The Yoga Store Murder (24 page)

The image on the screens was grainy, but it was in color and clear enough. Chris was visible on the right, closest to the camera, sitting on a chair against the wall and facing into the room. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, which, when he turned a certain way, showed the physique of someone who clearly worked out. Brittany sat behind him, in a corner, facing the camera, slouched in her gray lululemon garb.

Chris turned toward his sister. “Should I ask you? Did you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it here. I just want to go, Chrissy.”

“Listen, listen. I don’t know if they’re going to let you go. You need to tell me right now. Did you do it?”

“Chrissy, I just want to go home.”

“Brittany, I’m not going to fucking rat you out. But you need to tell me so I know how to talk to these guys. Because if you did it, we have to get you a lawyer to defend you.”

“I just don’t want to talk about it here. But I will tell you everything.”

“Just nod your head if you did. Please tell me. Please,” Chris said.

Brittany kept her head still.

“Chrissy, I don’t want you to be disappointed in me like everyone else.”

Chris was sitting in the one chair with wheels, allowing him to turn and move toward his sister. “What? What did you say?”

“I don’t want you to be disappointed in me like everyone else.”

“No one is disappointed in you. Brittany, we’re your family. No matter what, we’re going to be here for you, okay? Because everything he just told me? And I didn’t look like I was convinced, but that is really fucking convincing, okay? So you’re going to just tell me so that I can at least try to get you out of here. Because this is going to get a hell of a lot fucking worse.”

Brittany continued to apologize to her brother.

“I’m going to ruin our whole family,” she said.

“You’re not going to ruin our family, okay?” Chris said. “I’ll take that as a yes. Why?”

“I don’t know how it happened.”

Over in Gillespie’s office, prosecutor Ayres couldn’t believe what she was hearing. And she thought Maryland law was on her side as far as for the surreptitious recording of Brittany and her brother. The two were in a police station. How could they expect privacy? And then there was what Brittany had just said after her brother had given her a chance to explain herself. Instead of saying something like, “What are you talking about?” Brittany had said she didn’t know how it happened. Ayres walked out of Gillespie’s office, and ran into Ruvin, who was coming that way. “We can get a conviction off that,” she told him.

Ayres and Ruvin hustled back to the monitors.

Up on the screen, Brittany was worried. “Are you sure they can’t hear us, Chris?”

“I looked around for listening devices,” her brother said. “There’s nothing in this room. And if they did, even if they did record this, there’s nothing they could use in court.”

Chris asked Brittany if Jayna had accused her of shoplifting, how the fight started, if Brittany had planned out what happened. Brittany gave vague answers, even as Chris cut her off from saying too much. “Okay, stop, listen, listen. No, no, no. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to have to get you a defense attorney.”

“I know.”

“Okay, hold on. We have, we’re going to have two options. One option is going to be, they could do some temporary insanity or something like that. But the problem with that is that you’ve talked to too many people. You’ve talked to counselors and people know that you’re not insane, okay? So that’s probably not . . .”

Ayres couldn’t believe her good fortune. Down the road, if it evolved into an insanity case, she could put Chris on the stand and ask him about his sister’s mental health.

“I haven’t talked to anyone, Chris,” Brittany said.

“No,” her brother said. “I know you talked to the counselor on the phone for like forty minutes yesterday.”

“No, no, no. Like maybe ten minutes if that.”

Chris had already moved on. “You’ve talked to people,” he said, searching for words, his sentences trailing off. “You’ve been . . . So that’s not going to work. So what we’re going to have to do is . . . You’re going to have to be very honest with us and with an attorney mainly, and we’re going to have to try to concoct some sort of plan, like she attacked you. But that doesn’t look good, because you tried to cover it all up. Oh, God. Let me see if I can get you out of here, okay?”

Brittany again told her brother she was sorry, that she hadn’t been accused of shoplifting. The prospect of the personal-trainer position flashed into her head—the new job she wanted so badly.

“I damn near had a job,” Brittany told her brother. “I don’t know if she didn’t like me. I don’t know, Chris.”

“So she attacked? Wait, she came to let you in, right? And then what? What did she say?”

“That she was going to like, I don’t know, make sure our manager knew or something.”

“Your manager knew what? That you were shoplifting?”

“But I wasn’t. I didn’t have anything.”

“Had you stolen from that store before?”

“Never. Chris, honestly, I wouldn’t. I was doing good.”

Speaking barely above a whisper, Chris started to instruct Brittany on how to lie. “I’m going to tell you something. You’ve done it three times. When they ask you a question, you’re looking down and you’re looking to your left. That means you’re lying, okay? If you’re going to lie when you talk to them, find something in the room. See that red button? Look at that red button every time. Do not look at anything else.”

*

Chris got up to knock on the door. He would have to move fast to get Brittany out. Ruvin came in, and he and Chris walked into another interview room. The young detective had just listened to Chris advise his sister to lie, yet he couldn’t help but feel for the guy. Ruvin had a sister, too. He could see going into that kind of protective mode.

“I’m sorry you’re going through this,” Ruvin said.

“Hey, listen, you don’t, you don’t have to apologize,” Chris said. “Let me say a couple of things first. You’re just doing your job. I know that I told my dad when I first met you guys, that I didn’t sense any ill intent. I’m not playing the race card or anything like that. What you guys put in front of me, it’s, it’s compelling.”

Ruvin said he knew it was going to be hard on them. “I don’t know what I would do in your shoes as far as believing my sister or not. And you got to do what you got to do to take care of your sister. As far as her going home tonight, the evidence against her is just overwhelming, overwhelming.”

“I understand. I understand.”

Ruvin said he would get Marissa. “If you can just sit tight, we’ll try and bring your sister in.”

Less than a minute later, another detective arrived with Marissa. She and Chris were left alone in the room, with the door closed. Ruvin scrambled back over to his sergeant’s office to join the crowd watching the monitor. None of them had seen a case unfold like this, where siblings were being led in and out of the rooms, where they talked to the suspect or talked about the suspect.

“She did it,” Chris told Marissa. “She told me.”

“She did?”

“I never thought this,” Chris said, allowing that he’d suspected Brittany was involved, but only in the sense that she knew the killers. “Oh my God, Marissa.”

So here they were: alone in a dank interview room, facing the notion not just that their little sister Brittany was mixed up with crazed killers; she
was
the crazed killer. Apparently over something as stupid as shoplifting.

With an arrest seemingly imminent, Chris had a sudden jolt of terror. He realized that reporters might get to the town house—where their parents were staying—before he and Marissa had a chance to tell them what was going on. Chris took out his cell phone, called his dad, and told his parents to head over to another relative’s house nearby. “You’re not in danger, but right now, you guys need to leave that house, okay? When I can give you more information, I will.”

He hung up and continued speaking with Marissa. “The girl accused Brittany of shoplifting and Brittany lost it. She snapped. She said, ‘Chris, I don’t know what happened.’ Then the rest of the night she was trying to cover it up. That’s why she can’t sleep.”

The conversations being recorded continued to amaze prosecutor Marybeth Ayres, who watched some of them while eating tacos from Chipotle that someone had brought in for lunch. She needed to update her boss. McCarthy was still in the car on the way to the family funeral. He’d earlier told his wife that the drive to New Jersey would be a nice chance for them to catch up on things. Instead, he’d spent the whole drive on the phone with Ayres, talking about what Brittany had been saying. He turned his attention to whether the conversation between Brittany and Chris would get past a judge. “Do you think it’s coming in?” McCarthy asked her. “You’re there. You’re watching it. Will we be able to use that?”

Yes, Ayres told him.

*

The detectives kept shuttling Brittany’s brother and sister between the two interview rooms or other waiting areas. At 1:30 P.M., Marissa asked to go see her sister. “Sure,” Drewry said, leaving the two alone together. Marissa reached down to hug Brittany, who was still in her corner chair—not under arrest, not in handcuffs. “I just wanted to say I love you, honey.”

“Are they going to let me go?”

“I don’t think so, baby.”

Marissa sat down. She covered her mouth and spoke softly: “What happened to you?”

A minute later, the door opened, Marissa was led out, and Drewry and Ruvin came back in. The older detective cut to the chase.

“Do you want to tell us why the fight started?”

“I just want to see my family, that’s all,” Brittany responded.

Drewry said she could, in a little bit, and played a new card, saying he had listened to what she told her brother.

“This is recorded. We all heard you when you admitted that you fought with Jayna.”

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.”

The detective and suspect were both kind of right—Brittany had never directly said she fought with Jayna, but she’d implied it. Still, right now, she certainly wasn’t going any further. Ruvin gave it a shot: “We just don’t want you to like go down with the story, like, you’re still, like, denying it to the end. And just like Jim said, this room is recorded, and even when your brother said we can’t use it against you, we can, because for murders we can tape and listen for anything, okay? And we just don’t want you to go down as this evil person that stays like this to the end. We know there was a fight, and now you already told Chris there was a fight, and we knew, like my gut feeling was telling me there was a fight.”

Drewry chimed back in, swallowing his own true opinion of Brittany. He was used to doing that with murder suspects, but Brittany was making it particularly tough. She’d already ruined one good family, the Murrays, and was in the process of possibly ruining her own. “Everybody’s here to help you,” Drewry said. “Nobody’s going to judge you.”

He again invoked Brittany’s parents: “You can be the person your parents raised you to be. You can do this.”

Brittany didn’t respond, the silence passing fifteen seconds. She drew a long, deep breath. Drewry raised his hopes, having seen the expression before, just before someone caved.

“I can’t,” Brittany said.

*

Drewry and Ruvin walked back out and huddled with the other detectives. One thing worried them: when Chris had been alone talking with Brittany, he’d had his cell phone out. Had he been recording the conversation, too? They didn’t need that in the hands of a defense attorney, well ahead of when the recordings were normally turned over. Drewry tracked down Chris in the lobby, and got him to return to an interview room. He told Chris the rooms were in fact video recorded, and got right to his point.

“We know that you recorded part of the conversation on your BlackBerry.”

“No, I didn’t record any of it.”

“Okay, well, we’re going to seize your BlackBerry and have it examined, and then we’ll give it back to you.

“Right now, okay.”

Chris said he hadn’t been recording anything, he was trying to send a text to an attorney. That didn’t bother Drewry as much. He took the opportunity to both extend sympathy to Chris and work a new angle: trying to figure out if Brittany had a traumatic or psychiatric past that would become part of an insanity defense. “It’s fucked up,” the detective said sympathetically.

“That doesn’t begin to explain the situation,” Chris said.

“What do you think is in her background?”

“Listen, our whole family dropped everything they were doing to come to her aid. If any of us suspected this, we wouldn’t have reacted this way.”

“I mean, any kind of, like, emotional problems, before?”

“No.”

“Anything?”

“We were a normal, as normal as a family gets, normal. We all make our mistakes, but no.” Chris told the detective that just because he wasn’t showing it didn’t mean he wasn’t churning inside. “Don’t think that I’m not reeling. I am, okay?”

“Oh I know you are.”

Chris spoke about trying to protect his family. “This is going to be a media shitstorm.”

“Yeah,” Drewry said. He told Chris he’d try to keep Brittany’s address off paperwork he would submit as part of his charges against her. Chris appreciated the gesture, but doubted it would be possible. “This is a big case.”

“Yeah, well. It sucks. I know.”

As for Chris’s phone, Drewry offered an alternative to confiscating it. If Chris gave him permission, he’d have someone in the squad room look at it right now to make sure he didn’t record anything.

“That’s fine,” Chris said.

Drewry took the phone and walked out, leaving the door open. Chris could quickly sense the detectives were having trouble figuring out how to work his phone. In a surreal twist, given the circumstances, he found himself calling out technical information, saying any audio recordings in the phone would be stored where the videos are kept. Ruvin walked back in with the phone.

“It’s the original Palm Pre,” Chris told him. “If you hit the center button in the middle. I’ll just talk you through it.”