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

by Dan Morse

  Over the course of an hour, Hamill told Brittany she was a good person, that she wasn’t judging her, that everything happened for a reason, that Brittany telling right now might be the hardest thing she’d ever done—but that made it so important to do.

  Hamill got Brittany to talk about going back into the store with Jayna the night of the murder. “Did you guys do anything while you were there? Smoke dope, anything like that? I mean, you guys didn’t have any like sexual relationship or anything?”

  Brittany shook her head no. She whimpered, mumbled, curled her legs up on her chair, lowered her head, asked Hamill if she would get hurt in jail. “Thank you for staying with me,” Brittany told the detective.

  At one point Hamill left, coming back with a slice of pizza. Brittany didn’t eat any. Ruvin came in to join them, again trying to get Brittany to say there’d been a fight. She didn’t respond. Her sobbing sounds became panting. She told Ruvin and Hamill that she wouldn’t answer their questions, but she didn’t want to be alone. Ruvin stayed, trying again with the notion Brittany was the only one who could explain what happened.

  Drewry watched Ruvin and Hamill’s gallant efforts, growing more frustrated. He figured he’d give talking to Brittany one more try, but gone was any patience, any sense that she shouldn’t be treated like a killer. He had Ruvin handcuff her right wrist to the ring on the table leg. She slouched, looked at the ground.

  “Brittany, we’ve given you every opportunity in the world to tell us what happened, how this thing started,” Drewry said. “It is entirely up to you at this point as far as how people are going to see you. Are they going to see you as a cold-blooded, heartless, goddamned killer, or are they going to see you as a person that got into a situation over her head? That is entirely up to you if you’re going to tell us what happened.”

  Brittany looked up. He told her he was going to have to call Jayna’s parents about the arrest, and he would like to give them some kind of explanation of what happened. “The only person that can tell us why their daughter is dead is you. Is it because Brittany is psycho, and cold-blooded?”

  “No,” she sobbed.

  “Or is it because they got into a fight?”

  “I’m not psycho. I’m not cold-blooded.”

  “What are you? What happened? Who started the fight? Let’s get it out. Who started the fight? Either you started it, or Jayna started it, because they’re going to have to be told of the amount of injuries that Jayna had. Multiple, multiple injuries. And somebody’s going to have to explain how she got those injuries. I’m trying to be nice to you, kid. Told your brother and your sister that I would do everything I could to help you. You got to help yourself. Who started it?”

  Ten seconds passed.

  “I didn’t start it,” Brittany said, looking down.

  “You didn’t start it?” Drewry asked. “Jayna started it?”

  “Uh-huh,” Brittany seemed to mumble.

  “I can’t hear you, baby,” Drewry said, crouching down next to her. “Talk to me, put your head up and talk to me.”

  At one point, Brittany seemed to whimper that Jayna had started the fight. Drewry thought they might be on the verge of hearing something valuable. He reached out with his left hand to hold Brittany’s right hand, still cuffed to the table leg, and stroked her hair with his right. The detective had a running joke with his colleagues about how at this point in interviews they were willing to try anything, though Drewry liked to say he stopped short of a stunt others pulled—breaking out a Bible—because it conflicted with his agnostic beliefs.

  “I can’t hear you, okay?” he told Brittany. “You’re crying.”

  But all Drewry could make out were hysterical mumbles, which sounded like Brittany lamenting going off to jail. She bent further forward, her face on her knees. “Come on, baby. Lift your head up for me,” Drewry said.

  Brittany did, her head lobbing to her right and knocking a cup of water across the table. Ruvin pulled tissues out of a box to begin wiping it up. Drewry continued holding Brittany’s cuffed right hand and right knee, begging for answers as he grew more frustrated.

  “I’m sorry,” Brittany said. “I can’t. I just can’t talk. I’m sorry. I don’t want people to think I’m horrible but I can’t talk anymore.”

  Drewry again invoked Jayna’s parents, Brittany’s own parents. He waited nearly ten seconds. No response. At 6:01 P.M., a little more than seven hours after Brittany had arrived at the station, it was over.

  “Okay,” Drewry said with a shrug. He stood up and walked out to get paper towels to help Ruvin soak up the rest of the water. Then they left together, shutting the door behind them.

  * * *

  The police press office sent out word that there would be a 7:00 P.M. news conference about the lululemon case. Montgomery Police Chief Tom Manger walked into the homicide unit from upstairs, congratulating the detectives and trying to figure out what he was going to say. He looked over Ruvin’s shoulder as the detective typed up his affidavit to support first-degree, premeditated murder charges against Brittany.

  Drewry went to a quiet area to call the Murrays, who had returned to Texas after claiming Jayna’s body. Their week had been one soul-numbing task after another. One of the worst had been having to buy Jayna’s gravesite. Her dad, David, never thought she would die before him, and had planned to be buried in a military cemetary in Texas with his wife, Phyllis. But at the funeral home the day after finding out his daughter was dead, David switched his plans. “The military plot can go to someone else who needs it,” he told the woman selling them the gravesite, saying he needed at least six more for the rest of the family. “I’m going to be buried next to my daughter.”

  It was about 5:30 P.M. Texas time on Friday, March 18, 2011. David and Phyllis, their sons, and their sons’ families were getting ready to leave for a visitation set for Jayna at a nearby funeral home. David’s phone beeped. He answered and Drewry greeted him. “We just made an arrest,” the detective said.

  “That’s good,” David said.

  “There’s more to it,” Drewry said, going on to say how the case had taken a turn, how they had charged the purported survivor with murder.

  David exhaled a long sigh. His hand started to shake. He thanked Drewry, hung up, and told the others. No one knew what to say. Jayna’s brother Hugh called one of Jayna’s friends, and word quickly spread, reaching those already on their way to the funeral home—including Chasity Wilson, Jayna’s friend from Halliburton, whom Jayna had been so helpful to during her divorce, and who she’d encouraged to return to college. In the years since, Chasity had earned a degree in business and moved into a new house with her kids. During the previous week, even as Chasity had been rocked by Jayna’s murder, she’d been worried about the purported survivor. “That poor girl was laying there all night,” she had told her coworkers. “How is she going to go on?”

  Now in her car, hearing news of the arrest, Chasity burst into tears. She pulled off the freeway, onto a road with less traffic where she could stop her car. That the police in Maryland were saying the killer knew Jayna and tried to cover it up made it all the worse, if that was possible. Chasity sat behind the wheel, shaking as she wept, eventually composing herself to start driving again to the visitation.

  The Murrays arrived at the funeral home. Hugh asked the director if he had a computer on which they could watch the news conference, which he figured might be streamed live on Washington, D.C., television stations. In short order, the Murrays and a few friends were inside a small room, watching the news conference begin.

  “Tonight we have arrested Brittany Norwood,” Montgomery’s police chief said, “for the murder of Jayna Murray.” His statement was brief, and gave the vague possible motive as “a dispute between the two women.”

  Reporters asked follow-up questions, but the chief didn’t want to go into many details of the case. David and Phyllis Murray knew that hundreds of their friends and family members were outside in the main roo
m, including David’s best friend, who had come all the way from a drilling site in China. The Murrays left the small room to greet them, even as the press conference continued. The couple stood next to Jayna’s closed casket, receiving words of comfort from those lined up. By then, word had spread among the crowd about the coworker’s arrest.

  After a week of horror, the Murrays were paralyzed by a new question: why?

  SECTION IV

  WHY?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Neuropsychiatry

  With Brittany Norwood’s arrest for the murder of Jayna Murray, the fears that had gripped Bethesda vanished, replaced by heightened fascination over the case. Residents devoured news accounts describing Brittany’s respected, successful family; her lack of a criminal record; and the possibility that the whole thing started over stolen clothes.

  At Parker’s restaurant, a few doors down from the lululemon athletica store, customers were more interested in Brittany than they’d been with the infamous “Beltway Snipers,” who’d killed ten people in the region nine years earlier. “This isn’t two clowns from out of town,” the group of regulars was telling owner and bartender Matt Touhey. “It’s the girl down the street.”

  Three days after the arrest, Jayna’s parents appeared on Good Morning America, sitting on an interview sofa in the show’s New York studio. For much of the three-and-one-half-minute segment, David and Phyllis Murray smiled, recalling their daughter’s outgoing, spirited nature. David even summoned up some humor, saying he was being “as objective as a father can get.” But when he and Phyllis were asked about Brittany Norwood’s relationship with Jayna, their faces went blank.

  “Jayna never mentioned her,” Phyllis said. “There were always people that she would have dinner with and go to movies with, but Brittany’s name was never mentioned.”

  The arrest tore through Brittany’s family as well. News accounts presented a devastating case against her. Her siblings—Chris and Marissa—had been in that interrogation room, had heard the detectives lay out evidence against their sister. The Norwoods couldn’t help asking themselves: Could this really have happened? And if so, was there something we missed? Reporters called, rang doorbells, stuffed business cards into doorjambs next to the cards of their colleagues. The Norwoods stuck together, publicly saying nothing but privately researching and calling several of the best defense attorneys in Maryland. As Chris had promised Brittany just before she was taken to jail: “No matter what, we’re going to be here for you.”

  One of the lawyers they reached, Doug Wood, enjoyed a particularly aggressive reputation in the courtroom. “I think the system works best when it’s adversarial,” he had once told the Washington Post in a profile posted on his website. The story told of Wood cutting his teeth in the rough-and-tumble world of Washington, D.C., courts in the 1980s before going on to nearby Prince George’s County, in Maryland, where he won five murder acquittals over a two-year streak.

  “When I was younger, I tended to trust that police got the right guy and used the right process in finding him,” Wood said in the profile. “The more you see and hear, the more you learn you just can’t trust what they say. You have to look at every case with skepticism; that’s the only way to do it.” And Wood tried not to get chummy with his opponents. “I don’t have a cordial relationship with the police, and I like that,” he said.

  Outside of court, the slim, six feet one, fifty-nine-year-old Bethesda resident, who wore his wave of silver hair about an inch longer than most lawyers, was friendly, and quick with a joke. He had an equally skilled law partner in Chris Griffiths, who in 2007 had won acquittal for a murder suspect in Montgomery County—the first time in more than a decade that Montgomery prosecutors had outright lost a first-degree murder case. The Norwoods hired them.

  As is typical early in cases, Wood and Griffiths didn’t know exactly what the police had. But they could see three apparent pathways ahead, none of them easy.

  For one, they could embrace Brittany’s story about the masked men and assert that their client had nothing to do with Jayna’s death. The problem here, at least according to early media reports, was that Brittany had left evidence tying her to the crime and the cover-up. And to hear the prosecutors tell it, Brittany had lied to detectives hundreds of times during video-recorded interviews. Still, there often were ways around such challenges.

  For instance, what if the cops hadn’t properly handled all those tools, clothes, and other clues they’d collected? Wood and Griffiths could raise issues about mishandled evidence, and the possibility of blood transfer. Besides, could the prosecutors really use bloodstains to re-create Brittany’s movements in the store? Might not all that evidence be explained by Brittany’s fending off a furious, chaotic attack? As for the lies she’d allegedly told the detectives, they knew how detectives were forever playing games to get around reading suspects their rights to remain silent and contact a lawyer. Brittany’s words would mean nothing if Wood and Griffiths could get the interrogations ruled unconstitutional and excluded from evidence.

  The second path was based on the dramatic differences in sentencing for different categories of murder. Under this strategy, Wood and Griffiths would concede that Brittany killed Jayna, but assert that she hadn’t done so in a “willful, deliberate and premeditated” fashion, the elements of first-degree murder. The number of injuries to Jayna, if initial news accounts were accurate, would make this tough going—but what if Jayna had attacked Brittany first, causing Brittany to flash into an uncontrolled rage? And what if they could show that Jayna received at least some of her injuries by striking Brittany? The goal here would not be exoneration, but a conviction for second-degree murder and Brittany’s release from prison within fifteen years—when she’d be forty-three, still young enough to make a life. First-degree murder likely meant a life behind bars.

  The final option was an insanity defense, known in Maryland as “not criminally responsible.” In taking this route, the defense lawyers would likely concede that Brittany had killed Jayna, but would contend that she had an underlying mental disorder that made her unable to tell right from wrong. The challenge here was twofold. First, if evidence showed that Brittany had tried to cover up the murder, it was likely she knew it was wrong. Second, she apparently had never undergone mental-health treatment. But Brittany had said she’d suffered two concussions while playing soccer in college. Wood and Griffiths knew just whom to call: Dr. David Williamson.

  Williamson graduated with academic awards from the University of Edinburgh, then went on to Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, and launched a dazzling career exploring how traumatic brain injuries could induce “neurobehavioral” complications. He ran a private practice specializing in the role of brain illness in criminal and legal matters. For six years, he served as an attending psychiatrist at Maryland’s maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Killers who were sent there received treatment and, in some circumstances, were released back into society.

  Williamson had gained international acclaim in his position as medical director at the traumatic brain injury unit at Bethesda’s National Naval Medical Center, a temple of American medicine where U.S. presidents went for checkups and treatment. Williamson and his colleagues used advanced brain imaging, behavioral therapy, and combinations of medications to treat soldiers injured in Afghanistan and Iraq. He had briefed Congress and the president on the effects of traumatic brain injury, known as TBI.

  Of course, colliding with an opposing soccer player or “heading” the ball too many times didn’t bear comparison to being blown up by a roadside bomb. But the idea that sports injuries could induce behavioral changes was at least plausible. As it turned out, soccer players were suffering concussions in large numbers. In a 2007 paper published in the Journal of Athletic Training, researchers estimated that high-school girls who played soccer sustained 29,167 concussions a year, often from head-to-head collisions, and college soccer players, on average, were apt to sustain one co
ncussion in every 556 games they played. That was in the same ballpark as college football players, who were apt to sustain one concussion in every 331 games they played, according to the paper.

  “I am writing to request that Dr. David Williamson be permitted to have a contact visit with my client, Brittany Norwood,” Wood wrote seven days after Brittany’s arrest. The next day, on Saturday, March 26, 2011, one of the world’s leading experts on brain trauma and behavioral changes pulled up to the county jail in the sleepy Clarksburg community, twenty-two miles north of the yoga store.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Murders in Montgomery

  Charging someone with murder is one thing. Proving it is another. Leading that effort, from the time that Brittany Norwood was charged, was Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy. Fifty-nine years old, he’d grown up in a neighborhood in New Jersey near Philadelphia, and had come to the Washington area by virtue of a baseball scholarship to Catholic University, where he learned firsthand the career ceiling of five-foot-eight catchers. McCarthy graduated college, got a job teaching social studies at a local high school, then put himself through law school at night and joined the State’s Attorney’s Office as a line prosecutor in 1982. He took on tough cases, bided his time, and in 2006 ran as a Democrat for the elected position that headed up the office. McCarthy won by a landslide, and four years later was unopposed in his reelection.

  His morning newspaper-reading routine reflected his passion for sports and his skills as a politician. International news? Reports from the White House? Local news? In a pinch, they could all be passed over as he read deep into the sports section for the box scores of local high school football, basketball, and baseball games. He scanned for Montgomery County results, arming himself with details to deploy in the halls of the nine-story Montgomery County Circuit Courthouse. “Before we get to that case you were asking me about,” McCarthy might say, “let’s talk about what’s really important. I saw your daughter had fourteen points the other night.”