The Yoga Store Murder (21 page)

McGill was thinking on two levels. On the first, he was documenting the clinical observations he needed to put together reports and testify to in court. On the other, McGill was drawing a mental picture of what Brittany might have done, one he would share with the detectives to give them ideas of how to question Brittany. And here at the sink, after she cleaned her sneakers, Brittany either slipped them back on or walked about in her socks—in either case walking around the existing bloody prints and making her way to the back fitting room, where she knew the Reeboks were kept.

McGill studied the red-tape patterns, representing the trail Brittany presumably made after putting on the Reeboks to create the illusion of a large male killer. One of the first things made clear by the tape was, again, where the tracks
weren’t
: no Reebok tracks in the front of the store. Just New Balance tracks. That meant that for Brittany’s masked men story to be true, she would have had to either walk up to the door by herself, which raised the question of why she didn’t open it and flee, or she had to have walked up to the front door in the company of a masked man who didn’t have blood on his shoes, which seemed unlikely given how much blood was on the floors in the back of the store.

As for the back portions of the store, the Reebok tracks appeared to go in and out of the rear hallway at least twice. McGill imagined that Brittany, having already killed Jayna, may have used the pool of blood around Jayna’s head as a sort of giant inkwell from which to soak the Reeboks to be able to make more tracks. In any case, McGill surmised, Brittany eventually walked into the rear stockroom and into the small manager’s office. Inside the office, McGill noted, the Reebok prints suddenly went backward and sideways, as if Brittany had literally walked herself into a corner. It wasn’t surprising, really, given all that Brittany must have had on her mind inside the darkened store: Could someone have heard the commotion? Were the police coming? How do I imitate the steps of a tall man? How do I do so in huge, unlaced shoes without them falling off? In any event, McGill would later write, the Reebok tracks in the office represented movements “inconsistent with normal biomechanical movement,” which was more evidence the tracks had been created as part of a cover-up.

Immediately outside the office, the Reebok trail appeared to halt in front of an orange chair. It was here, McGill thought, that Brittany took off the Reeboks, cleaned them in the nearby sink, and gingerly walked around even more bloodstains to return the sneakers to the table.

*

As 2:00 P.M. approached, Drewry and Ruvin still weren’t sure how to proceed with Brittany. She’d grown weary of their questions the night before, maybe even wary of their suspicions. The detectives didn’t want to start digging into her past—calling friends, coworkers, past employers—for fear that news of the inquiries would get back to Brittany and spook her. With the DNA test results still days, if not weeks, away, they found themselves in a stressful holding pattern.

Drewry’s cell phone beeped. It was Chris Norwood, Brittany’s brother. He told them that Brittany had withheld an important piece of information about the attack because she’d been so rattled by the whole thing: the men actually made his sister move Jayna’s car the night of the murder. And Brittany wanted to talk to the detectives about it, to give them the whole story.

Drewry reacted as calmly as he could to this new twist in Brittany’s story, as if the development was perfectly understandable. They made plans for Brittany to come back to the station either later that day or Friday. He and Chris chitchatted a little longer about Brittany possibly moving back to Seattle. Then Drewry hung up, walked over to Ruvin’s cubicle, and gave him a report. “This is going to be a good story,” Drewry promised.

It was clear to the detectives what had happened. Brittany had figured out why Drewry had asked her about being in Jayna’s car. She’d realized that she must have left blood there. The detectives updated Sergeant Craig Wittenberger. “What’s she going to say?” Ruvin asked, laughing. “‘The two masked men walked me out to the car on Bethesda Avenue.’ Maybe she’ll say they took their masks off, but told her not to look at them.”

Drewry realized that his car questions the day before had spooked Brittany. She must have felt she could still lie her way out of this bind. Drewry told Ruvin to be ready for anything, that there was no way to know what she’d come up with: “You’ll go nuts trying to speculate.”

*

Back at the store, McGill was finishing up his shoe-print and tracking work. But one thing remained a mystery: a series of what looked like worm-shaped bloodstains in the stockroom and the fitting area. The worms had ridges, like the side view of a scallop shell, such that McGill dubbed them “scallops.” He had first noticed the faint stains earlier in the week. Now he’d seen the scallops throughout the day. Some of them were next to shoe prints. Others were off on their own. The isolated ones had originally been faint, but became more noticeable after he sprayed the Leuco Crystal Violet agent. McGill made sure he had pictures of all the scallops before heading to his office at police headquarters.

Thirty minutes later, he was sitting in his second-floor cubicle. Like those in the rest of the building, his space was cramped—roughly five feet by five feet. If he moved too far to the left, he hit a wall. If he wheeled back more than a foot, he rammed into the refrigerator he and his colleagues used, a three-footer he’d bought in college. McGill pulled the scallop photos up on his computer. He and a colleague—Cheré Balma, who’d searched Jayna’s car and taken Brittany’s hair samples—took a look.

“Maybe they’re shoelaces,” she said.

Certainly some of the marks were positioned next to shoe prints. But what about the scallops off on their own, with no corresponding shoe prints? As McGill and Balma talked about it, he mentioned how Brittany had likely washed her own shoes—probably so that she wouldn’t make tracks outside to Jayna’s car when she moved it. What if Brittany had cleaned her shoes and soles well, but left diluted blood on the laces? McGill looked at evidence photos of Brittany’s shoes. Two things jumped out: the laces weren’t tied, and the laces had a stylish twist to them, so they effectively formed up-and-down ridges.
Scallops,
McGill thought.

This was getting complicated, but McGill was able to advance a theory: first, Brittany walked around in her New Balances, which had blood on the soles and the laces. That created the scallop images on either side of her shoe prints. Then she washed her New Balances, unwittingly leaving diluted blood on the laces. She put the New Balances back on, walking with clean-soled shoes but whose laces left faint scallop marks as she went to get the Reeboks. Put another way, this was the possible order of things: wear New Balances, kill Jayna, get blood on them, make tracks, remove them, clean them, put them back on, walk to Reeboks, put Reeboks on, walk through Jayna’s blood, make tracks, get trapped in office, take off Reeboks, clean Reeboks, return Reeboks to table. It was an amazing sequence, one made by someone who likely was either scared or calculating, or both.

McGill knew he’d have to conduct an experiment the next morning to support his shoelace-markings theory. He planned out how he’d do it. First, he’d bring in an old pair of sneakers, like the ones he wore when he was doing yard-work or taking his six-year-old daughter fishing on the Potomac River. Using sheep’s blood kept in the crime lab for experiments, he’d be able to get the laces bloody. He could line the floor of a long hallway outside the lab with white paper. Then he’d step into his old sneakers, keep the laces untied, walk down the paper, and see what happened.

*

Downstairs, news of McGill’s findings was tempered by the fact they had gotten no word from Brittany’s family about the pending interview. People were getting nervous, wondering if Brittany had gotten an attorney or if she was going to rush off to Washington State. At 7:45 P.M., Drewry called her sister Marissa, trying not to sound eager. She told him that Brittany was simply too tired to talk, but they would bring her to the station the next morning at 10:00 A.M.

So far, Brittany’s family members had seemed straightforward and accommodating, even warm, to the detectives. Drewry believed that still to be the case. And he told his colleagues not to worry if Brittany bolted for the West Coast because they would inevitably track her down. “Flight is great,” he said. “It’s an indication of guilt.”

Offering an Out

Friday morning, March 18, 2011, opened with a heated debate inside the office of the Montgomery County Police Department’s major crimes commander, David Gillespie, over how far to push Brittany Norwood. One camp—essentially, all of the top commanders—contended it was time to confront Brittany with the evidence they had against her. Their feeling was that Brittany had grown wise to the detectives’ suspicions, this was likely their last shot with her, and she might even flee.

“We need to find out what her story is, and then we need to grill her from there,” Gillespie said.

Detective Jim Drewry pushed back. He worried about the strength of the case. Yes, they could go into the interview room, blow holes in Brittany’s story, and prove straight to her face that she was a liar. But what did they really have to convince Brittany they could prove she was the
killer
? Not DNA. Not eyewitnesses. Drewry certainly wasn’t above deceiving suspects that they had the goods, but he didn’t think that would work with Brittany. He favored letting her tell as many lies as she wanted to tell, into the next week if Brittany was willing. “Let’s give her as much rope as possible.”

One of the meeting’s attendees, Marybeth Ayres, was in a tricky spot: Not only she relatively new to the county, she looked so much younger than her thirty-nine years that she’d been mistaken by some outside the murder scene for one of the lululemon workers, and this was her first high-profile case in Montgomery County. But Ayres had held similar positions in Baltimore and Queens, New York. She stepped up and told the half dozen cops and commanders in the room that she’d watch the interview on the closed-circuit monitor in Gillespie’s office, keep her boss informed—State’s Attorney John McCarthy was on his way to New Jersey for a family funeral—and advise them as the interview unfolded. Ayres stayed silent on whether to confront Brittany, but told the detectives that if they did so, they had to first advise her of her rights to remain silent and consult a lawyer.

The meeting broke up by 9:45 A.M. Drewry knew what his bosses wanted him to do, but he wasn’t sure he was going to do it.

Brittany did not strike him as someone with a natural urge to tell the truth, a force that was somewhere deep inside a surprising number of killers. Drewry had spoken with David McGill, the shoe-print expert, and knew how Brittany appeared to have deliberately and repeatedly dipped both pairs of shoes into a pool of Jayna’s blood. Who does that? Someone who made the decision a week ago not to flee, but to doctor the scene, tie herself up, wait for the cops, and tell one lie after another. The biggest problem Drewry had with confronting her was that it disarmed him of two of his favorite tactics. Suspects like Brittany mixed their lies with the truth, and the longer Drewry could speak with her in a conversational tone, the closer he could get to some version of the truth. It was akin to peeling back at least the outer layer of the onion. Drewry also viewed back-and-forth conversation as the best way to fully back a suspect into a corner, which often was the only route to a confession. The veteran detective approached Ruvin.

“Let’s take a walk and talk,” Drewry said, leading the young detective outside to the parking lot.

“How are you doing?” Drewry asked.

“All right,” Ruvin said.

“Whatever happens, we’ve just got to do what’s best. Don’t worry about what everyone else is saying. Don’t worry about all the pressure. Don’t worry about that stuff. We’ll just play it by ear, and we’ll see where it gets us.”

Ruvin had been leaning toward the bosses’ view on confrontation—largely because he agreed that this was their last chance with the suspect. But he remained silent. He knew how he and Drewry had succeeded in past cases by letting Drewry take the lead on the questions in the interview room, while Ruvin quietly took his notes, biding his time until Drewry gave him a natural opening to come in with an inquiry. By 10:00 A.M., the detectives were back in their squad room, waiting for Brittany.

*

Upstairs, shoe-print expert McGill finished the rounds of his sheep-blood experiment. He’d soaked the laces of his old sneakers and walked down a hallway covered with a roll of wide, white paper. The results were just as he and his colleague Cheré Balma had predicted: the lapping laces generated stains similar to what he’d seen in the yoga store. And by keeping the soles free of blood, he could see how these stains seemed to be dancing off on their own, independent of actual shoe prints. McGill walked downstairs to share these results with the detectives, arming them with even more information ahead of Brittany’s arrival.

Just before 11:00 A.M., Drewry got word that Brittany was out front with her brother Chris and sister Marissa. “They’re here, Dimitry,” he called out, loud enough that other colleagues overheard. They knew how much pressure Drewry and Ruvin were under, and tried to keep them loose.

“Jim, keep your phone with you because I may have some suggestions,” one called out.

“Thank you, I will,” Drewry said. “As a matter of fact, I’ll crank the volume all the way up.”

Drewry, wearing a cream-colored sweater vest, walked to the lobby to greet Brittany and her siblings. He tried to make Chris and Marissa feel as comfortable as he could in the dumpy lobby, and brought Brittany back into the homicide unit, placing her in the same room she’d been in two days earlier. Again, he subtly eased her toward the chair in the corner, near the hidden microphone and facing the hidden camera. She wore gray lululemon workout pants and a gray zippered lululemon jacket.