The Yoga Store Murder (31 page)

In the case of Brittany Norwood, her attorneys, Doug Wood and Chris Griffiths, could not make a compelling connection between soccer injuries and mental illness—and abandoned the strategy. Dr. David Williamson, the renowned expert from Bethesda’s National Naval Medical Center, would not be testifying. Brittany would be tried as legally sane at the time she allegedly committed the murder.

Prosecutors John McCarthy and Marybeth Ayres, meanwhile, were struggling to figure out a way to tell jurors their theory of motive. In a hearing ten days before the trial, Judge Robert Greenberg told them they likely wouldn’t be allowed to call witnesses to testify about telephone conversations they had with Jayna Murray less than thirty minutes before she was killed. In those conversations, two coworkers would have said that Jayna told them she had just confronted Brittany over shoplifting before the two of them had left the store. But Greenberg had ruled it to be classic hearsay—the memory of what someone heard but didn’t have personal knowledge of.

The prosecutors had another option to try to present their motive. They could play parts of the video recording of Brittany talking to her brother Chris in the interrogation room. The two had been talking about what happened in the store just before Jayna was killed.

“Did she accuse you of shoplifting?” Chris had asked Brittany. “Is that what it’s all about?”

Brittany’s answer was muddled. She didn’t admit to taking anything, but she indicated Jayna suspected her of doing so. “She was going to, like, I don’t know, make sure our manager knew or something.”

It was compelling dialogue. But to prosecutor Ayres it was also problematic, something she couldn’t get out of her head as she took a shower one morning just days ahead of the trial. Before leaving for the office, she sent a text to McCarthy saying they had to talk as soon as she got there.

They did so, in McCarthy’s office. “We can’t play the tape,” Ayres told him.

In the hands of skilled attorneys like Wood and Griffiths, she told her boss, the conversation between Brittany and her brother could swell into indications of deep friction between Brittany and Jayna—and provide an opening to assert that Jayna had started a fight. And there was something else on the tape that the attorneys could use to build an argument that whatever happened, it was hardly premeditated.

“Was the whole thing planned?” Chris had asked his sister.

“No, not at all,” Brittany had said.

McCarthy agreed with what Ayres was saying. And he knew that if they didn’t play the video recording of a defendant, the rules of evidence meant Wood and Griffiths couldn’t introduce it. McCarthy made his decision. They’d try the case with no motive.

Days later, on October 24, 2011, around 150 juror prospects were summoned to the largest courtroom in Montgomery County, used for high-profile cases. Judge Greenberg warmly greeted the prospective jurors, asking each preliminary questions before describing the case. He asked everyone who had heard or read about it to rise. One hundred and thirty-one people stood up.

Greenberg didn’t want to rule any of them out in advance, and knew he’d have to ask if they could keep open minds while they listened to the evidence and arguments. In the meantime, though, he moved on to other questions, seeking factors that could color their views.

“Is there any prospective juror, or member of your immediate family, or a close friend who has been an employee in the legal profession, such as a lawyer, a law clerk, a legal secretary, or a paralegal?”

Eighty-six people stood up.

“Welcome to Montgomery County,” Greenberg cracked.

Among those standing was an ambitious young defense attorney, Donny Knepper, who on most days toiled across the street at a courthouse devoted to misdemeanor and traffic offenses. Knepper, thirty-six years old, didn’t know much about the case, but wanted to be selected so he could have a front-row seat for the skilled performances of attorneys Doug Wood, Chris Griffiths, John McCarthy, and Marybeth Ayres. He told Greenberg his juror number, 3, fairly sure the judge recognized him, then sat down and returned to his novel,
Life of Pi
.

Greenberg continued asking additional, broad-brush questions of the jurors, then relocated the proceedings to a private office behind a rear door in the courtroom. He took the attorneys back there, asking them to sit on either side of a conference table. He wanted the jurors to come in one by one in a setting where they could candidly answer personal questions.

Knepper knew his low juror number would have him going into the office early. He figured he’d make it through this “qualification” stage, when prospects could be disqualified only for obvious conflicts. His goal was to impress both prosecutors and defense attorneys so that at the next stage—probably a day or two away—they wouldn’t use their more subjective “strikes” to eliminate him. Knepper tried to think of it as a job interview.

His path to the defense bar hadn’t been a direct one. The son of a cop and a nurse in Erie, Pennsylvania, he spent two years at Penn State University, grew worried about drinking too much beer and drifting without much direction, so he dropped out and joined the U.S. Marine Corps, where he spent four years. Back at Penn State, he got a degree in human development, thought about becoming a family therapist, but decided to enroll in law school.

Shortly after 3:00 P.M., Knepper was told to go see the judge.

“I know you,” Greenberg said. “Would you close the door please, Juror Number 3.”

McCarthy also recognized Knepper as a defense attorney he’d seen around the courthouse. As a rule, the prosecutor hated having defense lawyers on juries, part of his vocation-avoidance list that included psychiatrists, social workers, and members of the clergy. “I’m not in the redemption business,” he liked to joke.

Greenberg looked over Knepper’s answers to earlier questions, noting that he had disclosed personal ties to someone in McCarthy’s office. “Tell us about that,” Greenberg asked.

“Vlatka Tomazic,” Knepper said, catching McCarthy’s full attention with the name of a prosecutor in his office, “is my girlfriend now of—I don’t know exactly when it became official—about nine months.”

McCarthy considered Tomazic one of the brighter young prosecutors in his office, and he figured if she was hanging out with this guy Knepper, there must be something to him. He was also intrigued to hear Knepper mention that his dad was a retired police officer.

Wood asked about his practice.

Criminal, traffic, juvenile crime, Knepper told him.

“Do you have any expectation of how your girlfriend wants this case resolved, in terms of what she thinks the outcome should be?” Wood asked.

“No, sir,” Knepper said. They wrapped things up, and he headed back to the courtroom.

As the trial lawyers waited for prospective jurors to come and go, a tone of informality quickly grew among the courtroom combatants, and Judge Greenberg encouraged it. He called Brittany’s lawyers by their first names, Doug and Chris. He asked McCarthy how his son was doing in his freshman year at Guilford College, in North Carolina, where he played guard on the basketball team.

“Scored thirty points in his first scrimmage,” McCarthy said. “Got diagnosed with mono yesterday. He’s out for six weeks. We play Davidson in two weeks.”

“Oh, that’s a shame,” Greenberg said as a new juror entered the room.

The informality spilled over to the attorneys’ interactions with prospective jurors, a tactical move they used to try to get jurors to like them. When one consultant said he worked in “business analytics and optimization,” McCarthy and Wood each vied to appear more humble than the other.

“Do you want me to ask what that is?” McCarthy asked his counterpart.

“No,” Wood said. “I’m going to pretend I know.”

The individual questioning lasted the rest of the afternoon and through the next day.

Greenberg and the attorneys returned to the back office to talk to individual juror prospects. The judge said it was becoming increasingly clear they wouldn’t find twelve people who didn’t know about the case.

“While I was lying awake last night, I thought about this issue, because, you know, it’s going to arise time and again,” he told the lawyers, saying they would just have to find people who could halt any preconceptions they’d formed. “I can’t remove what these people have read about the case.”

By Tuesday, word spread around the courthouse that Knepper was still in the running. Colleagues of McCarthy’s told him that Knepper could be aggressive when defending clients and urged McCarthy to use one of his strikes to bounce him. The prosecutor figured he probably would.

Wednesday morning, Greenberg had culled the 150 names down to 65 qualified candidates. He moved to the next phase, where the qualified jurors would be asked to stand in the jury box so prosecutors and defense attorneys could begin eliminating some of them. Under Maryland rules, prosecutors McCarthy and Ayres got ten strikes, while defense attorneys Wood and Griffiths got twenty.

Again, because of his low jury number, Knepper knew he’d be among the first in the box. He figured either side had about thirty to forty minutes to strike him as the process would unfold. At his table, McCarthy scanned his list of culled candidates, noting several who’d made bad impressions on him in the back office. He realized he might have to keep Knepper, whispering as much to Ayres, who wheeled around and whispered to their intern, Ashley Inderfurth, to hustle upstairs to their office to see Tomazic. “Go find out what kind of guy he is,” she said. Inderfurth rode the elevator up two floors and marched into Tomazic’s office. “John wants to know if your boyfriend will make a good juror,” she said.

McCarthy was starting to issue his strikes.

At the defense table, Wood sensed an opening. McCarthy had used three of his strikes on African Americans. Wood stood and asked for a private huddle in front of Greenberg’s bench, where he issued a “Batson challenge,” asserting McCarthy was eliminating jurors based solely on race.

McCarthy countered, giving his reasons for the three strikes. One of the prospects had been irate over juror responsibilities; another had seemed to downplay some trouble her attorney husband had gotten into; an older woman talked about lynchings of a century ago and said that another prospective juror had talked to her about the case.

“She was just very bizarre,” McCarthy said. “Her head was jiggling.”

The judge tended to agree, even if
bizarre
wasn’t the right word: “She was a loose cannon, in my view.”

McCarthy advanced his argument: although he was about to strike two more African Americans, including a twenty-year-old he considered an “airhead,” he also planned to keep the forty-seven-year-old African American human-resources worker with the British accent. “I want smart, intelligent people that are mature, that have made life decisions on this jury versus a twenty-year-old young girl who is unemployed, who appeared to be ditzy.”

Greenberg was swayed, agreeing that McCarthy was making “racially neutral” decisions in keeping five African Americans off the jury.

As for prospective juror Knepper, Wood and Griffiths seemed satisfied that his professional leanings—he’d previously worked in public defender’s offices and a legal-aid center before opening a private practice—outweighed his relationship with the prosecutors. McCarthy also had to figure out what to do with Knepper. Inderfurth had returned and delivered Tomazic’s reply, which was that although she was hardly unbiased, she thought Knepper would be fair and thoughtful throughout the process.

McCarthy and Ayres quickly and quietly discussed what to do.

“I think we can live with this guy,” McCarthy said.

Prosecutors John McCarthy and Marybeth Ayres knew they were about to present a powerful case. Forensic evidence alone would allow them to paint a detailed picture of how Brittany Norwood had killed Jayna Murray. And the prosecutors had hours of video and audio records of Brittany they could play for jurors, convinced that doing so would brand Brittany a pathological liar in their eyes.

But as McCarthy readied himself to deliver his opening statement on October 26, 2011, he knew he had to leave out one important detail that might prey on jurors’ minds: he couldn’t tell them
why
Brittany killed Jayna.

But the prosecutor was a gifted orator, the result of having spoken in courtrooms for thirty years, and classrooms for thirty-five. He and Ayres had written a detailed statement covering nineteen key points, and they expected it to take an hour. McCarthy used all the tools of good storytelling—short sentences, varied pacing, foreshadowing—building to the end, when McCarthy would reveal two of the bloodied murder weapons, and he opened with a cliff-hanger.

“The story is tragic,” he began. “One young woman brutally murdered, allegedly sexually assaulted, a surviving victim left behind, and two unknown assailants loose in our community. The details are breathless, and they are brutal—most supplied by the surviving victim herself. The law enforcement community gathered around this case because those men who did this to these young women had to be found, and had to be held accountable for their crimes. One problem—the concocted boogeymen did not exist.”

The front of the courtroom where McCarthy spoke had an odd layout, the result of well-intentioned architects from three decades earlier who prized acoustics over right angles. The resulting courtroom “well” was a circle, defined by the judge’s bench, the defense attorneys’ table, the prosecutors’ table, and a two-tiered section of large, dark-green leather juror chairs. Everything felt squeezed together, and when attorneys delivered opening statements, they did so with jurors pressed close to them—at the best of times, it increased the attorneys’ feeling of connection with the jury; at the worst, it was oppressive.

McCarthy quickly identified the person who’d invented the boogeymen, pointing to the defense table behind him. “Jayna Murray’s killer is in this courtroom,” he said.