Please Never Let the Sifrits Out

Deliverance by the Sea
(“Dirty  Little Secret,” Forensic Files)

Before going into this week’s recap, I’d like to share some exciting news — Bizarrepedia included True Crime Truant on its “Best True Crime Blogs and Websites” list.

Thanks much to the editors at the popular site for taking the time to check out my blog.

Erika and B.J. Sifrit

And speaking of all things bizarre, this week’s featured Forensic Files episode involves two people who put the “tan” in “satanic.”

Dirty Little Secret” tells the story of a double homicide that happened after two middle-class couples met by chance at a bar in seaside getaway Ocean City, Maryland, on May 25, 2002.

Friendly fiends. The four hit it off so well that they went to a club together and then headed back to one couple’s penthouse condo to have more drinks and enjoy the hot tub.

Martha “Genie” Crutchley and her boyfriend, Joshua Ford, had no idea that Erika and Benjamin Sifrit were ghouls.

The friendly, respectable-seeming Sifrits had no criminal records and owned the Memory Laine scrapbooking store in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Erika, who grew up in Pennsylvania, had been a good student and basketball player. Benjamin Sifrit, known as B.J., was a former Navy Seal who graduated first in his class.

Unsuspecting victims. But the sun-loving pair were so horrible I almost don’t want to write about them — except to let the public know which prison they call home and whether or not they have any chance of getting out.

So I’ll make the recap quick (last time I said that, the post ended up 1,228 words long, but this time I really mean it):

Shortly after Genie, a 51-year-old insurance executive, and Joshua, a 32-year-old mortgage broker, got back to the Sifrit’s place in the Rainbow condo complex, their new friends set in motion a thrill kill game so awful that they make Leopold and Loeb seem like humanitarians.

Breastaurant heist. The Sifrits, both 24, terrorized, humiliated, and shot and stabbed to death the innocent couple from Fairfax, Virginia. Then they disposed of their bodies in a macabre fashion.

Fortunately, Genie’s and Joshua’s coworkers quickly reported them missing and detectives found witnesses who recalled seeing them and the Sifrits together on a shuttle bus to the night spot Seacrets.

(During his Forensic Files interview, Detective Scott Bernal described Seacrets as “one of the hottest night clubs in Ocean City.” I didn’t realize there were hot clubs in Maryland.)

The case broke wide open when a silent alarm summoned local police to a Hooters gift shop (yeah, I know). They found Erika and B.J. loading stolen Hooters merchandise into their Jeep.

Mementos. Detectives discovered Erika had the missing couple’s drivers licenses in her purse and found a photo of her wearing Josh’s ring on a chain around her neck — trophies from the kills.

Erika ended up making a deal with prosecutors after investigators built a solid case against the Sifrits, including ballistic (hollow point bullets) and blood evidence in their rented condo.

Victims Genie Crutchley and Joshua Ford

But the agreement fell apartment when it became apparent that Erika participated in the killings to a greater degree than she originally claimed.

She ended up getting the longer sentence, life plus 20 years; the jury convicted her of one count of first-degree and one count of second-degree murder.

B.J. received 38 years after a jury found him guilty of one count of second-degree murder.

By the way, the Sifrits turned against each other at the trial.

So, do these two eastern seaboard versions of Deliverance hillbillies have any chance of tasting salt water and freedom again?

For Erika, probably not.

Drab accommodations. In 2014, U.S. District Court Judge Richard D. Bennett denied her appeal — the last of many she filed over the years — in which she claimed she was mentally ill at the time of the murders, her husband dominated her, and her lawyer, Arch Tuminelli, made errors during the trial.

The judge noted that her “claims are exhausted,” indicating legal avenues for exoneration have closed, according to a Maryland Coastal Dispatch story. (Warning: The article contains some gruesome details I could have lived without knowing.)

Erika, now 39, resides at Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in the town of Jessup.

Her husband, who occupies a cell at Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown, Maryland, has a much better chance of exiting prison on his two feet.

The homicides took place in a Rainbow condo

Stay gone. A judge gave him the 38-year sentence after lead prosecutor Joel Todd said that B.J. Sifrit “needs to be warehoused because he cannot be rehabilitated.” But the former military man is eligible for parole in 2021, when he’ll be in his mid-40s.

Let’s hope that’s enough time for friends and family members of the victims to plan a letter-writing campaign to keep B.J. Sifrit and his swastika tattoo behind razor wire for as long as possible — which in this case means 2040.

That’s all for this week’s post. Until next week, cheers. RR

John List: House-Poor Killer

Mass Murderer, Overextended Homeowner
(“The List Murders,” Forensic Files)

Pictures of Breeze Knoll frighten me not only because John List murdered his family there in 1971 but also because, well, think of the electric bill.

Scene of the crime: Breeze Knoll in Westfield, N.J.

I’d hate to see the heating tab for the 19-room mansion that occupied 431 Hillside Avenue in Westfield, New Jersey. Factor in regular maintenance like painting plus the HVAC crises liable to befall a Victorian-era structure, and you’re asking for some none-too-stately financial drama.

According to a letter List left in the house along with the five bodies, he turned to homicide in part to prevent the embarrassment that losing the home would cause his family.

Way roomy. This week’s post will take a look at how List’s predicament compares with the kind of woe that affects homeowners in the new millennium — and particularly after the subprime mortgage crisis.

First, a recap of the Forensic Files episode “The List Murders” with some additional research from the internet.

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John and Helen List, both 46, lived with their three teenage children and John’s mother, Alma, in a cavernous home in the affluent Union County town.

The family attended the Redeemer Lutheran Church, where John taught Sunday school.

Too much drama. Although Helen reportedly suffered from the effects of syphilis contracted from her previous husband, the family appeared stable and high-functioning to their friends and neighbors.

The Lists in a widely circulated photo

What no one knew was that John, an accountant, had trouble holding onto a job. At the time of the murder, John was unemployed. He left the house every morning, pretending to go to work when he was really whiling away time reading or sleeping in the train station.

There were more problems. John felt that his popular, socially active teenagers were neglecting their spiritual needs. It especially bothered him that his eldest, 16-year-old Patricia, was interested in becoming an actress. He thought it improper in the eyes of God.

He worried that she and the rest of the family wouldn’t get into heaven.

Undiscovered jackpot? His anxiety grew with his inability to keep up with mortgage payments and other bills. He was behind by $11,000 on the house and had been secretly dipping into his mother’s accounts.

The family had bought the house for around $50,000 in 1965. It meant living above their means, and List eventually had to take out a second mortgage.

By 1971, List seemed poised for a total financial collapse and didn’t want his wife and kids to bear the shame of going on public assistance.

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A couple of sources claim that the ornate house contained a skylight made of Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass valuable enough to bail List out of his financial problems. But in a pre-Antiques Roadshow world, he didn’t think to get an appraisal and try to sell the glass — if it really existed, that is.

Redefining eerie. By killing his family, he hoped to spare them shame, save their souls, and guarantee they could all spend the afterlife together. He chose not to commit suicide because he considered it a sin.

How do we know all this?

List’s five-page letter, addressed to his pastor, explained everything, including the way he murdered his family.

He waited until his wife and children arrived home one by one, crept up and shot them in the head at close range, and dragged their bodies into the ballroom. His 84-year-old mother, Alma, who lived in an upstairs apartment in the house, received a gunshot, too.

List lowered the temperature in the house, cued up some organ music on the intercom system, and told his kids’ teachers that the family had gone on a trip to North Carolina.

After cashing in his mother’s savings bonds and pocketing the money, he skipped town. He took the name Robert Clark, eventually got an accounting job, and remarried.

Bust the case. Meanwhile, back at Breeze Knoll, investigators found the bodies after neighbors summoned police because they hadn’t seen anyone enter or leave the house in a month.

The authorities couldn’t find List despite a nationally publicized manhunt led by the FBI; the fugitive had given himself too generous a head start.

Oh, and there was no internet back then.

The case turned cold until 18 years later, when then-new TV show America’s Most Wanted commissioned forensic artist Frank Bender to sculpt a bust that “aged” List. Host John Walsh, whose own son had been a murder victim, asked viewers to call in tips.

The effort was 100 percent successful.

Colorado resident Wanda Flanery contacted police about a former neighbor named Bob Clark who had recently moved away to Richmond, Virginia. He resembled the sculpture.

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Spooky landmark. List’s subsequent FBI arrest at his accounting office made for scintillating news around the globe and electrified America’s Most Wanted ratings.

At the time, I remember my roommate coming home and asking, “Did you hear they caught John List?” She’d grown up in Westfield, where kids made the List property their No. 1 spooky dare long after the house mysteriously burned down in 1972.

A jury convicted John List on five counts of first-degree murder in 1990. Superior Court Judge William L’E. Wertheimer gave him life without parole.

List died in 2008, a one-of-a-kind killer who disposed of his family amid a dilemma that seems fairly prosaic in light of the last decade or so.

Westfield, where the average house costs $1,057,871 (Coldwell Banker)

Internet research turned up a number of statistics that surely would have provided List with some consolation if he faced his same problems post-2000.

According to Mortgage Bankers Association data cited by the FDIC, lenders foreclose on one in every 200 U.S. homes and one child in every classroom belongs to a family in jeopardy of losing a home because of difficulty meeting mortgage payments.

A 2005 Freddie Mac-Roper poll also flagged by the FDIC concluded that “more than 6 in 10 homeowners delinquent in their mortgage payments are not aware of services that mortgage lenders can offer to individuals having trouble with their mortgage.”

Hardly atypical. The poll also determined that “homeowners fail to contact their lender because they are embarrassed, don’t believe the lender can help, and/or believe it would cause them to lose their home more quickly.”

Any prospective John Lists of the new millennium surely could see that their problems were shared by countless homeowners around the U.S. and the world.

Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research found that during the subprime-mortgage-induced Great Recession, 8 million Americans lost their jobs and each year lenders foreclosed on 4 million homes.

Lack of faith. If List simply admitted to his family and creditors and the IRS that he was in crisis, a solution that didn’t involve homicide and pseudonyms could have been hammered out.

List after his arrest

Perhaps if List knew back in 1971 that, 45 years in the future, an American who filed for bankruptcy protection four times would nonetheless be elected leader of the free world, he could have sucked it up, started over, and eventually made the List family great again.

That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR


Watch the episode on YouTube or Tubi

P.S. If anyone knows what year Breeze Knoll was built, please advise.

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To order the book:
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Target
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Sarah Johnson, a Killer at 16

A Girl Craving Freedom Ends up in Captivity
(“Disrobed,” Forensic Files)

Sarah Johnson

Note: Updated with information from 2020.

“Disrobed” tells the story of a teenager who shot her mother and father after they forbid her to see a guy who sounded at best like a waste of time and at worst like a life ruiner.

Bourgeois privilege? Since a jury convicted Sarah Marie Johnson at age 18 and sent her to prison for life for a crime she committed at 16, an epilogue to her story seems in order.

The justice system tends to show mercy to middle-class convicts who committed their crimes — no matter how awful — as minors.

A fair amount has happened since “Disrobed first aired in 2008. But before getting into that, here’s a recap of the episode plus some information from internet research.

Diane Johnson, a 52-year-old tax collector, and her husband, Alan, a 46-year-old landscaper, provided a lovely home for Sarah and her older half-brother, Matt, in Bellevue, a city on the outskirts of Sun Valley, Idaho.

Diane and Alan Johnson

By 2003, Sarah had taken up with a 19-year-old named Bruno Santos. He was a high school dropout suspected of gang membership and drug activity.

He also had a cocky personality. Sarah’s parents found him none-too-endearing.

Happy ending. But Sarah had no intention of letting go of Santos and tried the usual teenage tricks, like telling mom and dad she was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s when she was really with him.

When they found out about one such incident, her parents took away her car and threatened to file charges against Santos for statutory rape.

At some point, Sarah decided to quell the controversy by disposing of her parents.

That way, she and Santos could run off and set up their own love-filled affluent household financed by her parents’ $680,000 life insurance payout and the rest of their estate.

Dressed to kill. According to Disrobed, Sarah was a fan of true crime entertainment. Perhaps she felt she had picked up enough know-how to pull off a double homicide with impunity.

First, Sarah stole a .264 caliber rifle from the guesthouse on her family’s property. The Johnsons rented out the structure to Mel Speegle, an electrician who was out of town at the time of the crime on September 2, 2003.

That morning, Sarah pulled a shower cap over her blond hair, put a pink plush bathrobe on backward, crept into her sleeping mother’s room, and shot her in the head at close range.

The Johnsons’ house

Fall planting. Her father ran out of the shower to see what happened. Sarah shot him in the chest.

To suggest gang activity, she placed knives at the foot of her parents’ bed and in her brother’s room. (Matt Johnson was away at the University of Idaho in Moscow at the time.)

She put the rifle’s scope on Speegle’s bed and left the rest of it at the crime scene.

Then she made a beeline for a neighbor’s house and said her parents had been shot by an unseen intruder.

Investigators were probably disappointed to rule out their first suspect, Bruno Santos.

He was arrogant and disrespectful, but they couldn’t connect any of the crime scene evidence to him or his DNA.

Mel Speegle, who Sarah had probably hoped to implicate, gave police a solid alibi.

By this time, Sarah’s lack of sorrow over the tragedy had aroused suspicion.

Bruno Santos, age 19

Evidence galore. Her aunt, Linda Vavold, who appeared on Forensic Files, noted that Sarah seemed more interested in having her fingernails painted than grieving her mother and father’s demise.

And a lot more than innuendo was building up against Sarah. It turned out that she had pretty much left a trail of forensic breadcrumbs for the police to follow.

First, the presence of her mother’s blood and bone fragments on Sarah’s bedroom wall contradicted her story that she was asleep with her door closed when she heard the first shot.

Cap it off. The pink bathrobe that police retrieved from the trash — Sheriff Walt Femling had stopped the garbage truck from picking up the can on the day of the murder — had high-velocity blood splatter from both Diane and Alan Johnson.

Gloves found in the garbage had traces of gun powder residue outside and Sarah’s DNA inside.

Plumbers recovered the shower cap, which Sarah had flushed down the toilet.

As crime scene investigator Rod Englert said during his Forensic Files interview, “The evidence was yelling and screaming.”

Prosecutors charged Sarah with two counts of first-degree murder.

Family affair. At this point, Sarah probably didn’t need any more proof that her fairy tale had gone awry, but she got some anyway: Bruno Santos decided to testify against her in court.

Santos wanted to prove he had nothing to do with the murders.

Sarah’s brother took a turn in the witness chair in the 2005 trial as well, but he didn’t seem to have an agenda.

Matt Johnson said his sister was overdramatic and tended to stretch the truth when it suited her, but he loved her just the same.

Defense lawyer Bob Pangburn uncharitably pointed out that Matt would receive Sarah’s portion of their parents’ insurance money if the jury convicted her.

The prosecution brought in one of Sarah’s cellmates, convicted drug trafficker Malinda Gonzalez, who revealed that, during their jailhouse conversations, Sarah seemed to inadvertently confess.

Aunt no help. As reported by Emanuella Grinberg for Court TV, Gonzalez testified: “One time, she said, ‘When I killed…’ Then she stopped herself and was like, ‘When the killers …'”

Linda Vavold, Diane Johnson’s elder sister, ended up on the prosecution’s side as well. “When we would be discussing Alan and Diane and someone would be upset, [Sarah] would roll her eyes and act disgusted,” Vavold testified.

The five-week trial of the flaxen-haired killer turned into a national sensation. Court TV broadcast the proceedings live from Idaho’s Ada County courthouse.

Sarah received two sentences of life in jail without parole.

Pin it on someone. As far as what’s happening with her today, my initial guess was that Sarah had confessed to the crime already, embraced religion, and was helping inmates in a prison literacy program — and asking the state for mercy since she was young and foolish and evil back in 2003 and regretted her crimes.

Or maybe she would take the Menendez brothers’ route and admit to killing her parents but tell tales about why they deserved it.

Wrong on all counts.

As recently as 2014, Sarah — now 33 years old and prisoner No. 77613 at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center — was claiming someone else killed her parents.

She managed to draw the Idaho Innocence Project into her case. They contended that she had ineffective counsel at the first trial.

Her legal team also brought up the fact that the murder weapon carried someone else’s prints (not Sarah’s or Mel Speegle’s).

BF behind bars. But Speegle said that some prints probably came from a friend who had helped him move his things from his ranch to the Johnson guesthouse in 2002.

The Idaho Supreme Court denied Sarah’s petition in a six-page decision in February 2014.

Sarah Johnson in court circa 2014

Life has been no dream for the motivation for all this misery, either.

Bruno Santos served some jail time related to drug charges around the time of Sarah’s trial in 2005.

Then, in 2010, Blaine County brought him up on new substance-peddling charges, including the sale of a half pound of methamphetamine to an undercover detective.

The following year, he received a 10-year sentence and earned himself a bunk at the Idaho State Correctional Facility.

Santos, who is allegedly in the U.S. illegally, received parole in May 2018 and could face deportation to Mexico — possibly in 2024, which the Idaho Department of Correction lists as his sentence satisfaction date.

Finally, it should be noted that Idaho released an inmate named Sarah Marie Johnson-Ploghoft in 2018, but she’s not the Sarah Johnson who killed her parents.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

 


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