Cruel Death

By: M. William Phelps

Narrated by: J. Charles

A life gone murderously wrong...

Erika Sifrit was once a high school basketball star and an honors student. Then she married Navy SEAL Benjamin Sifrit. Some say Erika was abused by "B.J." Some say she pulled his strings. But by the time they reached Ocean City, MD, Erika was packing a gun in her Coach bag and was caught in the grips of a new American death ride...

A trail of blood and body parts...

In the sun-kissed, sea-swept resort town, a loving couple crossed paths with Erika and B.J. Sifrit. Shortly thereafter, Erika was wearing a bloody wedding ring on her necklace, while what remained of two dismembered vacationers was buried in a Delaware landfill, and a modern-day "Bonnie and Clyde" story was being written - a lurid tale of madness, money, sex , and murder...

©2009 M. William Phelps (P)2009 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Well investigated

Some actor impressions irritating but mostly good. Will read author again
This review is stupid but the app won’t let me out until I meet word minimum

I should have listened to the sample

I had no idea that the man I'd seen giving commentary on Forensic Files was a true crime author. So I looked him up and found this book after watching the episode about these murders.I had heard of this case but wanted to do a deeper dive into the facts. The book provided a lot of detail that I was craving regarding the motivation for the crime. I'm only disappointed that a privileged girl and a supposed patriot - a Navy Seal, were able to get away with petty crimes for so long; crimes that other groups/people would never get away with. Thus they were able to graduate to ultimate acts of depravity.

The narrator was over the top - especially when he attempted to change character by adding dialects in a somewhat exaggerated way in order to depict the region where the speaker lived or was raised. I would have appreciated it more if he would have just read the lines straight with a he-said or she-said. I'm not sure if it's technical but his voice had an odd way of dropping to lower frequencies on some sentences to the point where I had to re-listen to swallowed words in order to get what he was saying. Over time, I got used to the reader but it was challenging at first.

Narrator

I generally like this author but this was not his best work. The story has an odd flow. I probably would have finished it but when the narrator did his best Yosemite Sam voice for one of the prosecutors, I was done. Save your credit.

Such Disgusting People

While I listened to the entire book, it wasn’t my fave, for sure.
The characters were pure evil, there was no mystery to any of it. The crimes were senseless. I’ll forget this book by next week.

I usually like this author but...

This story was too over the top for me...and I listen to endless true crime! Too gory and too much needless graphic sex talk read from letters. But the worst thing was the narrator's voices where he tried to be different people. He has a pleasant voice when he is just narrating but when he did other men, they were hokey and sounded like goofy caricatures of men. Kind of like western characters on cartoons. It was so distracting and not befitting of judges or district attorneys. I'm almost done with it but really struggling because the courtroom parts sound absurd.