by Dan Morse
McCarthy worked from a corner office on the fifth floor of the courthouse, though his office felt less of a legal sanctuary than a reflection of his affection for family, sports, and his Irish Catholic heritage. There were photographs of his wife, Jeanette, their four children, and their first grandchild. There were trophies from recreational softball leagues, a row of baseball caps from the area’s top Catholic high schools, a Philadelphia Eagles helmet. There were two unopened bottles of Jameson Irish Whiskey, a black-and-white photo of John Kennedy, and a color shot of himself standing arm in arm with Maryland Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley and President Bill Clinton.
Prosecuting high-profile murder cases was nothing new to McCarthy, who’d done so many he’d long considered writing a book titled Murders in Montgomery. The cases McCarthy was talking about descended to depths of depravity that amazed him. One chapter might recount the story of onetime Motown recording engineer Lawrence Horn, who stood to inherit $1.7 million dollars upon the deaths of his ex-wife and eight-year-old son, who had been awarded a civil judgment after a hospital mishap left him a quadriplegic. So Horn hired a man named James Edward Perry, who purchased a pair of how-to books titled Hit Man and How to Make Disposable Silencers and read them carefully, then slipped into the former Mrs. Horn’s house in Silver Spring, quietly and fatally shot her and the boy’s overnight nurse in their heads several times with a .22-caliber rifle—including one round each into one of their eye sockets, like one of the books said—and then smothered the boy by using one hand to cover his mouth and nose and the other hand to cover the tracheotomy opening in his throat. Another chapter could cover Bruman Alvarez, a handyman who tied up and raped a fifteen-year-old girl inside a Potomac home where he was working. A short time later, when his boss arrived, Alvarez took him out with a hammer and a knife. Then the girl’s father and two sisters came home. Alvarez killed them all before returning to the bound girl and stabbing her to death. And what about Samuel Sheinbein? The seventeen-year-old killed another teenager; went to Home Depot to buy a Makita circular power saw, propane tanks, and trash bags; returned to the garage; sawed off the corpse’s arms and legs; and torched the remaining part of the body. A more recent entry would be Renee Bowman, who’d adopted two children through a government program that paid her to raise them. She then suffocated the girls and stuffed them into a chest-style freezer under ice cubes and packaged meats, where they remained for two years while she continued to collect her checks. “By killing the children, keeping them literally on ice,” McCarthy had said in his closing arguments, “the money continued to flow.”
In recent years, he’d become more of an administrator, but he still prosecuted one or two murder cases a year. He’d assigned himself the yoga store case in the opening hours, when it looked like a search for two masked men, but it had quickly taken shape as among the most violent, bizarre, and closely followed that he’d ever seen.
In the days after Brittany Norwood’s arrest, McCarthy learned that defense attorneys Doug Wood and Chris Griffiths were representing Brittany. McCarthy didn’t know either well personally, because they practiced primarily in neighboring Prince George’s County. But he certainly knew about Griffiths’s 2007 murder acquittal in Montgomery. “Came in here and fucking walked a guy,” McCarthy told a colleague. To learn more about Wood, McCarthy spoke to prosecutors who’d squared off against him, hearing again and again to get ready for anything. “Watch out for the other shoe,” said McCarthy’s deputy, John Maloney, who used to work in Prince George’s, “because it’s going to drop.”
McCarthy knew the three options open to Wood and Griffiths: stick with Brittany’s masked-men story, go for second-degree murder and the shorter prison term, or claim criminal insanity. To attack any of those defenses, McCarthy needed to learn exactly what happened inside that store.
He knew the blood drops and spatter could help re-create the fight—or the attack. There was a science to bloodstain-pattern analysis, complete with conferences and research papers. By measuring the width and length of the drops and applying principles of physics and trigonometry, forensic scientists could track the blood backward, determining where the blood came from and how it got there. On the witness stand, those guys could be great, as captivating to jurors as if they’d climbed into an episode of CSI–Montgomery County. McCarthy had a favorite blood-spatter expert, William Vosburgh, a top forensics official for the D.C. police department. McCarthy reached for his phone.
* * *
It was 6:30 P.M. on a Tuesday night when Vosburgh made his way to the back of the yoga store, still locked and under the control of the Montgomery Police Department. He was met by four of the key players in the investigation—Detectives Dimitry Ruvin and Jim Drewry and Sergeant Craig Wittenberger—and shoe-print expert David McGill. They all wanted to slip in through the back because they knew reporters were still making regular rounds in the front of the store to try to catch people going in and out. Vosburgh knew the outlines of the case, but asked the others not to tell him too much as they walked him through the four sections of the store: the narrow rear hallway, the back stockroom, the fitting area, and the main sales floor up front. In these opening minutes, Vosburgh wanted to form his own impressions.
Vosburgh hadn’t always wanted to be a forensic scientist. After studying chemistry in college, he went to dental school and started a practice in 1981. But he soon grew to hate the monotony, the screaming kids—feeling so beat down by 1987 that he went to see his physician, who diagnosed him with acute stress and prescribed two weeks off. Vosburgh took them and felt so much better that he took two more, then two more. Then he simply walked away from the profession for good. In need of a job, he got one as a chemist evaluating drugs seized by police in a county just south of Baltimore. That led to other forensic assignments, promotions, and eventually his current post in the D.C. forensics lab.
Inside the yoga store, what struck Vosburgh about the main sales floor, fitting area, and stockroom—particularly compared to the chaotic mess in the rear hallway—was the decided lack of blood spatter. Yes, he saw lots of bloody shoe prints, a bloody floor in one of the bathrooms, and blood droplets scattered about. None of that told him much about the assault. But one clue caught Vosburgh’s attention—the partial, bloody palm print on the wall near where a television had fallen. He studied it closely, and learned that tests were pending that could confirm that it was made by Brittany or Jayna. “That’s really important,” he said.
Vosburgh and the others returned to the rear hallway and shut the purple door behind them. The hard, gray floor was stained red with blood, and all along a three-sided corner defined by the closed door, the back wall, and the metal shelving unit, Vosburgh saw dense, saturated blood spatter just above the floor. Higher, and near his head to the right, he saw several tiny drops of blood. Upon close inspection, they looked like ovals with tiny tails, and they formed an arc. It was the classic sign of “cast-off,” droplets that fly from a blood-covered weapon as an assailant draws it back. “Kind of what I was looking for,” Vosburgh noted.
Bending over, he studied more concentrated spatter about four feet from the floor, noting additional “cast-off” arcs. He also noted “impact” droplets, which result when an assailant pounds a weapon onto a hard, bloody surface, such as a skull. The pattern was clear: the lower Vosburgh went, the more spatter—the beating was turning into a massacre. These drops were perfect circles, meaning the blood hit the wall at a 90-degree angle at the same height as Jayna’s skull.
Vosburgh looked to his left, at the shelving unit. The lowest shelf was only twenty-two inches off the ground. Vosburgh wondered if they’d find impact spatter on the bottom of that shelf. “I need to look at the underside of this,” he said to the others, bending down to get a better look. What he saw there, in his mind, confirmed it: the beating had continued after Jayna was flat on the ground.
* * *
The next day Vosburgh was on the phone with McCarthy, reporting what he had seen. He
had to couch his conclusions—more analysis of the spatter photographs was needed, he wanted to compare his findings with McGill’s shoe-print work, DNA results were pending, and he wasn’t sure where the altercation had started. But some things seemed clear to him. At some point, Jayna tried to make a run for it out the rear, emergency door and got close enough to leave blood on the handle. But Brittany pulled her back, trapping her in that corner. She started beating Jayna while they were standing, then continued as Jayna fell to the ground—causing blood to bounce upward from her skull onto the underside of the low shelf. “There’s significant blood spatter from the ground level, going up,” Vosburgh told the prosecutor.
McCarthy was optimistic about how this would look to a jury asked to convict Brittany of first-degree murder. Yes, maybe Brittany’s attorneys could argue that the first few strikes had been leveled without much thought, but the longer she’d gone on, the more Maryland’s definition of premeditation played against her. It was something the prosecutor could cite by memory. “Premeditated means that the defendant thought about the killing and that there was enough time before the killing, though it may only have been brief, for the defendant to consider the decision whether or not to kill and enough time to weigh the reasons for and against the choice.”
And there was more, Vosburgh told McCarthy.
It had to do with additional “cast-off” blood-spatter patterns he’d spotted in the back hallway—about four feet off the ground, to the left and right of where Jayna’s body had been. They suggested that at some point, Brittany had changed from an up-and-down pounding to a back-and-forth slashing—almost as if she was trying to disfigure Jayna. McCarthy thought about Jayna’s autopsy photos—wondering how many he’d be allowed to show the jury—as Vosburgh told him how evidence on the bathroom floor eroded Brittany’s claim of masked assailants. The bloodstains looked smeared. Vosburgh said that after the murder, Brittany probably had taken a shirt or a towel, dipped it in Jayna’s blood, carried it to the bathroom and created the bloodstain. It even looked diluted, as if she used water to increase it.
“The story of the outside intruders, it just doesn’t add up,” Vosburgh told the prosecutor.
Vosburgh’s findings lessened the chances Brittany’s attorneys would use a defense that stuck to her original story. So did continued work over at the police department. There was David McGill’s shoe-print analysis. And there was follow-up work Ruvin had done behind the yoga store. He’d been able to uncover two men who matched the description of the two men dressed in black seen on the surveillance videotape from outside the back of the Apple store, just after the time of the murder. The detective had set up in the parking lot in his unmarked car at 10:00 P.M. on a Friday night, and sure enough, a little past 11:00 P.M., two men, dressed in black, walked right by the back door of the yoga store. Ruvin went to question the men, showing them photographs from the surveillance camera. The men were nervous, and spoke only broken English, but said they were kitchen workers at a restaurant several doors away. Ruvin returned to their restaurant the next day, with his laptop, and showed the surveillance video to one of the kitchen workers. Yes, that is me and my coworker, the guy told Ruvin, adding that they were walking away from the restaurant after their shifts had ended, and that one of them was carrying a backpack. To Ruvin and McCarthy, that loop was closed—there was an explanation for the video if it came up at trial.
The thought of Brittany’s lawyers advancing a second-degree murder defense still worried McCarthy, however. All he had to do was look back at three Montgomery murders in which Vosburgh had testified. In the case of Robert Lucas, who was accused of breaking into a church rectory and repeatedly stabbing Monsignor Thomas Wells, Vosburgh told jurors that blood spatter on a wall had started at standing height and continued downward as the priest fell to his death. Two years after that, Vosburgh had been brought in for the murder trial of Dr. Zakaria Oweiss, a popular obstetrician whose wife, Marianne, had been found in their basement, bludgeoned to death with the hard rubber mallet the couple used to tamp down the tarp over their swimming pool. Citing blood spatter on the shin of one pants leg and the front thigh of the other, Vosburgh testified that Oweiss had kept swinging the weapon as he dropped to one knee while his wife fell to the floor. In a 2008 case, detectives were able to show that an ex-U.S. Army soldier, Gary Smith—who had served as an elite Ranger in Iraq—pulled up to his apartment building, loaded a revolver, and climbed a set of stairs to his apartment, where his roommate, fellow ex-Ranger Michael McQueen, sat watching television. Vosburgh testified that blood spatter from a single shot to McQueen’s head indicated Smith had been right next to him when the fatal shot was fired. Yet in all three of those cases, jurors found no premeditation and returned verdicts of second-degree murder. And the verdict in Smith’s case was later overturned because of a witness-testimony issue. Smith was given a new trial and convicted of involuntary manslaughter and use of a handgun in the commission of a felony. McCarthy didn’t want to accept such a verdict in the yoga store case. He was thinking not only of Jayna’s family, whom he was getting to know, and all the people who had worked on the case and were counting on him. There was also his political future.
In late 2010—months before the murder occurred—McCarthy had begun weighing a 2014 run for attorney general of Maryland, the top law enforcement official in the state. The post could set him up to run for governor in 2017 or 2021. Yes, the ever-increasing media attention on this case could be very good publicity, but that same media attention had also already cemented the image among voters that Brittany was guilty of the worst kind of premeditated murder. A verdict that freed her in fifteen years would hardly play well on the campaign trail.
Although McCarthy wasn’t the youngest person to consider an extended run in the upper echelon of Maryland politics, he also cheated age every day, following the exercise regime of a twenty-five-year-old. Lunch hours meant a quick drive to the county’s police-academy training gym. Some days it was a forty-minute run on the treadmill while speaking to other lawyers on his phone. Two days a week, it was five-on-five basketball with cops. Every Sunday morning, in a park behind his house, he played quarterback in a standing game of touch football with his buddies, a routine that one morning left him with two cracked ribs, courtesy of a blitzing prison guard. And he still taught, giving criminal-justice lectures at a local college two nights a week. McCarthy turned his attention to the bloody palm print. Tests confirmed that it matched Jayna’s left palm, supporting one of Vosburgh’s theories: Brittany had first struck Jayna in the rear stockroom or the fitting area, causing blood to soak into Jayna’s hair but not fall to the floor; Jayna instinctively reached up to her head as she pitched forward, catching herself by slamming her palm into the wall. The early DNA results also looked encouraging. McCarthy read a report about the bloodstains found inside Jayna’s car and on the brim of the hat in the back of the car. The prosecutor took notes, using the Greek delta as shorthand for the word defendant: “Black hat, interior driver side handle, gear shift—All Δ.” McCarthy also noted that although some of Jayna’s DNA was also found in the car, Brittany herself had said she had gotten Jayna’s blood on her. “Some Jayna in her car too. Okay,” McCarthy wrote.
As much as he’d wanted quick DNA results before the arrest—to make sure the detectives had the right person—the prosecutor now wanted to slow the process down. He was sure Brittany was the killer. But of the hundreds of pieces of evidence, the county’s crime lab could only test a limited number of additional spots, due to requests from other cases. For two days, McCarthy, Ayres, and the detectives met with a DNA analyst to decide what to test. They also recognized how certain results could work against them, such as the palm print that had been confirmed as Jayna’s on the wall. McCarthy already seemed to have enough evidence to tell jurors that Brittany had struck Jayna on her head, causing Jayna to grab the wound with her hand as she stumbled into the wall, leaving the print. So why test that print for DNA? If the results came b
ack as Brittany’s blood, that could just confuse matters. In the end, the group decided to concentrate tests on sections of the hammer, rope, and wrench found near Jayna’s head; sections of the inside of the shoes Brittany appeared to have worn as part of her cover-up; and various parts of a serrated bread knife found in the kitchenette area.
McCarthy knew that the more weapons he put in Brittany’s hands, the more likely he could prove premeditation. Suppose she started with a hammer, switched to a wrench, then a rope. Each time she rearmed herself, she would have had to pause, giving herself time to think about what she was doing. Meanwhile, at the forensics-autopsy lab in Baltimore, Dr. Mary Ripple was having trouble matching all the photographs of Jayna’s injuries with photographs of the possible weapons found at the crime scene. She called Ruvin and said she wanted to drive down to look at the tools in person. Ruvin called McCarthy and invited him and the assistant prosecutor on the case, Marybeth Ayres, to come to police headquarters.
In nearly thirty years of homicide prosecutions, McCarthy had never heard such an offer from a medical examiner—and he was happy to accept. He and Ayres joined detectives Ruvin, Drewry, and Wittenberger, and two forensic pathologists, Ripple and Kristin Johnson, around a table at the homicide unit, where Ripple went over some of her preliminary findings. Her final report, which would total almost thirty pages, said that Jayna had no signs of drugs or alcohol in her system. She had suffered at least 331 pummeling, cutting, and stabbing injuries, including at least 152 to her head. She had 105 injuries to her hands and arms, a clear indication she had been trying to block the attack. Simple multiplication revealed an astounding ordeal: if the assailant had struck once every second, the attack would have lasted about five and one-half minutes. A more likely scenario, particularly if the attacker had to pause for a break or to switch weapons, was one strike every three seconds. Nearly seventeen minutes.
