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

by Dan Morse

  Around the corner, Ruvin found himself inside a store, speaking with a manager and asking if he knew anyone suspicious in the area.

  “Yeah, there’s this guy, Keith Lockett,” the manager answered. On the morning of the murder, the manager continued, he’d seen Keith and two white guys walking toward the street where the yoga store was, Bethesda Avenue. “He had a backpack, and I’ve never seen him with a backpack before.”

  Ruvin immediately thought of the video images from behind the store: two men, one tall with a backpack, the other short. He walked back to the yoga store, where his colleagues were searching for more clues, and told them about the backpack witness. Sergeant Craig Wittenberger was intrigued.

  More than that, though, the sergeant had a sneaking feeling there was more to be learned right around them. He kept looking, walking up to a table in the fitting area. There were drawers underneath it. The table slid easily and was rotated slightly off center. Wittenberger kicked himself, realizing the table had probably gotten pushed against the wall during the melee. Yet no one had examined the backside, underneath the table, facing the wall.

  With the table now pushed away from the wall, Wittenberger bent down and looked at items on the shelves. He saw two pairs of running shoes without laces. A women’s pair rested on a large men’s pair. What were they doing in a store that didn’t sell shoes? With his gloved hands, Wittenberger placed them on the wooden floor. Both pairs showed traces of small red stains, as if someone had cleaned off blood but not gotten it all. Wittenberger picked up one of the size-14 Reeboks, and turned it over. His eyebrows rose toward his nearly bald head. He carried the shoe to the back stockroom, where the bloody shoe prints were particularly clear. Ruvin followed him. Wittenberger compared the sole to one of the prints. All of the wavy, waffle patterns lined up perfectly.

  You gotta be kidding me, Wittenberger thought.

  “These are the shoes,” Ruvin said.

  The two talked about Keith Lockett and his backpack. Homeless guys carry extra clothes around. That kind of fit. But why leave the shoes in the store? Why not toss them in a Dumpster? Then again, some of the behavior in Keith’s police file didn’t make sense either.

  They decided to amp up the search for Keith, calling in a team of undercover officers to try to find him. It didn’t take long. In short order, the undercover officers called in a report that perked up the detectives. Keith had turned up six miles away, at Washington Adventist Hospital, with bloody clothes and a swollen eye, and the undercover officers were heading there quickly. “Maybe Jayna put up a good fight,” Ruvin said.

  The undercover officers called the detectives back at the store, recounting the conversation. Excitement grew. Maybe Jayna’s DNA would show up in blood on Keith’s clothes. Ruvin speculated that Keith had avoided a closer hospital in Bethesda because he didn’t want to be recognized. “I think this is our guy,” he said.

  The officers found Keith in a hallway of the emergency room, lying down on a bed with an ice pack over his left eye, a swollen jaw, and a bloody nose. Keith recognized one of the officers, Curtis Jacobs. “I know you,” the patient said. “We go way back, man.”

  Jacobs asked Keith what had happened to his eye and nose. His first account: a black guy in dreadlocks hit him the night before at a club. It was a lucky shot, the former boxer said, and had caught him off guard. Keith didn’t know the guy’s name, but said he was in his thirties. Keith repeated the story, but this time said the assailant punched him on a street outside of Bethesda Cares—and tried to rob him. Keith said the man hung out with a short “Spanish dude,” the pair had robbed stores in Bethesda recently, and they had cut “that girl.” Jacobs asked Keith how he knew this. By hanging out on the streets, Keith said. Then he got teary eyed, and said he was across the street when the woman got hurt. “The black dude and the Spanish dude robbed the lady and cut her. I seen it with my two eyes.”

  Detective Jim Drewry hurried over to Washington Adventist Hospital to get Keith before he was discharged. The detective arrived at 7:20 P.M., and found the suspect still wearing a hospital gown. The undercover officers gave Drewry Keith’s bloody clothes, which had been placed in evidence bags. Drewry took them to his car, came back, and waited for Keith to be discharged. At 9:30 P.M., the two walked out of the hospital, Drewry in a leather jacket and steadying his handcuffed prisoner, who was wearing socks, undershorts, and the gown. Drewry laid a white bedsheet on his front passenger seat, which he found to be a safer way to transport someone, particularly when he didn’t have a partner with him. The suspect asked Drewry about his clothes, and allowed that the man who hit him was named Ricky. Drewry stayed away from direct questions about the yoga store, wanting to first get Keith to the station, where he could advise him of his rights to remain silent and contact a lawyer.

  Just before 10:00 P.M., the pair arrived at the police station. Drewry led his gowned suspect through the side door, past the detectives’ cubicles, and into a gray, dank interview room—nine feet long, seven feet wide, outfitted with a black metal table, three black chairs, and a secret audio and video recording system that had been activated upon their arrival.

  “In here, Keith, you can sit down in here,” Drewry said.

  “I gotta pee, man,” Keith said.

  “Okay, we’re going to let you do that.”

  “I can’t pee with two handcuffs on me.”

  “I’m going to get those off, okay. Trust me dude.”

  The two left, returning several minutes later. Drewry guided Keith to a seat and handcuffed his left wrist to a metal ring on one of the table legs. Keith looked around. “Where are my clothes at?”

  Drewry assured Keith he had his clothes. “I’ll be back witcha’ in a minute,” he said, and left the room.

  Left by himself, Keith quickly dozed off. Out in the squad room, Drewry, Ruvin, and Wittenberger slowly started going through Keith’s clothes. There were dried blood drops on his Lakers cap, sweatshirt, jeans, and white-leather Air Jordans. All intriguing signs. Keith’s black Nike jacket was also streaked with blood. But it seemed too fresh to have been left Friday night. The detectives felt no real hurry to go back into the interview room. They wanted Keith sober enough to answer yes to question 6 of the “Advice of Rights” form: “Do you understand what I just said?”

  At 11:15 P.M., Drewry went back into the interview room and offered Keith something to drink.

  “I want cappuccino,” he said.

  “Well, that one we don’t do,” Drewry said, “because this ain’t the Ritz.”

  Keith laughed. He said he’d take some water.

  Drewry left, eventually returning with Ruvin.

  “How you doing, Mr. Lockett?” Ruvin asked.

  “I wish I had some clothes on,” Keith said.

  Ruvin retrieved a dark-green prison jumpsuit, which Keith declined to wear, saying they were trying to make him look like a criminal. “How about a blanket instead?” Keith nodded, and Ruvin helped tuck in the suspect, his left wrist still handcuffed to the table leg.

  Drewry started going through some basic biographical questions. Keith spoke of his boxing career. “Five-time Golden Gloves champion of the world! No joke! No joke!” He grew quiet when telling Drewry that both of his parents had died young. “I went off the hook and started drinking and stuff.”

  Drewry began to read Keith his constitutional rights. But the suspect kept interrupting him, careening from one subject to the other: “I was drinking and he hit me . . . Guys I know killed somebody in front of my face; they’re trying to kill me . . . I need protection . . . I’m schizophrenic affective . . . I need to be on my medication . . . I gotta hang out on the street and watch my back . . .”

  Drewry got nowhere. “Let’s take a break.”

  “Don’t leave me here,” Keith said. “I can’t stay by myself.”

  Ruvin stayed behind. The detective unlocked Keith’s handcuffs, hoping that might put him at ease. Keith poured ice cubes out of a red plastic cup, placed them
on a paper towel, folded over its corners, and held the cold compress up to his swollen eye. Ruvin moved one chair closer to him, again trying to establish a bond. Every time Keith said something bizarre, Ruvin thought, it showed that he might be off-kilter enough to have attacked both women. Finally, at 1:15 A.M., after the two had been alone for more than an hour, Ruvin brought Keith to the cusp of talking about a recent robbery he had seen in Bethesda. The detective leaned back in his chair, allowing the suspect to describe it in his own words.

  “I just seen them young kids run away,” Keith said, lifting his hand and making a fluttering-away motion. “That’s the only thing I seen, the young kids just run away. Them young kids be on their skateboards who hang out at the Metro station. You need to be talking to them.”

  Out in the squad room, Drewry watched part of the interview on a monitor, confirming the feeling he’d had since meeting Keith at the hospital: the man seemed too addled to partner up with another assailant, to use the zipties, to clean off evidence, as suggested by the Formula 409 bottle and scrub brush found in the back stockroom. Yes, Keith appeared to know something about the yoga store murder, but at this point who in Bethesda didn’t? Wittenberger shared Drewry’s views, and Drewry decided he would go back in, act like he thought Keith killed Jayna, and see what happened. It went against Drewry’s nature to confront someone without having any good evidence. But it was also 1:30 in the morning, and Keith had started going in circles again.

  Drewry walked back into the interview room, sat down, and told Keith he was going to check the blood on his clothes to see if it matched the blood of the murdered woman.

  “You think I had something to do with that?” Keith asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Check my blood!” Keith yelled. “Check my blood! And you’re going to be wrong!”

  More ramblings, more assertions about the skateboard kids. Drewry tried again.

  “This woman that got killed inside the store. Did you do it?”

  “No. No. Hell no! Nah. Nah.”

  “And this woman that got raped inside the store, did you do it?”

  “No, no, no. I swear to God no!”

  “Because that’s what people are thinking: that you’re playing all these silly games because you killed this woman and raped this woman inside this store.”

  “Why would I do that? I would never do no shit like that, man. I got a woman,” Keith said. “The blood on my jacket came from me. The guy hit me in my nose.”

  Drewry and Ruvin wanted to get a sample of Keith’s DNA by drawing a cotton swab from the inside of his cheeks. Legally, they could do so if they asked him and he said yes, but the two worried the evidence wouldn’t be allowed into court because Keith hadn’t understood their request. They decided that they had better do this the more deliberate way, by getting a court order. Drewry retrieved the jumpsuit and told Keith he was taking him to jail. “Put this on. That way you’ll stay good and warm.”

  This time Keith accepted the garment. But he was concerned about how he’d get to the jail.

  “I can’t be in the back of no paddy wagon.”

  “You’re not going to be in the back of a paddy wagon. You’re going to be in the front seat of my car like you were when we came up here.”

  As they walked out, Wittenberger approached, still hoping to garner something from Keith. “I think you could have helped us out. Because I think you know who killed that woman.”

  “I don’t know,” Keith said. “I am being straight up on my mother’s grave and my father’s grave, man. I don’t know who done that.”

  Drewry drove Keith to the county’s jail in Rockville, three miles away. Ruvin followed. They booked Keith on the relatively minor alcohol charge, hardly what they were hoping for. It was 2:45 A.M. If the detectives were lucky, they could get three hours of sleep before starting up again on the case.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A Bit of Magic

  By Monday morning, residents in and around Bethesda were growing alarmed. The masked killer-rapists were still on the loose. And they hadn’t struck in a distant ghetto or the closed-off home of a nearby neighborhood. They’d invaded a carefully designed “Urban Village,” where thousands gathered daily to decompress a little from the hectic, high-pressure lives they led in the shadow of the nation’s capital.

  The five-block area hadn’t always been such a draw. Until the 1990s, it was home to car-repair shops, drab government buildings, and a concrete plant, where drivers who lined up to get their trucks loaded were known to put the truck in park and run into a nearby tavern for a quick cold one. Detective Jim Drewry knew the area well; it had been part of his route when he’d been a mailman, and he’d enjoyed the laid-back feel of the place, even if it had fallen further behind the ever-more-prosperous neighborhoods stretching for miles in other directions.

  But a smart local company named Federal Realty Investment Trust had smelled opportunity. Its planners studied the neighborhoods, whose residents were described in adjective-laden and affirmative terms: I look at the work I do as a career, not just a job . . . It’s important to continue learning new things . . . I am interested in other cultures . . . I make a conscious effort to recycle . . . It’s important to feel respected by my peers . . . Store environment makes a difference where I shop . . . I prefer food presented as an art form. They had a lot of money, were eager to spend it, and they wanted to do so in a safe, walkable area.

  Federal Realty began buying up the aging properties, pouring more than $190 million into a project designed around principles called “placemaking.” Buildings were leveled, and new ones constructed, as was a large but concealed parking garage, wider sidewalks, attractive landscaping, a community fountain. Soon enough, there was what Federal Realty called Bethesda Row, a five-block area lined with popular branded stores like Apple and Barnes & Noble, as well as clothing boutiques, specialty shops, and restaurants that stayed open late into the night offering food from around the world on tables that opened onto those new, wider sidewalks. There was even a pedestrian-only, cobblestone avenue called Bethesda Lane, bordered by fetching little stores below a chic five-story apartment building. A canopy of lights stretched across Bethesda Lane, evoking a lazy evening in the plaza of an old European town, albeit one that offered lemon-ricotta gelato for $5.30 a serving.

  The whole thing was a bit of magic. People drove to Bethesda Row, parked, and walked around. They joined forces with the people who lived in Bethesda Row or close enough to walk there. It created a critical mass of humans who kind of appeared to all be living there. And placemaking adherents loved it. “A vibrant urban gathering place,” said the Urban Land Institute, which gave Federal Realty an Award of Excellence. “A retail icon,” was the title of a presentation at a conference of the American Institute of Architects.

  Of the more than seventy-five stores and restaurants, few businesses understood the aspirations of their customers better than the one with a funny name, lululemon athletica, a wildly successful chain of yoga-gear stores that announced its 2008 arrival in Bethesda with a press release describing its planned immersion into the community. “Guests are invited to kick off the opening weekend with a complimentary yoga class on Saturday, June 7, at 9:00 A.M. The celebration continues throughout the day with yoga demos, a live DJ and kids’ face painting.” The store targeted educated, professional family women. “By creating products that help keep people active and stress free,” the company said in its press release, “lululemon believes that the world will be a better place.” A year later, in a presentation to Wall Street investors, the company described target customers of its own: Affluent . . . Confident . . . At the top of her game . . . Looks for quality . . . Shops organic.

  What businesses like lululemon and Apple understood—really, really understood—was how a growing segment of consumers had begun to question the belief that consumption would bring happiness . . . but they still liked to shop. It led down a path of virtuous consumption, or what retail guru Marti
n Lindstrom, who wrote a book called Buyology, described as the subconscious answer to a subconscious question: “How do I still accumulate my way to happiness?”

  Beyond that core Bethesda shopper, of course, the place offered a broader experience: families strolling down sidewalks, people stopping to pet dogs, the whole notion that they were more apt to meet a guest from Meet the Press than anyone out to do harm. The idea of mayhem, to say nothing of murder, erupting inside a yoga store was unimaginable. At Ginger, an upscale women’s boutique two hundred feet from lululemon athletica, the owner gave her saleswomen mobile panic buttons and had them close the store early, before dark. Customers talked almost exclusively of the murder and masked men. “Oh my God, are you guys afraid?” they’d ask. Workers walked to their cars together, passing white ribbons tied on doors in honor of the two victims from the yoga store, and reported their progress with text messages: “In the car . . . Made it home.” The nearest place people knew to buy pepper spray, Ranger Surplus, saw sales of the product triple in the days after the murder. Business at nearby restaurants dropped by as much as 50 percent. Even patrons who still came to Bethesda at night moved more quickly, eyes peeled for a tall man and a short man, walking together.

  For years, Bethesda Row had been safe, comfortable, and cozy. All of a sudden it wasn’t, and wouldn’t be again until the men were caught. “Is Bethesda going to get hit again?” people wondered.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Storming the Walls

  All weekend, reporters barraged the phones of officials with questions about the case, and the wave was still cresting Monday morning. Leads? Suspects? Bethesda still safe? Responsibility for the answers, or deflections, fell to Captain Paul Starks, the police department spokesman. He asked Captain David Gillespie, the major crimes commander, who had a simple message for his longtime friend: I’ve got nothing for you Paul, and tell the press to quit calling down here. Starks went to see his boss, Montgomery Police Chief Tom Manger.