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

by Dan Morse

  McGill knew he’d have to conduct an experiment the next morning to support his shoelace-markings theory. He planned out how he’d do it. First, he’d bring in an old pair of sneakers, like the ones he wore when he was doing yard-work or taking his six-year-old daughter fishing on the Potomac River. Using sheep’s blood kept in the crime lab for experiments, he’d be able to get the laces bloody. He could line the floor of a long hallway outside the lab with white paper. Then he’d step into his old sneakers, keep the laces untied, walk down the paper, and see what happened.

  * * *

  Downstairs, news of McGill’s findings was tempered by the fact they had gotten no word from Brittany’s family about the pending interview. People were getting nervous, wondering if Brittany had gotten an attorney or if she was going to rush off to Washington State. At 7:45 P.M., Drewry called her sister Marissa, trying not to sound eager. She told him that Brittany was simply too tired to talk, but they would bring her to the station the next morning at 10:00 A.M.

  So far, Brittany’s family members had seemed straightforward and accommodating, even warm, to the detectives. Drewry believed that still to be the case. And he told his colleagues not to worry if Brittany bolted for the West Coast because they would inevitably track her down. “Flight is great,” he said. “It’s an indication of guilt.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Friday:

  Offering an Out

  Friday morning, March 18, 2011, opened with a heated debate inside the office of the Montgomery County Police Department’s major crimes commander, David Gillespie, over how far to push Brittany Norwood. One camp—essentially, all of the top commanders—contended it was time to confront Brittany with the evidence they had against her. Their feeling was that Brittany had grown wise to the detectives’ suspicions, this was likely their last shot with her, and she might even flee.

  “We need to find out what her story is, and then we need to grill her from there,” Gillespie said.

  Detective Jim Drewry pushed back. He worried about the strength of the case. Yes, they could go into the interview room, blow holes in Brittany’s story, and prove straight to her face that she was a liar. But what did they really have to convince Brittany they could prove she was the killer? Not DNA. Not eyewitnesses. Drewry certainly wasn’t above deceiving suspects that they had the goods, but he didn’t think that would work with Brittany. He favored letting her tell as many lies as she wanted to tell, into the next week if Brittany was willing. “Let’s give her as much rope as possible.”

  One of the meeting’s attendees, Marybeth Ayres, was in a tricky spot: Not only she relatively new to the county, she looked so much younger than her thirty-nine years that she’d been mistaken by some outside the murder scene for one of the lululemon workers, and this was her first high-profile case in Montgomery County. But Ayres had held similar positions in Baltimore and Queens, New York. She stepped up and told the half dozen cops and commanders in the room that she’d watch the interview on the closed-circuit monitor in Gillespie’s office, keep her boss informed—State’s Attorney John McCarthy was on his way to New Jersey for a family funeral—and advise them as the interview unfolded. Ayres stayed silent on whether to confront Brittany, but told the detectives that if they did so, they had to first advise her of her rights to remain silent and consult a lawyer.

  The meeting broke up by 9:45 A.M. Drewry knew what his bosses wanted him to do, but he wasn’t sure he was going to do it.

  Brittany did not strike him as someone with a natural urge to tell the truth, a force that was somewhere deep inside a surprising number of killers. Drewry had spoken with David McGill, the shoe-print expert, and knew how Brittany appeared to have deliberately and repeatedly dipped both pairs of shoes into a pool of Jayna’s blood. Who does that? Someone who made the decision a week ago not to flee, but to doctor the scene, tie herself up, wait for the cops, and tell one lie after another. The biggest problem Drewry had with confronting her was that it disarmed him of two of his favorite tactics. Suspects like Brittany mixed their lies with the truth, and the longer Drewry could speak with her in a conversational tone, the closer he could get to some version of the truth. It was akin to peeling back at least the outer layer of the onion. Drewry also viewed back-and-forth conversation as the best way to fully back a suspect into a corner, which often was the only route to a confession. The veteran detective approached Ruvin.

  “Let’s take a walk and talk,” Drewry said, leading the young detective outside to the parking lot.

  “How are you doing?” Drewry asked.

  “All right,” Ruvin said.

  “Whatever happens, we’ve just got to do what’s best. Don’t worry about what everyone else is saying. Don’t worry about all the pressure. Don’t worry about that stuff. We’ll just play it by ear, and we’ll see where it gets us.”

  Ruvin had been leaning toward the bosses’ view on confrontation—largely because he agreed that this was their last chance with the suspect. But he remained silent. He knew how he and Drewry had succeeded in past cases by letting Drewry take the lead on the questions in the interview room, while Ruvin quietly took his notes, biding his time until Drewry gave him a natural opening to come in with an inquiry. By 10:00 A.M., the detectives were back in their squad room, waiting for Brittany.

  * * *

  Upstairs, shoe-print expert McGill finished the rounds of his sheep-blood experiment. He’d soaked the laces of his old sneakers and walked down a hallway covered with a roll of wide, white paper. The results were just as he and his colleague Cheré Balma had predicted: the lapping laces generated stains similar to what he’d seen in the yoga store. And by keeping the soles free of blood, he could see how these stains seemed to be dancing off on their own, independent of actual shoe prints. McGill walked downstairs to share these results with the detectives, arming them with even more information ahead of Brittany’s arrival.

  Just before 11:00 A.M., Drewry got word that Brittany was out front with her brother Chris and sister Marissa. “They’re here, Dimitry,” he called out, loud enough that other colleagues overheard. They knew how much pressure Drewry and Ruvin were under, and tried to keep them loose.

  “Jim, keep your phone with you because I may have some suggestions,” one called out.

  “Thank you, I will,” Drewry said. “As a matter of fact, I’ll crank the volume all the way up.”

  Drewry, wearing a cream-colored sweater vest, walked to the lobby to greet Brittany and her siblings. He tried to make Chris and Marissa feel as comfortable as he could in the dumpy lobby, and brought Brittany back into the homicide unit, placing her in the same room she’d been in two days earlier. Again, he subtly eased her toward the chair in the corner, near the hidden microphone and facing the hidden camera. She wore gray lululemon workout pants and a gray zippered lululemon jacket.

  “Did you want some water or something like that?” Drewry asked, holding his own cup of coffee.

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive,” Brittany said quickly, staking out a pleasant but slightly edged tone that gave a clear message: I am here to amend my story and then I’m leaving.

  Ruvin walked in. Brittany greeted him softly. “Hi, Dimitry.”

  Drewry learned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. “Thanks for coming back in. In talking with Chris and Marissa, it sounds like they’ve finally been able to convince you, like, to go back to Seattle and stay with Chris for a while.”

  It was part small talk and part establishing the framework of a “noncustodial” interview, which didn’t require him to inform Brittany of her rights to remain silent and consult an attorney. Drewry wanted Brittany to feel that as far as he was concerned, she was not only free to leave the interview room; she could head across the country.

  “It’s definitely an option,” Brittany told him, assuring the detectives she didn’t want that to become an obstacle to them solving a case. “I told them my only concern was
being here throughout this, and if needing anything from me, I didn’t want, you know, to be like unreachable. They told me that was the last thing I needed to worry about, and, if need be, I could fly back and forth. They would fly with me. They said not to worry about that.”

  “Okay, good,” Drewry said.

  Brittany spoke about how rattled she was—how she hadn’t slept, how she was scared even to walk out of her basement apartment and ascend the outside stairs to Marissa’s place. Brittany said she’d spoken to her brother Chris about her fears, and how that had led her to talk about what had happened Friday night. It was Chris’s idea, Brittany said, for her to come in and share additional details with the detectives.

  “So I’m here now,” Brittany said, fumbling over a few words before coming out with it. “Prior to him sexually assaulting me and zip-tying me, they made me move her car.”

  “Okay,” Drewry said, rolling his chair slightly back, displaying little reaction, and reaching to shut the door. He didn’t want any noises interfering with the recording on this one. Drewry nodded to Brittany, hunched his shoulders, leaned forward an inch. It was an acceptance of what she just said, an invitation to keep going. Brittany did.

  “They asked, they said, ‘Where are her keys?’ I said. ‘I have no idea.’ One of them punched me in my head, and made me look through her coat and her bag for them. When I finally found them, they said if I was to pass anyone and open my mouth, I can consider myself dead, and that one of them would be watching the entire time.”

  Brittany told them about the lot where she’d moved the car. Drewry offered one word, “Okay,” followed by silence. It was one of his favorite techniques, the pregnant pause. Suspects often felt compelled to end it by saying something, as Brittany did. “I remember seeing a cop, and I was just too scared to even flag him down.”

  Seeing a cop and not running to him for help? Maybe what really happened was that Brittany had seen Officer Justin Tierney ease his cruiser past her when she was parked in Jayna’s car—and she was trying to get in front of that story, too.

  Drewry asked a few more questions about Brittany moving the car, biding his time to segue into a broader discussion about the case. His tone was apologetic. “Okay, well, let’s, go, ah, through it step-by-step then as far as your returning to the store then, because you might remember some other things, too.” Brittany stuck to her earlier story. To help explain Jayna’s movements, she took her left hand out of the front pocket of her gray lulu jacket, extended her index finger and moving it across the metal table. Nine minutes after Brittany arrived, though, her tone had shifted to exasperation. “Do I have to go through it?”

  “Yeah,” Drewry said, “because you left out some things, okay? So let’s, like, see if you remember some other stuff.”

  “Left out what?”

  “Well, as far as like the car thing is concerned.”

  “I know,” Brittany said, raising the pitch of her voice, leaning back, and looking at the ceiling. “And that’s the only thing.”

  * * *

  The best detectives are also skilled con men. Judges have ruled again and again that detectives can deceive and lie during interrogations. It gave them permission to use an arsenal of tricks, ones Drewry and Ruvin had employed together in the past. They planned to use some with Brittany.

  Drewry wanted to come across like he was in Brittany’s corner, but that he needed some more explanations to get his superiors off his back. Ruvin wanted to eventually toss Brittany an “out,” a term detectives used to tempt suspects to lie their way out of trouble, only to get into more trouble. The “out” here would be that it was somehow not really Brittany’s fault for trouble that erupted inside the store; it was Jayna—she’d started a fight.

  For forty minutes, the detectives kept coming back to questions about the weakest links in Brittany’s story, in particular, this most recent notion that the men had sent her out, alone, to move Jayna’s car, and she came back to the store anyway, even knowing that one of the men had just viciously attacked Jayna. But Brittany edged forward, trying to add a detail to fill in another hole: the black cap she must’ve by now realized she’d accidentally left in the back of Jayna’s car. Before going out to move the car, she told the detectives, the men made her put the hat on.

  “Okay,” Drewry said.

  “I had a hat on. It’s a black hat.”

  “Okay. Why did they make you put the hat on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what did they say?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t remember,” Brittany said, raising the pitch of her voice. “Do you know how many times they hit me in my head?”

  Drewry shook his head no and turned the question around. “How many times did they hit you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Drewry leaned his chin atop his clasped hands, creating gaps of silence stretching past ten seconds. He returned to his questions about Brittany leaving the store to get Jayna’s car, acting out the role of just a cog in the wheel. “Okay, people would probably ask, ‘Well, why didn’t you just keep on going and not go back,’ you know?”

  “Because I was scared for my life.”

  Drewry asked Brittany why she didn’t flag down the cop she saw. “You know, people would probably ask stuff like that. And I guess I have to try to be able to answer that. So what’s the answer to that one?”

  “I was scared for my life. I mean I was scared for my life. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Drewry got Brittany to again confirm that she had blood on her face when she moved the car. Edging up the heat of the flame below her, Drewry asked Brittany about her three-block walk back to the store among late-night pedestrians. “Did they kind of look at you funny or anything like, you know, ‘Whoa, what’s she doing all bloody?’”

  “I don’t know if they saw, like I would have been more in front of them,” Brittany said.

  Ruvin smiled inside over Brittany’s contortions. It must have been a gut-wrenching moment for Brittany, he thought, when she realized that she left behind such a telling, bloodstained clue in Jayna’s car, the hat. And Drewry was returning to that subject, asking Brittany where the attackers got the hat. “I don’t know,” Brittany said, “maybe on like one of our mid-racks.”

  Drewry kept pushing on what happened inside the store. Brittany said she didn’t want to go over the horrifying details yet again, even as Drewry continued to go back over them.

  “And how did you fall onto Jayna, I mean, were you on your hands and your knees? Or straight down, facedown?”

  “On my knees.”

  “Okay. Were you straddling her, or were you actually physically, like, pancaked on top of her or what?”

  “He pushed me on her,” Brittany said, pausing for several seconds, and turning her voice into a soft, whispering cry. “I touched her head.”

  Drewry’s only concern about Brittany’s soft cries was that they weren’t being picked up by the recording equipment. In a gambit he repeated several times, Drewry pointed to his right ear and spoke of his own pretend limitations. “I understand that you’re emotional, and that you’re crying, okay. But with my, my hearing, and you know, and your crying, I can’t hear you.”

  “One of my hands,” Brittany said, “fell on her head before like sliding to the ground in the blood.” From the detectives’ point of view, Brittany played up her whimpers about having to relive what she’d seen, about how she had just wanted to come into the room that morning, give them her car-moving addendum, and leave.

  “I wanted to feel better after coming here,” she said.

  “Well, hopefully you will, okay?” Drewry said.

  “I don’t,” Brittany snapped.

  By 11:44 A.M., nearly an hour after the interview had started, Brittany had said she wanted to go at least four times. The detectives knew they were getting to decision time—either let her go or inform her of her rights to remain silent and get a lawyer. Drewry put his hands on the table an
d stood up. “Let’s take a break, okay. Do you want to use the bathroom, or some water, or something like that?”

  “Can I go?”

  “Probably in a couple of minutes. I just need to take a break, okay.”

  The detectives opened the door, leaving it that way so Brittany could see into the cubicles. They took a sharp left and walked forty feet down a hall to their captain’s office to strategize.

  * * *

  It was the same crowd as the morning. At issue was if and when to confront Brittany. Drewry still didn’t want to. He advocated going back into the room and getting Brittany to agree in front of the camera that she didn’t mind staying; then, ask a few more questions and see what happened. But it meant that they should be willing to let her walk out, to see if they could go after her next week with more evidence. His commanders returned to their same point in the morning: if she leaves, she’s not coming back. Go in there and confront her, they told Drewry. Ayres, the prosecutor, chipped in too, reminding the detectives they needed to advise Brittany of her rights before confronting her.

  * * *

  Drewry walked back to his cubicle, collecting the evidence he had to blow holes in Brittany’s story. He still wasn’t sure if and when he would follow his orders. He and Ruvin walked back into the interview room. Brittany sat expressionless, with her left leg looped over a chair arm.

  “I just wanted to clarify a couple of things,” Drewry began, getting Brittany to talk about how she may have gotten blood on her clothes. The detective saw an opening to try to evoke a feeling of guilt or sympathy.