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

by Dan Morse

  He couldn’t bring himself to say out loud that he suspected Brittany. Instead, he kept repeating what bothered him, that two guys would choose to rob a store in Bethesda on a Friday night, when people are still around. They don’t have weapons, and they stick around—to shove Brittany onto Jayna’s murdered body? “They were so cool, calm, and collected that they stayed in the store to mentally torture Brittany?” Ruvin asked Drewry.

  Something else didn’t square with Ruvin: Brittany’s assertion that the attackers had called her a nigger. Ruvin had come to the United States in 1995, enrolling in an integrated public high school. At thirty-one, he had plenty of white friends who adopted urban, hip-hop language—the very terms and phrases used in the video game Grand Theft Auto. “A twenty-year-old Grand Theft Auto guy, he’s not going to use that word,” Ruvin said. “He’s going to call her a fucking bitch.”

  On this much, however, Drewry disagreed. He’d grown up in an America where white people used the term all the time to keep black people “in their place.” When he’d gone to visit relatives in southern Ohio, he’d seen the “Whites Only” drinking fountains. That was only one generation ago. And the term lingered on. After he became a cop, in 1979, people he arrested uncorked it, as did other cops. And although the term was fading in its use, the idea that two white guys of any age would call Brittany a nigger, particularly the kind of guys who would rape and kill, was hardly a stretch.

  “I can see that happening,” Drewry said.

  But the young detective still struggled to believe it. “I think the story is very exaggerated, and two guys are made out to be villains. They’re villains.”

  As they drove, Drewry had a nagging feeling about where this case might be going—a place he didn’t want to follow, but one all too familiar for a detective in his shoes. He did not want to believe that this polite young African American girl—a presumed rape victim—was lying. In the United States, African Americans represented just 13 percent of the population but committed half the murders, a rate made to seem higher by decades of media portrayals. Every time there was a high-profile, unsolved murder case—and this one certainly qualified—African Americans held their collective breath. Drewry couldn’t help but do so as well, even if in his job he never made the distinction. Murder was murder was murder.

  Drewry had barely slept six hours over the previous two days. He didn’t know if Brittany knew the killers or had anything to do with Jayna’s murder, and he wanted to continue giving her the benefit of the doubt. He wanted to believe that the odd parts of her actions and explanations could be some kind of trauma-induced confusion. Hell, the case was only three days old. He didn’t want to doubt the Cosby kid.

  “Jimmy, something’s not right with this girl,” Ruvin continued.

  Drewry’s anger and worry and exhaustion came to the surface. He decided to give himself this much: a suspension of the discussion for the next fifteen minutes, the time they had left before arriving at their station. Drewry held up his right hand. “Don’t go there,” he said. “I don’t want to hear that shit right now.”

  The detectives rolled into their headquarters shortly after 9:30 P.M. They walked into the homicide unit and went to their cubicles. Another half-dozen detectives were there. Among them were Sergeant Craig Wittenberger and Detective Randy Kucsan, who’d both had early doubts about Brittany’s story; Detective Mike Carin, who’d talked to the Apple manager and seen her cry; and Detective Deana Mackie, who’d interviewed Brittany at the hospital and found her so believable. Just that afternoon, she’d fielded a question from a detective not involved in the case, who pondered if Brittany could have killed Jayna. “Absolutely not. No,” Mackie had replied.

  Without support from Drewry, Ruvin feared he wouldn’t be taken seriously. The young detective sat down and quietly started typing notes into his computer, but the other detectives could sense something was up.

  Drewry stood up and walked to Ruvin’s cubicle. Others needed to hear what Ruvin had to say.

  “Just tell them. Tell them what you think,” he said.

  Ruvin stood up. His head was spinning, not just from what he’d heard at Brittany’s apartment, but where his thoughts had gone since. Again, he hemmed and hawed—asking questions rather than making statements. He wondered aloud why Brittany’s attacker looked through her purse instead of making a quick escape. “Who does that?” Ruvin asked the others. “Who’s so calm, in the middle of Bethesda, ‘Let me go back and get her bills?’” Ruvin finally circled around to what he really wanted to say. It had come to him on the car ride from Brittany’s.

  It wasn’t that Brittany was involved and knew the killers. It was that she did it all by herself.

  It was the size-14 shoes that had convinced him—specifically, the fact the shoes were kept in the store. Why would one of the men have put them on? And even if he had, why then try to clean them up and put them back? No, it was Brittany who had stepped into those shoes, who’d walked in Jayna’s blood and then around the store to create the illusion of a big male attacker. “The shoe prints never left the store,” Ruvin said. “The killer never left the store.”

  Mackie sat only a few feet away. “What do you mean? What are you trying to say?”

  “I think Brittany killed Jayna,” he said.

  Silence followed the assertion. The detectives looked at each other.

  Wittenberger liked Ruvin’s bold accusation, even if it went beyond his own, earlier supposition that Brittany merely knew the killers. As the sergeant realized, trying to explain the abnormalities in Brittany’s story by saying she knew the killers hadn’t made them go away. But if Brittany was the killer—if she was the kind of person who could inflict hundreds of nonstop blows with whatever tools she could find—that rendered her subsequent actions positively tame: of course she could stage two rapes, of course she could cut herself and lie all night in the dark next to a mutilated corpse, of course she could patiently wait for the cops to come so she could tell an endless stream of lies. She could do all that, Wittenberger thought, if she was truly evil.

  And with that, it was open season on Brittany. The detectives threw everything they had at her, some realizing for the first time that they hadn’t reviewed key evidence. Ruvin pulled out the report completed by the nurse who examined Brittany for rape injuries. “Patient vaginal examination revealed no tears or tenderness. Cervix had several white lesions.” That seemed kind of light for a wooden coat hanger. He read the account of what Brittany told the rape-exam nurse. “Patient says that was her last memory until this morning being in the ambulance.” Of course: Brittany’s bottom line excuse for all the holes was memory loss.

  Wittenberger wanted to look at the photographs of Brittany’s injuries taken at the hospital. The sergeant called them up on his computer screen, clicking until he came to a photo depicting two long, superficial cuts across the small of Brittany’s back.

  “Can she get to her back like that?” Ruvin asked. Wittenberger stood up and demonstrated so with his hand—showing the natural direction the blade would travel, the same angle shown in the picture.

  The detectives pored over the photos of Brittany’s face when she came into the hospital. Yes, it was caked in dried blood from the cut to her forehead. But the blood flow was down and straight—covering the nose and lips and chin—indicating she’d been standing when she bled. That matched Brittany’s story of how she’d been struck, but was at odds with the idea that she’d then spent the night on the bathroom floor, on her back. “The blood flow would have shifted. It would have flowed to the sides, too,” Wittenberger said.

  He and the others discussed where the wound came from in the first place—maybe a backswing as Brittany was pummeling Jayna with one of the weapons. They talked about the missing cash from the store—about $900. Brittany would have had plenty of time to ditch that to stage a robbery.

  Kucsan, the tall detective who’d found the zip-ties, believed Ruvin’s theory but still struggled to picture it. This littl
e girl turned into the fucking Tasmanian Devil, he thought.

  Drewry worried they were moving too fast, blowing past the possibility that others might still be involved. No one had any forensic evidence attaching Brittany to the crime, let alone putting a weapon in her hand. Still, when Drewry finally went home that night around midnight, he couldn’t sleep. The more he played it through, the more he could come up with only one explanation for the holes in her story.

  Ruvin stayed at the station longer, going over the evidence with Wittenberger, and didn’t get home until 1:30 A.M. He walked in to find his wife, Yasra, asleep on the living-room sofa, having tried to wait up for her husband after putting their six-month-old son to bed. Ruvin sat down next to her. It had been so much easier to believe two masked men attacked both women, so much easier to want to protect Brittany and her family than to believe she was a savage killer.

  He still felt like he needed validation. He woke Yasra, and made her promise not to tell anyone what he was about to say.

  Yeah, yeah, of course, Mr. Dramatic, she thought.

  “I think I know who killed Jayna,” said Ruvin.

  Yasra had already been following the case more closely than any other her husband had worked. She was the same age as the murder victim, and she, too, was into fitness and working out.

  “You can’t tell anybody,” her husband said again. “I think it’s this girl Brittany.”

  Yasra sat up on the sofa. Goose bumps shot up on her arms.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Tuesday:

  “Let Me Throw This at You”

  The few hours of sleep recalibrated Jim Drewry’s thoughts. At 8:00 A.M. on Tuesday, March 15, the detective walked up to Dimitry Ruvin’s cubicle. “I think this girl did it,” Drewry said.

  “I think so, too,” Ruvin agreed.

  Drewry turned his attention to keeping a lid on their suspicions.

  “This cannot leak,” Drewry said, “because if we’re right, we’re right; but if we’re wrong, then it’s like the worst-case scenario.”

  The theory fit the evidence, but neither detective was certain that Brittany Norwood was Jayna Murray’s killer. They wanted to continue collecting evidence, waiting for the analysis, and keep Brittany talking. She had to believe they still believed her.

  Drewry also recognized the potential racial politics at play—in both directions. At first, he’d been frustrated by the way the media had again given so much attention to a white victim. Now, he worried that word would get out that he and the other detectives had turned on a black rape victim who’d told them two white madmen were on the loose. He invoked a notorious case out of New York from the 1980s. “We don’t want this to be another Tawana Brawley,” he said. “You don’t want Al Sharpton down here.”

  Drewry’s point was how explosive race and crime could be. In the Brawley case, an African American teenage girl had accused several white men, including one wearing a badge, of raping her in the woods and smearing her with excrement. It was an awful story, and Al Sharpton had taken up her cause, holding a series of press conferences alleging that detectives weren’t taking the girl seriously because she was black. It was a huge media storm—and it turned out that she had made the whole story up. The problem here was that if they ended up wrong about Brittany, their situation could end up even worse: it would be Tawana Brawley if Tawana had been telling the truth.

  Ruvin didn’t know who Tawana Brawley was. At the time of that case, he’d been seven years old and living in the Soviet Union. But he certainly understood the broader point. On a personal level, he knew that if they did file charges against Brittany and they turned out to be wrong, he’d be humiliated and would resign from the homicide unit.

  The detectives strategized with their sergeant, Craig Wittenberger, about how to go full speed at Brittany in the quietest way possible. Drewry thought briefly about simply not telling anyone else. But that was impossible: the crime-scene investigators had to be looped in, to say nothing of his entire chain of command. The sergeant turned his attention to how they might exploit Brittany’s personality. Assuming she was indeed the killer, she hadn’t fled or panicked after committing the murder. No, she’d slunk around in a dark, bloody store, staging a gruesome cover-up because she thought she could outwit the cops.

  You sometimes got that kind of thing in Montgomery County. Spouses who hired assassins. Fathers who suffocated their infants for insurance money. Coworkers who struck inside contained workplaces. Such had been the case for Wittenberger and Ruvin ten weeks earlier, when they found themselves standing over the body of Roosevelt Brockington Jr., stabbed seventy-four times by someone who’d left the twelve-inch knife lodged in his neck.

  “Who even knows this place exists?” Ruvin had asked. The room Brockington had been found in was an office inside a locked boiler room in the basement of a hospital. Talk about a contained murder scene. The detectives started going through the backgrounds of boiler-room staff like they were playing a game of Clue. One staffer jumped right out: Keith Little, who had been charged with killing a coworker years earlier but who’d been acquitted at trial. Little clearly knew the detectives would zero in on him. What he didn’t know was that they’d also be able to figure out that in a different part of the boiler room, he’d used a spigot of chemically treated water to clean a pair of gloves and a ski mask. Ruvin and Detective Deana Mackie eventually charged Little with first-degree murder. The motive: Little killed his boss because he’d changed his hours and given him a bad performance review.

  The case to be made against Brittany had obvious similarities. But despite his last name, Keith Little stood six feet one, weighed 225 pounds, was built like a linebacker, and acted like a complete badass. “You ain’t got shit on me,” he’d snarled to the detectives while riding an elevator up from the boiler room, handcuffs around his wrists. Wittenberger wondered about the hundreds of wounds inflicted on Jayna. Maybe Brittany had known Jayna was dead or dying, and kept going as part of the cover-up. She wants us to look for the crazy guys forever, the sergeant said to himself.

  * * *

  When high-pressure cases push down on police departments, there is a tendency for all those involved to do something—like return a tipster’s phone call, go back to the scene to look for more clues, reach out to informants. Important observations get relayed verbally, sometimes turning into a version of the parlor game Telephone, where one player whispers a story to another player who whispers to another player and down the line, until the whole thing is peppered with errors and omissions.

  It was in that context that the department’s shoe-print expert, David McGill, had learned about the parking-lot surveillance video, the one showing the two men walking outside the rear entrance of the yoga store the night of the killing. By the time the video was described to McGill, it showed two men walking out the back door of the yoga store. And that amounted to solid confirmation of the survivor’s account. It had certainly governed McGill’s thinking the day prior—on Monday—when he’d examined and analyzed the bloody shoe prints inside the store. He figured he’d find tracks linked to Brittany’s shoes, and to the size 14s found in the store. And McGill quickly found both. But that was it. That he couldn’t find any tracks for Jayna made sense, since she had apparently suffered the brunt of her attack where she fell. But what about the second guy from the video? Surely, McGill thought, he should be able to find at least one partial shoe print from him out of all the tracks and bloodstains in the store. He looked over and over, but couldn’t find a third type of shoe. To enhance the shoe-print stains, he sprayed them with Leuco Crystal Violet, a chemical agent that turns bright purple in the presence of blood. Still, no third pair of shoes. What the hell am I doing wrong? McGill kept asking himself.

  Now, on Tuesday morning, he decided to find a copy of the video and watch it himself. There were the two men, dressed in black, walking from the direction of the yoga store’s back door. But they weren’t coming out of an open door to the yoga store. It was im
possible to know exactly where they’d come from. How different reality—human foibles, bureaucratic breakdowns—was from the smash TV franchise CSI. McGill, forty-four, and his colleagues had watched the inaugural episode eleven years earlier, ordering pizzas, to see what it was all about. They’d laughed over the sexy and all-powerful crime-scene investigators who fed evidence into impossibly fast computers, interrogated bad guys themselves, and sewed up cases inside of an hour. McGill had only watched it once since.

  McGill decided to go see the detectives himself, walking down a flight of stairs to Wittenberger’s office and finding the sergeant inside with Detective Ruvin. He joined them, taking a seat, and could sense something was up.

  “Hey, Dave, let me throw this at you,” Ruvin said. “Let’s say the two guys don’t exist and Brittany is the killer. What would you think?”

  McGill thought about how far Jayna’s car had been found from the store, and the likelihood that Brittany would have moved it after the attack. He thought about how she could have zip-tied her wrists by herself. “We’d find blood in Jayna’s car and we might find teeth marks on the flex-tie.”

  The detectives said they’d check the car as soon as they could. McGill said he’d get to work on the flex-tie, also known as a zip-tie. McGill had actually worked a previous murder case involving zip-ties. And he knew what he needed: the zip-tie that had been wrapped around Brittany’s wrist, plus dozens, perhaps hundreds, of extra zip-ties to act as comparisons, and a microscope. He went off to get them.

  * * *

  At his desk, Ruvin fielded a call from Marybeth Ayres, a prosecutor assigned to the case. She was at her courthouse office three miles away and wanted to know about Keith Lockett, the homeless guy who’d been released from jail the day prior. “Do you have him under surveillance?” she asked.