The Yoga Store Murder: The Shocking True Account of the Lululemon Athletica Killing Mass Market Paperback

by Dan Morse

  As Drewry drove toward the yoga store crime scene, he called his boss, Sergeant Craig Wittenberger, who’d been around almost as long as Drewry. Drewry gave him the initial reports he’d received—two victims found in a store in downtown Bethesda, one killed and the other unconscious and possibly raped—and Drewry and Wittenberger didn’t even have to discuss how the case would unfold. They knew there’d be TV trucks, daily newspaper reports, elected officials asking questions, top brass needing updates.

  Drewry pulled up to the store at 9:25 A.M., seeing yellow crime-scene tape outside the front door. He asked the patrolmen to extend the tape farther out from the store to keep passersby from walking across possible evidence. The expansion pushed into the line of Apple customers, who dutifully rerouted their line to head in the opposite direction from Apple’s front door. Drewry saw no reason to rush in—not before more detectives and crime-scene investigators arrived—and turned his attention to a sergeant on the scene, Evan Thompson, who brought him up to speed. One store employee had been found dead in a rear hallway of the store, and the other had been taken to Suburban Hospital. The responding cops had searched the store, found no suspects, and were guarding the front and back entrances.

  Sergeant Thompson had been inside the store himself, the fourth cop that morning. As he’d waited for the paramedics to arrive, he was able to take five photos of the survivor. He’d also given his digital camera to another officer, who took four photos of the victim in the rear hallway. Thompson now handed the camera to Drewry, who scrolled through the images.

  The surviving victim, a young African American woman, was bound around her ankles and wrists. It appeared the assailants had used plastic zip-ties, which stores and other businesses use to cinch packaging, and cops and soldiers use as handcuffs when they have to make group detentions. The victim wore white footie-style socks stained with blood, black yoga pants that had been torn open at the crotch, and a bright, striped top that looked like a sports bra. Something was twisted around her neck. Several of the images zoomed in on her face, revealing how young she looked—maybe early twenties. Her face was caked with dried blood. On the tile floor next to her head was a white rock about the size of a flattened baseball, which sat in a wide streak of blood.

  Those photos were disturbing enough, but the images of the murder victim in the narrow hallway looked like something out of a horror movie.

  Two walls and a metal bookshelf were heavily spattered with blood, which ran in streaks to the floor. A Caucasian woman lay facedown in the middle of a blood pool so thick that it still had a wet sheen. Beneath her tangled and matted hair was what looked like a wide, open gash in the back of her head. Two ends of a rope extended from under her neck. A red metal toolbox rested on her shoulder. The back of her pants appeared to have been cut open.

  Thompson told Drewry that word was starting to filter back from the hospital. The surviving victim had spoken briefly with an officer there, telling him that two masked men had slipped into the store after closing time the night before, and had attacked her and her coworker.

  Drewry handed the camera back to the sergeant, and turned his attention to the two laypeople who’d been inside the store that morning. He started with Rachel Oertli, the yoga store manager with the orange sneakers. The detective introduced himself and, not wanting anyone to overhear their conversation, suggested they talk in the front seat of his car.

  Rachel told him about the store, part of a nationwide chain. This one had twenty-two employees, and on Friday nights the place closed at 9:00 P.M., after which employees cleaned up and got the store ready for the next day. Drewry asked Rachel who had closed the night before, and wrote down her answer: Brittany Norwood, a twenty-eight-year-old saleswoman, and Jayna Murray, a thirty-year-old supervisor. The first name he’d just heard from the patrol sergeant. She was at the hospital. Therefore, Jayna Murray, Drewry figured, was probably the dead woman in the store.

  Rachel told him that Jayna had called her shortly before 10:00 P.M. from her car. Their conversation had been about a store procedure typical in retail called bag checks, where workers check each other’s bags and purses on the way out to make sure no one was stealing. As Drewry made notes, Rachel said she and Jayna “spoke briefly about suspecting Norwood of putting merchandise in her bag.”

  Drewry wasn’t sure what to make of that. If Jayna and Brittany had gone through the bag checks and left, why had they been found in the store? But Rachel explained that, according to what she’d learned from other workers, Brittany had accidentally left her wallet behind when they’d closed, and called Jayna to let her back into the store. As a supervisor, Jayna had a key. As an entry-level saleswoman, Brittany did not. Drewry asked Rachel for the phone numbers of the other store employees who’d spoken to either Brittany or Jayna the night before. He would talk to them as soon as he could. For now, he didn’t want to overreact to the bag check, not this early in the case, not before they’d even been in the store, and certainly not before they’d had a chance to speak with the survivor.

  Drewry walked Rachel back to her coworkers, who had huddled off to the left, hugging and crying on one another’s shoulders, starting to figure out who was back in that hallway. Drewry could see lives starting to turn upside down, like he had countless times before.

  The detective had barely arrived, and the story of what had happened here was already getting complicated: a series of phone calls that brought the victims back to the store, two masked men, a gruesome murder, a surviving witness at the hospital.

  Next, Drewry spoke with Ryan Haugh, the Apple customer in the red Phillies cap who’d entered the yoga store. “He went in and saw stuff knocked over, blood on the floor and broken glass,” Drewry wrote, summing up what Ryan told him. “He opened the purple door in the rear of the store and saw a body facedown on the floor. There was a girl on the bathroom floor.”

  As the two spoke, more Bethesda shoppers began arriving for the day, people who hadn’t seen the stretcher wheeled out of the yoga store. To them, the police presence and yellow tape meant the possibility of vandalism, at worst a burglary. A woman carrying a cup of coffee approached the tape, casually lifted it, and continued walking toward Drewry. He was startled by her indifferent attitude to the police tape, but ultimately not surprised. He’d long ago concluded that for all their high-powered jobs and world travels, many Bethesda residents were clueless to the evil that humans could unleash on each other—any time, any place.

  “Hey, hey, hey!” the detective said, raising his voice, holding up his hands and directing the woman back outside the yellow tape. “This is a crime scene.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Auntie B and Tia T

  Like so many people in the Washington, D.C. area, the two women found in the yoga store were transplants. Brittany Norwood, the survivor, had grown up in Washington State, just south of Seattle, with eight brothers and sisters. Her mother, Larkita, sixty-one years old, was a homemaker who did part-time advertising work. Her dad, Earl, sixty-five years old, ran a specialized upholstery shop. One of her sisters was a doctor, and three of her brothers were engineers. Brittany was particularly close with her sister Marissa, older by only seventeen months; growing up, they’d shared the same bedroom, the same hairbrush. When both ended up in Washington, D.C., it was only natural for Brittany to rent the basement apartment in the century-old, $555,000 renovated town house owned by Marissa, a business consultant, and her fiancé, an operations research analyst. But Brittany had her own outside door and a roommate she wasn’t particularly close to, so when she hadn’t come home the night before—Friday—it went unnoticed.

  “Good morning! Are you awake?” Marissa had texted Brittany early Saturday morning. She sent another one thirty seconds later, indicating that Brittany’s two young nephews—the sons of their sister Candace, who also lived nearby—had spent the night. One of the boys was eager to see Brittany. “A little person in striped pants is asking for you.” No response. Brittany was probably sleeping. />
  To many people in her life, Brittany was a bubbly and caring presence—a former college soccer star with plans to one day open her own gym. A key first step to that goal was securing a personal-trainer spot at Equinox, the upscale health-club chain. Brittany had impressed the people at the Bethesda location so far, and a key interview was set for that Monday.

  An hour after Marissa sent Brittany the text messages, she tried to call her sister but only got voice mail. Marissa handed the phone to their nephew, who, along with his brother, beamed whenever Brittany picked the two up from elementary school or took them out for pizza. “Call me back, Auntie B,” he said. “I love you. Bye-bye.”

  As the morning progressed, those kinds of calls—greetings of affection, calling to discuss everyday matters—started to give way to calls of growing concern among those who knew both women.

  Phyllis wrapped up the call and walked outside toward her husband, David, who at sixty-eight years old and with two titanium hips still ran oil-drilling projects around the world. He was pulling weeds from their flower garden. The two had married in 1969, and had three kids: thirty-nine-year-old Hugh, who’d spent ten years as a professional triathlete, gone on to law school and the U.S. Army’s JAG Corps, and was now serving as a captain in Iraq; thirty-six-year-old Dirk, who’d competed in rodeo bull-riding as a kid, worked as a pilot, and had two young sons; and thirty-year-old Jayna, the girl who’d tagged along with Hugh and Dirk to Boy Scout campouts led by their dad, the teenager her parents shuttled to dance lessons, and the adult professional and world traveler fluent in Spanish. Jayna was now poised to take the next step in her career, just two months shy of getting two master’s degrees, one in business administration and one in communication from Johns Hopkins University’s campus in Washington, D.C. Like Brittany Norwood, she, too, was adored by her two young nephews, who called her “Tia T,” a name derived from the Spanish word for aunt and the first initial of Jayna’s middle name, Troxel, her grandmother’s maiden name. That afternoon, in fact, David and Phyllis were due at one of the boys’ fourth birthday party.

  Phyllis made her way to the flower garden. She told David about the phone call with Jayna’s boyfriend.

  “Fraser feels that Jayna is missing.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Successful People

  Sergeant Craig Wittenberger, the homicide supervisor whom Detective Jim Drewry had called on his way to the yoga store, had quickly headed to the crime scene himself, calling in more detectives on the way. The sergeant selected “lead detectives” for cases based on a rotating system. On this Saturday, a relative newcomer to the homicide unit, Detective Dimitry Ruvin, thirty-one, was at the front of the queue. He’d only been working homicides for the past thirteen months, but he knew computers and cell-phone technology (an increasingly important skill in homicide work), had seemingly limitless energy, and meshed well with Drewry, whom Wittenberger wanted to keep on the case as well. By 10:15 A.M., Wittenberger, Drewry, and Ruvin were all gathered outside the store. They put together a plan for examining the place, and slipped on rubber gloves and rubber booties that looked like clown shoes. At 10:40 A.M., joined by crime-scene investigator Amanda Kraemer, they walked through the front door.

  The detectives knew how critical the clues in front of them would be. Unlike convenience stores or banks, places where robberies were anticipated, the yoga store didn’t have interior surveillance cameras. Also working against the detectives were the surviving witness’s hazy recollections and the amount of time that had already passed, giving the attackers plenty of time to hit the road, dispose of evidence, or marshal alibis.

  Documenting the crime scene was Ruvin’s job. As new as he was to homicide, however, the detective was certainly no stranger to chaos, having grown up in the nation of Azerbaijan as it broke off from the Soviet Union. Violence there forced his parents, ethnic Russians, to seek political-refugee status in the United States in 1995, and the Ruvins settled outside Baltimore. Dimitry boned up on his English, enrolled in high school and later the University of Maryland’s computer-science program, and secured an internship, designing websites at the prestigious National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda. His parents, who’d been chemical engineers back in the home country, couldn’t have been more proud. As happens a lot in front of computers, though, Ruvin found himself surfing to other sites. He began reading about police work, and thought it sounded exciting. He secured a second internship, at the Montgomery County Police Department, and enjoyed it enough to apply for a slot in the academy. He was an appealing candidate. He seemed eager; his computer skills certainly were in demand; and in a county like Montgomery—peppered with foreign service workers, international economists, and new immigrants—how often did the academy get to produce a cop fluent in English, Russian, and Azeri? Ruvin was accepted right away, went on to patrol, then burglary and robbery investigations, and now, homicides.

  On one of his first murder cases, which he’d worked with Drewry, Ruvin had learned both how critical small details could be and how well he and the older detective worked together. They’d been standing over a corpse of a man who’d been cut and stabbed thirty-six times outside an apartment building in Silver Spring. A lanyard holding a key and three plastic cards rested on the victim’s right ankle. Ruvin figured the lanyard had been pulled from a pocket while the killer rifled through it. Drewry had other thoughts. He bagged the evidence, took it to the victim’s sister, and asked if she’d ever seen it. She had not. Nor did the key fit in the victim’s front-door lock. The detectives started making calls based on the plastic cards on the key-ring—one for a gym membership, one for a bookstore, and another for purchases at CVS drugstores. Within hours, they had their killer, Alexander Chambers, who—during the confusion inherent in violently murdering someone—had managed to leave the lanyard behind. Chambers didn’t say much to detectives when questioned, but Drewry got this out of him: “I just need to pray. Things didn’t go real well.”

  Inside the yoga store, things up front looked largely intact.

  Like Apple customer Ryan Haugh, Ruvin was seeing the inside of a lululemon athletica store for the first time, and he noted the spotlit tables and racks of clothes; the cubbyholes displaying yoga mats; the mannequins dressed in yoga pants, thin tank tops, and, in some cases, running gear. The feel was athletic and high-end. When Ruvin later checked out some of the price tags, he saw just how high-end: $25 for a water bottle, $98 for yoga pants, $148 for a running jacket. There was even a small men’s section, with a pair of $64 shorts.

  He was quickly picking up on the store’s aspirational theme. On one shelf, he saw a series of framed photographs of staff members, with long-term goals well beyond their current jobs spelled out alongside their pictures. Ruvin had spoken minutes earlier with four store employees who had come down to the scene, and although they were rattled and scared, he’d found them poised as well. Now, as Ruvin stood behind the cash registers, he spotted a supply of bright red reusable shopping bags displayed so customers could see them. The bags showed the silhouette of a woman in a yoga pose and were covered with all kinds of sayings. Some advised taking a break, slowing down: “Breathe deeply and appreciate the moment.” Others advised gearing up to succeed in today’s competitive world. “Successful people replace the words ‘wish,’ ‘should,’ & ‘try,’ with ‘I WILL.’”

  The detective looked into the store ahead of him. From what he could see, and from what witnesses and employees had just told him, the place broke down into four main areas: this front section; a large fitting area beyond that; a rear stockroom; and—behind the purple door—a rear hallway leading to the emergency fire exit. Ruvin knew the body was in that hallway. He didn’t want to rush to it, worried that doing so would impair his effort to document as much as he could in the other parts of the store.

  Ruvin walked through the front section. For the most part things were in order, but two mannequins had toppled over, one with its hand dislodged and resting about eight feet away. There wer
e blood drops scattered around the floor, and Ruvin could see faint bloody shoe prints that appeared to lead up to the front door. Where they went from there wasn’t clear. By his count, at least a dozen people had crossed the tracks that morning, between the store manager, the Apple customer, the responding officers, and the medics. The shoe print was dry, though, and Ruvin hoped a shoe-print expert could later find more of them and re-create the exact movements of the person wearing them.

  The detective gingerly stepped around the sales counter in his crime-scene booties, jotting down observations. “Safes behind front register opened. Receipts on the floor.”

  Ruvin moved on, and as he walked around a display rack, he could see trouble laid out before him. A flat-screen television rested on its back, having apparently tumbled off a table. A black athletic bag appeared to have been dropped suddenly, spilling out a white candle, a tube of lip balm, and a pair of headphones. Clothes and green water bottles were strewn about. “Visible signs of a struggle,” Ruvin wrote.

  Ruvin walked into the next part of the store, the fitting area, which was surrounded by full-length mirrors, changing rooms, and two bathrooms. He and Kraemer, the crime-scene investigator, looked at the walls and noted what looked to be a partial, bloody palm print in a corner. On the floor below them, red shoe prints crisscrossed each other. Kraemer measured the clearer ones, which stretched past twelve inches.

  Ruvin stepped into the bathroom where the survivor had been found, noting blood and rocks on the floor. He looked at the sink, and saw drops of blood near the drain, a smudge of blood across the mirror. There was a severed zip-tie, presumably removed by the medics from the victim’s wrists, and on the floor just outside the bathroom, a wooden coat hanger, a bottle of Windex, used paper towels, and a knocked-over, solid-looking Buddha statue, perhaps ten inches tall.