Cruel Death by M. William Phelps Read Free Book Online

so he could keep an eye on her, he said, “[It’s] possible that I influenced that decision.”
    It wasn’t a conscious decision on his part, in other words, or some sort of devious plan to keep his grown daughter near home, Mitch insisted. It was more of, “What father wouldn’t want his children near him?”
     
     
    For BJ, it was a move he needed to make for Erika’s sake, he later explained. After being discharged from the navy under serious charges, and a slew of rather odd circumstances that he and Erika had found themselves in with the navy, Mitch financed a “two-month trip” for him and Erika to South America—a trip Erika later admitted to police that had been fueled by her growing addiction, at the time, to Xanax and Valium, which she and BJ had bought by the drawerful down in South America and smuggled back home. When they returned in late 2000 from that trip, Erika demanded they move to Altoona and, moreover, open a business together, so she could be with BJ 24/7.
    BJ wanted to get a job outside the home, he claimed.
    “But if I was to leave the house eight hours a day,” he said later, “either somewhere where she couldn’t be close by, she would have panic attacks.” The only thing that would solve the problem, BJ explained, was if they worked together every day.
    They decided to call the store Memory Laine. It was a play on Erika’s middle name, Elaine, for which one of her nicknames, Lainey, had been designed around (the other being Gracey).
    Memory Laine was perfect. The two of them together all day in the store. What could be better? Husband and wife and their own business.
    BJ later said that it was Mitch who financed the entire store: “I had no money.”
     
     
    There was a day after BJ and Erika had moved into their own apartment just outside Altoona and began running Memory Laine when Mitch asked BJ to go hunting with him. A boys’ weekend in the woods, with campfires and beers and guns. “Testosterone City.” Male bonding. They needed to get to know each other. They hadn’t really talked much. And Erika was so crazy about this guy she had married after knowing him for only a few weeks, Mitch wanted to get to know him. Kind of accept BJ into the family.
    BJ was thrilled. Growing up in Iowa as a young boy, he had hunted with his father in the Midwest. Pennsylvania had some of the best big-game hunting in the region. BJ had already gotten all his gun permits squared away in the state. There was nothing stopping him.
    “No,” Erika said (according to BJ). She was firm.
    “What? Why not?” he asked. “It’s your father.”
    “I don’t want you away from me for that long.”
    “A few days, Erika,” BJ said. “That’s all.”
    “No, no, no.” She was hysterical. Panicking. Crying and yelling.
    “So I never went,” BJ said later.
    If you ask Mitch Grace about this particular event, he recalls the proposed hunting trip a bit differently.
    “I really did not hunt much,” he said later. “They (Erika and BJ) were only here one year . . . and he was sick the whole week before [hunting season] and could not go to work.”
     
     
    As they started living together, Erika and BJ began to learn of each other’s little quirks and habits. Living outside Altoona was the first time, really, that they had stayed in the same home, together, for an extended period of time. Throughout their first few years of being married, before BJ had gotten himself tossed out of the navy, he was always traveling with the SEALs and training in some far-off place. Now they were together.
    BJ soon suggested that Erika get a gun. A Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. It was versatile, easy to load and use, BJ explained. Erika generally kept it in an ankle or waistband holster, maybe in her purse. Maybe she’d put it in the crook of her back down into the crack of her ass, but the point was, BJ said, she always had the gun on her.
    Beyond the gun, it was jewelry, many later said, that excited Erika more than