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

by Dan Morse

  Ruvin and the other Montgomery County detectives have moved into more spacious, more modern headquarters, but the space doesn’t yet feel right to Ruvin. Maybe it’s the higher cubicles, making each detective feel more isolated. Maybe it’s the size of their floor, which allows officers and civilians from other departments to wander through. Maybe it is the interrogation rooms—new and improved, sure—but too far from their computers to enable them to go check something quickly. Maybe it’s none of that. “We’re cops. We bitch about everything,” Ruvin deadpans, sitting inside his high-walled cubicle and fielding a call about a long-running case he is working. The detective still sees evil erupt out of nowhere in his county. On June 10, 2013, Ruvin also found himself at a sentencing hearing—watching forty-seven-year-old Curtis Lopez get sent away for life for crushing his estranged wife’s skull with a thirty-pound dumbbell and her eleven-year-old son’s skull with a baseball bat. Ruvin has stayed in touch with Jayna Murray’s family, and, like Drewry, he plans to pay Brittany a call in prison. But he wants to wait a few more years—until Brittany has exhausted her appeals, until she feels she has nothing to lose by being candid with him. “I think her mind has to get used to the fact she’s not getting out,” the detective says.

  Sergeant Craig Wittenberger, who supervised the lululemon investigation, retired from the Montgomery force after thirty-one years, and took a job with the federal government. “There were no winners in this case,” Wittenberger said shortly before he retired. “Jayna was brutally murdered. Both Jayna’s and Brittany’s families have been torn apart. Brittany’s probably just been conniving people her whole life.”

  Another person dragged into the case was Keith Lockett, the homeless Bethesda man who had the misfortune of showing up in an emergency room after the murder while talking about having just been in a fight. Wittenberger, Drewry, and Ruvin had no choice but to go full-tilt at him, even as they could never really get comfortable with the idea of him unleashing such brutality. Keith has largely stayed out of trouble since being questioned in the investigation, picking up a minor trespassing charge and two drinking-in-public citations, according to court records. Reached on a cell phone he keeps, Keith declined to talk about the case.

  THE LAWYERS

  Marybeth Ayres, the Montgomery County Assistant State’s Attorney who helped prosecute Brittany Norwood, was promoted to head the office’s gang unit, taking on crimes often committed in the county’s middle- to lower-class neighborhoods. These areas aren’t as rough as those in inner-city Baltimore or Queens, where Ayres worked before she came to Montgomery, but among some residents, there is a parallel: violence, particularly in the form of protection or retribution, is a way of life. Ayres often thinks that Brittany should have been different, given how she was raised and the opportunities she had. “True evil,” she says these days from behind her desk, “comes from a complete lack of empathy.”

  In the summer of 2012, State’s Attorney John McCarthy considered a run for Maryland attorney general, but as he found himself weighing his family life against the eighty-hour weeks that would come with a new and bigger office—and when a political ally and popular state senator decided to run for attorney general—McCarthy had his answer. He’d remain Montgomery County’s State’s Attorney.

  The public’s fascination with the lululemon case continues to amaze him. He speaks regularly about the trial to civic groups and other attorneys, and even, on May 10, 2013, to about forty Maryland judges at their annual training conference. “We don’t have many murders in Montgomery,” he began, “but the ones we have are often completely bizarre.” He clicked through a PowerPoint presentation, projecting evidence photographs. He played video shot from inside the Apple Store, showing the managers approaching the wall to better hear the screams and thuds—as McCarthy himself moved closer to his audience. “The murder is happening closer than Judge Salmon is to me,” he said, indicating a distance of eight feet.

  Brittany’s defense lawyers, Doug Wood and Chris Griffiths, returned to their winning ways after the trial. On November 15, 2012, their client Alexis Simpson was acquitted on all charges after being accused of stabbing her college roommate to death in the throat. “Clearly, the jury felt she acted in self-defense,” Griffiths told reporters after the verdict. He and Wood still maintain a public silence about the lululemon case, in part, they say, because Brittany is still pursuing her appeal, and also out of the wishes of the Norwood family.

  THE MURRAYS

  On the eleventh day of every month, Chasity Wilson, one of Jayna Murray’s close friends from Halliburton, helps organize a lunch or happy hour for those who knew Jayna in Houston. They share stories and remember how Jayna made them laugh, trying to redefine the day of the month on which Jayna was murdered. In May 2013, the eleventh fell on a Saturday when the Murray family was gathering at a cemetery north of the city, where days earlier a nine-foot custom-chiseled Celtic cross had been erected over their cemetery plot. Chasity spoke to Jayna’s parents, altered her group’s typical plans, and invited everyone to the gravesite. The mourning is always there, and on this day this was the place to go.

  Jayna’s friends and parents—David and Phyllis Murray—were joined by her brother Hugh and his wife, Kate, in town from North Carolina with their first child, and by Jayna’s brother Dirk, his wife, April, and their two young sons. The boys, who had called Jayna “Tia T,” helped their grandmother place flowers in two stone vases at the base of the cross. About thirty minutes after everyone had arrived, David and Phyllis gathered them all around him to read a poem that captured what they feel Jayna tries to tell them every day. “So live your life, laugh again, enjoy yourself and be free. Then I know with every breath you take, you’ll be taking one for me,” David recited, choking up over the words.

  Jayna’s family tries to live out that philosophy but can’t always pull it off. For Dirk Murray, the nightmares have become less frequent, but they still occur: he is outside a locked store, desperate but unable to get in to his sister as she is being brutally murdered. By day, he works to shield his sons from learning details of Jayna’s death, at least until they’re older; already, though, there have been challenges, things the boys have picked up on from overheard conversations among adults, the way kids do. Dirk and April know that the day is coming when they’ll have to carefully explain to the boys what really happened.

  Hugh Murray remains a captain and attorney in the U.S. Army. He is stationed at Fort Bragg, where he prosecutes cases as part of the army’s legal arm, the JAG Corps. As the lululemon case unfolded in 2011, Hugh and Kate, also an attorney, explored three possible lawsuits. One was a wrongful death case against Brittany. But she had no money. The second was a claim against Apple. But what legal responsibility did the company have outside its stores? The most compelling case seemed to be a negligence claim against lululemon athletica, which knew it had a questionable employee on its hands. Countering that were several factors: Hugh, Kate, and the rest of the Murrays didn’t want to drag out the case any longer; they didn’t want to see themselves as victims; Jayna had been so fond of lululemon; and lululemon had been so good to them after the tragedy. In the end, the Murray family decided not to sue.

  David Murray returned to overseas oil and gas work, managing a project in Israel when he wasn’t in Texas. The memories of his daughter are constant. “Not too many minutes of the day go by when I don’t think about Jayna.” He thinks less and less about Brittany Norwood, even as he yearns for answers. “I still want to know why.”

  Phyllis Murray received from the police the jewelry Jayna had been wearing on the night she was killed, including a pinkie ring, which she wears all the time and constantly finds herself touching. She takes pride in a nonprofit started by her sons and her daughter’s friends, the Jayna Murray Foundation, which soon will begin awarding scholarship money from more than $80,000 raised so far. She looks at scrapbooks of her daughter and tries to remember her laugh. “But there are days,” she says, “when nothing will make
you happy.”

  THE NORWOODS

  Earl Norwood still runs an upholstery shop on a stretch of industrial parks in Kent, Washington, about twenty miles south of Seattle. The shop sells foam to other businesses, makes mattresses, and repairs upholstery on home furniture, car seats, RV seats, and boat seats. The inside of the shop looks as one might expect: sofas here, fabric swatches there, large pieces of foam over there. When approached in person, Earl politely declines to comment on the case. “I don’t know what I’d say,” he says, adding only that nothing he could say would change anything.

  Neither his wife, Larkita, nor any of their sons and daughters returned calls or letters to discuss what Brittany was like before March 11, 2011. Doug Wood, one of Brittany’s attorneys, said that the family did not want to be interviewed. Brittany’s parents and eight siblings did however write letters to Judge Robert Greenberg ahead of Brittany’s sentencing hearings. The letters expressed deep sorrow to the Murray family, but were carefully scripted, in deference to Brittany’s pending legal appeal, stating nothing about the murder and acknowledging only that Brittany had been convicted of it or, even more vaguely, that she had done something that warranted prison time. They also described Brittany as a good person who eventually deserved a chance at parole.

  “I want the world to have a chance to know Brittany for more than what took place on one extremely unfortunate day and know her the same way I do,” her younger brother Zachary wrote.

  “Brittany is from a family of kindhearted people, a family that has been through thick and thin,” another younger brother, Josh, wrote. “A family with two loving parents that have worked as hard as they possibly could to do anything for their children, no matter what.”

  Larkita wrote that her heart was broken for Jayna’s family: “Seeing them hurting in court was very difficult for me. I live with this sadness every single day.”

  The families’ suffering was all too familiar to Russell Butler, executive director for the Maryland Crime Victims’ Resource Center, who spent seventeen years as a criminal defense attorney. Time and time again, he has seen murder cases tear through the families of victims and killers. “It’s the same event, but the trauma manifests in different ways,” Butler said.

  The victim’s family members often find themselves dwelling on the way he or she died. The more gruesome the death, the harder it is not to think about. “It’s vicarious trauma. They relive it,” he said. “They visualize it in their head, over and over and over.”

  The defendant’s family members also dwell on what happened, but from a different point of view: the fact that their flesh and blood inflicted pain can cause them to feel responsible. Did they miss something? Should they have gotten help for their loved one? “They can’t separate themselves from it,” Butler said.

  BRITTANY NORWOOD

  Until Brittany Norwood speaks about the case, her mind-set and motives won’t be known.

  In court papers submitted prior to her sentencing, Brittany’s attorneys, Doug Wood and Chris Griffiths, said that she did not suffer from any mental disorder that met the legal definition of insanity. “Ms. Norwood is neither a calculating killer nor a deranged psychopath,” they wrote, arguing that she was amenable to rehabilitation and deserved a chance at parole. “Ms. Norwood became overwhelmed with emotion during a confrontation, and before she could regain her composure, she committed the unthinkable. It is understandable why the jury rejected that characterization of Ms. Norwood’s state of mind, but her defense was honest. Ms. Norwood committed a crime of passion.”

  But experts who study psychopaths say that Brittany’s personality and actions bear the hallmarks of the condition—which is not so much a mental illness as a personality disorder, and is marked by superficial charm, pathological lying, and a stunning lack of remorse and guilt. As for what made Brittany turn so violent, the experts say it’s important to think about why murders happen in the first place. On one extreme are killers who strike from reaction and emotion, just as Brittany’s attorneys described. On the other extreme are killers who see a solution to a problem. It is the latter end of the spectrum where psychopaths—even those who’ve never been in a fistfight—are more apt to be.

  “Their threshold for becoming violent is lower,” says J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and author of The Psychopathic Mind. “They don’t have things that inhibit the rest of us, like conscience, empathy, sympathy.”

  In Brittany’s case, detectives could never determine exactly how the crime started. Did Brittany strike from behind as the two were walking through the store? Did it start off as a face-to-face confrontation? Either way, Brittany seems to have concluded that her only way out of the mess—being caught shoplifting, not getting the personal trainer job she wanted—was to eliminate Jayna. Under such a scenario, she switched into murder mode not because she snapped, but because it was such an easy segue to make. “For psychopaths, the emotional brakes aren’t there,” says Robert Hare, author of Without Conscience, the book that Jayna’s brother Hugh found so revealing after the murder.

  “It probably seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” says Matthew Logan, a longtime criminal investigator and psychologist who has interviewed more than two hundred psychopaths in prisons. “They think, ‘I don’t like this situation. I don’t like what this person is doing to me. I am going to take the person out.’”

  Brittany did so, struggling to find the right weapon as she delivered blow after blow. But what about the nonlethal slashings to Jayna’s face—the notion, as Judge Robert Greenberg put it, that Brittany “reveled in the gore”?

  They’re all part of the package, according to Meloy, Hare, and Logan, who along with ten other psychopath experts wrote about the disorder in a 2012 FBI training publication devoted to the subject. Psychopaths, they wrote, are threats not only because they con and manipulate, but also because they seek thrills and control. “If psychopaths commit a homicide, their killing likely will be planned and purposeful, not the result of a loss of emotional control,” the experts wrote. “Their motive more commonly will involve sadistic gratification. When faced with overwhelming evidence of their guilt, they frequently will claim they lost control or were in a rage when committing the act of violence. In fact, their violence often is emotionless, calculated, and completely controlled.”

  Brittany is now Inmate Number 401149 at Maryland’s only female prison, the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women. Originally built in 1939, the facility has an interior courtyard bordered by a mix of old red-brick support buildings and modern living quarters—all surrounded by fences, razor wire, and guard towers. The prison is known for its sewing shop, and in particular the shop’s production of giant American flags. Most inmates share a double-cell. As of the spring of 2013, Brittany was one of 765 inmates there, and one of 54 serving life sentences, according to a Maryland prison spokesman. Citing confidentiality rules for inmates, he declined to comment on Brittany’s conduct in prison or what kind of programs she might be participating in.

  Those who know Brittany, and those involved with investigating and prosecuting her, wonder how she is doing there—a suburban girl who’d never been locked up among hardened and larger inmates from the streets of Baltimore and other rough spots in Maryland. Detective Dimitry Ruvin, for one, thinks Brittany will not be pushed around in prison. All her life, he thinks, she fooled people about who she really was, owing to her ability to put on whatever persona she needed to get by. “It will serve her well up there,” he said. As to whether Brittany really knows what she did or why she did it, even her supporters have wondered how long it will take for that to sink in. After her sentencing hearing, one of her defense attorneys, Doug Wood, addressed the subject during a press conference. Giving Brittany a chance at parole, even a remote one, would have helped guide her rehabilitation, he said. “She could come to terms with what she did,” Wood said, “and try to figure out why it happened.”

  On May 31, 2013, Brittany’s appellant atto
rneys filed another request to delay their legal brief outlining why her conviction should be reversed and a new trial ordered. It is unclear what argument they can or will advance. Their brief is due in late 2013.

  Author’s Note

  I learned that the body of an apparent murder victim had just been found inside an upscale yoga store called lululemon athletica in Bethesda, Maryland, minutes after the police did—not from some trusted informant deep inside the local police department, but because a colleague of mine from the Washington Post, Eric Athas, happened to be standing fifteen feet from the store when patrolmen and paramedics rushed into the place. He’d come to Bethesda that morning—March 12, 2011—to get an early spot in line for the latest gizmo from Apple.

  Deep Throat . . . CIA moles . . . or a colleague waiting to buy a new iPad? You take what you can get.

  So I arrived, notebook in hand, and was standing outside the freshly strung yellow crime-scene tape as Detectives Jim Drewry and Dimitry Ruvin and Sergeant Craig Wittenberger put on their evidence gloves and booties, opened the door of the yoga store, and slipped inside. It was one of those moments in journalism, repeated countless times, when you realize just how little you know about what’s going on. Over the next eleven months, as the Post’s police reporter for Montgomery County, Maryland, I wrote stories about the investigation, the trial, and its aftermath. But many of the details of the case and its conclusions remained a mystery: How and why was Jayna murdered? What exactly had led detectives to her killer? What behind-the-scenes maneuvers did the lawyers make? And who were Jayna Murray and Brittany Norwood, the principals at the heart of the story?