The Yoga Store Murder (17 page)

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.

“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 impossible 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 ziptied 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 zipties. And he knew what he needed: the zip-tie that had been wrapped around Brittany’s wrist, plus dozens, perhaps hundreds, of extra zipties 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.

Ruvin didn’t know what to say. All around him were veteran colleagues who feared leaks—feared them to a degree Ruvin thought bordered on paranoia. “I’ll call you back,” he said.

Ruvin got up, walked down the hall, and ducked into a large room that housed the police department’s computer-networking equipment. He knew Ayres and trusted her. And he knew he would be working on the case with her for months, possibly years. He had to be honest with her. He also hoped he could keep her from asking too many questions.

“Let Lockett be,” Ruvin said.

“What are you saying?” Ayres asked.

She was relatively new to the county, but had prosecuted murders in Baltimore in her previous job. And she now had the detective under a form of cross-examination. Ruvin hesitated, then tried to use some of Drewry’s language to describe Lockett.

“We’re just not feeling him.”

“Do you have any other suspects?”

Screw it, Ruvin thought. He told Ayres they were looking at Brittany as the killer. “Marybeth, why do you think the footprints never left the store?” Still, Ruvin told Ayres, they weren’t
sure
Brittany did it and not to fear—they knew better than to arrest her too quickly. “If we charge her and we get it wrong, we’re fucked.”

*

Twenty miles south, in Washington, D.C., Brittany Norwood’s family members were deeply worried about her. Brittany wasn’t sleeping. They wondered if she should get out of the house. It wasn’t like her family members were going to let anyone hurt her again. They convinced Brittany to go out with them to a shoe store and to Bed Bath & Beyond. It was something, at least.

Brittany didn’t have her iPhone with her, having left it at the crime scene when her bag fell to the floor. Friends were still trying to reach her, leaving voice mails and text messages.

“Hey Brittany. I’m thinking, praying, and sending you all the love I can muster up,” one former coworker from the Georgetown store wrote.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” wrote another. “Let me know if I can help with anything at all.”

And the bank kept calling, leaving automated messages. “Please call Citi, regarding your Citi account . . .”

The recording tracked with a deposit slip Brittany had recently tucked inside her wallet, one showing her balance had dropped to $7.25.

*

For Jayna Murray’s parents, each day brought ever-more unimaginable horrors. The calls on Saturday from Drewry, the news that Jayna might have also been raped, the sudden need to buy her a gravesite, a flight to Washington, D.C., to claim their daughter’s body. Amid all that, they also had to inform Jayna’s brother Hugh what had happened. They did so by getting news to Hugh’s supervisor in Baghdad, who tracked Hugh down in the northern part of Iraq.

“Is there anybody there with you?” the colonel asked.

“No,” Hugh said. He was sitting alone inside the windowless plywood hut that served as his office. Hugh figured they were about to discuss classified information.

“Is there anyone you can get to sit with you?” the colonel asked instead.

“Not really,” Hugh said. His office mate had just gone on leave.

“Hugh, there’s been a family emergency.”

“What is it, what kind of emergency is there?”

“Your sister’s dead.”

“No, there’s no way. She’s healthy.”

“No, Hugh, she was murdered.”

It took Hugh fifty hours and a series of flights to get to Washington. He didn’t sleep, staring straight ahead at the seat in front of him. He couldn’t help but think about what he’d been doing the moment Jayna was murdered. It had been early in the morning in Mosul. Protected by a group of Army infantrymen and traveling in mine-resistant trucks, Hugh had left his base to meet with an Iraqi judge. As they headed out, everyone was aware of a recent intelligence report that said insurgents were trying to target Americans meeting with judges—and they were the only Americans meeting with judges. The caravan rolled up to the courthouse. There was no judge. No local police. No protection. The infantrymen climbed out and took up positions. Finally the judge arrived, Hugh met with him briefly, and the trucks headed back to the base. Who could have guessed that a luxury retailer in a wealthy suburb would be the deadlier place?

The Murrays met Hugh at Dulles International Airport outside D.C. and drove him to their hotel for a quick rest. And now—on Tuesday afternoon—Hugh said he wanted to go see the memorial outside the store: the flowers, cards, and notes to Jayna. His parents and brother, Dirk, wondered about all the reporters camped outside. “I want to see the notes,” Hugh insisted.