The Yoga Store Murder (12 page)

A key member of lululemon athletica’s solid team in Bethesda, Maryland, was Jayna Murray, a gregarious thirty-year-old Texan poised to start a new chapter in her life.

As 2011 opened, she was closing in on dual master’s degrees in business administration and communication, and looking for a corporate marketing job in the Pacific Northwest, where her longtime boyfriend, Fraser Bocell, was getting a PhD in educational statistics at the University of Washington. The two had started looking at engagement rings. One of the companies interested in hiring Jayna, at its corporate headquarters in Vancouver, Canada, was lululemon athletica.

As lulu executives knew, Jayna could fill a room with her personality—her laugh, her confidence, her penchant for asking thoughtful questions. She collected friends everywhere she went: people she’d met at college, on jobs, or during trips she’d taken to places around the world. She bungee jumped, scuba dived, skydived, drank margaritas, and danced salsa until 3:00 in the morning. “If you’re afraid to do something,” Jayna liked to say, “go do it.”

But she had her struggles, too. As a senior in high school, Jayna drifted away from clear ambitions, and refused to fill out college applications. As she got older and moved from city to city, she’d often go through months of private sadness before forming new friendships.

Her father, David Murray, grew up the son of a military officer and earned a scholarship to play linebacker at what was then a full-time military school, Texas A&M University. Her mother, Phyllis, was raised in Manly, Iowa, population 1,500, and eventually attended Texas Lutheran University, which is how she and David met. In 1966, he went to the U.S. Army’s Airborne and Ranger schools. He learned a relatively new style of combat: flying aboard helicopters into hot spots and either jumping out or sliding down zip lines. David shipped off to Vietnam and led a platoon of soldiers into battle. As they hacked through the jungle one day, a booby-trapped land mine erupted, killing three of his men and badly injuring David’s legs. He recovered in a military hospital and charged back into battle, this time leading a Special Forces unit. When David came home, in 1969, he and Phyllis married.

Both went on to pick up postgraduate degrees, Phyllis in family and child development, with a specialty in family counseling, and David in geological engineering and international affairs. Phyllis worked briefly as a therapist before pursuing a career as a flight attendant for TWA. David went to work for Phillips Petroleum, even as Vietnam continued to weigh on his mind. He struggled with anger and vivid flashbacks of friends killed next to him, often having trouble sleeping. David tried talking to counselors, but that didn’t do much.

What did, and what kept his rage in check, was to smile at all he had. A big part of that was his wife, Phyllis; their two sons; and, as of November 22, 1980, their daughter, Jayna. Jayna was strong-willed from the get-go. At age two, she already hated their weekly family ritual of splitting up sections of the Sunday newspaper for everyone to go through. Jayna knew the other four were reading but couldn’t understand why she wasn’t able to do so—a contradiction that sent her off crying to her room. A couple of years later, she tried to escape a spanking by hiding every wooden spoon in the house.

“With guidance, she’ll set the world on fire,” a swimming instructor once told her mother. “Without guidance, she’ll destroy herself.”

Phyllis and David took that advice to heart. Her father began taking Jayna along on Boy Scout campouts for the troop he led. Jayna carried her own backpack, helped her dad pitch their tent, and rolled out their sleeping bags. She learned to tie knots and start campfires—the same activities that the older boys, including Jayna’s two brothers, did to collect merit badges. Jayna also went to Boy Scout meetings, said the Pledge of Allegiance alongside them, and watched the boys receive their badges. David told Jayna the rules said she couldn’t officially receive badges—but he gave them to her at home, away from the troop.

Phyllis’s degree in family and child development also played a role in Jayna’s upbringing. If Jayna or her brothers wanted to try a sport or a musical instrument, they had to agree to commit to it for a certain amount of time, such as six months or a year. Their parents didn’t want them to quit before they understood if they really liked something. “Always moving forward” was the way David thought about it. “And the only way to do that was through self-awareness and self-improvement.”

He had worked his way up at Phillips and began managing drilling sites around the world. Phyllis, too, of course, traveled a lot for her flight-attendant job. The result: heavy rotations of single-parent duty. But they found ways to make their schedules work with the kids’ interests. For example, one of them would take Jayna to dance class at the Houston Metropolitan Dance Company, where for three hours, six days a week, she eagerly worked through the paces. Her teachers started telling her she had a good chance to make it on Broadway.

For her parents—with the family home more than an hour away—it made little sense to drive back and return for pickup. David spent much of his three hours outside in their Ford Aerostar, reading technical journals, writing drilling plans, or watching ball games on a portable television. One night, on the way home, Jayna, about thirteen at the time, looked up from the homework she was doing under the dome light and asked him about it.

“Dad, why don’t you come inside?”

“Well, sometimes I do.”

“You don’t come inside all the time.”

“I’m just more comfortable out in the car.”

“What do you mean you’re more comfortable out in the car? It’s dark out in the car.”

“The car’s got lights. I read. I watch baseball.”

“Well, you need to come inside the studio.”

As Jayna kept pushing, David realized his daughter had figured out the real reason behind his reluctance. He felt uncomfortable around Jayna’s dance instructors, at least two of whom he thought were gay.

“Dad, they’re not interested in you,” Jayna continued. “They don’t care about you. You’re married.”

David didn’t have a comeback. He talked to his wife about it. She told him his daughter was right. He began spending the full three hours inside the studio. As he got to know the instructors, he saw how much they cared for his daughter, how athletic they were, how foolish he’d been, how lucky he was to have a daughter who would speak her mind and teach him things.

Jayna did well academically—low As—but had trouble finding the right school. By the time she was in her senior year, Jayna had been to four different high schools, including one year spent in Norway, when her father was transferred there. About the same time, she realized that dancing, even on Broadway, was a tough way to make a living. Her parents took her to two days of aptitude testing, which revealed she seemed built for a career in sales or marketing. “I don’t want to do that,” she told them. Phyllis and David took her to visit nearly ten colleges. Many had dance programs. But Jayna always put off filling out the applications.

Her parents had long ago figured the best way for them to parent a strong-willed daughter with ambitions was to suggest this, talk about that, nudge this. But now they had a daughter exerting her will to not really do anything. They decided to meet force with force. The night before her high school graduation, Phyllis told Jayna she had six weeks to either get accepted to a college or secure a full-time job. “If not, you’re going to be out of this house,” Phyllis said.

Jayna stormed out, passing a brother’s girlfriend in the driveway. “Mom and Dad are kicking me out!” she cried.

She quickly applied to two colleges: the University of Central Florida, where she thought she could get a job dancing at Walt Disney World, and Saint Louis University, which appealed for two reasons: it was in the city of TWA’s hub, from which Jayna could use family benefit miles to travel around the world, and it had a study-abroad program. Jayna flew to Saint Louis for a student orientation and convinced the administrators to let her start right away—in Madrid. Suddenly, she had a plan.

*

Jayna and her classmates took an orientation trip to the Pyrenees mountains, on the border of Spain and France. Things got off to a tense start, with students either too shy or homesick to say much. On their first night, they all went to sleep on the floor in one room. Jayna had a trick up her sleeve. She knew how to throw her voice.

“Help, I’m trapped in the closet,” she said softly. “I’m trapped in the closet.”

Another student jumped up and flipped the lights on. “Did you hear that?!”

Jayna and the student next to her started to laugh. Soon the whole room was cracking up.

Jayna studied in Madrid for two years, then enrolled in a Semester at Sea program, studying with hundreds of other students aboard a converted cruise ship that made stops all over the world. One night she went to a salsa dance class taught by a fellow student, Rudy Colberg, a native of Puerto Rico who’d taken seven years of Latin dance lessons while growing up. As the class got under way and Rudy walked among the students, he saw Jayna’s dance skills and asked if she wanted to help him teach. She agreed. Afterward, she and Rudy ended up dancing by themselves for two hours and trading moves they knew. Rudy was stunned. This blue-eyed blonde was by far the best salsa partner he’d ever had. The two became close friends.

Rudy was with Jayna on the deck of the ship when it reached Vietnam. As they sailed up the Mekong River toward Ho Chi Minh City, the big cruise ship towering over groves and swamps, Jayna thought about her father—how he’d been here three decades earlier, how many friends he’d lost, how he’d struggled with harrowing memories. She started to cry. “My dad was here during the war,” she told Rudy. The students spent six days in Vietnam. “I wish he could come back one day and see the country.” After the Semester at Sea program, Jayna came home and talked to her dad about going back to Vietnam. He was skeptical, but slowly started to make plans to do so.

Jayna finished up her bachelor’s degree at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Just before her senior year there, she walked into her dorm room to find a new roommate, Marisa Connaughton, sitting on the floor and crying. Marisa said she and her boyfriend had just broken up. Her phone beeped. “Oh my God, it’s him,” she told Jayna. “What should I do?”

“You’ve got to answer it! Tell him you’re out having a great time!”

As Marisa answered, Jayna immediately started whooping and laughing, and got a friend she was with to do the same thing. The guy on the other end of the line could hear them. “Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m out with my friends,” Marisa said, and quickly hung up. She tried to cry but found herself laughing instead. Jayna tended to have that effect on people.

Despite her exuberant attitude, Jayna was resolute about some things, like loyalty and limits and values. “Jayna’s gray zone,” Rudy would later say, “was very well-defined and very narrow.” But with anything outside the zone, Jayna generally tried to laugh her way through. One of her favorite things to do was teach five-year-olds how to dance. “They don’t care about how they look,” she’d say.

*

By 2006, Jayna had graduated from George Washington with a degree in international business and marketing, and was back in Houston, Texas, working in marketing at Halliburton, the energy and engineering giant.

She became good friends with her office neighbor, Chasity Wilson, despite their outward differences: Jayna, a twenty-five-year-old white girl with an undergraduate degree in international business and marketing, who put her career plans ahead of any intentions to marry or have children, and Chasity, a thirty-one-year-old African American mother of two going through a divorce, who had joined Halliburton as an administrative assistant and worked her way up. Jayna invited Chasity to her desk for early morning sessions of “cube therapy” with two other female colleagues, where they spent ten minutes discussing various personal issues or cutting up before getting to work. Jayna would sit atop her desk or a filing cabinet. Back in their seats one morning, Jayna used instant messaging to tell Chasity she could hear the music quietly coming out of her computer.

“I love that song,” Jayna typed. “Give me one of your speakers.”

The two looped one of Chasity’s speakers into Jayna’s cubicle, and went on to spend their days listening to Chasity’s iPod collection of top 40 and hip-hop. “Play that one again,” Jayna would type.

The two began traveling together overseas for the company. And outside of work, the two hit bars, laughed loudly, and danced. But things weren’t all roses. About eighteen months earlier, Jayna’s condo had been destroyed by a fire, and she’d lost everything inside: photographs, traveling mementos, letters, a twenty-one-year-old cat named Sally. Jayna needed more than a year of counseling to recover, but did so with a renewed appreciation of the value of all her relationships with family and friends. Chasity was having a hard time dealing with splitting up with her husband of thirteen years. She and her husband were rotating in and out of the house, so that the kids could stay put. Jayna let Chasity stay with her. They’d sit on the floor, drink wine, and talk themselves to sleep, with Chasity often in tears. Jayna never wavered in her message: Chasity and her husband were doing right by their kids. “You’re doing everything right,” Jayna told her. “The kids don’t have to go anywhere.”

Chasity had never met anyone like Jayna, who could impart such insightful advice, despite being six years younger and having no personal experience with marriage or kids. Jayna got her friend to take college classes again, something she’d halted. “You can’t stop,” Jayna told her. “You have to keep going.”

*

Jayna’s professional interests lay outside the oil industry and more with companies that lived and breathed marketing and branding—the Coca-Colas, the Nikes. She applied to MBA programs, was accepted to Johns Hopkins University, and ended up back in the Washington, D.C. area. A short time later, she noticed a bag her friend Marisa was using to carry her lunch. It was red and white and had writings all over it.