The Yoga Store Murder (20 page)

Deep down, Drewry was growing more convinced Brittany was a coldhearted killer. But he didn’t show it, having long ago learned to suspend his emotions in the interview room. Best to just try to treat a suspect like he or she was a regular person. “I try not to judge people” is how he described the technique.

Drewry pushed back from the diagram, gave Brittany a bit of space, and asked her quietly about the rape.

“He has a hanger,” Brittany said. “He says he’s not going to stop until I came.”

“How long do you think this went on?”

“Forever, it seems like,” Brittany said, her voice cracking.

“I’m sure,” Drewry said.

He moved on, getting to how they bound her in the zipties. Drewry decided to push a little bit, hoping to trap Brittany. “Okay. Where did he get the zipties from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because it sounds like he was probably with you the entire time?”

“Yeah, he was. I don’t know. He had them with him.”

“When they came into the store, they had them with them?”

“I don’t know where he gets them, I don’t know.”

Drewry stepped off the gas, inferring that he didn’t understand the whole zip-tie thing either. “Because there is a box of ties in, in the back, in the storage room. And I don’t know if those are the same ones or not.”

He could tell Brittany was now itching to get out of the interview room. “I really don’t want to talk anymore,” Brittany said, following that a few moments later with, “Can I just get my fingerprints and then go? I’m sorry.”

Drewry had to make a split decision. Both doors to the room were closed. Brittany was asking to leave. It was getting to the point where if he wanted to ask more, he would have to inform her of her rights. He wasn’t about to do that, not this early in the case. But he didn’t want her to go, figuring he might never have a chance to ask her about Jayna’s car. Drewry forged ahead, resetting the table with a couple of questions about the rape, all structured as if he absolutely believed it had happened. Brittany still was asking if she could quit talking. There was no time left for a subtle approach.

“Has she ever given you a ride home or anything?” Drewry asked out of left field.

“No,” Brittany said.

The detective had gotten the response he was after, but at a price. Who knew if Brittany would ever come back and talk to them now?

Drewry tried to cover up the randomness of the question, asking Brittany how she got back and forth to work, hoping to convince Brittany that he was pursuing the notion that the masked men had somehow been following her to work. Drewry had one more card to play, one he hoped would make him appear so lost he was looking everywhere. The detective showed Brittany a picture of a lululemon coworker—another apparent outlier—who’d been involved in a bizarre criminal case. She’d been charged with arson for allegedly trying to set her estranged husband’s house on fire. One of the tips the detectives had actually received was that the estranged husband had hired a hit man to go after her in the store, and in a case of mistaken identity, the hit man took out Jayna. Drewry figured it would do him good to play the string out in front of Brittany. He pointed to the photo. “What’s she up to? Is she cool?”

“Always fun to work with,” Brittany said. “Always energetic. I don’t know anything else, I mean, nothing personal with her.”

Drewry said he’d go get the fingerprint technicians and see about getting her home. “Let me go out and see if your family is here.”

In front of Brittany were the two tissues. She’d never used them.

*

It had been two hours since Brittany’s family dropped her off. Drewry wondered what Brittany might tell them on the way home.
The detective kept making me go over the story. He asked me questions about Jayna’s car.
Drewry wanted Brittany’s dad and siblings to counter Brittany by saying the detectives were just doing their jobs. He tracked one of the family members down on a cell phone. “Sorry it has taken so long. Where are you folks?” Turned out they were waiting up front, in the dumpy lobby. “Oh, okay,” Drewry said. “You guys want to come in and just talk for a minute?”

Drewry brought them all back to the homicide unit, walking the Norwoods past the open door of the interview room, where the technicians were deferentially fingerprinting Brittany. “They’re just finishing up, doing some elimination prints,” Drewry said.

He sat them down at a long table with Ruvin. The detectives tried to keep things light, and largely succeeded. One of Brittany’s brothers, a semiconductor-design engineer, joked at being directionally challenged by the area around the police department, a common ailment for newcomers navigating the looping roads that wound through the office parks. Conversation veered to how one of Brittany’s other brothers studied criminal justice, and whether the detectives liked their jobs. Drewry talked about his earlier career as a letter carrier: “It was either become a cop or go postal at the post office, literally.”

The Norwoods also wanted to know about the case. “You guys know anything new?” one asked.

“We still got a lot of tips,” said Ruvin, unsure what to add.

Earl Norwood asked about the murder three months earlier in the basement of Suburban Hospital, less than two miles from the yoga store. The detectives didn’t know how Earl knew about that case—maybe from one of his other daughters who lived in the area—but it seemed like he was grasping for a connection to what had happened in the yoga store.

“Can you be more specific as to what that one was?” Earl asked them.

“An arrest was made,” Drewry said. “So the guy is locked up.”

Brittany could hear the conversation, could hear her family’s concern and worries. She calmly cooperated with the fingerprint technicians, apologizing when she failed to lay down a clear print, even as the procedure stretched past thirty minutes.

Out around the table, conversation fell back to casual subjects. Earl spoke about living near Puget Sound. Drewry said he’d traveled to the area once. Earl said he hoped Drewry would return. “Look me up, and we can go fishing,” he said.

The detectives felt for the family. Every word the Norwoods had said since they’d met them had been gracious, cooperative, and even, where appropriate, humorous. If the detectives’ theory about Brittany was correct, the Norwood family had perhaps a week, maybe even less, left to their lives as they knew it. For now, of course, the detectives’ charade that Brittany was a victim continued. Ruvin could hear the technicians finishing up. He walked back into the interview room to get Brittany.

“Do you want to hang out with your family?” he asked her.

“Sure.”

As she stood up, Ruvin could see she’d taken off her running jacket for the fingerprinting, and was wearing a tight, athletic T-shirt. She was small, but only around the waist. Brittany’s torso extended upward in an inverted triangle to broad, muscular shoulders. Her arms were equally defined.

Brittany joined her family, but only for a few minutes. The technician reviewing the fingerprints announced they were all in order. Drewry walked the Norwoods out of the station. He returned and spoke to Ruvin, talking about Brittany’s family, repeating the offer that Ruvin had also heard. There was sadness in the detective’s voice: “He invited me out to Seattle to go fishing.”

Tracking and Trailing

Detectives Jim Drewry and Dimitry Ruvin returned to the office Thursday, March 17, worried they’d spoken with Brittany Norwood for the last time but convinced more than ever she was the lone killer. It wasn’t just the holes in her story. No one was stepping forward who had seen men enter the store, heard men’s voices inside it, or seen men leave. The tipsters who were now calling increasingly lacked specificity and, in some cases, a connection to reality.

A local musician said she’d gone for a walk down Bethesda Avenue the night before the murder and saw a tall, muscular black man with a “criminal face” pass in front of her while wearing a dark polyester hoodie—possibly casing the store. “Didn’t fit in,” a detective wrote, taking notes of the call. “Hardened face, looked angry, walking in middle of street, criminal face.” An anonymous tipster suggested detectives look into a group seen one or two days before the murder, gathering a block from the yoga store in front of Barnes & Noble. “Caller stated the group was having a meeting before being sent out to go door-to-door to solicit magazine sales. Caller stated in their experience the people involved in those door-to-door sales are from outside the area.”

A performer from a well-known strip club in Washington, D.C., submitted a tip on one of the police department’s online-reporting forms. She offered the name, e-mail address, and employer of one of her more rabid fans, and recalled a recent conversation with him: “He said a lot of his women friends died, that he wanted to join the Army to kill people for the last war and he was serious.” The stripper said she practiced yoga in Bethesda. Her implication, seemingly, was that the fan went looking for her at the store and slipped into a rage. “I get a creepy feeling from him,” she wrote. If the police wanted to talk to the man directly, they could find him at the strip club. “He will most likely show up on Saturday morning right when we open.”

A psychic reported a vision that one of the yoga store victims suffered internal bleeding because she’d been raped with a knife. Another tipster said he had
spoken
to a psychic who saw the killer as a heavyset man, possibly named Raphile, who could be identified by his tattoo of a non-English word surrounded by a circle. And there was the person who called with simply a gut feeling: “The suspect might have a disease on the foot or bad odor on one foot.”

Drewry and Ruvin didn’t personally have to field many of the calls or sift through the tips, but their colleagues kept them up to speed on the more outlandish ones as a form of comic relief. A more serious pursuit, the detectives knew, was under way inside the store, where evidence was adding up in support of their theory that Brittany had killed Jayna while wearing her pink, size-7½ New Balance running shoes, then took them off, stepped into the store’s size-14 Reebok running shoes, and walked through the blood to create another set of tracks.

*

The pursuit was being led by David McGill, one of the crime-scene investigators, who was an expert in shoe prints. His wife constantly teased him during beach vacations for allowing his eyes to wander off at the sight of tracks left by shoe-clad tourists. He was an expert in the discipline, and had studied shoe prints in more than 500 cases.

Until now, McGill’s time in the yoga store had been limited to locating each shoe print. What he wanted to figure out now was the movements of the shoes. It wasn’t going to be easy; in many places, the shoe prints and partial prints crossed over each other in different directions. McGill’s plan was to lay down pieces of bright tape next to each shoe print, along with an arrow when he could establish a clear direction. He’d use yellow for Brittany’s sneakers, and red for the ones found in the store.

McGill wanted to study all four parts of the shop: main sales floor, fitting area, rear stockroom, and rear hallway exit. He wanted cleared-away, open spaces to lay down his tape and get clear photographs of any established trails. By now, almost all of the scattered clues and evidence first encountered had been photographed, cataloged, and taken away to the crime lab. So he was free to roam, except on the main sales floor, which was filled in the middle with its normal assortment of merchandise tables and racks. So McGill and two colleagues pushed the displays into corners easily enough, since the displays were meant to be cleared out for community yoga classes. What a difference that scene must have been—a roomful of people on their mats, legs crossed, soft sitar music playing—versus a middle-aged crime-scene guy with a slight paunch, staring at bloodstains.

As McGill laid down his red and yellow tape and arrows, he encountered a challenge. In a small patch in the middle of the sales floor, there was a different type of bloodstain: drops that were not near any of the shoe prints. McGill didn’t know what it meant, but he wanted to encircle the drops with a different colored tape. Problem was, he didn’t have any other color of tape.

“Hey, Paula, I’m going to cut up one of these yoga mats,” McGill said, calling out to Detective Paula Hamill, a homicide investigator who was there to guard the place and help him while he worked. “Go ahead,” Hamill said. McGill had several colors to choose from, and quickly selected purple for its contrast to the floor and his tape markings. He marked off the drops using three-inch strips. As McGill completed his layout—the tape, arrows, purple strips—the store began to take on the look of some kind of inverted, macabre game of Twister.

When he was done, one thing was clear: how often the New Balance prints and Reebok prints crossed paths. It made things confusing but offered valuable data in the form of smudges and smears, which McGill examined closely. As far as he could tell, Brittany’s New Balance tracks were always made first.

The New Balance tracks were abundant in the rear hallway, where Jayna’s body was found, and the fitting area near where Brittany herself was found. In both locations, there was too much back and forth for clear direction. But coming from the fitting area, a track of yellow arrows pointed toward the front door of the store. They stopped just before an interior deadbolt lock, turned around, and headed back to the fitting area.

By studying how the tracks grew fainter, McGill surmised that at some point, the person in the New Balance shoes—most certainly Brittany—had returned to the rear hallway and got more blood on the soles. What she was doing back there wasn’t clear. But when she came out, according to the shoe prints, the soles were soaked. McGill’s yellow arrows led into the stockroom and toward a sink in the rear corner. It was in this area, he knew, that Windex, Formula 409, and a scrub brush had been found on the floor, and a drop of diluted blood had been found on the hot water handle. What McGill
couldn’t
locate was equally compelling—there was no evidence of the shoes walking away from the sink. Brittany, it seemed, had removed her shoes here and cleaned them.