The Yoga Store Murder (26 page)

“When I was younger, I tended to trust that police got the right guy and used the right process in finding him,” Wood said in the profile. “The more you see and hear, the more you learn you just can’t trust what they say. You have to look at every case with skepticism; that’s the only way to do it.” And Wood tried not to get chummy with his opponents. “I don’t have a cordial relationship with the police, and I like that,” he said.

Outside of court, the slim, six feet one, fifty-nine-year-old Bethesda resident, who wore his wave of silver hair about an inch longer than most lawyers, was friendly, and quick with a joke. He had an equally skilled law partner in Chris Griffiths, who in 2007 had won acquittal for a murder suspect in Montgomery County—the first time in more than a decade that Montgomery prosecutors had outright lost a first-degree murder case. The Norwoods hired them.

As is typical early in cases, Wood and Griffiths didn’t know exactly what the police had. But they could see three apparent pathways ahead, none of them easy.

For one, they could embrace Brittany’s story about the masked men and assert that their client had nothing to do with Jayna’s death. The problem here, at least according to early media reports, was that Brittany had left evidence tying her to the crime and the cover-up. And to hear the prosecutors tell it, Brittany had lied to detectives hundreds of times during video-recorded interviews. Still, there often were ways around such challenges.

For instance, what if the cops hadn’t properly handled all those tools, clothes, and other clues they’d collected? Wood and Griffiths could raise issues about mishandled evidence, and the possibility of blood transfer. Besides, could the prosecutors really use bloodstains to re-create Brittany’s movements in the store? Might not all that evidence be explained by Brittany’s fending off a furious, chaotic attack? As for the lies she’d allegedly told the detectives, they knew how detectives were forever playing games to get around reading suspects their rights to remain silent and contact a lawyer. Brittany’s words would mean nothing if Wood and Griffiths could get the interrogations ruled unconstitutional and excluded from evidence.

The second path was based on the dramatic differences in sentencing for different categories of murder. Under this strategy, Wood and Griffiths would concede that Brittany killed Jayna, but assert that she hadn’t done so in a “willful, deliberate and premeditated” fashion, the elements of first-degree murder. The number of injuries to Jayna, if initial news accounts were accurate, would make this tough going—but what if Jayna had attacked Brittany first, causing Brittany to flash into an uncontrolled rage? And what if they could show that Jayna received at least some of her injuries by striking Brittany? The goal here would not be exoneration, but a conviction for second-degree murder and Brittany’s release from prison within fifteen years—when she’d be forty-three, still young enough to make a life. First-degree murder likely meant a life behind bars.

The final option was an insanity defense, known in Maryland as “not criminally responsible.” In taking this route, the defense lawyers would likely concede that Brittany had killed Jayna, but would contend that she had an underlying mental disorder that made her unable to tell right from wrong. The challenge here was twofold. First, if evidence showed that Brittany had tried to cover up the murder, it was likely she knew it was wrong. Second, she apparently had never undergone mental-health treatment. But Brittany had said she’d suffered two concussions while playing soccer in college. Wood and Griffiths knew just whom to call: Dr. David Williamson.

Williamson graduated with academic awards from the University of Edinburgh, then went on to Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, and launched a dazzling career exploring how traumatic brain injuries could induce “neurobehavioral” complications. He ran a private practice specializing in the role of brain illness in criminal and legal matters. For six years, he served as an attending psychiatrist at Maryland’s maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Killers who were sent there received treatment and, in some circumstances, were released back into society.

Williamson had gained international acclaim in his position as medical director at the traumatic brain injury unit at Bethesda’s National Naval Medical Center, a temple of American medicine where U.S. presidents went for checkups and treatment. Williamson and his colleagues used advanced brain imaging, behavioral therapy, and combinations of medications to treat soldiers injured in Afghanistan and Iraq. He had briefed Congress and the president on the effects of traumatic brain injury, known as TBI.

Of course, colliding with an opposing soccer player or “heading” the ball too many times didn’t bear comparison to being blown up by a roadside bomb. But the idea that sports injuries could induce behavioral changes was at least plausible. As it turned out, soccer players were suffering concussions in large numbers. In a 2007 paper published in the
Journal of Athletic Training
, researchers estimated that high-school girls who played soccer sustained 29,167 concussions a year, often from head-to-head collisions, and college soccer players, on average, were apt to sustain one concussion in every 556 games they played. That was in the same ballpark as college football players, who were apt to sustain one concussion in every 331 games they played, according to the paper.

“I am writing to request that Dr. David Williamson be permitted to have a contact visit with my client, Brittany Norwood,” Wood wrote seven days after Brittany’s arrest. The next day, on Saturday, March 26, 2011, one of the world’s leading experts on brain trauma and behavioral changes pulled up to the county jail in the sleepy Clarksburg community, twenty-two miles north of the yoga store.

Murders in Montgomery

Charging someone with murder is one thing. Proving it is another. Leading that effort, from the time that Brittany Norwood was charged, was Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy. Fifty-nine years old, he’d grown up in a neighborhood in New Jersey near Philadelphia, and had come to the Washington area by virtue of a baseball scholarship to Catholic University, where he learned firsthand the career ceiling of five-foot-eight catchers. McCarthy graduated college, got a job teaching social studies at a local high school, then put himself through law school at night and joined the State’s Attorney’s Office as a line prosecutor in 1982. He took on tough cases, bided his time, and in 2006 ran as a Democrat for the elected position that headed up the office. McCarthy won by a landslide, and four years later was unopposed in his reelection.

His morning newspaper-reading routine reflected his passion for sports and his skills as a politician. International news? Reports from the White House? Local news? In a pinch, they could all be passed over as he read deep into the sports section for the box scores of local high school football, basketball, and baseball games. He scanned for Montgomery County results, arming himself with details to deploy in the halls of the nine-story Montgomery County Circuit Courthouse. “Before we get to that case you were asking me about,” McCarthy might say, “let’s talk about what’s really important. I saw your daughter had fourteen points the other night.”

McCarthy worked from a corner office on the fifth floor of the courthouse, though his office felt less of a legal sanctuary than a reflection of his affection for family, sports, and his Irish Catholic heritage. There were photographs of his wife, Jeanette, their four children, and their first grandchild. There were trophies from recreational softball leagues, a row of baseball caps from the area’s top Catholic high schools, a Philadelphia Eagles helmet. There were two unopened bottles of Jameson Irish Whiskey, a black-and-white photo of John Kennedy, and a color shot of himself standing arm in arm with Maryland Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley and President Bill Clinton.

Prosecuting high-profile murder cases was nothing new to McCarthy, who’d done so many he’d long considered writing a book titled
Murders in Montgomery
. The cases McCarthy was talking about descended to depths of depravity that amazed him. One chapter might recount the story of onetime Motown recording engineer Lawrence Horn, who stood to inherit $1.7 million dollars upon the deaths of his ex-wife and eight-year-old son, who had been awarded a civil judgment after a hospital mishap left him a quadriplegic. So Horn hired a man named James Edward Perry, who purchased a pair of how-to books titled
Hit Man
and
How to Make Disposable Silencers
and read them carefully, then slipped into the former Mrs. Horn’s house in Silver Spring, quietly and fatally shot her and the boy’s overnight nurse in their heads several times with a .22-caliber rifle—including one round each into one of their eye sockets, like one of the books said—and then smothered the boy by using one hand to cover his mouth and nose and the other hand to cover the tracheotomy opening in his throat. Another chapter could cover Bruman Alvarez, a handyman who tied up and raped a fifteen-year-old girl inside a Potomac home where he was working. A short time later, when his boss arrived, Alvarez took him out with a hammer and a knife. Then the girl’s father and two sisters came home. Alvarez killed them all before returning to the bound girl and stabbing her to death. And what about Samuel Sheinbein? The seventeen-year-old killed another teenager; went to Home Depot to buy a Makita circular power saw, propane tanks, and trash bags; returned to the garage; sawed off the corpse’s arms and legs; and torched the remaining part of the body. A more recent entry would be Renee Bowman, who’d adopted two children through a government program that paid her to raise them. She then suffocated the girls and stuffed them into a chest-style freezer under ice cubes and packaged meats, where they remained for two years while she continued to collect her checks. “By killing the children, keeping them literally on ice,” McCarthy had said in his closing arguments, “the money continued to flow.”

In recent years, he’d become more of an administrator, but he still prosecuted one or two murder cases a year. He’d assigned himself the yoga store case in the opening hours, when it looked like a search for two masked men, but it had quickly taken shape as among the most violent, bizarre, and closely followed that he’d ever seen.

In the days after Brittany Norwood’s arrest, McCarthy learned that defense attorneys Doug Wood and Chris Griffiths were representing Brittany. McCarthy didn’t know either well personally, because they practiced primarily in neighboring Prince George’s County. But he certainly knew about Griffiths’s 2007 murder acquittal in Montgomery. “Came in here and fucking walked a guy,” McCarthy told a colleague. To learn more about Wood, McCarthy spoke to prosecutors who’d squared off against him, hearing again and again to get ready for anything. “Watch out for the other shoe,” said McCarthy’s deputy, John Maloney, who used to work in Prince George’s, “because it’s going to drop.”

McCarthy knew the three options open to Wood and Griffiths: stick with Brittany’s masked-men story, go for second-degree murder and the shorter prison term, or claim criminal insanity. To attack any of those defenses, McCarthy needed to learn exactly what happened inside that store.

He knew the blood drops and spatter could help re-create the fight—or the attack. There was a science to bloodstain-pattern analysis, complete with conferences and research papers. By measuring the width and length of the drops and applying principles of physics and trigonometry, forensic scientists could track the blood backward, determining where the blood came from and how it got there. On the witness stand, those guys could be great, as captivating to jurors as if they’d climbed into an episode of
CSI–Montgomery County
. McCarthy had a favorite blood-spatter expert, William Vosburgh, a top forensics official for the D.C. police department. McCarthy reached for his phone.

*

It was 6:30 P.M. on a Tuesday night when Vosburgh made his way to the back of the yoga store, still locked and under the control of the Montgomery Police Department. He was met by four of the key players in the investigation—Detectives Dimitry Ruvin and Jim Drewry and Sergeant Craig Wittenberger—and shoe-print expert David McGill. They all wanted to slip in through the back because they knew reporters were still making regular rounds in the front of the store to try to catch people going in and out. Vosburgh knew the outlines of the case, but asked the others not to tell him too much as they walked him through the four sections of the store: the narrow rear hallway, the back stockroom, the fitting area, and the main sales floor up front. In these opening minutes, Vosburgh wanted to form his own impressions.

Vosburgh hadn’t always wanted to be a forensic scientist. After studying chemistry in college, he went to dental school and started a practice in 1981. But he soon grew to hate the monotony, the screaming kids—feeling so beat down by 1987 that he went to see his physician, who diagnosed him with acute stress and prescribed two weeks off. Vosburgh took them and felt so much better that he took two more, then two more. Then he simply walked away from the profession for good. In need of a job, he got one as a chemist evaluating drugs seized by police in a county just south of Baltimore. That led to other forensic assignments, promotions, and eventually his current post in the D.C. forensics lab.

Inside the yoga store, what struck Vosburgh about the main sales floor, fitting area, and stockroom—particularly compared to the chaotic mess in the rear hallway—was the decided lack of blood spatter. Yes, he saw lots of bloody shoe prints, a bloody floor in one of the bathrooms, and blood droplets scattered about. None of that told him much about the assault. But one clue caught Vosburgh’s attention—the partial, bloody palm print on the wall near where a television had fallen. He studied it closely, and learned that tests were pending that could confirm that it was made by Brittany or Jayna. “That’s really important,” he said.

Vosburgh and the others returned to the rear hallway and shut the purple door behind them. The hard, gray floor was stained red with blood, and all along a three-sided corner defined by the closed door, the back wall, and the metal shelving unit, Vosburgh saw dense, saturated blood spatter just above the floor. Higher, and near his head to the right, he saw several tiny drops of blood. Upon close inspection, they looked like ovals with tiny tails, and they formed an arc. It was the classic sign of “cast-off,” droplets that fly from a blood-covered weapon as an assailant draws it back. “Kind of what I was looking for,” Vosburgh noted.