The Yoga Store Murder (28 page)

One of the lululemon coworkers, Eila Rab, told detectives that she and Jayna had bonded over academics—how she had completed her MBA and Jayna was about to. Eila also knew Brittany well enough to hang out with her after work. “This whole thing is just unreal to me,” she told the detectives. “When I first found out that she had been charged, I just couldn’t piece it together. Because as much as I want to believe I know Brittany, I don’t.”

Eila said she had never considered Brittany violent or even aggressive. “She never raised her voice. When she laughed, it was a lighthearted laugh.”

Another coworker said the same. “She was so normal,” Chioma Nwakibu told Drewry. “She was really friendly. She just carried herself in such a way that you’d never think that she would be stealing or anything like that.”

The lululemon staffers said Brittany and Jayna weren’t close, largely because Brittany had only worked at the store for six weeks. None of the staffers had picked up any hints of trouble between them.

McCarthy and Ayres also started to interview those who knew both women. People talked about Jayna’s knack for imparting confidence and ambition to others. “She changed my life,” Courtney Kelly told the prosecutors. Rachel Oertli, the store manager, ticked off a series of characteristics that, to McCarthy, encapsulated what a half-dozen other people had told him about Jayna. “Intelligent,” the prosecutor wrote in his notes. “Sassy attitude. Highly motivated. Disciplined. Never late. Honest, always.”

The picture of Brittany was more complicated. McCarthy read detectives’ paperwork and notes about her years at Stony Brook University. “Known to steal from other athletes . . . Stole from friends . . . Pathological liar,” Captain David Gillespie wrote after he’d fielded a call from a classmate. A report from the Stony Brook campus police described a fellow student telling officers that her ATM card, bank statement, and account funds had come up missing just days after Brittany had been in her room. It was unclear from the report how the campus police had followed up, or whether they had had enough information to open a formal investigation. McCarthy learned that soccer teammates accused Brittany of stealing money and clothing, and at one point, Brittany admitted to stealing $20.

Over at the homicide unit, Ruvin had started to find traces of Brittany on the Internet. A high-end hairstylist in Washington—the same one Brittany had given last-minute excuses for cancellations—posted a comment on a blog called
Miss A
regarding a photo of Brittany. The stylist noted that the photo had been taken just after she’d done Brittany’s hair, with imported hair and a full weave, but that when the time came to pay, Brittany “claimed that someone in the salon had stolen her money out of her wallet.” Despite assurances from Brittany that she would return later to pay, she never did. “After doing Brittany’s hair for about four or five years and developing a close relationship with her, I never expected this. She seemed to be a very nice and determined young lady with a huge future,” the stylist wrote.

McCarthy also looked into Brittany’s life as she moved to Washington, D.C., reviewing the restraining order that her ex-boyfriend, dentist Maury Branch, had filed against her. He called Maury, who wanted to help. The dentist said the two dated for more than a year, but he’d had trouble getting to know her. First Brittany told him she’d graduated from college. Then she said she didn’t, because of tuition debts. Then she said it had been because of problems with the soccer coach. Maury also told McCarthy that while he and Brittany were together, $1,000 in cash had gone missing from his house, something he’d initially blamed on a cleaning woman.

“Did she ever say anything about concussions?” McCarthy asked.

“Yes.”

“Migraines?” McCarthy followed up, anticipating the kinds of evidence the defense lawyers might be looking for. Chronic migraines were one of the symptoms of athletes who’d suffered bad concussions.

“No,” the dentist answered.

The prosecutor tracked Brittany’s employment record and tried to get to the bottom of what happened at the lululemon athletica store in Georgetown, where Brittany was fired and rehired. It was murky, with each side still claiming to be right. In McCarthy’s mind, supervisors suspected Brittany of stealing but used Brittany’s end-of-the-year abuse of “Shop Night” as the technical reason to fire her. And a pattern in Brittany’s past was taking shape: dustups rarely stuck to Brittany, and when they did, she could almost always talk her way out of trouble.

Also emerging was the extent of Brittany’s dual life. One of the starkest examples to McCarthy was the text messages and Internet browsing histories he was shown that had been lifted off the iPhone Brittany left in the store. Brittany visited “Sugar Daddy” websites. The text messages showed Brittany discussing what to McCarthy were clearly prostitution services: “Just a younger woman with goals/dreams and could use financial assistance,” Brittany had written, describing herself to a man in Virginia she met on Craigslist.

Another example came when McCarthy’s office researched the lineage of two plastic subway fare cards also found in the store. McCarthy knew that most users added money to the cards via credit card. He subpoenaed the Washington-area subway system for records connected to the numbers on the bottom of the cards. The first fare card, found in a pocket of Brittany’s jacket, was traced back to Jayna. That actually matched part of Brittany’s account of what happened the night of the murder; Brittany said that after she and Jayna looked in vain for Brittany’s wallet, Jayna gave Brittany her fare card to get home. The second card, which had been found on the floor of the stockroom where Brittany’s wallet was found, traced back to a group called HIPS, or Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive. An intern in McCarthy’s office called HIPS, where an official said they distributed the fare cards as part of an outreach program so prostitutes could get to doctors’ offices or treatment programs. The official said HIPS didn’t keep records of who received the cards, ending that trail.

To McCarthy, the card was more evidence Brittany had gotten into prostitution. Although he doubted a judge would allow him to present either the texts or the HIPS card to the jury, McCarthy wondered whether Brittany’s secret life was a reflection of her character—or something that shaped it. He and Ayres talked about it. Did Brittany get a thrill out of keeping secrets? Did they wear her down? Was it a combination of the two?

*

The prosecutors watched recorded interviews of Brittany talking to Drewry and Ruvin, looking for more people they might want to question. One individual stood out: Brittany’s brother Chris Norwood, who had been at the station the day Brittany was arrested, and who detectives had allowed to speak alone with Brittany so they could eavesdrop on the conversation. Several times, according to the video recording, Chris asked Brittany if she did it. Brittany never really said yes—and never really said no.

“Chrissy, I just want to go home,” she’d told him, later adding: “I just don’t want to talk about it here.”

A short time later, as seen on the video, the detectives arranged for Chris and his sister Marissa to be alone in the room. “She did it,” Chris told Marissa. “She told me.”

However dramatic that exchange sounded, McCarthy knew it would have limited value at trial. It could even play into the defense’s hand. What exactly was the “it”? Without a broader context, it didn’t give McCarthy much. And he wanted to ask Chris about other things he had said in the interview room, such as about Brittany going on trips to south Florida, or her never having been treated for mental illness. McCarthy decided to bring Chris in and put the squeeze on him.

Back in suburban Seattle, at the end of a cul-de-sac in the community of Maple Valley, the electrical engineer had been trying to return to some kind of regular life. He commuted seventeen miles a day to an office park in Federal Way, where he worked for a Fortune 500 semiconductor company. But, suddenly, he was served with court papers from Maryland, compelling him to fly across the country and testify in a pretrial process. Chris retained an attorney, who helped hatch out a deal with McCarthy: Chris would come in but would speak in a less formal atmosphere.

On an afternoon in May, Chris sat at a long conference table in the prosecutor’s office. In front of him was a video camera, flanked by McCarthy and Ayres on one side and detectives Drewry and Ruvin on the other. If he turned toward a bookshelf to his right, he could see the framed photo of McCarthy arm in arm with former president Clinton.

The prosecutor asked a few general questions before moving on to the events of March 18, 2011, when the detectives had recorded Chris and Marissa’s conversation. “Let’s play that,” McCarthy said.

There in front of Chris was a grainy image of him speaking with Marissa in the interview room. In a soft, clear voice, he was seen telling her that he had been worried Brittany might have been involved, but only in the sense that he’d suspected she knew the killers.

“Marissa, this is the fucking worst scenario,” Chris said on the video. “I never thought this. I thought that she was involved. I thought maybe it was drug-related. I thought a lot of things. I thought about all of her Miami trips: it was like them sending her a warning message.”

McCarthy now fired his questions at Chris. How many Miami trips? Who were “them”? Did Chris think his sister was involved in the drug trade? Either way, McCarthy knew Chris’s answers would be helpful. If Chris gave him some reason to believe Brittany might be moving drugs, that was just more dirt on her; if he downplayed it, it was just another blow to the idea that masked men, maybe a pair of drug traffickers, had struck inside the store.

“No idea,” Chris said, parrying the questions. “I speculated a lot of things. That’s exactly what it was. It was speculation.”

Chris told McCarthy that anything he said on March 18 should be put in the context of when and where he had said it: a police station, one sister accused of a horrendous killing, another falling apart in front of him.

“I was out of my mind trying to come up—trying to make sense of the whole thing, all right?” he said. “What would you do? I mean we’re trying to make sense of this situation. Our little sister just got charged with murder.” Pushed by McCarthy, Chris said that on that afternoon, with his head spinning, he fell back to familiar, if illogical, territory. “This is me watching too much Court TV is essentially what it is,” he said.

The prosecutor zeroed in on Chris’s conversation with Brittany, also captured on videotape. “This was the conversation when Brittany admitted to you that she committed the murder,” McCarthy said.

Chris wouldn’t bite, looking at McCarthy silently for several seconds before opening his hands: “Let’s play the tape.”

McCarthy cued an assistant to play the video, pausing it occasionally after what he considered key exchanges.

BRITTANY
: “Chris, I’m sorry.”

CHRIS
: “Don’t, don’t apologize. Just tell me.”

BRITTANY
: “I’m going to ruin our whole family.”

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

BRITTANY
: “I don’t know how it happened.”

McCarthy tried to be as direct as he could. “She’s admitting to you that she did it,” he said to Chris.

“She’s not admitting to anything.” The protective older brother was intent on not giving McCarthy anything against his sister.

The prosecutor tried to flesh out other exchanges. Chris responded with what the prosecutor thought were maddeningly simplistic answers.

“You are a college graduate, correct?” McCarthy asked. “Look, I think you’re a very smart, intelligent guy.”

“No one’s questioning anyone’s intelligence here,” Chris shot back.

McCarthy fished around about Brittany’s Internet activity, asking Chris if he was familiar with Craigslist.

“Yeah, I buy car parts on Craigslist.”

“Are you familiar with a website called sugar-daddy dot-com?”

Chris smiled slightly, a hint that he found the site’s very name ridiculous. “No, I am not.”

At one point, tensions eased when McCarthy asked Chris if he’d read a recent article about his sister in the local newspaper. Chris smiled and said his hotel hadn’t provided newspapers. McCarthy looked around the table. “I think that’s a shot at the hotel we put him at.”

Before letting Chris go, McCarthy had something else on his agenda. “Are you aware of any point in her life, growing up or as an adult, that she has received psychiatric or any kind of counseling from a professional?”

“No,” Chris said, unscrewing the cap on a plastic water bottle and taking a drink.

“Has that been discussed with you by any member of the family?”

“No, it hasn’t.”

“Do you believe, based on your observation of her, she ever needed that type of assistance or help?”

“No, I don’t,” Chris said, screwing the cap back on the bottle, and quickly correcting himself to account for the present tense. “Or I didn’t.”

*

Forensic evidence continued to mount against Brittany. At the police crime lab, McGill, the shoe-print expert, finally completed his work on the plastic zip-tie that had been found binding Brittany’s wrists—he’d held off doing so until the arrival of a new microscope that allowed him to take digital photographs of images he was viewing. McGill had figured Brittany had likely used her teeth to tighten the zipties around her ankles and her wrists. This would not be the first time he’d analyzed zipties in a case, and McGill knew that he had to account for the way zipties were manufactured, with liquid plastic poured into molds. Each mold produces its own set of microscopic imperfections—ridges and scratches—that could look like teeth marks.

McGill spotted a “K2D” stamp on Brittany’s zip-tie, which he knew identified a certain mold. The next step would be finding unused zipties made from that same mold. Fortunately for McGill, he had a full box of zipties found in the store. He found a handful made with the same K2D mold—“exemplars” he called them. With these zipties as comparisons, now McGill could look at them under his new microscope to establish the locations of that mold’s imperfections—showing up at the same location on each zip-tie. He placed the Brittany zip-tie under the microscope. He could see all the imperfections from the mold, and he saw something unique to Brittany’s zip-tie: indentations that likely were left by her teeth.