by Dan Morse
Ruvin didn’t know what to say. All around him were veteran colleagues who feared leaks—feared them to a degree Ruvin thought bordered on paranoia. “I’ll call you back,” he said.
Ruvin got up, walked down the hall, and ducked into a large room that housed the police department’s computer-networking equipment. He knew Ayres and trusted her. And he knew he would be working on the case with her for months, possibly years. He had to be honest with her. He also hoped he could keep her from asking too many questions.
“Let Lockett be,” Ruvin said.
“What are you saying?” Ayres asked.
She was relatively new to the county, but had prosecuted murders in Baltimore in her previous job. And she now had the detective under a form of cross-examination. Ruvin hesitated, then tried to use some of Drewry’s language to describe Lockett.
“We’re just not feeling him.”
“Do you have any other suspects?”
Screw it, Ruvin thought. He told Ayres they were looking at Brittany as the killer. “Marybeth, why do you think the footprints never left the store?” Still, Ruvin told Ayres, they weren’t sure Brittany did it and not to fear—they knew better than to arrest her too quickly. “If we charge her and we get it wrong, we’re fucked.”
* * *
Twenty miles south, in Washington, D.C., Brittany Norwood’s family members were deeply worried about her. Brittany wasn’t sleeping. They wondered if she should get out of the house. It wasn’t like her family members were going to let anyone hurt her again. They convinced Brittany to go out with them to a shoe store and to Bed Bath & Beyond. It was something, at least.
Brittany didn’t have her iPhone with her, having left it at the crime scene when her bag fell to the floor. Friends were still trying to reach her, leaving voice mails and text messages.
“Hey Brittany. I’m thinking, praying, and sending you all the love I can muster up,” one former coworker from the Georgetown store wrote.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” wrote another. “Let me know if I can help with anything at all.”
And the bank kept calling, leaving automated messages. “Please call Citi, regarding your Citi account . . .”
The recording tracked with a deposit slip Brittany had recently tucked inside her wallet, one showing her balance had dropped to $7.25.
* * *
For Jayna Murray’s parents, each day brought ever-more unimaginable horrors. The calls on Saturday from Drewry, the news that Jayna might have also been raped, the sudden need to buy her a gravesite, a flight to Washington, D.C., to claim their daughter’s body. Amid all that, they also had to inform Jayna’s brother Hugh what had happened. They did so by getting news to Hugh’s supervisor in Baghdad, who tracked Hugh down in the northern part of Iraq.
“Is there anybody there with you?” the colonel asked.
“No,” Hugh said. He was sitting alone inside the windowless plywood hut that served as his office. Hugh figured they were about to discuss classified information.
“Is there anyone you can get to sit with you?” the colonel asked instead.
“Not really,” Hugh said. His office mate had just gone on leave.
“Hugh, there’s been a family emergency.”
“What is it, what kind of emergency is there?”
“Your sister’s dead.”
“No, there’s no way. She’s healthy.”
“No, Hugh, she was murdered.”
It took Hugh fifty hours and a series of flights to get to Washington. He didn’t sleep, staring straight ahead at the seat in front of him. He couldn’t help but think about what he’d been doing the moment Jayna was murdered. It had been early in the morning in Mosul. Protected by a group of Army infantrymen and traveling in mine-resistant trucks, Hugh had left his base to meet with an Iraqi judge. As they headed out, everyone was aware of a recent intelligence report that said insurgents were trying to target Americans meeting with judges—and they were the only Americans meeting with judges. The caravan rolled up to the courthouse. There was no judge. No local police. No protection. The infantrymen climbed out and took up positions. Finally the judge arrived, Hugh met with him briefly, and the trucks headed back to the base. Who could have guessed that a luxury retailer in a wealthy suburb would be the deadlier place?
The Murrays met Hugh at Dulles International Airport outside D.C. and drove him to their hotel for a quick rest. And now—on Tuesday afternoon—Hugh said he wanted to go see the memorial outside the store: the flowers, cards, and notes to Jayna. His parents and brother, Dirk, wondered about all the reporters camped outside. “I want to see the notes,” Hugh insisted.
The Murrays struck a compromise, deciding to first drive by the store and see how many reporters were parked outside. Once they arrived, and slowly drove by the memorial and the reporters, Hugh made a quick left into Bethesda Row’s hidden parking garage, pulled into a spot, and turned off the car. For about fifteen minutes the Murrays discussed what to do, what to say if a reporter approached. Finally, they got out and walked across the street.
As they approached the lululemon store and the memorial, they also saw the yellow police tape and brown paper taped over the windows. Whatever was behind those windows wasn’t a store anymore, but a crime scene. Until that moment, Phyllis Murray had tried to convince herself that her daughter wasn’t really dead. That was now impossible. “You can’t hurt any more than you hurt” is how she would later describe it. Next to the flowers someone had left an empty can of Diet Dr Pepper, Jayna’s favorite drink. Another person had left an accounting textbook, a subject Jayna had struggled with at Johns Hopkins. The Murrays slowly started reading the cards and notes. Journalists mumbled to each other: “Is that the family?” A television reporter approached David and asked if he knew Jayna. When it was clear David did, he asked a follow-up: “How does this make you feel?”
Four days of devastating grief hadn’t just robbed David of sleep; it had weakened his ability to keep anger under his surface. Rage burst forward, transporting him back to combat mode. He walked toward the newsman, but was halted by Captain Paul Starks, the police spokesman, who put his hand on David’s chest. “Mr. Murray, I’ll take care of this,” he said.
Hugh grabbed the back of his dad’s coat and helped get him away. Starks got the reporter to retreat.
As quickly as the rage had surfaced in David, it was replaced by a sense of shame—that he had embarrassed his family, embarrassed Jayna. Starks approached again, saying they could keep reading the cards. The captain also asked, whenever they were done, would they be willing to go to a nearby police facility and meet with the detectives? The Murrays agreed.
* * *
Thirty minutes later, the Murray family sat around a table with Detectives Drewry and Ruvin. David and Phyllis asked about Jayna’s coworker who’d been in the store. “How is she doing? Is she okay?” The detectives said she was recovering well. They chose their words carefully. “We’ve still got a lot of stuff to do. We’re finishing things up at the store,” Ruvin said.
He and Drewry guided the conversation to Jayna. They wanted to cross all their t’s in case the case against Brittany fell apart. Her family walked them through Jayna’s life: she traveled a lot growing up, attended several different high schools, studied overseas, worked in Houston, and moved to Washington to get her MBA. Drewry asked about boyfriends, learning about Fraser Bocell, the PhD candidate on the other side of the country. “Came here to visit New Years and was supposed to come this coming Thursday,” Drewry wrote. The detective was interested in any past problems. Jayna’s parents described a former boyfriend. “Very controlling,” the detective wrote.
The Murrays wanted to know how Jayna died. In nearly twenty-five years working homicides, Drewry had come to expect the question from grieving families. Of course they wanted to know. The fundamental emotion of empathy—the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes—wasn’t something they could cut off. They wanted to know about her final
moments, holding out hope that she didn’t suffer. “Was it fast?” Dirk asked.
Drewry knew the whole story would be hard, but lies would be just as devastating to them down the road. He tried to tell them the truth but say as little as possible, in this case telling Dirk that no, it wasn’t fast.
The Murrays asked about a weapon. “Multiple instruments” was all Drewry would say.
Dirk pushed, asking why the killers had left a witness alive. One of the assailants may have simply been more violent than the other, Drewry offered. “We’re still trying to figure that out,” he said.
David Murray, Jayna’s father, sat across the long table from Drewry, who looked him straight in the eye and said, “Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.”
* * *
Inside the county prosecutors’ office, State’s Attorney John McCarthy had kept tabs on the yoga store murder since the case’s opening hours—both as a skilled lawyer and an astute politician. For the past three days, he, too, had thought the murder was the work of two masked, crazy men. Now he was learning otherwise. He called the police department’s homicide unit to say he needed to come over for an update.
Around 7:00 P.M., he and an assistant state’s attorney, Marybeth Ayres, entered the homicide unit. McCarthy walked through the cubicle area, and stood three feet outside Wittenberger’s office, greeting the sergeant he’d known for more than twenty years through an opened door. There was a small table to McCarthy’s right. He looked down and saw a startling autopsy photograph: an unrecognizable human face, mangled with slashings and blood. McCarthy picked up the photograph and similar ones stacked below it, leafing through one image after another.
“Holy mother of God, what’s this?” McCarthy asked.
“That’s your case,” Wittenberger said.
Everyone gathered for a meeting. McCarthy had always been of the opinion that every prosecutor, detective, judge, and defense attorney came across three or four cases in their careers that—if handled the wrong way—would end those careers. This one felt like it could be one of those, particularly in a left-leaning place like Montgomery County. Brittany had no criminal record, came from a good family, and was a college-educated African American woman in a nation that historically had been too quick to arrest black suspects. McCarthy urged the detectives to wait for DNA results, invoking a case from 2005 when the twenty-three-year-old son of Iranian immigrants was charged with beating and strangling his mother to death inside her Potomac home. Then the DNA results came in, showing another, unknown man had left either saliva or sweat on the victim’s neck. “The Makki case,” McCarthy said. “We’ve been down this road before.”
The detectives assured him they were in no hurry to arrest Brittany before they had more physical evidence and more conversations with her. But the prosecutor knew the pressure they were under—given the effect the case was having on downtown Bethesda.
“You’ve got to get this right,” McCarthy said. “This is a hell of an allegation to make against somebody the community has embraced as a victim.”
* * *
Jayna’s car was the logical next step. The detectives had put off examining the car’s contents while they focused on the store and, later, Keith Lockett. With Brittany as the suspect, however, and given the story she had told, the car now took on added value. The detectives wanted proof that Brittany had later moved the car, hopefully by finding blood in it.
Just before 9:00 P.M., Ruvin, Drewry, and Wittenberger drove to an evidence garage in a nondescript industrial park five minutes away. Together with three crime-scene investigators, they walked up to Jayna’s silver, two-door Pontiac with Texas plates, its hood casting sharp reflections from bright florescent lights overhead. Inside was a stick shift—good news for crime-scene investigators, because a driver had to constantly touch it—and on the front passenger floorboard was a bright-pink workout jacket, and a black, baseball-styled cap was on the rear seat floorboard. A crime-scene investigator named Jennifer Greer slowly started working through the car. She swabbed surfaces, placing each swab in a small box so it could be tested in the lab for any DNA left by someone’s skin cells. She found a tiny smudge of what looked like blood on the driver’s floor mat and, about twelve inches from that, a dark-red drop the size of a pinhead against the driver’s side door. Greer found a possible bloodstain in the jacket, and a red smudge the size of a fingertip on the front, inside band of the cap—one subtly branded with the lululemon logo and a saying stitched in small letters from the company manifesto: “Sweat Once a Day.”
The clue on the hat was particularly intriguing. The band was stained in the same location as the center of the wearer’s forehead—right where Brittany had been cut. Greer brought the cap out of the car. A colleague conducted a field blood test by swabbing the red mark, pulling the swab away, and dropping three solutions onto it. The swab turned bright pink.
“Oh yeah, we got blood. We got blood,” Ruvin said, high-fiving anyone he could.
All anyone knew at the moment was that it was blood. The samples would be submitted for DNA analysis, but results probably wouldn’t be ready for at least four or five days. At 10:45 P.M., the five finally left the garage.
Their secret suspicions were still safe. On the Washington Post website, the latest story was based on the statements made by the police department the day before: “The masked assailants who slipped into a Bethesda yoga store raped two workers, beat one of them to death and beat and bound the other, Montgomery County police said Monday. It was the first time that police have said how Jayna T. Murray was killed.”
National outlets were starting to pay attention. That night, two hours before the crime-scene investigators had started combing through Jayna’s car, CNN’s HLN network launched into a segment about the case.
“Tonight, a devastating blow in the war on women,” host Jane Velez-Mitchell said. “Two young women savagely attacked inside a trendy yoga clothing store in an upscale neighborhood. Two masked men brutally sexually assault them, murdering one and leaving the other tied up. Police desperately searching for any clues tonight. Who are these cold-blooded demons? And I’ll tell you why this case has sparked global outrage among women.”
The two suspects were described as about six feet tall and about five feet three inches tall. Velez-Mitchell then introduced a guest commentator, Linda Kenney Baden, a defense attorney who earlier had represented Florida’s Casey Anthony.
“It is terrible,” Baden said. “I mean, this is an upscale neighborhood. It looks like a crime of opportunity. And I would beg people out there who know somebody who pals around with a five-foot, three-inch person and a six-foot person to call them in, because no one is safe, not even their own family, with the kind of violence that these two have engaged in.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Wednesday:
Setting a Trap
If Detectives Jim Drewry and Dimitry Ruvin starred in a network crime drama, they’d spend their Wednesday morning leafing through a complete DNA workup of Jayna’s car search and, minutes later, compare that with a DNA analysis of samples taken from Brittany, Jayna, and hundreds of locations in the store—tools, ropes, Buddha statues, bloody walls, sink handles, and more.
In reality, their crime-lab colleagues upstairs moved in real time. They’d barely begun the series of drawn-out steps needed to make DNA comparisons. Working at the molecular level, they had to break open cells, clear out proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids, extract the actual DNA, count it, try to extract more if needed, and start a process to make millions of something akin to genetic-level photocopies. And that only got them about halfway there. Working around the clock, the lab could push through a DNA analysis and comparison in forty-eight hours. But that wasn’t really a good idea. The analysts liked to have the same person do every step, avoiding having to later bring a whole team in to testify at trials—a confusing jumble for juries. Cutting any corners now could render the whole workup useless for court. Drewry and Ruvin
, aware of this, limited their DNA-analysis requests to those that followed solid leads, which at this point zeroed in on the evidence pulled from Jayna’s car the night before. The detectives hoped to get results by early the next week. They expected it to match Brittany’s blood.
Drewry and Ruvin settled on their next move: asking Brittany if she’d ever been inside Jayna’s car. Chances were she’d say no, which would make the DNA evidence that much stronger because it would also trap Brittany in a lie. There was a second reason to lock Brittany into this position. Down the road, if she ever went on trial, her defense attorney couldn’t fuzz up the car evidence by asserting that it simply could be DNA left by Brittany touching parts of the car when she’d earlier borrowed it or taken a ride inside it.
But the detectives couldn’t just call Brittany and ask her if she’d ever been in the car. That likely would spook her, particularly if she’d realized by now she’d left the hat behind. And the last thing Drewry or Ruvin wanted was their suspect calling an attorney. What they needed was a ruse, preferably one that would lure Brittany to the station and into one of their interview rooms with the secret recording system. They could then get Brittany to go through her story again. With so many moving parts, she’d likely have trouble keeping them in the right order with each telling. Something would trip her up.
Drewry proposed the time-tested ruse of telling Brittany they needed to get her fingerprints and hair samples to distinguish them from those of the attackers. Drewry hoped to pass off the request as standard procedure from two slightly bungling detectives. He called one of Brittany’s siblings, who said the family could bring Brittany by that day. Shortly after 4:30 P.M., on Wednesday, March 16, Brittany, her dad, and several of her siblings walked into the police lobby. Even in an affluent place like Montgomery County, the police-station lobby was hardly a welcoming space: just a twenty-by-twenty-foot room with brown and gray walls; a thick glass window that forced visitors to bend over and speak through tiny, metal slits; two small, square sofas; three plastic chairs with extended writing surfaces—the kind you might sit at while taking a standardized test—and a pay phone. Drewry thanked the Norwoods for coming, and apologized in advance that it might take some time for them to do the elimination fingerprints and hair samples. The Norwoods said they’d get something to eat and come back. As they left, Drewry figured he’d passed the first test; the family still felt comfortable leaving their daughter with him.