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

by Dan Morse

  She called her dad in suburban Seattle at least once a week, often reaching him at his upholstery shop. On one call, a ringing bell could be heard in the background, as if a customer had come through the door.

  “Do you need to go?” Brittany asked.

  “No, it’s okay,” her father said, telling Brittany he’d been waiting for her call. He always ended conversations by telling her they loved her, missed her, and were praying for her.

  Inside his shop, Earl Norwood received visitors who wished him well, even if they didn’t quite know how to say it. Tim Longmead, who worked across the street at a woodworking shop, was one of them. “I’m doing fine,” Earl told him, but his voice seemed about to crack with every word. The initial hearing hadn’t gone well for his daughter.

  The import of the judge’s rulings and comments were even clearer to the attorneys in the case. In early September 2011, State’s Attorney John McCarthy was pulling into a conference-center parking lot to attend a political gathering when his phone beeped. One of Brittany’s attorneys, Doug Wood, said he wanted to come in and talk about a plea deal—one that would give Brittany a chance at parole.

  “Doug, I don’t know,” McCarthy said. “I’ve got to ask the family.”

  McCarthy wanted a trial, but felt compelled to talk to Jayna Murray’s family about the proposed deal first. As it turned out, David and Phyllis Murray, their sons, Hugh and Dirk, and their daughters-in-laws, Kate and April, were all coming into town the following week for a road race to raise money for a foundation to be established in Jayna’s honor. McCarthy invited them all to his office.

  The outlines of the proposed deal meant that Brittany would plead guilty, but her sentence would be capped, making her eligible for parole in as soon as fifteen years. The prosecutor told the Murrays he had a strong case, but warned that anything could happen during a trial. He cited the much-publicized acquittal of Casey Anthony in Florida, whom a jury had recently found not guilty of murder, aggravated manslaughter of a child, or aggravated child abuse—even after the skeletal remains of her daughter, Caylee, were found near her home.

  “Why don’t we leave you all alone to talk about it?” McCarthy said as he and Marybeth Ayres got up to leave. It had been 191 days since Jayna’s murder, each one horrifying for the Murrays in its own way.

  Few were as bad as the morning the family entered Jayna’s apartment in Northern Virginia just outside D.C. and tried to decide what to do with her possessions, tried to select the clothes Jayna would wear in her closed casket. Phyllis could tell that her daughter had dashed to work quickly on her last day of life. Jayna’s Murphy bed was still folded down. An empty Diet Dr Pepper can sat on her desk. For some reason—perhaps because she could so clearly envision Jayna drinking from it, maybe because she’d seen it at the store memorial—Phyllis couldn’t throw the can away. She packed it up. Other things she didn’t feel the need to keep, such as Jayna’s sheets and towels, but she found herself folding them before throwing them away. It was like that, the grief, prompting behavior that didn’t always make sense. Phyllis couldn’t take walks anymore, even with other people, because they made her feel even more alone. She could go to the grocery store, but avoided the aisle where powdered drink mixes were kept because she had liked to buy them for Jayna. And every day, she dreaded the hour between 3:00 and 4:00 P.M., which was when Jayna would have called. She had learned to turn her ringer off for that hour. “Some days you’re so down you just ache” was how she later described it.

  After his daughter’s murder, David’s thoughts still ran to his combat days, but only in vague terms. The vivid images and bad dreams were instantly replaced by thoughts of his daughter’s final minutes. He forced himself back to work, knowing he had to occupy his mind. Alone in his office, tears would often overcome him. But David found that if he put in twelve hours at work and two hours at the gym, then fell into bed, he might get to sleep within a few minutes. If not, he’d be up all night, thinking about how Jayna died.

  Jayna’s brother Dirk had agonized over how much to tell his young boys, something he’d faced since the opening hours of the tragedy, when he attended his son’s scheduled birthday party knowing Jayna was missing, trying to pretend nothing was wrong. Since then, he struggled with how much to tell the kids, well aware of how fast kids grow up when they’re surrounded by hundreds of TV channels, computers, video games. In the days after the murder, when masked men were supposedly on the loose, Dirk’s six-year-old son told him the police needed to review store surveillance video. “They can go look at the tapes,” he’d told his dad.

  Hugh, Jayna’s other brother, who after the murder had flown to Washington from Iraq, had had to return there several weeks later. When he did, he found a package awaiting him from Jayna, which she had mailed just before her death. Hugh took it to his private quarters, hesitating before he opened it, knowing he was about to read Jayna’s last words to him. Inside was a running cap, along with a card that listed things that didn’t work when they were apart: Chips without Dip . . . Macaroni without Cheese . . . Me without You. She thanked him for his e-mails. “It’ll be even better once you’re back telling the stories and showing pictures in person. Take care and be safe! Love you and miss you, Jayna.”

  Now he was in McCarthy’s office, listening to the prosecutor ask how he and his remaining family felt about taking a plea deal in Jayna’s murder. The family didn’t have much to discuss. Hugh and his wife, Kate, as lawyers, had spent countless hours studying Maryland law, studying which homicide statutes applied, and what prison sentences they carried. The family already had asked McCarthy whether Maryland law allowed an inmate’s wages from prison jobs to be garnisheed, and whether the state had a “Son of Sam” law preventing inmates from profiting from books or movies about their crimes. They’d created a flow chart of possible plea deals and their effects on sentences. Every one of them was convinced that Brittany had committed first-degree, premeditated murder, and over something as senseless as a pair of yoga pants. Kate got up to find McCarthy, who hadn’t even made it to his administrative assistant’s office, twenty feet away. “We made our decision,” she said. They would go to trial.

  So the conversation resumed, this time veering toward Brittany. The Murrays had always been inquisitive people—led by David as an engineer and Phyllis as a trained family therapist—and they couldn’t stop themselves now. What would drive someone like Brittany to kill?

  Ayres, the prosecutor who had tried killers in Baltimore and rapists in Queens, had wrestled with that question as never before. She told the Murrays about a book she was reading, The Sociopath Next Door, which suggested that one in twenty-five people possess little or no conscience. Some of these people were successful businessmen. Others were senseless killers.

  “What fuels them is this deep-seated insecurity,” Ayres told the Murrays.

  The Murrays soon found themselves all reading the book. The first paragraph seemed particularly revealing.

  Imagine—if you can—not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools. Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

  The author, Martha Stout, wrote that the condition w
ent by a more familiar term, psychopathy, and cited one of the most well-known authorities in the field, Robert D. Hare.

  Jayna’s brother Hugh also bought Hare’s book, Without Conscience, a more clinical take on the subject. Hare had interviewed murderers in prisons for twenty-five years. The term psychopath was too loosely used, he wrote, conjuring up images of crazed killers depicted in horror movies. Instead, Hare asserted, “Their acts result not from a deranged mind but from a cold, calculating rationality combined with a chilling inability to treat others as thinking, feeling human beings.”

  Hare acknowledged that compared with widely studied conditions such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness, the contours of psychopathy were only starting to take shape. He estimated that there were more than two million psychopaths in North America, existing on a sliding scale of severity. Some had been shaped by their environment. Others were simply wired wrong.

  On the outside, psychopaths could charm anyone, making it difficult to know if that carried over to genuine affection. At their worst, Hare wrote, psychopaths weren’t governed by an emotion that drives so many daily decisions—the ability or desire to see the world from someone else’s perspective. “In short, a complete lack of empathy, the prerequisite for love,” Hare wrote.

  Hugh read the book while at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he’d been sent after his Iraq deployment had been cut short so he could be closer to the court proceedings in Maryland. He couldn’t help but think of that country and his final assignment there, as the legal chief of detention operations—and all the prisoners he’d met face-to-face. Among them were insurgents willing to blow themselves up or blow up others. They believed in a greater cause, and in that sense, at least their actions carried logic. Not so for the woman who killed his sister, Hugh thought. “They selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret,” Hare wrote. “Their bewildered victims desperately ask, ‘Who are these people?’”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “I Think We Can Live with This Guy”

  In the case of Brittany Norwood, her attorneys, Doug Wood and Chris Griffiths, could not make a compelling connection between soccer injuries and mental illness—and abandoned the strategy. Dr. David Williamson, the renowned expert from Bethesda’s National Naval Medical Center, would not be testifying. Brittany would be tried as legally sane at the time she allegedly committed the murder.

  Prosecutors John McCarthy and Marybeth Ayres, meanwhile, were struggling to figure out a way to tell jurors their theory of motive. In a hearing ten days before the trial, Judge Robert Greenberg told them they likely wouldn’t be allowed to call witnesses to testify about telephone conversations they had with Jayna Murray less than thirty minutes before she was killed. In those conversations, two coworkers would have said that Jayna told them she had just confronted Brittany over shoplifting before the two of them had left the store. But Greenberg had ruled it to be classic hearsay—the memory of what someone heard but didn’t have personal knowledge of.

  The prosecutors had another option to try to present their motive. They could play parts of the video recording of Brittany talking to her brother Chris in the interrogation room. The two had been talking about what happened in the store just before Jayna was killed.

  “Did she accuse you of shoplifting?” Chris had asked Brittany. “Is that what it’s all about?”

  Brittany’s answer was muddled. She didn’t admit to taking anything, but she indicated Jayna suspected her of doing so. “She was going to, like, I don’t know, make sure our manager knew or something.”

  It was compelling dialogue. But to prosecutor Ayres it was also problematic, something she couldn’t get out of her head as she took a shower one morning just days ahead of the trial. Before leaving for the office, she sent a text to McCarthy saying they had to talk as soon as she got there.

  They did so, in McCarthy’s office. “We can’t play the tape,” Ayres told him.

  In the hands of skilled attorneys like Wood and Griffiths, she told her boss, the conversation between Brittany and her brother could swell into indications of deep friction between Brittany and Jayna—and provide an opening to assert that Jayna had started a fight. And there was something else on the tape that the attorneys could use to build an argument that whatever happened, it was hardly premeditated.

  “Was the whole thing planned?” Chris had asked his sister.

  “No, not at all,” Brittany had said.

  McCarthy agreed with what Ayres was saying. And he knew that if they didn’t play the video recording of a defendant, the rules of evidence meant Wood and Griffiths couldn’t introduce it. McCarthy made his decision. They’d try the case with no motive.

  Days later, on October 24, 2011, around 150 juror prospects were summoned to the largest courtroom in Montgomery County, used for high-profile cases. Judge Greenberg warmly greeted the prospective jurors, asking each preliminary questions before describing the case. He asked everyone who had heard or read about it to rise. One hundred and thirty-one people stood up.

  Greenberg didn’t want to rule any of them out in advance, and knew he’d have to ask if they could keep open minds while they listened to the evidence and arguments. In the meantime, though, he moved on to other questions, seeking factors that could color their views.

  “Is there any prospective juror, or member of your immediate family, or a close friend who has been an employee in the legal profession, such as a lawyer, a law clerk, a legal secretary, or a paralegal?”

  Eighty-six people stood up.

  “Welcome to Montgomery County,” Greenberg cracked.

  Among those standing was an ambitious young defense attorney, Donny Knepper, who on most days toiled across the street at a courthouse devoted to misdemeanor and traffic offenses. Knepper, thirty-six years old, didn’t know much about the case, but wanted to be selected so he could have a front-row seat for the skilled performances of attorneys Doug Wood, Chris Griffiths, John McCarthy, and Marybeth Ayres. He told Greenberg his juror number, 3, fairly sure the judge recognized him, then sat down and returned to his novel, Life of Pi.

  Greenberg continued asking additional, broad-brush questions of the jurors, then relocated the proceedings to a private office behind a rear door in the courtroom. He took the attorneys back there, asking them to sit on either side of a conference table. He wanted the jurors to come in one by one in a setting where they could candidly answer personal questions.

  Knepper knew his low juror number would have him going into the office early. He figured he’d make it through this “qualification” stage, when prospects could be disqualified only for obvious conflicts. His goal was to impress both prosecutors and defense attorneys so that at the next stage—probably a day or two away—they wouldn’t use their more subjective “strikes” to eliminate him. Knepper tried to think of it as a job interview.

  His path to the defense bar hadn’t been a direct one. The son of a cop and a nurse in Erie, Pennsylvania, he spent two years at Penn State University, grew worried about drinking too much beer and drifting without much direction, so he dropped out and joined the U.S. Marine Corps, where he spent four years. Back at Penn State, he got a degree in human development, thought about becoming a family therapist, but decided to enroll in law school.

  Shortly after 3:00 P.M., Knepper was told to go see the judge.

  “I know you,” Greenberg said. “Would you close the door please, Juror Number 3.”

  McCarthy also recognized Knepper as a defense attorney he’d seen around the courthouse. As a rule, the prosecutor hated having defense lawyers on juries, part of his vocation-avoidance list that included psychiatrists, social workers, and members of the clergy. “I’m not in the redemption business,” he liked to joke.

  Greenberg looked over Knepper’s answers to earlier questions, noting that he had disclosed personal ties to someone in McCarthy’s office. “Tell us about that,” Gr
eenberg asked.

  “Vlatka Tomazic,” Knepper said, catching McCarthy’s full attention with the name of a prosecutor in his office, “is my girlfriend now of—I don’t know exactly when it became official—about nine months.”

  McCarthy considered Tomazic one of the brighter young prosecutors in his office, and he figured if she was hanging out with this guy Knepper, there must be something to him. He was also intrigued to hear Knepper mention that his dad was a retired police officer.

  Wood asked about his practice.

  Criminal, traffic, juvenile crime, Knepper told him.

  “Do you have any expectation of how your girlfriend wants this case resolved, in terms of what she thinks the outcome should be?” Wood asked.

  “No, sir,” Knepper said. They wrapped things up, and he headed back to the courtroom.

  As the trial lawyers waited for prospective jurors to come and go, a tone of informality quickly grew among the courtroom combatants, and Judge Greenberg encouraged it. He called Brittany’s lawyers by their first names, Doug and Chris. He asked McCarthy how his son was doing in his freshman year at Guilford College, in North Carolina, where he played guard on the basketball team.

  “Scored thirty points in his first scrimmage,” McCarthy said. “Got diagnosed with mono yesterday. He’s out for six weeks. We play Davidson in two weeks.”

  “Oh, that’s a shame,” Greenberg said as a new juror entered the room.

  The informality spilled over to the attorneys’ interactions with prospective jurors, a tactical move they used to try to get jurors to like them. When one consultant said he worked in “business analytics and optimization,” McCarthy and Wood each vied to appear more humble than the other.

  “Do you want me to ask what that is?” McCarthy asked his counterpart.

  “No,” Wood said. “I’m going to pretend I know.”

  The individual questioning lasted the rest of the afternoon and through the next day.