Friends, family in dogged search for presumed N.J. homicide victim

Barbara Kellam crosses through a field of knee-high weeds and towering power lines in Sicklerville, still wearing the pink scrubs from her overnight shift as a nurse as she searches for sand and water.

She calls a psychic, a Haitian priest, and puts him on speaker phone.

Kellam didn't believe much in psychic powers until her cousin Erica Crosby, a mother of two, disappeared on New Year's Eve, the black dress she had bought online and was supposed to wear never removed from the box.

Now - with Crosby's husband, Kyle, accused of killing her, but authorities unable to find the Mount Laurel woman's body - Kellam will take any clues she can find.

"I don't see water," Kellam, 34, tells the priest, whom she described as the husband of a fellow nurse.

"There's got to be water," he replies, envisioning the location of Crosby's body. He says he believes the body was chopped up, something a mysterious caller Saturday also suggested. The woman caller said she felt Crosby's body was put through a woodchipper.

"I always see leaves, sand, water," the priest tells Kellam. "A black plastic bag."

Kellam hollers to five others, sifting through the weeds nearby. "Could you all see sand?" No, they answer.

The tedious and, at times, agonizing search for Erica Crosby's body has become an obsession for a small group of her family and friends.

For the last month, twice a week, up to 15 of them have waded through ice-encrusted creeks, shined flashlights into murky drain holes, and scoured woods in Camden, Gloucester, and Burlington Counties.

Occasionally they find something.

Last week, searching a Williamstown quarry that Kyle Crosby allegedly frequented as a teenager, they discovered a Victoria's Secret sandal, size 6, which they said matched Erica Crosby's feet. They also found a small bone.

While encouraging the searchers, Kellam said, the Burlington County Prosecutor's Office has remained quiet about its investigation. It has not said how it determined Erica Crosby, 26, is dead. Family members suspect that Kyle Crosby, 28, who is being held on $1.2 million bail, has stayed silent with the authorities.

So Kellam and the others have become detectives.

A Gloucester Township police officer in an SUV drives slowly toward Kellam and the group.

"Here come the cops," Steve Good, 25, whose wife, Melissa, was friends with Erica Crosby, tells them.

The field they are searching is part of Shenandoah Village, a 55-and-older community in Sicklerville of nearly identical one-story homes. The group is here because the priest repeatedly mentioned Skyline Drive, which crosses through the village - and happens to be a mile from the home of Kyle Crosby's parents.

Officer Bill Westphal lowers his driver's-side window. Police, he says, had received a call about trespassers.

Kellam mentions Kyle Crosby's name, and Westphal, who has investigated a few homicides of his own, quickly recognizes it.

"He's still in jail, and he's not talking?" Westphal asks.

"He's not talking," Kellam says.

"It's hard," Erica Crosby's sister, Janiya Crippen, 22, tells Westphal. "People are not motivated to help us."

"You guys got any questions?" Westphal asks. "I know this area really well."

They tell him about the sand and water. He recommends they search near pine trees - "Wherever there's pine trees, there's sand" - and Kellam thanks him.

"I'd be doing the same thing if it was my family," Westphal says.

Kellam jumps into her white Nissan Armada, where the bone and sandal she found last week sit in a plastic bag. She and the group drive to another part of the field.

Here, they find their sand: a trail with tire marks.

They get out and walk, soon pushing past branches toward an icy creek.

Steve Good, wearing rain boots, steps into the knee-high water and wiggles his left leg to see if he can feel anything. He pulls out a piece of green fence. Then he kicks a few sheets of ice floating around a large tire.

It's another dead end.

Good grips a tree trunk and pulls himself out, slipping momentarily.

He and the others walk back onto the trail, briefly peering into a storm-water drain, before entering another part of the woods.

Kellam is back on speaker phone with the priest.

"He said keep looking," she tells the group. "He's going to go to Erica's house and try to connect with her spirit."

Erica and Kyle Crosby lived in the 5000 block of Aberdeen Drive in Mount Laurel with their daughter, Kay'lee, now 4 months old, and a 7-year-old girl, Amirra Baker, whom Erica Crosby had from a previous relationship.

Kellam said Amirra told the family a vicious argument flared the day her mother disappeared. Kellam assumes it was about drugs.

Authorities have said Kyle Crosby used the painkiller Percocet daily and has previous arrests for drug possession, burglary, and aggravated assault. He and Erica, a nursing assistant who worked as a home health aide, met online two years ago.

On the trail, Melissa Good, 25, yells to Kellam.

They have found a hole, the dirt fresh.

All they need is a shovel.

Kellam walks toward the hole, the pine trees soaring above her into the cloudy sky.

She begins talking about her tough-minded cousin, whom a friend would later describe as "only 5-foot-2, but got a mouth that's 6-foot-2" - the type of person who would put up a fight.

Erica Crosby, Kellam recalls, liked to shop. She owned more than 50 pairs of shoes.

"That girl, she would wear heels to everything," Kellam says.

"And she would rap," Kellam says. Gospel songs in particular.

Kellam reaches the hole, where a large, broken branch sits on top of brown leaves.

"It's real soft, and it's got tunnels," says Dominique Cooper, 26, of Lindenwold.

Kellam, thinking of Kyle Crosby, muses, "How can you be so coldhearted?"

Steve Good then pushes a shovel into the ground with his heel. Kellam and the others gather around him in silence, watching closely.

Good pulls up dirt. Then more dirt.

Another bust.

"Every time we don't find her, it's just another failed day," Crippen, Erica Crosby's sister, says. "I feel like we're failing."

On Friday, as if replaying a script, they will search again.