The Yoga Store Murder (33 page)

Again, the jurors found themselves glued to the testimony. Lloyd, the software engineer, felt for the managers having to live with their decision not to call 911. Harrington, the nuclear engineer, wondered if that decision said something broader about society. Both jurors had objective reactions as well—exactly the kind McCarthy was hoping to evoke. In Lloyd’s view, the conversation from inside the yoga store that the Apple managers heard indicated that Brittany had time to think about what she was doing, to stop what she was doing—both pointing to first-degree murder. Harrington factored in the interior Apple Store surveillance video that was played for the jurors, with its little time stamps, and thought the assault lasted a long time.
Even on the short end
, he thought,
it was ten minutes.

McCarthy had timed the Apple witnesses well for Friday afternoon, giving jurors something to think about all weekend. “I have not been sleeping well,” Knepper wrote in his journal. “I do not usually let such disturbing things into my headspace.”

Despite all the blood he had seen and all the rest of the damning evidence against Brittany, Knepper was willing to hear a plausible defense from Wood. Maybe Brittany thought that Jayna had stolen her wallet, giving her justification at least to start a fight. “The general public usually presumes that if you get arrested and charged with a crime that you are guilty. I am not doing that,” he wrote. “I have not made my decision regarding this girl’s guilt.”

McCarthy wanted to start off the week with a bang. After a brief fingerprint witness, who was on the stand for less than three minutes, McCarthy called William Vosburgh, the blood-spatter expert whom he’d asked to examine the crime scene. The prosecutor had used him as a witness before and figured his scientific bearing would play well to what was a well-educated jury panel. McCarthy led him through questions about the discipline of bloodstain-pattern analysis. By using “very simple trigonometry,” Vosburgh told the jurors, “one can calculate backwards from the shape of the droplet what the point of origin was.”

Juror Lloyd took detailed notes, feeling on some level like he was back in a physics lecture at Virginia Tech University. Knepper was also impressed. “He is the guy who really gave us the picture of how this crime occurred. Disturbing stuff,” the attorney wrote in his journal. Knepper was further impressed by Detective Dimitry Ruvin, who testified that detectives had wanted to believe and help Brittany, and that there were too many moving parts at the outset to know exactly what was going on. “I trust this guy,” Knepper wrote.

As the trial entered its fifth day, Brittany’s defense strategy was taking an increased toll on both families. The Norwoods had long wondered about—hoped for—the possibility of a provocation that could help explain what Brittany had done. “Tell me what she did to get you to fight her?” Chris had asked his sister that afternoon in the interrogation room.

To the Murrays, the idea of a fight was offensive, and there was no forensic evidence to support it.
Easy to pick on the dead person
, Jayna’s brother Dirk said to himself during the trial. In the Murrays’ minds, it was an ambush, not a fight.

Neither family spoke to the other, aside from one accidental encounter during a break. Phyllis Murray walked into a courthouse women’s room and ran into two of Brittany’s sisters. It was awkward and tense. “We’re sorry for the loss of Jayna,” one of them told Phyllis. She also asked Phyllis how Jayna’s nephews were doing, saying they had two nephews in their family about the same age. “We are working with them,” Phyllis replied.

Phyllis was scheduled to take the witness stand late on the fifth day. McCarthy needed someone to formally identify Jayna Murray in photographs, and assert that she didn’t have a twin sister, which would have altered the conclusions of DNA testing. McCarthy also knew the emotional impact that seeing Jayna’s mother would have on jurors. Judge Greenberg called the attorneys up to his bench for a huddle and told McCarthy he’d be on a tight clock. “Let me be really candid with you,” Greenberg whispered to him. “She’s been through enough.”

Phyllis walked to the witness stand and spelled her name, speaking in a slightly singsong, upper-midwestern accent. McCarthy asked her how long she’d lived in Texas.

“Off and on for, jeepers, thirty years,” she said.

At the sound of her voice, sadness shot through juror Ron Harrington. His mother had a similar small-town air about her. She said “jeepers” all the time. Harrington thought about how his mother would have felt, how she would have coped, if one of her children had been murdered. Tears welled in his eyes. And the more he listened, the more Phyllis strengthened the case against Brittany for him. She said her daughter played volleyball and was athletic. If it had been a fight, Harrington told himself, Jayna would have better defended herself.

As effective as Jayna’s mother was, McCarthy saved his best witness for last: Dr. Mary Ripple, the medical examiner. He’d met with her three times during the case, most recently to figure out how they would explain all the injuries without being so repetitive that they risked losing the jurors’ attention. Ripple suggested they do it not by injury type, but by areas on Jayna’s body. “Let’s do it regionally,” she said.

Before her testimony, McCarthy and Wood had sparred over whether jurors would be allowed to see autopsy photos and, if so, how many. McCarthy told Greenberg the photos explained the injuries, while Wood countered that their brutality would make it difficult for jurors to remain objective. In the end, Greenberg said he would allow McCarthy to show nine of them, projected from a large video monitor, and the attorneys warned the family members seated behind them what was coming. As Ripple took the stand, the second row was almost empty. Of all the family members, only Earl Norwood remained in the courtroom to see it through with his daughter.

The images were beyond ghastly. Jayna’s shaved head looked as if it had been run over by a lawn mower. Greenberg tried not to keep the images projected any longer than necessary. But they truly helped explain how Jayna was killed.

Ripple created the impression that she was speaking only to the jurors and saw no one else in the courtroom. Her words were horrifying but delivered in a style that was both clinical and understandable. She walked them through injuries on different parts of Jayna’s body, eventually reaching a gaping wound that was depicted by one of the autopsy photographs projected for jurors. The killer, Ripple said, had first fractured the area in seven places, making it susceptible to a subsequent crushing injury. “These areas are now more fragile because of these defects,” she said. “Lots of internal brain injury with regard to that. Do you want me to explain that now, Mr. McCarthy?”

“Yes, why don’t you do that.”

“Okay, so there’s bleeding on the—there’s the skull fractures that you can see—and there’s bleeding on the surface of the brain that we call ‘subarachnoid hemorrhage.’”

McCarthy questioned Ripple for more than two hours. She told jurors how the linear and L-shaped wounds in Jayna’s head were consistent with the shape of the merchandise peg. She said the knife wound at the base of Jayna’s brain came late in the attack, and likely killed her within a minute. And she explained how Jayna’s heart had continued to pump blood into the final wound, meaning she was alive until the end.

When his turn came at last, Wood cross-examined Ripple as best he could and even scored a few minor points. He got Ripple to say that although Jayna’s heart was pumping, that didn’t mean she was conscious. He also got her to acknowledge that some of the “defensive injuries” to Jayna’s hands could have been “offensive injuries,” and that some of the injuries could have occurred when she fell into the metal shelving near the spot where her body was discovered. But Wood could do little to overcome the grim power of Ripple’s testimony and the enormous contrast between Jayna’s autopsy photographs and Brittany’s insignificant injuries. The doctor left the stand, and the family members who’d stayed away from the autopsy photographs came back into the courtroom.

McCarthy rested his case.

By then, it was pretty much over for Greg Lloyd, the juror who didn’t always think that system was fair, who’d been willing to give Brittany every benefit of the doubt. Even at 331 injuries, he’d told himself, if they’d somehow been part of a long fight, and if Brittany had been acting without thinking, he could at least entertain a verdict of second-degree murder. But Brittany simply didn’t have any serious injuries. And now it was clear to Lloyd that she had halted her attack, retrieved a knife, and went back at it.

Wood had signaled for weeks that he would call just a few witnesses—no forensic experts, no psychiatrists. He certainly didn’t want his client to testify on the stand and face McCarthy’s marathon cross-examination of her five, fiction-filled interviews with detectives. Hoping he’d counterpunched effectively in his own cross-examinations, Wood told Greenberg that his side was done as well. The defense would call no witnesses.

All that was left now were the closing arguments. For seven months, McCarthy had been building to this. He wouldn’t get his chance here to say
why
the murder had happened—that would come later, he figured, at sentencing. But he could certainly paint a vivid picture of
what
had happened.

His many forensic experts—in blood spatter, shoe prints, pathology, DNA, fingerprints—gave him data points throughout the store. He had a timeline from cell-phone records, store alarm reports, and the Apple managers’ testimony about the screams they’d overheard. The detectives’ testimony had stitched together, and then unraveled, Brittany’s cover-up.

“This was a difficult case,” McCarthy began softly, mindful of the tears some jurors had shed over the autopsy photographs.

And then he laid it out for them. How, after Jayna and Brittany left the store, Brittany had tricked Jayna into coming back with the story about her forgotten wallet. How Brittany lured Jayna back to the stockroom, where employees typically left their belongings. There were no windows back there, no view to the remaining pedestrians on Bethesda Avenue. He reminded the jurors that the steel bars used for garment displays were kept in a bin near the chairs. “The merch pegs are back there,” McCarthy said, standing in the circular well without notes, using his hands for expression. His legal pad was on a table in front of him, highlighting key points he wanted to make. But he found himself hardly having to check it.

The prosecutor resisted the urges to fill in blanks—the likely conversation between Brittany and Jayna; in fact, he had never learned for sure how the attack began. Did Brittany sneak up from behind? Were they face-to-face? One thing seemed certain—however it started, Brittany quickly got the best of Jayna, who was too stunned to defend herself. These were not two women grappling—this was an assault.

“It’s on,” McCarthy told the jury of the attack, “and it’s not fair.”

He walked them through how evidence showed that Jayna grabbed the back of her bleeding head, staggered forward into the fitting-room area, and reached up to catch herself on a wall near the television set, leaving a bloody palm print and causing the TV to crash to the floor. Jayna now was in escape mode. She probably didn’t run for the front door because she knew the two had locked it behind them, and she wanted something quicker—the rear exit that could be pushed open. Maybe the emergency alarm would even sound. Jayna broke away, literally wrestling out of her coat, which Brittany was grabbing. “This was her last mad dash to try to save her life,” McCarthy said.

Jayna burst through the purple door to the rear hallway, but Brittany was right behind her. Jayna made it to the back door, McCarthy told the jurors, close enough to get her blood on the push bar. “She doesn’t get out,” McCarthy said. “She’s pulled back.” Brittany then pushed Jayna back down the narrow hallway to the corner—still armed with the merch peg. In his mind, McCarthy had decided it was Brittany speaking those clear words in the rear hallway—the phrases asking “What’s going on?” and saying “Talk to me.” McCarthy figured that Brittany had been trying to determine if Jayna had told their manager about the theft, but he couldn’t tell the jurors this, because he hadn’t introduced evidence of the alleged theft. So the prosecutor went as far as he could.

“She hadn’t ‘lost it,’” McCarthy told the jurors, “but she was demanding that she talk to her: ‘Tell me what’s going on.’”

McCarthy told jurors how Jayna sank to the floor, eventually so helpless that Brittany was free to search for more weapons—some she thought might be more effective, like the hammer or the rope, and some she wielded for mutilation, like the box cutters. “This was a long, brutal, slow attack,” McCarthy said.

At the end of it, McCarthy told the jurors, Jayna began to make loud gasping noises—known as “agonal breathing”—that people emit as they die. He didn’t dwell on the autopsy photographs, but he used them as he described the fatal blow to the base of Jayna’s skull. The Murrays had been warned the images would be shown, but they remained in the courtroom to support Jayna’s memory during the most crucial part of the trial.

“This is the area of the back of her head,” McCarthy told the jury.

Jayna’s father, David, who had seen terrible violence in combat, looked away but not quickly enough. What he viewed was the worst thing ever—a full-color depiction of what had happened to his only daughter. He kept his head down, shaking and sobbing next to his wife, Phyllis. McCarthy continued, telling jurors how Brittany had retrieved a knife from the kitchen and plunged it into the base of Jayna’s skull. “The stab wound that kills her. This is the one that enters her brain. This is the one that mercifully ends it all.”

Brittany had been watching McCarthy, but turned her head away from the projected photo. It was one of her few visible reactions during the trial. Her parents, Earl and Larkita, sat still, their arms intertwined.

Legally, it had been a terrible day for Brittany’s side as well. The medical examiner’s testimony about the length and brutality of the attack made it nearly impossible to argue that Brittany didn’t have time to stop and think about what she was doing. Three hundred and thirty-one times. At least five different weapons. As Wood rose to speak, he knew he couldn’t erase the images of those autopsy pictures. So he tried to turn it around, to argue instead that no clear-thinking person could have produced such devastation.