The Yoga Store Murder (27 page)

Bending over, he studied more concentrated spatter about four feet from the floor, noting additional “cast-off” arcs. He also noted “impact” droplets, which result when an assailant pounds a weapon onto a hard, bloody surface, such as a skull. The pattern was clear: the lower Vosburgh went, the more spatter—the beating was turning into a massacre. These drops were perfect circles, meaning the blood hit the wall at a 90-degree angle at the same height as Jayna’s skull.

Vosburgh looked to his left, at the shelving unit. The lowest shelf was only twenty-two inches off the ground. Vosburgh wondered if they’d find impact spatter on the bottom of that shelf. “I need to look at the underside of this,” he said to the others, bending down to get a better look. What he saw there, in his mind, confirmed it: the beating had continued after Jayna was flat on the ground.

*

The next day Vosburgh was on the phone with McCarthy, reporting what he had seen. He had to couch his conclusions—more analysis of the spatter photographs was needed, he wanted to compare his findings with McGill’s shoe-print work, DNA results were pending, and he wasn’t sure where the altercation had started. But some things seemed clear to him. At some point, Jayna tried to make a run for it out the rear, emergency door and got close enough to leave blood on the handle. But Brittany pulled her back, trapping her in that corner. She started beating Jayna while they were standing, then continued as Jayna fell to the ground—causing blood to bounce upward from her skull onto the underside of the low shelf. “There’s significant blood spatter from the ground level, going up,” Vosburgh told the prosecutor.

McCarthy was optimistic about how this would look to a jury asked to convict Brittany of first-degree murder. Yes, maybe Brittany’s attorneys could argue that the first few strikes had been leveled without much thought, but the longer she’d gone on, the more Maryland’s definition of premeditation played against her. It was something the prosecutor could cite by memory. “Premeditated means that the defendant thought about the killing and that there was enough time before the killing, though it may only have been brief, for the defendant to consider the decision whether or not to kill and enough time to weigh the reasons for and against the choice.”

And there was more, Vosburgh told McCarthy.

It had to do with additional “cast-off” blood-spatter patterns he’d spotted in the back hallway—about four feet off the ground, to the left and right of where Jayna’s body had been. They suggested that at some point, Brittany had changed from an up-and-down pounding to a back-and-forth slashing—almost as if she was trying to disfigure Jayna. McCarthy thought about Jayna’s autopsy photos—wondering how many he’d be allowed to show the jury—as Vosburgh told him how evidence on the bathroom floor eroded Brittany’s claim of masked assailants. The bloodstains looked smeared. Vosburgh said that after the murder, Brittany probably had taken a shirt or a towel, dipped it in Jayna’s blood, carried it to the bathroom and created the bloodstain. It even looked diluted, as if she used water to increase it.

“The story of the outside intruders, it just doesn’t add up,” Vosburgh told the prosecutor.

Vosburgh’s findings lessened the chances Brittany’s attorneys would use a defense that stuck to her original story. So did continued work over at the police department. There was David McGill’s shoe-print analysis. And there was follow-up work Ruvin had done behind the yoga store. He’d been able to uncover two men who matched the description of the two men dressed in black seen on the surveillance videotape from outside the back of the Apple store, just after the time of the murder. The detective had set up in the parking lot in his unmarked car at 10:00
P.M.
on a Friday night, and sure enough, a little past 11:00
P.M
., two men, dressed in black, walked right by the back door of the yoga store. Ruvin went to question the men, showing them photographs from the surveillance camera. The men were nervous, and spoke only broken English, but said they were kitchen workers at a restaurant several doors away. Ruvin returned to their restaurant the next day, with his laptop, and showed the surveillance video to one of the kitchen workers. Yes, that is me and my coworker, the guy told Ruvin, adding that they were walking away from the restaurant after their shifts had ended, and that one of them was carrying a backpack. To Ruvin and McCarthy, that loop was closed—there was an explanation for the video if it came up at trial.

The thought of Brittany’s lawyers advancing a second-degree murder defense still worried McCarthy, however. All he had to do was look back at three Montgomery murders in which Vosburgh had testified. In the case of Robert Lucas, who was accused of breaking into a church rectory and repeatedly stabbing Monsignor Thomas Wells, Vosburgh told jurors that blood spatter on a wall had started at standing height and continued downward as the priest fell to his death. Two years after that, Vosburgh had been brought in for the murder trial of Dr. Zakaria Oweiss, a popular obstetrician whose wife, Marianne, had been found in their basement, bludgeoned to death with the hard rubber mallet the couple used to tamp down the tarp over their swimming pool. Citing blood spatter on the shin of one pants leg and the front thigh of the other, Vosburgh testified that Oweiss had kept swinging the weapon as he dropped to one knee while his wife fell to the floor. In a 2008 case, detectives were able to show that an ex-U.S. Army soldier, Gary Smith—who had served as an elite Ranger in Iraq—pulled up to his apartment building, loaded a revolver, and climbed a set of stairs to his apartment, where his roommate, fellow ex-Ranger Michael McQueen, sat watching television. Vosburgh testified that blood spatter from a single shot to McQueen’s head indicated Smith had been right next to him when the fatal shot was fired. Yet in all three of those cases, jurors found no premeditation and returned verdicts of second-degree murder. And the verdict in Smith’s case was later overturned because of a witness-testimony issue. Smith was given a new trial and convicted of involuntary manslaughter and use of a handgun in the commission of a felony. McCarthy didn’t want to accept such a verdict in the yoga store case. He was thinking not only of Jayna’s family, whom he was getting to know, and all the people who had worked on the case and were counting on him. There was also his political future.

In late 2010—months before the murder occurred—McCarthy had begun weighing a 2014 run for attorney general of Maryland, the top law enforcement official in the state. The post could set him up to run for governor in 2017 or 2021. Yes, the ever-increasing media attention on this case could be very good publicity, but that same media attention had also already cemented the image among voters that Brittany was guilty of the worst kind of premeditated murder. A verdict that freed her in fifteen years would hardly play well on the campaign trail.

Although McCarthy wasn’t the youngest person to consider an extended run in the upper echelon of Maryland politics, he also cheated age every day, following the exercise regime of a twenty-five-year-old. Lunch hours meant a quick drive to the county’s police-academy training gym. Some days it was a forty-minute run on the treadmill while speaking to other lawyers on his phone. Two days a week, it was five-on-five basketball with cops. Every Sunday morning, in a park behind his house, he played quarterback in a standing game of touch football with his buddies, a routine that one morning left him with two cracked ribs, courtesy of a blitzing prison guard. And he still taught, giving criminal-justice lectures at a local college two nights a week. McCarthy turned his attention to the bloody palm print. Tests confirmed that it matched Jayna’s left palm, supporting one of Vosburgh’s theories: Brittany had first struck Jayna in the rear stockroom or the fitting area, causing blood to soak into Jayna’s hair but not fall to the floor; Jayna instinctively reached up to her head as she pitched forward, catching herself by slamming her palm into the wall. The early DNA results also looked encouraging. McCarthy read a report about the bloodstains found inside Jayna’s car and on the brim of the hat in the back of the car. The prosecutor took notes, using the Greek delta as shorthand for the word
defendant
: “Black hat, interior driver side handle, gear shift—All Δ.” McCarthy also noted that although some of Jayna’s DNA was also found in the car, Brittany herself had said she had gotten Jayna’s blood on her. “Some Jayna in her car too. Okay,” McCarthy wrote.

As much as he’d wanted quick DNA results before the arrest—to make sure the detectives had the right person—the prosecutor now wanted to slow the process down. He was sure Brittany was the killer. But of the hundreds of pieces of evidence, the county’s crime lab could only test a limited number of additional spots, due to requests from other cases. For two days, McCarthy, Ayres, and the detectives met with a DNA analyst to decide what to test. They also recognized how certain results could work against them, such as the palm print that had been confirmed as Jayna’s on the wall. McCarthy already seemed to have enough evidence to tell jurors that Brittany had struck Jayna on her head, causing Jayna to grab the wound with her hand as she stumbled into the wall, leaving the print. So why test that print for DNA? If the results came back as Brittany’s blood, that could just confuse matters. In the end, the group decided to concentrate tests on sections of the hammer, rope, and wrench found near Jayna’s head; sections of the inside of the shoes Brittany appeared to have worn as part of her cover-up; and various parts of a serrated bread knife found in the kitchenette area.

McCarthy knew that the more weapons he put in Brittany’s hands, the more likely he could prove premeditation. Suppose she started with a hammer, switched to a wrench, then a rope. Each time she rearmed herself, she would have had to pause, giving herself time to think about what she was doing. Meanwhile, at the forensics-autopsy lab in Baltimore, Dr. Mary Ripple was having trouble matching all the photographs of Jayna’s injuries with photographs of the possible weapons found at the crime scene. She called Ruvin and said she wanted to drive down to look at the tools in person. Ruvin called McCarthy and invited him and the assistant prosecutor on the case, Marybeth Ayres, to come to police headquarters.

In nearly thirty years of homicide prosecutions, McCarthy had never heard such an offer from a medical examiner—and he was happy to accept. He and Ayres joined detectives Ruvin, Drewry, and Wittenberger, and two forensic pathologists, Ripple and Kristin Johnson, around a table at the homicide unit, where Ripple went over some of her preliminary findings. Her final report, which would total almost thirty pages, said that Jayna had no signs of drugs or alcohol in her system. She had suffered at least 331 pummeling, cutting, and stabbing injuries, including at least 152 to her head. She had 105 injuries to her hands and arms, a clear indication she had been trying to block the attack. Simple multiplication revealed an astounding ordeal: if the assailant had struck once every second, the attack would have lasted about five and one-half minutes. A more likely scenario, particularly if the attacker had to pause for a break or to switch weapons, was one strike every three seconds. Nearly seventeen minutes.

Tests on Jayna’s brain showed deep bruises, the kind typical of car-crash whiplash victims, which suggested the killer wielded an instrument that was heavy but could be swung with great velocity.

Ripple and Johnson pulled out their autopsy photos, along with rulers and calipers. Drewry and Ruvin cut open evidence boxes and bags and spread their carefully sealed contents neatly on the table—hammer, wrench, screwdriver, Buddha statue, rope, and several small box cutters. Looking at the autopsy photographs, Ripple quickly matched a series of tiny, circular pounding wounds to the side of the adjustable wrench, just as she’d hypothesized at her lab in Baltimore. She also matched rounded, crushing injuries to Jayna’s skull to the hammer. The slashing injuries to Jayna’s face seemed to match the box cutters.

What Ripple couldn’t find was the weapon that had inflicted a catastrophic series of straight-lined gouges in Jayna’s skull and forehead. “I need something with some weight behind it,” she said. “What about that Buddha?”

The detectives handed over the two-pound statue, with its square seven-inch-by-four-inch base. But the edges didn’t jibe with the wounds. There were other still-mysterious wounds as well, shaped like Ls, as if delivered with a club with some kind of right-angle attachment on the end. The doctors drove back to Baltimore.

Despite their not having matched all the wounds to weapons, for McCarthy, it had been a fruitful session. He knew how to present murder weapons dramatically at trial to jurors. But he still didn’t have a complete accounting of exactly how Jayna was killed, and he could imagine a skilled attorney like Wood cross-examining Ripple: “So you really don’t know what caused all these injuries, do you, Dr. Ripple?”

*

McCarthy was certain that Brittany’s lawyers were exploring their third option, an insanity defense. “Let’s see who they’re bringing into the jail to see her,” he told Ayres.

He got his answer simply by asking the jail to provide Brittany’s visitation requests and logs. McCarthy scanned them for doctors he knew from previous cases. He didn’t see any familiar names, but he caught an unfamiliar one: Dr. David Williamson. McCarthy looked him up, and saw articles detailing world-renowned work on behavior problems caused by brain trauma.
Uh-oh
, McCarthy thought.

Next up—and on this score it didn’t matter what defense Brittany’s lawyers chose—the prosecutor needed to learn more about both Brittany and Jayna, their relationship, and their interactions on the night of the murder. The lead detectives, Drewry and Ruvin, already had interviewed three of the women’s coworkers, so McCarthy and his assistants popped the interview DVDs into their computers. The images were incongruous—attractive, ambitious young women in designer fitness clothes seated in the dank interrogation rooms, at worn metal tables with little rings for attaching handcuffs.