Free Cruel Death by M. William Phelps Page A

It was one of the hardest things she had ever done. She had taken a life. The baby had been alive that morning, kicking and moving in her womb, and now it was gone. Dead. Just a piece of garbage in some medical disposable waste site. They didn’t even know what it was: boy or girl. And now they never would.
    The abortion issue had never meant much to Erika. Heck, since she’d married BJ—who absolutely disbelieved in and despised God and religion altogether, shunning and exclaiming that Jesus Christ was a fake and a fraud—Erika hadn’t even thought about it much. But here she was, heading home after aborting her child, knowing exactly what all those women before her had gone through. Later, she would get a tattoo of a cross on her stomach to pay homage to the child.
    On the way home from the clinic, Erika later explained to a friend in a letter, she sat with her head down on BJ’s lap and he petted her hair as he drove.
    I was 100% sedated . . . , she wrote.
    “It’s OK now, Lainey,” BJ said. He was rubbing her ears and talking sweetly. “You passed the loyalty test. Everything is going to be OK.” He said he was going to “take care” of her now that she had proven her devotion to him. He had to “make sure” that she would “pass the test” and because she had, she would “be his wife forever.” It was why he had to do it, BJ explained.
    “Everything’s gonna be OK now, Lainey.”
    When he returned home one afternoon shortly after that, BJ saw that Erika had a sad look about her face. She was hurt. How could he be so coldhearted and cruel? What had motivated him to manipulate her to such an extent?
    “Why?” she asked him.
    According to what Erika later recalled, BJ said, “I never wanted a kid to begin with, Lainey. I just wanted to see how far you would go for me.”
    From BJ’s perspective, Erika had perhaps passed the ultimate test. He knew now that he could trust her. He could ask of her the most intimate, the most personal, and the most horrible of things to do, and even though she might kick and scream, he understood that she was loyal and would likely do whatever he asked.
     
     
    Now, that’s one story of the abortion. A friend of Erika’s tells a completely different version of this event in Erika’s life.
    BJ had lived in North Carolina with some friends, a SEAL buddy and his wife. For a while, even after they were married, Erika lived with them. But they had, according to the friend, “moved out by this point.... We had heard they were having problems and she had been causing him a lot of problems by then with the military, calling his command and getting in his business.”
    BJ’s SEAL buddy’s wife was pregnant. Erika knocked on the door one day to have a chat with her. She had just been to her therapist, she said, whose office was close by.
    Erika’s pupils were so dilated, the friend recalled, you could barely see the color of her eyes.
    “I just wanted you to know that I was pregnant and we (meaning she and BJ) decided that I should get an abortion. He’s been doing so much coke (cocaine) and I’ve been popping so many pills, it was better this way.... It probably wouldn’t be safe for me to have a baby.” She even said she’d just discussed it with her therapist, and the doctor agreed.
    “Well,” the friend said, “you did the right thing. Don’t feel bad about it.”
    Was this Erika covering for her husband’s craziness? Her friend didn’t think so. Erika seemed fairly sincere that day.
    “The only people that truly know what happened are them.”

17
    “911 . . . ?”
    If what Erika later said is true, sometime around 2:30 A.M ., Joshua, Geney, Erika, and BJ walked along the beach up to the Rainbow Condominium and entered room 1101, BJ and Erika’s spacious, elegant flat, after stopping at the Atlantis, where Geney and Joshua were staying.
    When they first got inside, Erika later explained, Geney and Joshua were overwhelmed by how nice the place