeanine’s head in the other hand, and he wanted you to take his picture?” the investigator asked.
“Yes,” Erica answered.
“And then what was he wearing?”
“Nothing.”
At their separate trials, each pointed a finger at the other. The disgraced Navy SEAL claimed he was merely napping in their Jeep while the carnage unfolded inside the condominium.
In the end, Erica was sentenced to life plus 20 years. Benjamin was handed a sentence of 38 years because he was never convicted in Joshua’s death, as the jury believed Erica was the one who killed him.
“I think she was, she was the mastermind behind all this,” an attorney reflected. “I think, you know, he was the muscle. He did what she asked and, you know, he took care of business, if you will, but she was, she was the cause of all the drama.”
“I believe Ben and Erica were caught at the beginning of what were going to be probably a serial killing couple,” M. William Phelps concluded.
The Sifrits’ marriage was certainly forged in hell.
“What is your hope for their families?” the interviewer asked a investigator.
“Well, you, you obviously hope that they, they don’t have pain,” the investigator stated. “But, you know, they think about them every day. They have to. I would. So, but you know, and speaking for the dead, it’s, it’s not an easy thing to do. So, we did our best.”
Seven years after their conviction, this killer couple apparently had enough of one another. Benjamin divorced Erica while behind bars. He became eligible for parole in 2021, and Erica will be eligible for parole in 2024.
