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

by Dan Morse

  While Brittany was still dripping with Jayna’s blood, Ayres told the jury, she walked to the cash registers to stage the robbery. This was evident, Ayres said, because drops of Jayna’s blood were found up front. Then Brittany walked to the sink, cleaned her shoes, cleaned her hands, and cleaned the blood off her forehead, which Ayres told the jurors came from a wound Brittany gave herself while attacking Jayna. From there, Brittany grabbed Jayna’s car keys—she had to move Jayna’s car from out front so that Rachel Oertli, the manager who lived in an apartment across the street, wouldn’t see it—donned a lululemon cap, drove the car three blocks away, parked it, and walked back to the store. Ayres had always thought that at this point, Brittany probably used her fingernails or a box cutter to re-open the cut on her forehead and make her own injuries look worse. The prosecutor now asserted so to the jury: “After she came back from the car, she did something to that, to her forehead, to make it have blood come all the way down her face.”

  Ayres implored the jurors to put emotions aside and look at the evidence. “As humans, we want to believe it’s the masked men. We want that. That makes us feel better,” Ayres said. “You don’t want to believe that it’s the articulate, educated, attractive girl next door. You don’t want to believe that, because that’s someone you might trust.”

  Once Ayres finished, the jurors were escorted into their deliberation room, where they sat around a twelve-foot-long table, antsy to talk, but Greenberg’s law clerk forbid them to discuss the case until all the boxes and bags of evidence had been carted in. Finally, after ten minutes, the evidence came in, the clerk left, and several simultaneous conversations broke out. For a minute or so, the jurors talked among themselves about how rough the case was. It was attorney Donny Knepper who spoke up first. As he knew, the printed jury form given to them had limited options to consider:

  1. As to the crime of First-Degree Murder, we, the jury, find the Defendant:

  ___ Not Guilty ___ Guilty.

  If your answer to Number 1 is Guilty, your deliberations are concluded. If your answer to Number 1 is Not Guilty, proceed to Number 2.

  2. As to the crime of Second-Degree Murder, we, the jury, find the Defendant:

  ___ Not Guilty ___ Guilty.

  “Hey, hey,” Knepper said, “let’s do an initial vote to see who would vote for first-degree murder, to see if there are any issues around that.”

  All twelve jurors raised their hands. Nobody seemed surprised.

  But Knepper thought he should at least create a conversation about second-degree murder. He defined the classic scenario: man comes home, finds wife in bed with other man, picks up nearest heavy object, kills wife without really thinking about it. “Somebody make an argument for how this could be second-degree murder,” Knepper said.

  Greg Lloyd gave it the best shot, figuring it was their duty to at least play devil’s advocate. But after several minutes, he realized he wasn’t making any sense. This is ridiculous, he thought to himself. Someone voiced the question that was bugging them all—Why did Brittany do it?—and silence ensued. Eventually, Ron Harrington wondered aloud if Brittany and Jayna liked the same guy, whether somehow their ties to Seattle played into that. Another juror suggested that perhaps Jayna had accused Brittany of shoplifting, but Knepper found the idea so outrageous that he didn’t even respond to it. Finally, he spoke. “You know what? Maybe in ten or fifteen years, Brittany Norwood will come out and explain why she did this. But the fact of the matter is we don’t have to know.”

  Harrington wanted to talk about what had saddened him since the previous afternoon. “Who else had a hard time when Jayna’s mother was on the stand?” he asked. Several other jurors agreed.

  Harrington knew their work was essentially done, but he wanted to examine one piece of evidence, though. He put on a pair of rubber gloves and pulled the bloodstained merchandise peg out of its box, noting the sharp flange on the end and hefting its one-pound weight. Heavy enough to have good mass, the engineer thought, but light enough to swing rapidly. “Holy crap, this is a perfect weapon,” he said, saddened it was such an easy thing to say.

  Knepper led another vote. It was unanimous for first-degree murder. Everyone got ready to go back into the courtroom. “Does anybody have any doubt whatsoever?” Knepper asked. “This is a very important decision.” Nobody did.

  A block and a half way, at a brew pub called Gordon Biersch, McCarthy had just ordered a round: draft beer for him, a Sprite for Ayres, and a rum and Coke for Detective Dimitry Ruvin. Ayres’s phone rang. The jury was ready. She smiled. “They wouldn’t walk her that quickly.” The three hustled back to the courthouse, which they had left just ten minutes before.

  By 6:56 P.M., everyone was seated. The jurors filed in to their two tiers of chairs. Not including the time they’d spent waiting for the exhibits to arrive, and for everyone to reassemble in the courtroom, they’d only deliberated for twenty-one minutes.

  A juror seated to the far right on the front row—the official foreman—stood. The clerk spoke to him in the official script used for verdicts:

  “As to the crime of first-degree murder, we, the jury, find the defendant?”

  “Guilty.”

  Brittany displayed no emotion.

  Her family cried. So did Jayna’s.

  Minutes later, Greg Lloyd, the juror who had started the trial willing to step in if he thought Brittany was being unfairly prosecuted, started to walk out of the courtroom. As he had for the past six days, he saw Jayna’s father, David Murray, near the middle aisle of the second row. Lloyd had tried to remain objective during the trial, but his emotions had overwhelmed him that morning during presentation of the autopsy photos, and he’d wept. The feelings hadn’t ebbed all day. He stopped to shake David’s hand, each man looking into the wet eyes of the other. “I am so sorry for your loss,” Lloyd said.

  Moments later, in the vestibule outside the front entrance to the courtroom, Detective Jim Drewry was looking for someone. A sheriff’s deputy he knew led him into a small room near the entrance, where witnesses typically wait. There sat Earl Norwood, the man who had invited him fishing, even as Drewry was dead set on locking up his daughter for the rest of her life. “None of this was personal,” Drewry told him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  More Than Three Hundred Blows

  Brittany Norwood’s sentencing hearing was scheduled for 1:30 P.M. on an overcast Friday afternoon, January 27, 2012, with winds whipping to thirty miles per hour. For weeks Montgomery Circuit Court Judge Robert Greenberg had weighed whether to impose a life sentence that offered Brittany a chance at parole in the distant future, or impose a sentence of life with no chance at parole.

  Expecting hundreds in the gallery, Greenberg had again reserved the county’s largest courtroom. By 1:15 P.M., more than 150 people had already taken their seats. Three minutes later, sheriff’s deputies escorted in Jayna Murray’s family, leading them down a center aisle and seating them in the second row on the left side. Then came Brittany Norwood’s family, escorted down the aisle to the second row on the right. On both sides of the aisle, the occupants of the second rows leaned on each other, held hands in their laps, and for the most part stared straight ahead.

  By the time Judge Greenberg called the hearing to order, at 1:36 P.M., there were more than 200 spectators. He would hear first from both families, then their attorneys, and then—if she chose to speak—from Brittany. He had already read filings submitted by the prosecution and the defense, which offered a preview of how each side would try to define Brittany and how each side hoped she would be punished.

  Prosecutors John McCarthy and Marybeth Ayres, supported by more than sixty letters from Jayna’s family and friends, strongly urged a sentence of life without parole. They labeled Brittany “evil”—someone who’d attacked Jayna with as many as ten weapons, who could then shift into cover-up mode and slice open Jayna’s pants and underwear to stage a rape, who’d lied to her own family about phantom attackers knowing the addre
ss of the home where they were staying. Brittany “showed no regard, nor empathy, for anyone,” the prosecutors wrote.

  On the other side, Brittany’s attorneys Doug Wood and Chris Griffiths, backed by letters from Brittany’s eight siblings and others, urged Greenberg to look decades into the future, when Brittany might at least have a chance to convince a parole board to release her. They described their client as “neither a calculating killer nor a deranged psychopath” but someone who’d “become overwhelmed with emotion” and “committed the unthinkable.” They attached a report by Dr. David Williamson, the head-trauma expert who visited Brittany at the jail three times and whose credentials had worried McCarthy. But his report said nothing about concussion-related problems from the soccer field. Instead, it dealt with moodiness and depression. “Over the past five years, Ms. Norwood developed phases of depressed mood or moodiness,” Williamson wrote. “During exacerbations, she would become socially isolative, experience emotional disturbances, have changes in her appetite, her sleep patterns and at times contemplate her own death and even develop fleeting suicidal ideas. She had trouble during those phases keeping up with her everyday responsibilities, fell behind on her bills. She often neglected her hygiene and appearance. She noted that she was forgetful and had concentration problems.”

  Before the hearing, McCarthy and Wood had done some horse-trading. The prosecutor wanted to allow eight people to speak about Jayna and the murder’s impact on them and why Brittany should receive the maximum sentence. Wood could have insisted on only one speaker, but what he really wanted was a chance to speak last. Deal, McCarthy said.

  Jayna’s father, David Murray, rose and walked to the podium in the well of the courtroom, facing the judge. His hands shook as he steadied a prepared statement before him. Twenty feet away sat Brittany, her hair pulled back, her head bent, her legs twitching. She wore a black cardigan sweater over a light pink shirt and white necklace.

  “I miss Jayna more than can be expressed in words,” David said, trying somehow to capture what he’d been through for ten months—the bottomless grief, the crushing guilt of an ex-soldier who hadn’t been able to protect his child. “She was more than a daughter,” David said, his voice breaking as spoke about how close his family was. “She was one of my four best friends.”

  David paused for a video of Jayna bungee jumping off of a bridge in Washington State on her thirtieth birthday, her smile beaming into the courtroom to the music of Tom Petty’s “Learning to Fly.” Behind David, Brittany’s mother, Larkita, sat with tears streaming down her face.

  Jayna’s mother, her two brothers, her two sisters-in-law, her longtime boyfriend, and one of her closest friends spoke as well. “I wake up every day and set the intention to build the strength to be happy,” Marisa Connaughton told Greenberg, “even if it is just for one minute.”

  McCarthy then described what Brittany had inflicted on Jayna: not only brutal strikes and stabs that crushed Jayna’s skull and damaged her brain, but also the slicing and cutting wounds that amounted to mutilation. “They’re torture,” he said of the cuts. “They’re sadistic.”

  Freed from the trial’s restrictive rules of evidence, McCarthy now had his chance to explain Brittany’s motive. It was a question to which he’d been assembling his answer since March, interviewing those who knew Brittany, studying the crime and the cover-up, talking to Ayres about her research into psychopathy. Only one thing engendered any compassion in him for Brittany: she seemed to have been born miswired. The section of her brain where a conscience should be simply hadn’t developed fully. And apparently what Brittany had done was expand that gap in her brain, feed it for her own thrills. She stole from close friends just to see their reactions; she led a dark, secret life, uninhibited by any sense that it was wrong; she knew how to stay one step ahead of trouble, or talk her way out of trouble when it caught up to her. That only gave her more confidence to do as she pleased. It was here that Ayres’s views on psychopathy came into play, suggesting that Brittany was on a contradictory path of self-destruction. The more secrets Brittany kept, the worse she felt about herself as people all around her succeeded—and succeeded without deceit and subterfuge. “Anyone who is like this lacks self-esteem and self-worth,” Ayres had told McCarthy. The two had talked about Brittany’s affection for her family, which seemed genuine. “I think that side was real,” Ayres said.

  McCarthy wanted to offer Greenberg—and everyone else in the courtroom—a sense of the Brittany he’d come to know. He started off talking about her family.

  “Your honor has been doing this for more than thirty years,” he said. “I’ve been doing it for thirty years. Mr. Wood’s been doing it for thirty years. We always hear about these terrible families that the defendants that come before us come from—they didn’t really ever have a chance, they were never given a real opportunity.” That was hardly the case for Brittany. “This is a lovely family,” McCarthy said. “Supportive of her. Even here today.”

  The opportunities they gave her led to a college scholarship, he said. Yet she stole, she got thrown off the soccer team, she moved to Washington, D.C., and she continued to steal. She made a mess of her job at the first lululemon store where she worked, in Georgetown.

  McCarthy knew he couldn’t reveal too much about Brittany’s most shameful secrets—he’d long concluded she was into prostitution, but it hadn’t been part of the trial—so he worked the edges. He told Greenberg that Brittany had accidentally dropped a subway card on the floor of the store the night of the murder. The card came from a “prostitution self-help group in the District of Columbia,” McCarthy said. Later, he told the judge about Brittany’s text messages involving “providing personal services,” prompting Wood to object, and Greenberg to put a halt to it.

  But McCarthy was on solid ground when he recounted what he’d learned about the events leading to the murder. He described how Jayna and Brittany had checked each other’s bags, how Jayna had confronted Brittany about trying to steal a pair of pants, how Brittany couldn’t explain herself, how the two left the store and Jayna called her manager.

  “Brittany Norwood was about to be fired the next day,” McCarthy said.

  And it wouldn’t have been just a firing. It would have resurrected the Georgetown suspicions, and it would have cost her the personal-trainer job she had lined up at the fancy health club where she really wanted to work.

  “She was on her way,” McCarthy said. “It was more than a pair of pants. It was an unraveling of the life she had set for herself.” So Brittany came up with a ruse about forgetting her wallet and called Jayna. “She lured Jayna back to the place where this killing began,” he said.

  McCarthy couldn’t know exactly what happened immediately after the two returned to the store, but he had his assumptions. Brittany probably asked Jayna not to report the theft to the store manager, Rachel Oertli. Jayna probably responded in one of two ways: “It’s too late. I already have,” or “I can’t do that. It’s between you and Rachel.” Within seconds, McCarthy concluded, Brittany attacked. Was she enraged? Was she trying to silence the witness? McCarthy had always thought it was a combination of the two—and he’d come to believe something else. At some point after the murder—maybe during the staging, or after she’d started talking to the detectives, or after the lululemon athletica company had reached out to lend her support—Brittany actually thought she’d come out of the whole thing ahead. She’d have her job at Equinox. She’d have the sympathy of all those around her. It wouldn’t be that big a deal, really. But who really knew what happened in those critical seconds? Only Brittany. Maybe not even Brittany.

  For McCarthy, it was enough to have walked the judge through her complicated past, the bag check, the attack, and the cover-up. “There was cunning and guile involved in this,” he said, and he urged Greenberg not to give Brittany a chance at parole.

  As they waited to ask Greenberg for leniency instead, Brittany’s family had heard a horrible new word—torture—adde
d to the description of what Brittany had done. Her oldest brother, Sandré, stepped forward first. He told the Murrays how sorry his family was for their loss. It was a crime so brutal, he acknowledged, that he and other family members could have turned their backs on Brittany.

  But they didn’t, Sandré said, because of all the things she had done for her parents and siblings and nephews before March 11, 2011. “One is not given this type of love and support, not even from family,” he said. “It can only be earned.”

  He urged the judge to give Brittany a chance at parole. “Brittany is a person worthy of rehabilitation and, maybe, at some point, redemption.”

  Not until Sandré spoke his final words did Brittany raise her head briefly and look his way, wearing the same blank expression she had throughout the proceedings. “Please, your honor, at least give her some hope,” he said. “If you leave her with hope, you leave our family with hope.”

  Brittany’s lead attorney, Wood, got up to speak, talking about the devastation not just to the Murrays, but to the Norwoods as well. “Every time they think it’s healing, the wound will be opened by regret,” Wood said. “It will be opened by looking around and not seeing Brittany and realizing what she had done. Her absence will always be there and will always torture that family. What I would say to that family, though, your honor, is that it’s not their fault . . . They did everything they could. But they’re always going to wonder about that regret. And that’s a punishment that their daughter has inflicted on them.”

  Wood ended as Sandré had: even a distant, remote chance at parole would give the family some hope, he said.