by Dan Morse
For the most part, the young detective enjoyed his work. But it involved a staggering amount of “death calls”—not necessarily murders, but any passings that had to be checked out for signs of foul play: drug overdoses, suicides, drownings, healthy people not waking up in the morning. Talking about all the gloom with his wife the previous year, Ruvin had come up with an idea to create some balance in his life by starting a side business as a wedding videographer. He’d discovered a talent for the work when editing the lousy footage from their own wedding a friend had taken, which Ruvin had been able to salvage by editing with a program that allowed for cuts, fade-ins, background music, and other effects. It had been relatively easy for him to do, and all their friends thought the video had been done professionally. The side business shooting and editing wedding videos might not make him rich, but being around the happy gatherings—with their dancing, drinking, and laughing—seemed about as far from death as you could get. So the couple bought two cameras, placed an advertisement on Craigslist, spread the word, and launched their business, doing a handful of weddings a year.
Ruvin popped the surveillance DVD into his computer and scrolled to shortly before 10:00 P.M. For more than an hour he saw nothing helpful, just cars, couples, individuals in light-colored clothing. Just after 11 P.M., two men suddenly appeared from the left, walking right. One looked to be about six feet tall. The other was shorter. Both were dressed head to toe in black clothing. One wore a knit cap, similar to the way robbers were known to roll up their ski masks after leaving a crime scene. Ruvin scrolled the DVD backward, slowed it down, kept repeating the images. He couldn’t see the men’s faces, but he could see one of them talking on a cell phone. Tremendous, Ruvin thought: if they found the guy, they could use exact cell-phone call logs and GPS tracking technology to further tie him to the area. Ruvin called Wittenberger. “I think I see these two guys,” he said.
The sergeant was about to leave the store anyway. Twenty minutes later, he stood over Ruvin’s shoulder, watching the video snippet over and over. Wittenberger strained his neck to look to the far left of the image, trying to make out a piece of lululemon athletica’s back door. He couldn’t. But the men were moving quickly. One had a backpack.
If Brittany had been in on it, Wittenberger thought, surely she wouldn’t have described the guys so exactly; she would have at least come up with different heights and different colored clothes for these guys. And why say it was a pair of assailants? Why not one, or three? “Well, my fucking theory’s out the window,” he told Ruvin. “I guess it is two masked men.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hundreds of Wounds
Early on Sunday, March 13, 2011, Detective Dimitry Ruvin had two things to pick up before driving to Jayna Murray’s autopsy in Baltimore: the rope at Montgomery County Police headquarters and Detective Mike “Bucket” Carin at his home. By 8:00 A.M. the skyline of downtown Baltimore appeared, burnished by new office buildings and high-rise hotels. But off to the left and right, as the detectives knew, were the low-slung, row-house neighborhoods that served up more killings in a given month than Montgomery County might see in a year.
The detectives drove into an area just west of downtown, parking in a garage across from the state’s five-story, brand-spanking-new, $43 million Forensic Medical Center. Ruvin grabbed his paper bag and notebook. The two detectives eventually were led into one of the building’s two cavernous autopsy rooms—fifty feet long, thirty feet wide. The gurney holding Jayna’s body had already been wheeled into position, next to a stainless-steel table that held knives, scalpels, clamps, and other dissection tools. The body bag was zipped open. Jayna was still on her back, just how they’d last seen her in the store.
A thirty-one-year-old autopsy technician in a white coat introduced himself as Mario Alston. “What happened?” he asked.
Ruvin explained about the crime scene at the yoga shop in Bethesda. He told him about the suspects they were looking for—two guys in masks, and how they’d attacked two workers inside the shop. “These two assholes go into the store, kill this girl, rape this other girl. It’s crazy.”
Alston was shocked. Moments before, when he’d unzipped the bag and seen Jayna’s distorted face and the athletic clothes she was wearing, he’d thought maybe she’d been hit by a car while riding a bicycle, maybe even slammed headfirst into a tree.
“Are you kidding me?” Alston asked Ruvin, who said he wasn’t, and handed over the brown paper bag.
Two doctors joined them: Mary Ripple and Kristin Johnson. They cut open the bag and looked at the rope, noting its dark-red stains and coarse fibers. A lab photographer started taking pictures. Ripple bent down to look at Jayna’s hands and forearms, quickly noting what the detectives had seen the night before: dozens of defensive wounds. Entangled in Jayna’s bloodstained fingers were fibers similar to those on the rope, and hairs similar to her own.
Dr. Ripple knew this autopsy would take all day. “Uh-oh,” the forty-eight-year-old Ripple had said to herself as she’d looked through pictures from the scene in her office earlier that morning. She was one of the agency’s deputy directors, and supervised the work of other doctors. For cases like the Montgomery one—numerous injuries, unknown weapons—she often took part herself. Twelve bodies had arrived from around the state over the previous twenty-four hours. Eleven of the cases seemed fairly straightforward, including a gunshot victim from Baltimore, a traffic fatality from a rural part of the state, and several drug overdoses. But the murder case from Montgomery County was something else.
Ripple, Johnson, and Alston removed Jayna’s blood-soaked clothes, putting them in individual evidence bags. They looked over Jayna’s body and took swab samples that later could be tested for DNA. Ripple stared at Jayna’s long hair, and wondered aloud if they could get away without shaving it off. It wasn’t a question so much as a remark of frustration. If they didn’t, how else could they evaluate, let alone count, the injuries? And Jayna’s face was so distorted, Ripple knew her family wouldn’t want an open-casket funeral. “We have to,” she told the others.
Everyone paused to watch Alston delicately go to work with a pair of scissors, antibacterial soap that acted like shaving cream, and an orange disposable razor. He tried to collect as much of Jayna’s long hair as he could so it could be returned to her family. Maybe they would want it washed and sewn back in before she was buried. Every inch or so, he came across a red gouge in Jayna’s skull that he had to work around. Some were circular—as small as the tip of a ballpoint pen or as large as a quarter. Others were straight, stretching for two inches and in some cases turning at right angles. Alston carefully worked his way to the four-inch wide, open wound on the back of Jayna’s head. As he cut and shaved, everyone could clearly see how the wound corresponded to a section of skin on Jayna’s scalp that flapped open.
After he’d shaved her head, Alston washed down Jayna’s face, head, and body with a narrow hose, as the red outflow ran down little canals on the edges of the exam table and into a collection sink.
It was time for the two medical examiners, Ripple and Johnson, to begin individually documenting each injury. They typically did so by mapping each wound on relatively simple forms—one that was an outline of the body, another that was an outline of the head—but the doctors quickly realized that their simple head outline was too small for them to list the extent of Jayna’s injuries. They instead went to plan B: printing out color photographs of different portions of Jayna’s head and drawing wound diagrams directly on those printouts. The doctors also had to measure the length and depth of each injury. They sorted through wounds on top of wounds, and tried to determine whether each injury was caused by something sharp that cut into the skin or by something blunt that had caused the skin to burst open. The injuries were extraordinary, but their notes reflected the dry medical nature of it all: “Irregular curvilinear lacerations . . . subcutaneous tissue of the right frontal scalp . . . helix and the antitragus of the right ear . . . outer table of the
skull oriented on the 10 to 4 o’clock axis with the convex aspect of the fracture.”
Ripple could envision broad outlines of the murder. With the first blows, Jayna probably reached for her head reflexively, which is how what appeared to be her own hairs ended up in her hands. She tried to shield herself as the blows kept coming. The killer, or killers, probably used the rope late in the attack, maybe after Jayna had fallen to the ground. Those fibers in her fingers, Ripple figured, meant that Jayna had been able to get her hands under the rope and loosen it even as she was dying.
Ripple could feel anger swelling. Such an immediate, emotional reaction was unusual, but she couldn’t help identifying with the victim. Ripple had always been strong-minded, growing up on a small dairy farm in western Maryland and playing all kinds of high school sports. In college, she taught volleyball to help pay tuition. And now, on the table was a younger version of herself—someone who’d tried to fight off the attack even after becoming dazed and disoriented. Ripple knew she’d have done so as well.
She and Johnson examined in detail the open wound on the back of Jayna’s head. Within its borders, they counted thirteen fractures, which had caused that portion of the skull to cave into Jayna’s brain. The doctors compared the area with Jayna’s forehead, which was gouged with similar patterns that hadn’t caused fractures. The doctors noted that the front of Jayna’s skull was unusually thick. “Maybe that’s why the front of her head didn’t break,” Johnson told Ripple.
As the autopsy entered its second hour, the detectives moved to a second-floor observation deck where they could sit down, talk on their phones, and still watch. They knew the autopsy was their best chance to connect Jayna’s injuries to the various tools they’d found in the store. From there, they hoped to connect the tools to her killers.
Ripple eventually came up to visit. She said they hadn’t totaled the wounds yet, and that she couldn’t tell if Jayna had been raped, but based on bloodstains they’d seen early in the exam, it appeared that she had been. The doctor went back downstairs to continue her work.
Ruvin’s phone beeped. It was his sergeant, Craig Wittenberger. Ruvin told him about the possible rape. “They beat this girl down,” he said. Wittenberger let out a long, slow sigh. Then he got to his point: he needed Ruvin and Carin’s help researching a suspect. “Come on back in,” Wittenberger said.
* * *
By 3:00 P.M., Ripple and her physician colleague Johnson were inside Ripple’s fifth-floor office, having finished the main exam downstairs. Of particular difficulty was analyzing all the wounds to Jayna’s face and head. The doctors laid out the printed photographs, now diagramed with little marks that mapped out all the injuries. Johnson used a red pen to circle the slashing and stabbing injuries, and a black to circle the pounding injuries. The doctors tried to be conservative in their totals. The wounds atop wounds were difficult to measure, so each one was counted as a single wound. Ripple knew it could be weeks before she had a precise total, after they’d had a chance to study their notes and all thirty-seven autopsy photos. Preliminarily, though, the doctors had found more than two hundred injuries to Jayna’s face, head, and neck, and more than one hundred to her hands, arms, and shoulders.
Ripple and Johnson also counted at least five different wound patterns, meaning at least five different weapons had been used. Ripple noted quarter-inch-wide circles that surrounded smaller circles on Jayna’s hands and skull. “I bet that’s the back end of a wrench,” she told Johnson.
The kind of wrench she had in mind was one she’d seen in two previous homicides—an adjustable, crescent-shaped tool, which the killer would rotate 90 degrees to deliver the most forceful blow. The resulting mark mirrored part of the wrench’s adjusting mechanism. Ripple headed downstairs, found a maintenance worker’s tool cart and borrowed a wrench to compare with the photographs. Perfect match.
The medical examiners had also found two rope-burn injuries on Jayna, one to her throat, the second to her chin, perhaps made after she’d been able to loosen the rope. And another horrific pattern emerged from all the injuries: blood in the wound paths. That meant Jayna’s heart was still beating, that she had still been alive for all of them. Ripple hoped that, even as Jayna’s heart was still pumping blood, she was unconscious toward the end.
Of all the injuries, the worst wasn’t the four-inch long gash; it was a stabbing wound at the base of her skull. The opening measured one inch long and only one-sixteenth of an inch wide. But a thin knife of some kind had gone deep enough to chip off a piece of vertebra, pierce her skull, and cut the base of her brain. She couldn’t have survived for another ninety seconds after that. That wound path also showed blood, indicating it was probably the fatal blow. Jayna’s murderer finally figured out a way to kill her, Ripple thought.
As 5:00 P.M. approached, the case weighed on the doctor in a way that only a handful of cases ever had before. Ripple dwelled on the dozens of wounds to Jayna’s hands and arms. Most, if not all, appeared to come from Jayna defending herself, not from her trying to deliver blows herself. In Ripple’s mind, that meant Jayna likely received a powerful strike early in the assault that dazed her. Goddammit, Ripple said to herself. I wish she could have been able to fight back.
Mario Alston, the autopsy technician, was also affected by the case. Maybe it was in part because of Jayna’s age, so close to his and his wife’s own. When he went home that evening to the town house in downtown Baltimore he shared with his wife and two young sons, he found himself telling his wife about the case, something he rarely did.
There wasn’t a whole lot the thirty-one-year-old hadn’t seen. One of his first jobs out of college had been helping FEMA identify the bloated bodies of drowning victims in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Since joining the Baltimore state lab, he’d helped perform more than 3,000 autopsies. But he couldn’t remember another murder so horrific.
What he kept going over in his head was how Jayna Murray’s killer or killers had had time to watch her suffer, time to watch any emotion she had fade away, time to think about what they were doing. Eventually, though, Alston walked to the refrigerator, pulled out a cold Guinness, sat down, and tried to put it out of his mind.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Locked In
The Montgomery County detectives discussed what kind of men could have invaded the yoga store and unleashed such an attack. It seemed unlikely they were experienced robbers, who preferred to hit cash-heavy businesses and dash out with their money. What fit better, unfortunately, was a pair of crazed men, or at least one crazy man who had convinced a buddy to go along with him. One of them murdered Jayna while the other assaulted Brittany; then they both dashed off. Maybe they were locals, familiar enough with Bethesda to know about the yoga store and its staff of pretty young women?
Already, the initial wave of what would become more than 300 telephone calls and e-mails had poured into the department’s tip lines. Most were too vague and unrelated to pursue. Others centered on the same person, a forty-year-old character named Keith Lockett. “All of Bethesda has called on this guy,” Detective Randy Kucsan, the investigator who’d found the box of zip-ties in the rear hallway, told Detective Dimitry Ruvin when he’d returned from Baltimore.
The investigators were skeptical, wondering if Keith Lockett stood out in the area simply because he was a tall, black homeless man with a tendency to get drunk and obnoxious. In a way they were right; homeless people largely went unseen in Bethesda, even as they were being helped. Bethesda Cares, a local nonprofit where Keith was a regular, operated from a nondescript storefront a half-mile north of the yoga store. One of its staff members made regular rounds to homeless people to invite them to come inside the Bethesda Cares building during the daytime. There, they could receive counseling, send and get mail, shower, shave, drink coffee, eat lunch, and get help finding a shelter or a subsidized apartment. Bethesda Cares also ran a “Clothing Closet,” much of it designer stuff donated by Bethesda residents. Once cleaned up and outfitt
ed in nice, if not perfectly fitting, clothes, Bethesda Cares’s clients filtered back into the streets, some making their way to the library or the second-floor café at Barnes & Noble. Keith could be inconspicuous as well, having recently held a job stocking produce at a grocery store. But among some Bethesda merchants and beat cops, he was also known to drink too much beer and uncork sexually charged comments to women. “I’m terrified of him,” one of the callers had told Kucsan.
It was all pretty squishy. None of the callers put Keith near the store at the time of the murder. And Brittany had said the assailants sounded white. But other callers noted that Keith hung out with a short guy and hadn’t been seen at the store where he bought his beer since the afternoon of the murder. The detectives printed out his ten-page, single-spaced rap sheet and talked to Bethesda patrolmen who knew Keith. A portrait of instability emerged. Born in Washington, D.C., he’d graduated from high school and had a long career as an amateur boxer. The arrests started by the time he was nineteen years old: cocaine possession, assault and battery, robbery, carrying a loaded gun, disorderly conduct, beating someone with a stick. Not all the charges stuck, but it seemed clear that Keith Lockett was no stranger to trouble. The detectives found an active warrant charging Keith with furnishing alcohol to a fifteen-year-old. That was relatively small-scale stuff but would allow them to bring Keith in for questioning if they found him. He was definitely someone they wanted to speak with.
The detectives headed to Bethesda to visit the shops and try to find more outdoor surveillance video. They arrived to find reporters staking out the yoga store, asking for interviews. The detectives declined and called their media-affairs colleague, Captain Paul Starks, who hustled down to Bethesda, then stood outside the yoga store in front of the cameras and announced that detectives were canvassing the neighborhood.
