The Yoga Store Murder
Read The Yoga Store Murder Online
Authors: Dan Morse
PRAISE FOR
THE YOGA STORE MURDER
“A true-crime tour de force, with all of the features that make a whodunit great: a suspenseful, intricately constructed plot; a taut prose style that wastes no words; memorable characters brought to vivid life in a few deft strokes; and of course, a dogged murder investigation that leads to a stunning revelation. Readers will tear through the book—as I did—to learn the solution to the dark mystery at its core.”
—Harold Schechter, author of
Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of
and
The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook a Nation
“Dan Morse has written a true-crime thriller that reads like a ripsnorting novel. With a storyteller’s flair for the cinematic and a keen eye for detail he has honed as a crime reporter, Morse unveils the fast-paced investigation into a killing that captured the nation’s attention. The murder was as brutal as its setting was unexpected: behind the closed doors of a hip retailer in the wealthiest and safest of suburbs.”
—Del Quentin Wilber, bestselling author of
Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan
“With its riveting narrative and precise, unflinching rendering of a murder that isn’t what it seems, Dan Morse’s
The Yoga Store Murder
rises to the level of the finest crime novels. Except that it’s all true.”
—Bryan Gruley, Edgar®-nominated author of the Starvation Lake trilogy
“Cerebral and thoroughly frightening,
The Yoga Store Murder
takes the reader on a moment-by-moment hunt with a group of wily detectives as they sort through a tangle of lies and bloody sneaker prints. It will keep you up way past your bedtime.”
—Michael E. Ruane, coauthor of
Sniper: Inside the Hunt for the Killers Who Terrorized the Nation
To Dana
THE YOGA STORE
MURDER
THE SHOCKING TRUE ACCOUNT OF THE LULULEMON ATHLETICA KILLING
DAN MORSE
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
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A Penguin Random House Company
THE YOGA STORE MURDER
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author Copyright © 2013 by Dan Morse.
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PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley premium edition / November 2013
Cover art of
Yoga Mat
© discpicture/shutterstock;
Footprints
© Igor Kovalchuk/shutterstock;
Abstact Grunge Texture
© Ursa Major/shutterstock; and
Detailed View of Yoga Mat Texture
© Ambient Ideas/shutterstock.
Cover design by Jane Hammer.
Contents
SECTION II: BRITTANY AND JAYNA
16.
Mediocre Lives Are Lousy Lives
20.
Tuesday: “Let Me Throw This at You”
22.
Thursday: Tracking and Trailing
28.
“I Think We Can Live with This Guy”
30.
More Than Three Hundred Blows
SECTION I
BETHESDA
It Couldn’t Happen Here
The sounds—were they screams?—reached Jana Svrzo as she walked across the sales floor of the Apple Store, now closed for the night. Jana (pronounced “Yah-nah”) was twenty-nine years old and wore funky black sneakers and a ready smile—an easy fit among Apple’s hip, young sales army. It was just after 10:00 P.M. on Friday, March 11, 2011, in downtown Bethesda, an affluent area just north of the nation’s capital, and Jana, the store’s manager, had about an hour’s worth of record-keeping ahead of her, following the opening day sales for Apple’s hot new product, the iPad 2, which had created a nearly four-hundred-foot line of eager buyers down the sidewalk.
Now, though, she looked to her right and listened. The sounds were high-pitched yelps and squeals, and low-pitched grunts, thuds, a dragging noise, as if something heavy was being moved. Jana thought they might be coming from a room near the back exit or a room upstairs, where technicians were still on duty. She asked one of the two security guards to help her search.
Jana and the guard split up, meeting two minutes later upstairs, where they spoke to another young manager, Ricardo Rios, who wore a dark baseball cap and a bright blue Apple employee shirt.
“Screaming,” the guard said. “It sounded like some lady was screaming.”
They checked out the technicians’ room. All clear. They walked downstairs to the sales floor and heard more yelling. Suddenly, Jana felt sure of the origin. “It’s coming from next door,” she said—from lululemon athletica, the luxury yoga store with which Apple shared a wall.
She and Ricardo walked closer to the wall. Jana now could hear someone saying: “Talk to me. Don’t do this. Talk to me. What’s going on?”
Then she heard what sounded like a different voice, maybe the one that had just been screaming. Now it was quieter: “God help me. Please help me.”
Ricardo also could hear that first voice, the one saying “Talk to me,” but couldn’t make out the words of the second one. They were muffled, covered by crying and panting, as if a woman was trying to catch her breath. Ricardo kept staring at the wall, walked away from it, returned, then knocked on it, trying to get the attention of whoever was on the other side. “What’s going on?” he asked, his voice raised.
No response.
“Maybe I should just call the cops,” Jana said.
“That’s up to you,” Ricardo answered. He thought it was a private matter, and told Jana it sounded as if one person had just heard tragic news and the other was trying to get her to talk about it. “I think it’s just drama.”
Ricardo said he was going back upstairs and did so. It was 10:19, eight minutes after Jana had first heard the noises.
Wilbert Hawkins, the second of the two security guards, had been observing the commotion without feeling overly concerned. The crashing sounds, he figured, could have been a merchandise display falling over, the yelling some kind of horsing around. It didn’t seem threatening. Maybe if they were somewhere in nearby D.C., where, even in a high-end area like Georgetown, danger could erupt without warning—but not here, Wilbert thought, not along the tony, walkable streets in the middle of Bethesda.
Jana sensed the noises growing fainter. To her left, outside the glass front doors, the sidewalks were slowing down but still active. People huddled in coats against the chilly March air, walking to and from restaurants and bars. In the few months Jana had worked at the store, she’d come to see how safe the area was. Jana shared Wilbert’s view: surely the noise was something explainable. She went upstairs. For the next half hour, she and Ricardo went through their closing duties, typing away on computers, adding up receipts for the day.
Ricardo left at 10:56
P.M.
Jana finished ten minutes later. She walked downstairs again, across the sales floor to the front door. A new security guard on duty let her out. The restaurant to her left was still open. To her right, the yoga store and the store beyond it were dark and closed. It was March 11, 2011, and all seemed normal.
“Is She Going to Make It?”
The morning of Saturday, March 12, twenty-six-year-old Ryan Haugh walked up to the Apple Store in Bethesda. He’d tried to buy an iPad 2 the night before and waited in the long line outside for more than two hours, but the prized computer tablets were sold out by the time he got to the door. Ryan didn’t want to make the same mistake again, so he’d thrown on some jeans and a bright red Philadelphia Phillies baseball cap and dashed out of his home that morning without a shower.
It was now 7:45
A.M.
, more than two hours before the store would open at 10:00. The skies were cloudy, the temperature 41 degrees. No other customers had yet arrived, so Ryan took a seat on a solid teak bench near the Apple Store, whipped out his iPhone and began reading the
New York Times.
Ryan didn’t typically spend much time in this five-block area, called Bethesda Row, finding the prices a bit high and jokingly comparing it to elements of the 1998 movie
Pleasantville
, which captured safe and perfectly ordered streets. But the biotechnology-industry salesman certainly enjoyed the place when he did come. In the carefully developed retail blocks around him, stores offered serenity, luxury, and virtue—sometimes rolled into a single product. Spas served up $130 facials. An ecofriendly toy store sold $73 toxin-free, German-made fire trucks. A furniture place called Urban Country had a distressed-wood dinner table for sale at $2,513. Chic restaurants and bars stayed open late and gave patrons a sense of urban energy without the danger.
Others started to join Ryan in the line. Shortly after 8:00 A.M., he saw a woman approach, her orange running shoes bright against the gray morning, and go into the store next to Apple, clearly an employee about to start her day. Moments later, Ryan heard a voice.
“Hello? Hello?!”
There was an edge to it. The woman in the orange shoes came back out and was talking on her phone. “I hear someone moaning in the back,” she was saying, “and it looks like it’s been vandalized and I’m just really scared to go in.”
To Ryan it was clear she had called 911. The woman’s panic was growing. She answered a few more questions, giving her name, Rachel, and the address of the store. The police were coming. She ended the call and turned toward Ryan. “Have you seen anyone go in or out of this store this morning?” she asked him.