The Yoga Store Murder (23 page)

“May I say something?” Ruvin asked, prompting Drewry to reach for his coffee cup, take a sip, and lean back—a display to Brittany that he now had all day to listen to his partner’s questions.

Ruvin continued, trying to do so in the casual language of someone struggling to understand: “We deal with this kind of stuff all the time, right, and, and I can see two things that are kind of wrong with this. The second thing about, like, making up these guys, and that’s very, very common, I’ve done it, Jim has done it . . . I can understand that, and I can appreciate that, because you’re not evil enough to just, you know, do all this. But the other part is how it happened. We already know there was a fight between you and her. We just know that all the forensic evidence that we have points that there was a fight between you and her, but we just don’t know why. We just don’t know.”

He talked of his memory of first meeting Brittany and her family. “I was just, like, Brittany is just such a nice person. Her family, I’ve never seen a family so loving and understanding of her. And I can’t understand or believe how this thing transpired. And the only thing, the only way I can explain it, something happened between her and you, some things went down.”

Ruvin had no evidence that Jayna started a fight, or any evidence there’d been much of a fight at all. Brittany had only two injuries of note: the cut to her right hand and the cut to her forehead. In all likelihood, the hand cut was accidentally self-inflicted, the result of a knife slipping in her hand. The forehead cut? Who knew? Could have been from Jayna. But Ruvin thought it was more likely a backswing of one of Brittany’s weapons or a cut she gave to herself. None of that really mattered to Ruvin right now. If he could convince Brittany to tell one more lie—that Jayna had started a fight, and Brittany only reacted to it—that would instantly do away with the masked men. Then Ruvin would give her what he termed a “reward.” He’d thank her for coming clean, for doing such a hard thing, before adding, “But here’s the thing . . .” And then he and Drewry could really go to work: How did the fight start? How come you weren’t injured? Why didn’t you stop fighting after, say, the fifth blow, the tenth blow, or the two-hundredth?

Ruvin offered his sympathy to Brittany. “It’s very hard to come out and say, ‘There was a fight between Jayna and me.’ It’s so hard. I can understand that, and I can appreciate that. But at the end, it’s going to come down to, are you a good person and this bad thing happened to you?”

But Brittany wasn’t biting. She wasn’t even showing any expression. “I am a good person,” she said.

Drewry broke in, appealing to Brittany about what her family would think.

“I understand that you’re probably thinking, ‘God, what are my parents going to do now? What are my parents going to think about me? How are they going to think about me? How are my friends going to think about me? What’s going to happen?’ You got to do the right thing, you got to get this off your chest, okay, because you’re, you’re going to go flat-out freaking nuts. You can’t carry this weight around with you, you can’t. Marissa said that like you guys had to sleep together on the couch, on the sofa, okay? Because this is tearing you up. This is tearing you up inside physically and mentally. It’s got to be. For yourself and for your family, you got to tell us what happened, how it started.”

Brittany pushed back, saying she wanted to go home. At one point, thinking ahead to a judge reviewing the video recording, Drewry said he couldn’t stop her. But he also decided to take another break—walking out with Ruvin and leaving Brittany inside.

The detectives again walked to Gillespie’s office. Everyone liked an idea Drewry and Brittany had talked about just before the break, of bringing her brother and sister into the room. The detectives would present the evidence to them. It was a terrible thing to do to them, but could prompt Brittany to offer a meaningful explanation—that there’d been a fight, she lost control of herself, something. Ayres, the prosecutor, worried that Drewry and Ruvin should have read Brittany her rights about forty minutes earlier. She insisted they do so now, adopting the language of the Montgomery County Police Department, which had an Advice of Rights form that was labeled
MCP 50
.

“You’ve to MCP 50 her,” Ayres said.

The detectives returned to the room, with Drewry advancing the always delicate dance of reading someone her rights—those thunderous-sounding words everyone had heard on television—without making it seem like all that big of a deal. He talked about wanting to make sure they were on the same page, that Brittany wasn’t under arrest, but this was something he had to do. He told her she had the right to be silent, to consult a lawyer, that anything she said could be used against her. It was, as always, ominous sounding. But it did give the detectives a break from feeling like they were always on the edge of having to let Brittany leave. Now they could settle in for hours of more questioning. And the detectives knew that they still had cards to play. They could bring in a new detective, maybe a woman, claim to have more evidence of a fight, appeal to Brittany about what Jayna’s family was going through, appeal to her about what the world would think of her. Still, unlike even some hardened, longtime cons who’d been in that same chair—men twice her size—Brittany didn’t seem like someone who was going to break down and admit what she’d done. “Can I just see my sister and brother?” she asked.

“Sure,” Drewry said, “Let me go get them.”

Moments later, the three walked back into the room. Marissa smiled at Ruvin and took a seat. Her brother said he could stand.

“Have a seat, Chris,” Ruvin said.

“You might be here for a minute,” Drewry added.

“Oh, okay,” Chris said.

Drewry put his hands in his front pockets and stood in the center of the tiny room. On the left side of the table sat Marissa. On the right sat Brittany and Chris.

“You guys,” Drewry said, looking at Marissa and Chris, pausing, hating this, but hating what Brittany had done a whole lot more. “Let’s start from the beginning, I guess.”

Drewry told them about the holes in Brittany’s original story about the masked men, and how she must have realized in recent days that she’d left blood in Jayna’s car. So she’d decided to tell the police that the assailants had made her move Jayna’s car, then come back. “That’s when she came up with this story,” Drewry said.

“Came up with a story?” Chris asked.

“Thank you,” Brittany said in a haughty tone that effectively conveyed her feeling that at last there was another reasonable person in the room.

“No,” Drewry said. “What she’s saying, and it is incredible to me, that she and Jayna are inside of the store, and they’re attacked by these two guys. And that Jayna is taken into the back room, or hallway, where she’s bludgeoned to death, killed, possibly sexually assaulted. And that they then force her to get Jayna’s car keys, and give them to her, and tell her, ‘Go move Jayna’s car, and then come back, and if you don’t come back within ten minutes, we’re going to kill you.’ And that’s when she walks out of the store, she sees a police car drive by, but she doesn’t do anything. And then she walks down the street to Jayna’s car, gets in her car, and drives three blocks away and parks her car, covered in blood by the way, because they had already forced her facedown onto Jayna, who is dead and covered in blood. And so, she gets in the car, and she drives off, parks the car, and then walks back. And this is Friday night in Bethesda, everybody’s out all over the place. A black girl in Bethesda covered in blood walks back to the store, and goes back inside, so they can either rape or kill her. Does that make any sense to you?”

“None,” Chris said. “Let’s cut to the chase.”

Drewry told them about the shoe prints. He laid the photos of Brittany’s wounds on the table. Marissa was silent, covering her face with both hands. Chris picked up one of the photos. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” Drewry said. “Those are self-inflicted wounds.”

“What’s your theory?” Chris asked the detective.

“Brittany killed Jayna.”

“Uh-uh,” Brittany protested.

“That’s not possible,” said Marissa. “This is not. This isn’t . . .”

“Marissa, wait,” Chris said. The electrical engineer picked his words carefully. He would later describe his thinking as a whirlwind of emotion, a search for some kind of objective reality. In front of him, one sister sat accused of murder and the other was falling apart. “Let’s say that you’re right, say Brittany kills Jayna, why does she move her car?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out, too,” Drewry admitted, speculating it was part of her cover-up.

“It’s not true,” Brittany said matter-of-factly, turning toward Marissa, who covered her mouth, a blank look in her eyes.

Seeing Marissa’s distress, Chris asked, “Can you guys take her out of here, please?”

“Sure. I’m really sorry,” Ruvin said, walking Marissa into the squad room.

Marissa burst into loud sobs, hugging the nearest woman she could find, Detective Paula Hamill. “This is not my sister,” Marissa told Hamill. “This is not my baby sister. I don’t understand. It’s like we’re talking about a different person.”

Back inside the interview room, Drewry explained how the zipties were too hidden for two intruders to find, and how they expected tests would show Brittany’s saliva on the zip-tie that had been around her wrists.

Drewry told Chris that Brittany had been suspected of shoplifting.

“Chris, it’s not true at all,” Brittany told her brother.

Drewry reached into the back of his legal pad, placing another photograph on the table. It showed a person facedown.

“Can I see that?” Chris asked.

“Yup,” said Drewry.

Chris picked it up and stared at it. The person was wedged into a corner. Blood was spattered on the walls next to her and pooled on the floor all around her. “This is Jayna?”

“That’s Jayna,” Drewry said, turning his head quickly toward Brittany. “Ripped the seat of her pants to make it look like she had been raped.”

Chris continued to stare at the photo. He again tried to stay analytical, tried to ask about shoe prints around the body. He wondered if Jayna had been found in a common hallway shared by other stores. No, Drewry said.

Chris sighed quietly. “Oh my . . .” His voice trailed off. He laid the photo back on the table.

Drewry and Ruvin kept it coming: the shoe prints in other parts of the store, the fake moaning for the medics. “The physical evidence knocks down everything that she tells us, everything,” Drewry said.

“Chrissy, can we go?” Brittany asked.

“I don’t know,” Chris said, looking up at Drewry. “Can we go?”

“We’re trying to make that decision right now. I don’t know. I was kind of hoping that with your help that Brittany might be willing to tell us what happened and why.”

“Do you want to say anything?” Chris asked his sister.

She said she didn’t.

Drewry asked Chris what his gut feeling was, based on what he just told him.

“My gut feeling is there was never a robbery. That never made sense to me. I told you that,” Chris said, recalling his conversation with the detectives five days earlier. “I was concerned that the assailants, there was a connection, right. Like I told you, some of the story didn’t make sense. I didn’t know how much of the story was things I heard in the media or what. I didn’t know. You guys have the facts; I never did. There were things that didn’t add up. I never addressed it with Brittany, because I figured when she wanted to talk, she would talk. I mean, something like this happens, you’re not just running around, ‘Hey, you know: this and this happened.’ And she needed, needs to, to slowly accept what’s happened, and I figured she would talk to me when she was ready, so I have tried not to assume. I told my brothers, you don’t react until you have enough evidence, or enough information to make an intelligent decision. You guys have convinced yourselves that Brittany did it . . .”

“The evidence,” Drewry interjected.

“The evidence has convinced you.”

“I did not want to believe it at first,” Drewry said.

Brittany sat silently in the corner as Chris continued.

“Naturally, I’m Brittany’s brother, and I love her, and it’s going to take like, either she’s going to have to tell me that. She’s going to have to look me in the eye and say, ‘Chris, I did this, and this is why.’ Because I don’t, naturally, I don’t want to believe it, okay? There’s a lot of people that don’t want to believe this.”

“And that’s fair,” Ruvin said.

“Yeah, so that’s, you can’t expect me to just sit here and turn my back on my little sister.”

“Absolutely,” Drewry said.

“Right now, I’m confused, and I’m, I could get defensive, and I could come up with something like, ‘Oh, we’re in Montgomery County. This is Bethesda. They need a story, you know. They need to solve this, because people are uneasy.’”

“Yeah, and kick the—throw the—black girl under the bus,” Drewry said, trying to pitch in.

“No, this isn’t, I’m not saying race. It’s not race. I’m thinking as a socioeconomic thing, right? You don’t, nobody wants people that are afraid. There’s little boutiques, and little ladies in boutiques in Bethesda saying, ‘Oh my God, I’m not working at night,’ things like that. And as soon as the police can restore order in the area like that, everyone’s happy. I’m not saying that.”

Chris asked the detectives more about their case, trying to gauge what they had. Drewry tried to turn it around, back to Brittany, saying she was the one who could say what happened. Chris moved to cut him off. He still thought he could get Brittany out of the station before they arrested her. Maybe if they couldn’t get Brittany to admit anything, they couldn’t charge her. He needed to stop Brittany from coming across as such a liar.

“Can I talk to her for a minute alone?” Chris asked.

“Sure,” Drewry told him.

“I’m sorry,” Ruvin added on the way out.

The two detectives shut the door and walked as quickly as they could to the closed-circuit monitors. In Sergeant Craig Wittenberger’s office, thirty feet away, other detectives crowded inside. Someone wondered aloud what the two would say, and was told to “Shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up” so people could hear. In major crimes commander Captain David Gillespie’s office, another group gathered in front of another monitor: Gillespie, Assistant Police Chief Drew Tracy, and Marybeth Ayres, the prosecutor.