The Yoga Store Murder (25 page)

“Thank you,” Ruvin said, looking down at the phone.

“Now swipe it away, push it up top, just, and yeah, that’s gone, keep going with that, there you go, you can keep going. No. Up, just straight up, there you go. Keep swiping straight up, just go up here. You can just throw the app away, right.”

Minutes later, Ruvin confirmed that Chris hadn’t recorded anything. He gave Chris his phone back.

“I don’t envy you,” Drewry told him.

*

Minutes later, Chris and Marissa were allowed to say their final good-byes and hugs to Brittany. The detectives cleared out, hustling back to the monitor. The chances they’d hear anything useful had faded, now that they were all aware of the recordings. Still, with the volume cranked up, they heard intriguing murmurs.

“I fucked up our whole family,” Brittany said.

“Don’t ever say that,” Marissa said.

“We’re never going to judge you, you know that. We all love you,” Chris said. “Your family’s going to be fine, okay?”

*

Leaving Brittany alone in the interrogation room, Drewry and Ruvin started putting together their arrest affidavit. Nearly an hour passed. Ruvin heard a sound from the other side of the door, walked over, and opened it.

“You knocking?” he asked Brittany.

“Is anyone allowed to sit in with me?”

Ruvin said he’d see what he could do. “We’re actually trying to order some pizza. I don’t know if you want some?”

Brittany said she just wanted company. The detectives brought in Detective Paula Hamill, the female detective who had consoled Brittany’s sister. Married to another cop and the mother of five kids, she worked a different shift, and beyond helping David McGill do his shoe-print work, she hadn’t been directly involved in the case. But she had interviewed homicide suspects for nearly twenty years. The detectives thought maybe Brittany would open up to another woman. Drewry brought in some water and left the two alone.

“I met your brother and sister,” Hamill said. “They’re very nice. Very nice family.”

“I have a wonderful family. I really do.”

Hamill slowly went to work on her, talking about her kids, how Brittany, too, had been raised around a lot of brothers and sisters, and no doubt taught to tell the truth. “You’ve done the easiest thing already by, you know, I say, by lying. But really, it was like a defense mechanism.”

Hamill told Brittany how the evidence kept leading them back to her, keying in on how the gynecological exam in the hospital hadn’t corroborated her story about the wooden coat hanger: “You just had no injuries that would support that. And you know, as a chick, we, you know that, that you would have some significant type of trauma of some sort. I mean, people get trauma, or bleeding, whatever, just from having sex sometimes.”

Like Drewry and Ruvin, Hamill offered Brittany an “out.” “Brittany, you know what? If something, if you guys had a whatever, I don’t even care, if you had an argument about stealing, money, men, women, whatever, then you know, like tell us . . . If it was something silly, you know, and it was initiated by her, then just reach in, honey.”

“I’m trying,” Brittany whimpered.

“I know. You know what? I know you’re trying. And you know what? You can do it.”

Over the course of an hour, Hamill told Brittany she was a good person, that she wasn’t judging her, that everything happened for a reason, that Brittany telling right now might be the hardest thing she’d ever done—but that made it so important to do.

Hamill got Brittany to talk about going back into the store with Jayna the night of the murder. “Did you guys do anything while you were there? Smoke dope, anything like that? I mean, you guys didn’t have any like sexual relationship or anything?”

Brittany shook her head no. She whimpered, mumbled, curled her legs up on her chair, lowered her head, asked Hamill if she would get hurt in jail. “Thank you for staying with me,” Brittany told the detective.

At one point Hamill left, coming back with a slice of pizza. Brittany didn’t eat any. Ruvin came in to join them, again trying to get Brittany to say there’d been a fight. She didn’t respond. Her sobbing sounds became panting. She told Ruvin and Hamill that she wouldn’t answer their questions, but she didn’t want to be alone. Ruvin stayed, trying again with the notion Brittany was the only one who could explain what happened.

Drewry watched Ruvin and Hamill’s gallant efforts, growing more frustrated. He figured he’d give talking to Brittany one more try, but gone was any patience, any sense that she shouldn’t be treated like a killer. He had Ruvin handcuff her right wrist to the ring on the table leg. She slouched, looked at the ground.

“Brittany, we’ve given you every opportunity in the world to tell us what happened, how this thing started,” Drewry said. “It is entirely up to you at this point as far as how people are going to see you. Are they going to see you as a cold-blooded, heartless, goddamned killer, or are they going to see you as a person that got into a situation over her head? That is entirely up to you if you’re going to tell us what happened.”

Brittany looked up. He told her he was going to have to call Jayna’s parents about the arrest, and he would like to give them some kind of explanation of what happened. “The only person that can tell us why their daughter is dead is you. Is it because Brittany is psycho, and cold-blooded?”

“No,” she sobbed.

“Or is it because they got into a fight?”

“I’m not psycho. I’m not cold-blooded.”

“What are you? What happened? Who started the fight? Let’s get it out. Who started the fight? Either you started it, or Jayna started it, because they’re going to have to be told of the amount of injuries that Jayna had. Multiple, multiple injuries. And somebody’s going to have to explain how she got those injuries. I’m trying to be nice to you, kid. Told your brother and your sister that I would do everything I could to help you. You got to help yourself. Who started it?”

Ten seconds passed.

“I didn’t start it,” Brittany said, looking down.

“You didn’t start it?” Drewry asked. “Jayna started it?”

“Uh-huh,” Brittany seemed to mumble.

“I can’t hear you, baby,” Drewry said, crouching down next to her. “Talk to me, put your head up and talk to me.”

At one point, Brittany seemed to whimper that Jayna had started the fight. Drewry thought they might be on the verge of hearing something valuable. He reached out with his left hand to hold Brittany’s right hand, still cuffed to the table leg, and stroked her hair with his right. The detective had a running joke with his colleagues about how at this point in interviews they were willing to try anything, though Drewry liked to say he stopped short of a stunt others pulled—breaking out a Bible—because it conflicted with his agnostic beliefs.

“I can’t hear you, okay?” he told Brittany. “You’re crying.”

But all Drewry could make out were hysterical mumbles, which sounded like Brittany lamenting going off to jail. She bent further forward, her face on her knees. “Come on, baby. Lift your head up for me,” Drewry said.

Brittany did, her head lobbing to her right and knocking a cup of water across the table. Ruvin pulled tissues out of a box to begin wiping it up. Drewry continued holding Brittany’s cuffed right hand and right knee, begging for answers as he grew more frustrated.

“I’m sorry,” Brittany said. “I can’t. I just can’t talk. I’m sorry. I don’t want people to think I’m horrible but I can’t talk anymore.”

Drewry again invoked Jayna’s parents, Brittany’s own parents. He waited nearly ten seconds. No response. At 6:01 P.M., a little more than seven hours after Brittany had arrived at the station, it was over.

“Okay,” Drewry said with a shrug. He stood up and walked out to get paper towels to help Ruvin soak up the rest of the water. Then they left together, shutting the door behind them.

*

The police press office sent out word that there would be a 7:00 P.M. news conference about the lululemon case. Montgomery Police Chief Tom Manger walked into the homicide unit from upstairs, congratulating the detectives and trying to figure out what he was going to say. He looked over Ruvin’s shoulder as the detective typed up his affidavit to support first-degree, premeditated murder charges against Brittany.

Drewry went to a quiet area to call the Murrays, who had returned to Texas after claiming Jayna’s body. Their week had been one soul-numbing task after another. One of the worst had been having to buy Jayna’s gravesite. Her dad, David, never thought she would die before him, and had planned to be buried in a military cemetary in Texas with his wife, Phyllis. But at the funeral home the day after finding out his daughter was dead, David switched his plans. “The military plot can go to someone else who needs it,” he told the woman selling them the gravesite, saying he needed at least six more for the rest of the family. “I’m going to be buried next to my daughter.”

It was about 5:30 P.M. Texas time on Friday, March 18, 2011. David and Phyllis, their sons, and their sons’ families were getting ready to leave for a visitation set for Jayna at a nearby funeral home. David’s phone beeped. He answered and Drewry greeted him. “We just made an arrest,” the detective said.

“That’s good,” David said.

“There’s more to it,” Drewry said, going on to say how the case had taken a turn, how they had charged the purported survivor with murder.

David exhaled a long sigh. His hand started to shake. He thanked Drewry, hung up, and told the others. No one knew what to say. Jayna’s brother Hugh called one of Jayna’s friends, and word quickly spread, reaching those already on their way to the funeral home—including Chasity Wilson, Jayna’s friend from Halliburton, whom Jayna had been so helpful to during her divorce, and who she’d encouraged to return to college. In the years since, Chasity had earned a degree in business and moved into a new house with her kids. During the previous week, even as Chasity had been rocked by Jayna’s murder, she’d been worried about the purported survivor. “That poor girl was laying there all night,” she had told her coworkers. “How is she going to go on?”

Now in her car, hearing news of the arrest, Chasity burst into tears. She pulled off the freeway, onto a road with less traffic where she could stop her car. That the police in Maryland were saying the killer knew Jayna and tried to cover it up made it all the worse, if that was possible. Chasity sat behind the wheel, shaking as she wept, eventually composing herself to start driving again to the visitation.

The Murrays arrived at the funeral home. Hugh asked the director if he had a computer on which they could watch the news conference, which he figured might be streamed live on Washington, D.C., television stations. In short order, the Murrays and a few friends were inside a small room, watching the news conference begin.

“Tonight we have arrested Brittany Norwood,” Montgomery’s police chief said, “for the murder of Jayna Murray.” His statement was brief, and gave the vague possible motive as “a dispute between the two women.”

Reporters asked follow-up questions, but the chief didn’t want to go into many details of the case. David and Phyllis Murray knew that hundreds of their friends and family members were outside in the main room, including David’s best friend, who had come all the way from a drilling site in China. The Murrays left the small room to greet them, even as the press conference continued. The couple stood next to Jayna’s closed casket, receiving words of comfort from those lined up. By then, word had spread among the crowd about the coworker’s arrest.

After a week of horror, the Murrays were paralyzed by a new question: why?

SECTION IV

WHY?

With Brittany Norwood’s arrest for the murder of Jayna Murray, the fears that had gripped Bethesda vanished, replaced by heightened fascination over the case. Residents devoured news accounts describing Brittany’s respected, successful family; her lack of a criminal record; and the possibility that the whole thing started over stolen clothes.

At Parker’s restaurant, a few doors down from the lululemon athletica store, customers were more interested in Brittany than they’d been with the infamous “Beltway Snipers,” who’d killed ten people in the region nine years earlier. “This isn’t two clowns from out of town,” the group of regulars was telling owner and bartender Matt Touhey. “It’s the girl down the street.”

Three days after the arrest, Jayna’s parents appeared on
Good Morning America
, sitting on an interview sofa in the show’s New York studio. For much of the three-and-one-half-minute segment, David and Phyllis Murray smiled, recalling their daughter’s outgoing, spirited nature. David even summoned up some humor, saying he was being “as objective as a father can get.” But when he and Phyllis were asked about Brittany Norwood’s relationship with Jayna, their faces went blank.

“Jayna never mentioned her,” Phyllis said. “There were always people that she would have dinner with and go to movies with, but Brittany’s name was never mentioned.”

The arrest tore through Brittany’s family as well. News accounts presented a devastating case against her. Her siblings—Chris and Marissa—had been in that interrogation room, had heard the detectives lay out evidence against their sister. The Norwoods couldn’t help asking themselves: Could this really have happened? And if so, was there something we missed? Reporters called, rang doorbells, stuffed business cards into doorjambs next to the cards of their colleagues. The Norwoods stuck together, publicly saying nothing but privately researching and calling several of the best defense attorneys in Maryland. As Chris had promised Brittany just before she was taken to jail: “No matter what, we’re going to be here for you.”

One of the lawyers they reached, Doug Wood, enjoyed a particularly aggressive reputation in the courtroom. “I think the system works best when it’s adversarial,” he had once told the
Washington Post
in a profile posted on his website. The story told of Wood cutting his teeth in the rough-and-tumble world of Washington, D.C., courts in the 1980s before going on to nearby Prince George’s County, in Maryland, where he won five murder acquittals over a two-year streak.