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

by Dan Morse

  Elizabeth tried on another pair as well, eventually made her choice, and walked toward the cash registers at the front of the store. Brittany followed and passed her, walked behind the counter next to Jayna, and rang up the sale. One pair of black “Speed” shorts, $57.24, including tax. It was 8:57 P.M. The two saleswomen pleasantly said their good-byes to the couple. Brittany led them to the door and locked it behind them—an indication to Paul and Elizabeth that the saleswomen were eager to shut things down before another customer came in. The store now closed for business, Brittany and Jayna counted money, finished reports, made sure the displays and racks were lined up, swept the floors, and shut down the computerized cash registers. Around 9:30, they performed a final duty: checking each other’s bags. Both had plenty of items inside. Jayna’s held a digital camera, battery charger, black leather datebook, a leadership book, and a bottle of red Argentinean wine her coworker had left for her for agreeing to switch shifts. Brittany’s had a black makeup pouch, workout clothes, the flip-flops, a candle, and a curling iron.

  As Jayna looked through Brittany’s bag, though, she also spotted a pair of “crops”-style workout pants with a price tag still on them. She asked Brittany if she had a receipt. Brittany said she’d thrown the slip away, something employees often did because they couldn’t return the merchandise they purchased at a discount anyway. But Jayna had more questions. “Who rang you out?”

  “Chioma,” Brittany said, referring to the floor supervisor and mathematics graduate who’d spoken with Jayna earlier in the day.

  Jayna wanted to check Brittany’s explanation. “I can just go into the computer,” Jayna said. But she couldn’t boot up the system; it was programmed to stay off once it was shut down for the night. “It’s no big deal,” Jayna said. “We’ll deal with it later.”

  She set the burglar alarm at 9:45 P.M., and the two dashed out before the sensors engaged. Jayna locked the door from the outside. She and Brittany said their good-byes and walked in opposite directions—Jayna toward her parked car, Brittany toward the subway station.

  It took Jayna less than three minutes to turn the corner, cross Arlington Road, and descend seventeen steps into a parking garage. By then, she’d taken out her BlackBerry and called Chioma. Jayna asked if she’d sold Brittany anything that day. “Nope, I sure didn’t,” her colleague said.

  “I didn’t think you did,” Jayna said, “because when I bag-checked Brittany, I found a pair of crops in there that still had the tag on.” Jayna wrapped up her call, saying she needed to get in touch with the store manager, Rachel. Seven seconds later, she did.

  The two were very close. Rachel considered Jayna smart, sassy, and honest. Brittany, on the other hand, was someone Rachel hadn’t had a good feeling about—she’d passed on hiring her in the first place a year earlier, but was forced to take her on after the Georgetown dustup.

  “We caught the bitch,” Jayna said.

  “I’m going to fire her in the morning,” Rachel said.

  Six minutes after leaving the store, Brittany made a call of her own, telling coworker Eila Rab that she’d left her wallet in the store and needed Jayna’s number so she could come back and unlock the door for her. Eila suggested Brittany call their store manager, Rachel Oertli, who lived across the street from the store and also had a key.

  “Well, Jayna was just here,” Brittany said. “Can I just get her number?”

  “I can give it to you now,” Eila said.

  “No, just text it to me,” Brittany said.

  A moment later the text arrived, and Brittany called Jayna, leaving her a voice mail. As Brittany waited, she dashed off a quick text to the coworker: “Thank you!” She tried calling Jayna again, couldn’t get through, and followed that with a text: “Hey Jayna it’s Britt I think I forgot my wallet in the store.”

  Jayna called back, spoke with Brittany briefly and said she could come back to the store. “I noticed I didn’t have my laptop anyway, so that’s fine.” Ten minutes later, Jayna pulled her silver, two-door Pontiac G5 up near the front of the store. Brittany was waiting for her at the teak bench. It was 10:05 P.M. They opened the door and walked inside.

  SECTION III

  ZEROING IN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Monday Night:

  Piling On

  By the evening of Monday, March 14, 2011, detectives had spent three days piecing together what happened after Brittany Norwood and Jayna Murray returned to the lululemon athletica store. At first, they’d been alarmed at the idea that two men could have been so bold as to slip into a popular nightlife area and unleash mayhem. Then they became wary, as parts of Brittany’s story didn’t add up, but backed off, swayed by the parking-lot video that seemed to back up her story, and the discovery of a bloodied homeless man, Keith Lockett, who seemed to know about the case.

  But the prospect of Keith being the killer had fizzled. And even if he was, the statements he’d given in the wee hours of the morning had been so incoherent as to be useless. The only way to tie Keith to the crime would be through DNA analysis, and those results were at least several days away. Detective Jim Drewry, one of the two lead detectives on the case, wasn’t even sure whether to ask the crime lab to analyze Keith’s blood yet. He knew they’d be bombarding the lab with such requests in the case, and wanted to maintain goodwill. Citizens had continued to call in with tips, which other detectives checked out, but none were leading anywhere.

  Drewry and Detective Dimitry Ruvin, the other lead detective, didn’t know much about the two victims, and had yet to meet Brittany personally. There’d been no immediate need to hit their stunned friends and family members with questions about them, and what information about the women that was available online and in law enforcement databases offered only broad overviews. Still, they’d been able to form some initial impressions. Jayna Murray was obviously a go-getter. Her LinkedIn profile showed that she was getting two master’s degrees at Johns Hopkins University, and before that listed her as having held an international marketing position at Halliburton. She had no criminal history. Brittany Norwood was less visible on the Internet, though she, too, had a clean criminal history. She’d clearly been a star soccer player in high school, good enough to earn a college scholarship. A Google search of her home address indicated that she lived in an apartment unit of a large renovated town house owned by her sister and her sister’s fiancé.

  “What do we have? Do we have any credible tips?” Ruvin asked Drewry, before answering his own question: “No. We have nothing.”

  They knew Brittany was out of the hospital now, resting at home. Maybe they should go introduce themselves, see if she was relaxed enough to offer more details and better descriptions of the suspects. Drewry had her sister Marissa’s cell-phone number and called her. Marissa said it would be fine to stop by that evening.

  Drewry and Ruvin climbed into Drewry’s Dodge Intrepid and headed south. The detectives enjoyed each other’s company, despite their differences: Ruvin the gadget freak; Drewry the man twice his age with no Facebook account. As Ruvin liked to tell him: “You’re the only guy around here who can say you were a cop before I was born and not be lying about it.”

  Drewry parked near the town house, and the detectives walked up the single flight of stairs to the door of Marissa’s immaculately renovated, century-old home, where they were greeted warmly. Many of Brittany’s family were there, including those who’d flown in from the West Coast to rally around her. The whole scene—big home, successful African American family, everyone sticking together—seemed to Drewry like something right out of The Cosby Show. As he and Ruvin introduced themselves, a diminutive young woman walked in from another room. “Hi, I’m Brittany.” She spoke softly and said she lived downstairs. “That will probably be the best place to talk.”

  The detectives walked down the outside flight of stairs, entering a tidy apartment and taking seats around a dining table. Ruvin got out a legal pad to take notes. Brittany’s roommate, Lisa, made a bri
ef appearance before ducking back out of sight. Brittany told the detectives her family wanted her to move back to Seattle. “They’re very concerned for me.”

  But Brittany said she wasn’t going to let the attackers scare her into leaving. “Before this all happened, I was talking to Equinox gym. I was looking for a job. They reached out to me since it happened and said the job is mine when I’m better. I can come work there anytime.”

  Ruvin knew the gym was just two blocks from the yoga store, and thought she was brave to consider going back to the area in such a visible job. His partner tried to put Brittany at ease. “We just want to go over the story one more time,” Drewry said. “A lot of times, a couple of days later, people remember a small detail that may be important to us.”

  Brittany told them the same thing she’d earlier told Detective Deana Mackie in the hospital, adding in more details. Friday evening had been fairly slow in the store. She and Jayna closed at 9:00 P.M., cleaned up and left, heading in opposite directions. Brittany realized she’d left her wallet behind and called Jayna to ask if she could come back to let her in. “I noticed I didn’t have my laptop anyway, so that’s fine,” Brittany recalled Jayna saying. “So I’ll just meet you at the store and we’ll walk in together.”

  Brittany said there weren’t many people left on Bethesda Avenue when she’d waited for Jayna. The fancy bakery, Georgetown Cupcake, was closed, as was the Apple Store. When Jayna arrived, the two went inside but couldn’t find Brittany’s wallet. Jayna offered Brittany her plastic subway fare card so she could board the subway. “Why don’t you just take mine, and we’ll look for it in the morning?” Brittany recalled Jayna saying.

  Drewry pulled out his digital recorder. She told him how she and Jayna were walking out when the two men suddenly appeared, with one of them striking Jayna. Drewry asked Brittany where the man was who attacked her.

  “Behind one of our clothing racks.”

  “Okay,” Drewry said. “And what did he do?”

  “When I noticed him is when he jumped up. When I tried to turn around, he yanked me back by my hair and was telling me to shut up. At this point, Jayna and I are both yelling for help.”

  Brittany spoke clearly. She said both men wore dark clothes, gloves, ski masks with narrow slits cut around the eyes, and hoodies over the masks. “My suspect was taller than me by a couple of inches, maybe five five,” she said, adding that “Jayna’s suspect” was taller. He dragged Jayna by her hair. The two men laughed, almost as if they were acting out a violent video game, Brittany said, the name of which she couldn’t place.

  “Grand Theft Auto?” Ruvin asked.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Brittany said. Her hands started to shake, tears sprang to her eyes. She told the detectives that her attacker forced her to the cash registers to get money, whacked her across the head, pushed her to the back of the store, then shoved her onto Jayna’s bloody, dead body.

  Ruvin was stunned at the horrific scene Brittany described, and his own emotion took over. He stopped writing. We will find these assholes, he told himself. I don’t care how long it’s going to take.

  Brittany suddenly paused, looked down, then back up at the detectives. She said there was something she hadn’t told the female detective back at the hospital. “They know where I live.”

  “Well, how would they know?” Drewry asked.

  “I don’t know. They probably looked in my purse and maybe found my bills. I had Comcast bills and a gas bill.”

  Drewry tried to get more detailed descriptions of the attackers.

  “Okay. And describe the guy that assaulted you.”

  Brittany was vague, saying he was covered from head to toe.

  “Okay. And from his voice, how old do you think he was?”

  “I guess, I’d say midtwenties.”

  “And from his voice, can you give me a race or an ethnicity?”

  “I would say he was Caucasian.”

  She said Jayna’s attacker was taller, about six feet. “As far as the color of his skin, I have no idea,” Brittany said.

  “Do you think he was white, black, Asian from the way that he spoke?”

  “The same: Caucasian.”

  As Brittany continued to speak to Drewry, the detective started getting an uncomfortable feeling. Something was bothering him about Brittany’s crying. It didn’t feel . . . real. Maybe the effects of the trauma, he told himself.

  At the same time, however, Detective Ruvin was also feeling his earlier rush of emotion—the comment to himself: We will find these assholes—start to recede. It was Brittany’s detail about the bills that had started it for him. How would that have worked? Brittany just indicated her assailant left during the attack to go through her purse. Couldn’t she have made a break for it?

  And the more he thought about how the guy pushed Brittany onto Jayna, the more it didn’t sit right. It was too evil. Brittany continued talking to Drewry, saying how her suspect called her a “nigger” as he raped her.

  Drewry didn’t want to push with the questions. He moved to wrap up the interview, and asked Brittany if she’d told her family that the assailants knew where she lived.

  “No, I haven’t told them. Should I?”

  “We can’t tell you, but I think you should, because they have the right to know,” Drewry said.

  The three made their way back upstairs to Marissa and her fiancé’s place. Family members gathered around. “I think Brittany has got something to tell you guys,” Drewry said.

  “They know where I live,” Brittany told her family. “These guys know where I live. I think they found my bills. They were in my purse. They knew my name and my address.”

  Brittany’s father, Earl, spoke up. “I guess the obvious question is what do we do?”

  Drewry tried to put them at ease. In 99.99 percent of cases, he said, the suspects don’t return. But he added: “If you see anything suspicious, even if it’s something little or if you think it’s irrelevant, but if it’s suspicious, you need to call the police and express that.”

  Drewry sought to assure them that the case would get solved. “We’re working every lead we can. We’re getting all kinds of tips. Our whole shift is working on it nonstop.”

  As the detectives prepared to leave, Ruvin thought about the sneakers that his sergeant had found in the store the day before, in particular the pair of size-14 Reeboks that matched the bloody tracks. “Hey Brittany, can I ask you something real quick?” Ruvin asked.

  “OK,” Brittany said, walking over to him.

  “Do you guys sell shoes?” Ruvin asked.

  “No,” Brittany said.

  “Were there any shoes in the store?”

  “Yeah, there were two pairs, men’s and women’s. The men’s are really big. And we use them for alterations.”

  Alterations. The thought hadn’t crossed their minds. Who knew yoga pants had to fit so well? It sent their theory that one of the killers had brought the shoes inside the store out the window. But why would the killer put those shoes on? How would he know where they were in the first place? Ruvin’s head was starting to spin when Brittany’s brother Chris approached.

  “Can I come down with you guys?” he asked.

  “Of course,” Ruvin said.

  The three walked down and stood on the sidewalk. “You know, I’m happy that my sister is alive. I’m thankful my sister is alive,” Chris said. He was cordial, then bluntly starting talking about the case. “But I just can’t get over the fact that like, why would they spare her? This girl was killed, and my sister only has a few injuries.”

  The three stood in silence. It was certainly something the detectives had considered. But they’d worked off of the theory that only one of the masked men was totally deranged, or they’d been scared away by something before killing Brittany.

  “Do you think your sister had something to do with it?” Ruvin asked, realizing after he’d done so that the question was too strong.

  “No, no, I don’t think that
,” Chris said.

  Ruvin tried another angle. “What kind of person is your sister?”

  Chris seemed to be both trying to help and worried about what he was saying.

  “My sister is a very secretive person,” Chris said.

  Then he told the detectives a story. When Brittany was six or seven years old, their dad once ran out of gas while taking her to a soccer game. He told Brittany to stay in the car while he went to a gas station, yet when he returned, she was gone—she had hitchhiked home. He didn’t add much more to the story, nor explain why he was telling it. Chris politely said good-bye and went back inside.

  But that word—secretive—stuck in Ruvin’s head as he and Drewry walked back to the car. So did the strange information about the shoes, and the utility bills. There was only one good explanation: Brittany knew the killers. She had let them into the store for some reason, a robbery, perhaps, and things had gone terribly wrong. Whatever relationship she had with them caused them to spare her life. And most everything Brittany had done since was an attempt to cover up her involvement.

  The two detectives climbed in the car. Drewry started driving to their station in silence, but the quiet didn’t last long, as Ruvin couldn’t ignore how quickly his mind had changed.

  “Jimmy, something’s not right,” he said to Drewry. “You know, we have a store in the middle of Bethesda Avenue. It’s still busy. These guys go in there. They got no weapons. They rape and kill one girl. And now they’re like, sticking around? They threw Brittany on Jayna’s body, like to mess with her. You can find probably one guy that’s like this Hannibal Lecter. But to find two guys like that?”