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

by Dan Morse

But it was the next moment that so many in the courtroom had waited for since Jayna’s death, among them Chasity Wilson, Jayna’s close friend from their days at Halliburton in Houston. Chasity had been in the United Arab Emirates on business and had come home through Washington so she could be at this hearing. She sat just behind the Murray family. She’d tried to get a look at Brittany when she’d arrived, but couldn’t see her. Now, however, Brittany stood up. She hardly looked look like a monster, Chasity thought.

  “May I address the Murray family and my family first?” Brittany asked.

  “Yes,” Greenberg said.

  “During the break, I really considered if I wanted to say anything because I figured, ‘What was the point?’” Brittany began, her head cocked and body slouched.

  Most people in the courtroom were hearing her soft and steady voice for the very first time. In Chasity’s mind, and in the minds of many of Jayna’s supporters, the substance of those first words created the immediate impression that Brittany didn’t care. But Brittany’s supporters heard something else: the weight of her crime bearing down on her more than ever.

  “But for the Murray family,” she continued, “what do I honestly say to your family when your daughter is gone and I’m the one who has been convicted of her murder? I know whatever I say to you today won’t take the pain away over your loss of Jayna.” Brittany’s voice shook.

  “But before I go to prison, I needed for you to hear me tell you just how deeply sorry I am. My hope for your family is that someday you will be able to find the forgiveness in your heart and peace. And I am truly sorry. For my family,” she said, sniffling and pausing, “as you know, I couldn’t have asked for a better family. Mom and Dad, you’ve been the most loving and supportive parents I could have ever hoped for. To my brothers and sisters, I have always shared such a special bond with each of you. And that will never change no matter the circumstances. I am truly blessed to have all of you as my family. I don’t want any of you to think that I am here today because of anything you did or did not do. I truly love you all very much, and thank you for the tremendous amount of love I feel from you every day.”

  She reached for a tissue to wipe her nose. With his arm around his wife’s shoulders, Earl Norwood watched his daughter and subtly mouthed words of support to her. “Your honor, I understand I’ll be severely punished for the crime I have been convicted of. And now I face a possible lifetime in prison. I also know there are many people who want for me to have a sentence without hope. But I am asking you today to leave me with some. I don’t even ask you this for myself. I truly ask you this for my family, that is, especially my mom and dad. Thank you.”

  She sat down, having spoken for less than three minutes, not admitting to killing Jayna but referring only to “the crime I have been convicted of,” carefully chosen words that could not be used against her when she appealed the verdict. Legal niceties aside, the passive words were a kick in the gut to Jayna’s family and friends. Brittany had made no admission. She did not explain.

  Greenberg had said little during the three-hour hearing. He’d presided over this case for months, including the pretrial hearings, rendering decisions based on law and evidence. Now, the husband and father of three children spoke directly to the Murrays and Norwoods, choking over his words as he thanked them for sending him letters to review. “I want to assure each and every one of you I read those letters. I felt your pain on both sides, and I understand the emotions that you expressed.”

  Within several minutes, though, he had moved on to describing the brutality and cold-blooded nature of Brittany’s actions.

  “I guess we’ll never know, Ms. Norwood, whether, when you went back to that lululemon store, you intended to kill Ms. Murray. And to be candid with you, I’m not 100 percent sure that when you went back there that was your intention. But once you started your assault, you reveled in the gore. What has struck me as most remarkable about this case, ma’am, especially in light of the fact that I’m being told that you wanted a career as a physical trainer, is the incredible physical condition in which you found yourself on that day—to be able to rain down more than three hundred blows with a variety of lethal instruments that I think were not immediately available to you is nothing short of astounding to me, ma’am. I confess to you, I once sat and just went like this”—here Greenberg made a pounding motion—“three hundred times. It took me about eight minutes to do that.”

  Greenberg continued. “With adrenaline coursing through your body, you mutilated this woman. And after every blow, you had a chance to think about what you were doing. The lies that you told afterward were incredible. You’re one hell of a liar, ma’am.”

  Nothing about Brittany had impressed him. But her family had.

  “I watched your family during this trial, and I wanted to cry for them, because they appear to be the personification of the American dream,” Greenberg said, turning his head to the second row. He spoke of raising children and how they eventually leave home. “You know at some point, we who are parents, we send our children off into the world. I have three children I sent off into the world. And they’re either off to college, or they’re off to the workplace, and all we can do is hope that we instilled in them the values that we had, that they’re good citizens. But sometimes things go wrong, terribly wrong.”

  Next he spoke about Jayna’s family, and what Brittany had done to them.

  “No parent should ever have to bury their child. Sometimes things happen. We lose a child to accident, disease. And while as parents we may not accept that, at least we understand it. We understand why our loved one was taken away. But when a murder so horrific occurs, ma’am, there isn’t any such acceptance.”

  Thirty feet away, from his second-row seat, Jayna’s brother Dirk started to feel that the sentence he and his family wanted was coming. When Greenberg first began to speak, Dirk had whispered to his wife, April, that the judge wasn’t going to issue a no-parole sentence. “He’s not going to do it. He’s not going to do it,” he’d said. But now, to Dirk’s ears, Greenberg had stripped Brittany of her identity. He kept calling her “ma’am.”

  Greenberg spoke about how she had no drug problem, no deep psychiatric illness. “The information that I have—provided from your family and from your attorneys—expresses complete bewilderment as to how this could have occurred.”

  He said how reluctant he was to give her even the slightest chance at freedom.

  “Stand up, please,” the judge told her. Brittany did as requested, void of expression. “It’s the sentence of this court that you be confined to the Maryland Division of Correction for the balance of your natural life without the possibility of parole.”

  Clapping and cheers erupted. Chasity said “Yes!” as did others.

  “Please!” Greenberg said, silencing the crowd.

  Brittany showed little reaction. Her father, Earl, looked down, his arm around his wife.

  Greenberg dryly went through Brittany’s right to appeal. Then he looked up at the attorneys, and it was over. “Thank you, counsel. That will conclude the matter.”

  In the crowd, Jayna’s mother, Phyllis, shook as she hugged first her husband and then Fraser Bocell, Jayna’s longtime boyfriend. Up front, sheriff’s deputies put Brittany back in handcuffs and led her away. She looked only at the door in front of her. Earl Norwood kept his arm around his wife as he spoke to one of his sons.

  The two lead detectives in the case, Dimitry Ruvin and Jim Drewry, stood up and stretched their legs. They knew Brittany was headed to the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women, about twenty-five miles away, in Jessup, and each planned to eventually pay her a call. Ruvin figured he’d wait five years. Drewry thought he’d go sooner, maybe 2014. But both of them intended to ask the same question: why?

  In all the commotion, Wood asked Greenberg for one last bench conference. When the attorneys approached, Wood told the judge that Brittany’s parents were staying in town until the end of the weekend. Given that
it was Friday, he asked the judge to recommend that Brittany be kept temporarily at the local jail so they could see her before they left. As everyone knew, the transfer to Jessup would delay visits until she was fully processed there.

  “I don’t feel I have the power to do that, Mr. Wood,” Greenberg said. “I’m sorry.”

  Epilogue

  LULULEMON ATHLETICA

  The murder of Jayna Murray inside the lululemon athletica store in Bethesda, Maryland, pushed grief 2,900 miles to the company’s headquarters, in Vancouver, Canada. When executives there heard the tragic news that Jayna and her coworker, Brittany Norwood, had been attacked, they reached out to both families and offered to help. A week later, however, when police pinned the murder on Brittany, the company suddenly faced new concerns—over both liability and public image. Executives made the decision to not publicly discuss Brittany’s tenure.

  On a concrete level, lululemon had to decide what to do with its store in Bethesda once the police completed their forensic testing. Retain the store’s marquee location, next to the Apple Store and across from the cobble-stoned pedestrian avenue called Bethesda Lane, and risk upsetting customers, who’d be asked not to dwell on the fact that they were shopping in a former crime scene? Ultimately, yes. As spring turned to summer in 2011, lululemon executives revealed their plans in a carefully worded statement: “It is with warm and grateful hearts that we are announcing the reopening of our newly renovated Bethesda store on Friday, June 24. The reopening will embrace the theme of ‘love’ in honor of Jayna Murray. More than ever, we remain committed to the people of Bethesda and look forward to continuing to share with this community the same love, passion and grace with which Jayna lived her life.”

  The renovation featured a new stained-glass window across the top of the storefront, which spelled love in cursive script. The next day—with traffic blocked outside the store along Bethesda Avenue—lululemon held a community yoga class. Loyal customers showed up with mats, rolled them out, and struck poses for an hour.

  Not everyone was thrilled. Employees returned to a store that had been renovated but not overhauled. The location of bathrooms—in one of which Brittany had staged her own attack—were the same, as was the layout of the fitting area where Brittany had laid down bloody, size-14 shoe prints in an effort to implicate intruders who had never existed. A door led to a small closet where Jayna had been beaten and slashed and stabbed to death.

  Customers who followed the case closely could look around and see the similarities. Some asked saleswomen questions about the case: “Where are the shoes? You had shoes at the store that day.”

  These days, Saturday mornings along Bethesda Avenue look very much the same as they did before the murder. Couples stroll the sidewalks, holding their children’s hands and their dogs’ leashes. Shoppers walk in and out of the Apple store and Georgetown Cupcake. Most customers no longer view the lululemon store as a crime scene. Many support the company’s decision to reopen it, even those like labor attorney Ellen Silver, who had misgivings the first time she returned. But speaking outside the store recently, she wondered aloud what good it would have done to have the space now playing host to a restaurant. That would have meant pretending the murder didn’t happen. “This is somehow reaffirming of life,” she said.

  Lululemon executives consistently declined reporters’ requests for interviews about the case. Margaret Wheeler, the company’s top human-resources executive—or, in lulu parlance, the “Senior Vice President of People Potential”—agreed to speak by phone for thirty minutes only on the condition that the questions broadly covered the company’s culture and what it looked for in employees. Wheeler said lululemon looks for sales workers who are outgoing, smart, lead a healthy lifestyle, and are committed to setting and achieving goals. “Even though we teach it,” she said of goal setting, “we actually look for people who are predisposed to being goal setters and being up to really big things in their lives in lots of different things.”

  Regarding the murder case, although Wheeler was the company’s point person after the tragedy—she attended the trial and got to know the Murrays and the workers at the Bethesda store—she deferred to remarks by then-lululemon CEO Christine Day after the verdict. That 217-word statement remains the most detailed from the company about the case. “We have all been deeply affected by the loss of Jayna Murray and the violation of our safe and loving store environment,” Day said. “The actions of Brittany Norwood that night are the antithesis of the values of our company and are not reflective of the outstanding people who work for lululemon.”

  As for its business, lululemon is facing furious competition from companies such as Gap and Nike, which have both spread into yoga-apparel sales, and recently endured a controversial recall of thousands of pairs of yoga pants that were mistakenly made of see-through fabric. But lulu’s moneymaking magic has remained intact, as has its aura of meeting more intangible goals. “Reaching a billion dollars in revenue is clearly an important milestone that as a company we can all be very proud of,” Day said in 2012 as she announced record-setting sales. “But far more important than the number itself are the beliefs, values, culture and people that achieved it. We really are so much more than our numbers; it is the everyday actions of our dedicated team that translates into an unparalleled guest experience and allows us to achieve our ultimate goal of elevating the world.”

  THE APPLE MANAGERS

  The Apple Store managers and security guards in Bethesda took a public flogging for not calling 911 the night they heard screams coming from the adjacent lululemon athletica store. On November 3, 2011, the day after Brittany Norwood was convicted of murder, someone placed white flowers on the sidewalk outside Apple that were arranged into the number “331,” the number of injuries Jayna Murray had suffered. Commentators and bloggers wrote that their inaction raised broader questions about society, or even reflected poorly on their parents.

  As of this writing, the only public remarks that Jana Svrzo and Ricardo Rios have made about that night were those from the witness stand during the trial. Svrzo declined to comment for this book, and Rios did not respond to messages. Apple’s corporate public-relations officials declined to talk about the case or make the managers available for interviews. In discussions with detectives and prosecutors, Jana broke down over what had happened; although Ricardo showed less emotion, those who interviewed him couldn’t tell if that was his natural disposition or his feelings about what happened. Ricardo still works at the Bethesda Apple Store next to lululemon. Jana transferred to Apple’s store in Georgetown, where she is a senior manager.

  The murder also weighed on security guard Wilbert Hawkins, who no longer works at the Bethesda Apple Store. “I feel sad that happened on my shift, right next door,” he said. Wilbert described the noises from the lululemon store as yells and crashing sounds, and he remembered telling Ricardo not to worry because he’d heard noises there before. He said his sense of danger had been shaped by his past: growing up in a rough neighborhood in Washington, D.C., then working a series of security jobs in office buildings, construction sites, and housing projects before his Apple posting in Bethesda. Had he been working somewhere else, Wilbert said he wouldn’t have dismissed what he was hearing. “I would have done something different, much different,” he said. “I would have been expecting it.”

  The lack of action by the Apple managers and security guards bore hallmarks of what scientists have long called the “Bystander Effect,” which holds that a person is less apt to call 911 when others are around. “The key phrase is ‘diffusion of responsibility,’” said Joel Lieberman, a psychologist who chairs the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “It’s a pretty powerful effect. It’s robust.”

  Lieberman has studied group behavior for decades. He and others believe that people’s brains often work against them in such situations, telling them that if someone is truly in trouble, someone else will call 911. “That really shocks the layperson.
But these situations don’t surprise me,” says Lieberman. “The more observers there are, the less likely people are to get involved.” People also are more apt to call 911, he said, when specifically asked to do so.

  Several factors conspired to invoke the Bystander Effect that night: the calm and safety of downtown Bethesda, creating the mind-set that even harsh screams didn’t mean violence; the terrible fact that Jayna Murray couldn’t point to one person and ask for help; the diffusion of responsibility, in which the Apple managers looked to the security guards for guidance, and the guards deferred to the managers; and the fact that lots of people were still out and about at 10:10 P.M. on a Friday in downtown Bethesda.

  “It almost sounds like a perfect recipe,” Lieberman said.

  Of course, he and other bystander experts are quick to add, other factors could also have been at play—such as an individual’s character, or his or her sense of empathy, or level of “self-efficacy,” a psychology term describing a person’s belief that he or she can complete a goal. In the end, though, Lieberman came back to this: “When things like this happen, the people who don’t call 911 seem like monsters. How can people be that cold? But time and time again, we’ve seen this happen to people who are not monsters.”

  THE DETECTIVES

  Detectives Jim Drewry and Dimitry Ruvin still work murders for the Montgomery County Police Department.

  Drewry has moved to the cold-case squad, giving him regular hours and Fridays off ahead of his planned retirement in late 2013. The job has other rewards as well. In April of 2013, Drewry sat in a courtroom as sixty-four-year-old Richard E. Ricketts was sentenced to life in prison for a vicious rape he’d committed more than thirty years earlier. The squad had found Ricketts in Florida after testing old evidence in the case for DNA and matching the results against a database of known offenders. “You are a wretched and warped man,” Montgomery Judge Terrence McGann said during the sentencing, an opinion Drewry had no quarrel with. Because so much of cold-case work is based on forensics, Drewry rarely interviews suspects anymore, but he hopes to get one last chance—with Brittany Norwood—before he retires. But he remains pessimistic about what the interview will bring, even if he manages to see her. “Can anybody really figure out someone like Brittany?” he says.