The Yoga Store Murder (35 page)

McCarthy wanted to offer Greenberg—and everyone else in the courtroom—a sense of the Brittany he’d come to know. He started off talking about her family.

“Your honor has been doing this for more than thirty years,” he said. “I’ve been doing it for thirty years. Mr. Wood’s been doing it for thirty years. We always hear about these terrible families that the defendants that come before us come from—they didn’t really ever have a chance, they were never given a real opportunity.” That was hardly the case for Brittany. “This is a lovely family,” McCarthy said. “Supportive of her. Even here today.”

The opportunities they gave her led to a college scholarship, he said. Yet she stole, she got thrown off the soccer team, she moved to Washington, D.C., and she continued to steal. She made a mess of her job at the first lululemon store where she worked, in Georgetown.

McCarthy knew he couldn’t reveal too much about Brittany’s most shameful secrets—he’d long concluded she was into prostitution, but it hadn’t been part of the trial—so he worked the edges. He told Greenberg that Brittany had accidentally dropped a subway card on the floor of the store the night of the murder. The card came from a “prostitution self-help group in the District of Columbia,” McCarthy said. Later, he told the judge about Brittany’s text messages involving “providing personal services,” prompting Wood to object, and Greenberg to put a halt to it.

But McCarthy was on solid ground when he recounted what he’d learned about the events leading to the murder. He described how Jayna and Brittany had checked each other’s bags, how Jayna had confronted Brittany about trying to steal a pair of pants, how Brittany couldn’t explain herself, how the two left the store and Jayna called her manager.

“Brittany Norwood was about to be fired the next day,” McCarthy said.

And it wouldn’t have been just a firing. It would have resurrected the Georgetown suspicions, and it would have cost her the personal-trainer job she had lined up at the fancy health club where she really wanted to work.

“She was on her way,” McCarthy said. “It was more than a pair of pants. It was an unraveling of the life she had set for herself.” So Brittany came up with a ruse about forgetting her wallet and called Jayna. “She lured Jayna back to the place where this killing began,” he said.

McCarthy couldn’t know exactly what happened immediately after the two returned to the store, but he had his assumptions. Brittany probably asked Jayna not to report the theft to the store manager, Rachel Oertli. Jayna probably responded in one of two ways: “
It’s too late. I already have,”
or
“I can’t do that. It’s between you and Rachel
.” Within seconds, McCarthy concluded, Brittany attacked. Was she enraged? Was she trying to silence the witness? McCarthy had always thought it was a combination of the two—and he’d come to believe something else. At some point after the murder—maybe during the staging, or after she’d started talking to the detectives, or after the lululemon athletica company had reached out to lend her support—Brittany actually thought she’d come out of the whole thing ahead. She’d have her job at Equinox. She’d have the sympathy of all those around her. It wouldn’t be that big a deal, really. But who really knew what happened in those critical seconds? Only Brittany. Maybe not even Brittany.

For McCarthy, it was enough to have walked the judge through her complicated past, the bag check, the attack, and the cover-up. “There was cunning and guile involved in this,” he said, and he urged Greenberg not to give Brittany a chance at parole.

As they waited to ask Greenberg for leniency instead, Brittany’s family had heard a horrible new word—
torture
—added to the description of what Brittany had done. Her oldest brother, Sandré, stepped forward first. He told the Murrays how sorry his family was for their loss. It was a crime so brutal, he acknowledged, that he and other family members could have turned their backs on Brittany.

But they didn’t, Sandré said, because of all the things she had done for her parents and siblings and nephews before March 11, 2011. “One is not given this type of love and support, not even from family,” he said. “It can only be earned.”

He urged the judge to give Brittany a chance at parole. “Brittany is a person worthy of rehabilitation and, maybe, at some point, redemption.”

Not until Sandré spoke his final words did Brittany raise her head briefly and look his way, wearing the same blank expression she had throughout the proceedings. “Please, your honor, at least give her some hope,” he said. “If you leave her with hope, you leave our family with hope.”

Brittany’s lead attorney, Wood, got up to speak, talking about the devastation not just to the Murrays, but to the Norwoods as well. “Every time they think it’s healing, the wound will be opened by regret,” Wood said. “It will be opened by looking around and not seeing Brittany and realizing what she had done. Her absence will always be there and will always torture that family. What I would say to that family, though, your honor, is that it’s not their fault . . . They did everything they could. But they’re always going to wonder about that regret. And that’s a punishment that their daughter has inflicted on them.”

Wood ended as Sandré had: even a distant, remote chance at parole would give the family some hope, he said.

But it was the next moment that so many in the courtroom had waited for since Jayna’s death, among them Chasity Wilson, Jayna’s close friend from their days at Halliburton in Houston. Chasity had been in the United Arab Emirates on business and had come home through Washington so she could be at this hearing. She sat just behind the Murray family. She’d tried to get a look at Brittany when she’d arrived, but couldn’t see her. Now, however, Brittany stood up. She hardly looked look like a monster, Chasity thought.

“May I address the Murray family and my family first?” Brittany asked.

“Yes,” Greenberg said.

“During the break, I really considered if I wanted to say anything because I figured, ‘What was the point?’” Brittany began, her head cocked and body slouched.

Most people in the courtroom were hearing her soft and steady voice for the very first time. In Chasity’s mind, and in the minds of many of Jayna’s supporters, the substance of those first words created the immediate impression that Brittany didn’t care. But Brittany’s supporters heard something else: the weight of her crime bearing down on her more than ever.

“But for the Murray family,” she continued, “what do I honestly say to your family when your daughter is gone and I’m the one who has been convicted of her murder? I know whatever I say to you today won’t take the pain away over your loss of Jayna.” Brittany’s voice shook.

“But before I go to prison, I needed for you to hear me tell you just how deeply sorry I am. My hope for your family is that someday you will be able to find the forgiveness in your heart and peace. And I am truly sorry. For my family,” she said, sniffling and pausing, “as you know, I couldn’t have asked for a better family. Mom and Dad, you’ve been the most loving and supportive parents I could have ever hoped for. To my brothers and sisters, I have always shared such a special bond with each of you. And that will never change no matter the circumstances. I am truly blessed to have all of you as my family. I don’t want any of you to think that I am here today because of anything you did or did not do. I truly love you all very much, and thank you for the tremendous amount of love I feel from you every day.”

She reached for a tissue to wipe her nose. With his arm around his wife’s shoulders, Earl Norwood watched his daughter and subtly mouthed words of support to her. “Your honor, I understand I’ll be severely punished for the crime I have been convicted of. And now I face a possible lifetime in prison. I also know there are many people who want for me to have a sentence without hope. But I am asking you today to leave me with some. I don’t even ask you this for myself. I truly ask you this for my family, that is, especially my mom and dad. Thank you.”

She sat down, having spoken for less than three minutes, not admitting to killing Jayna but referring only to “the crime I have been convicted of,” carefully chosen words that could not be used against her when she appealed the verdict. Legal niceties aside, the passive words were a kick in the gut to Jayna’s family and friends. Brittany had made no admission. She did not explain.

Greenberg had said little during the three-hour hearing. He’d presided over this case for months, including the pretrial hearings, rendering decisions based on law and evidence. Now, the husband and father of three children spoke directly to the Murrays and Norwoods, choking over his words as he thanked them for sending him letters to review. “I want to assure each and every one of you I read those letters. I felt your pain on both sides, and I understand the emotions that you expressed.”

Within several minutes, though, he had moved on to describing the brutality and cold-blooded nature of Brittany’s actions.

“I guess we’ll never know, Ms. Norwood, whether, when you went back to that lululemon store, you intended to kill Ms. Murray. And to be candid with you, I’m not 100 percent sure that when you went back there that was your intention. But once you started your assault, you reveled in the gore. What has struck me as most remarkable about this case, ma’am, especially in light of the fact that I’m being told that you wanted a career as a physical trainer, is the incredible physical condition in which you found yourself on that day—to be able to rain down more than three hundred blows with a variety of lethal instruments that I think were not immediately available to you is nothing short of astounding to me, ma’am. I confess to you, I once sat and just went like this”—here Greenberg made a pounding motion—“three hundred times. It took me about eight minutes to do that.”

Greenberg continued. “With adrenaline coursing through your body, you mutilated this woman. And after every blow, you had a chance to think about what you were doing. The lies that you told afterward were incredible. You’re one hell of a liar, ma’am.”

Nothing about Brittany had impressed him. But her family had.

“I watched your family during this trial, and I wanted to cry for them, because they appear to be the personification of the American dream,” Greenberg said, turning his head to the second row. He spoke of raising children and how they eventually leave home. “You know at some point, we who are parents, we send our children off into the world. I have three children I sent off into the world. And they’re either off to college, or they’re off to the workplace, and all we can do is hope that we instilled in them the values that we had, that they’re good citizens. But sometimes things go wrong, terribly wrong.”

Next he spoke about Jayna’s family, and what Brittany had done to them.

“No parent should ever have to bury their child. Sometimes things happen. We lose a child to accident, disease. And while as parents we may not accept that, at least we understand it. We understand why our loved one was taken away. But when a murder so horrific occurs, ma’am, there isn’t any such acceptance.”

Thirty feet away, from his second-row seat, Jayna’s brother Dirk started to feel that the sentence he and his family wanted was coming. When Greenberg first began to speak, Dirk had whispered to his wife, April, that the judge wasn’t going to issue a no-parole sentence. “He’s not going to do it. He’s not going to do it,” he’d said. But now, to Dirk’s ears, Greenberg had stripped Brittany of her identity. He kept calling her “ma’am.”

Greenberg spoke about how she had no drug problem, no deep psychiatric illness. “The information that I have—provided from your family and from your attorneys—expresses complete bewilderment as to how this could have occurred.”

He said how reluctant he was to give her even the slightest chance at freedom.

“Stand up, please,” the judge told her. Brittany did as requested, void of expression. “It’s the sentence of this court that you be confined to the Maryland Division of Correction for the balance of your natural life without the possibility of parole.”

Clapping and cheers erupted. Chasity said “Yes!” as did others.

“Please!” Greenberg said, silencing the crowd.

Brittany showed little reaction. Her father, Earl, looked down, his arm around his wife.

Greenberg dryly went through Brittany’s right to appeal. Then he looked up at the attorneys, and it was over. “Thank you, counsel. That will conclude the matter.”

In the crowd, Jayna’s mother, Phyllis, shook as she hugged first her husband and then Fraser Bocell, Jayna’s longtime boyfriend. Up front, sheriff’s deputies put Brittany back in handcuffs and led her away. She looked only at the door in front of her. Earl Norwood kept his arm around his wife as he spoke to one of his sons.

The two lead detectives in the case, Dimitry Ruvin and Jim Drewry, stood up and stretched their legs. They knew Brittany was headed to the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women, about twenty-five miles away, in Jessup, and each planned to eventually pay her a call. Ruvin figured he’d wait five years. Drewry thought he’d go sooner, maybe 2014. But both of them intended to ask the same question: why?

In all the commotion, Wood asked Greenberg for one last bench conference. When the attorneys approached, Wood told the judge that Brittany’s parents were staying in town until the end of the weekend. Given that it was Friday, he asked the judge to recommend that Brittany be kept temporarily at the local jail so they could see her before they left. As everyone knew, the transfer to Jessup would delay visits until she was fully processed there.

“I don’t feel I have the power to do that, Mr. Wood,” Greenberg said. “I’m sorry.”

The murder of Jayna Murray inside the lululemon athletica store in Bethesda, Maryland, pushed grief 2,900 miles to the company’s headquarters, in Vancouver, Canada. When executives there heard the tragic news that Jayna and her coworker, Brittany Norwood, had been attacked, they reached out to both families and offered to help. A week later, however, when police pinned the murder on Brittany, the company suddenly faced new concerns—over both liability and public image. Executives made the decision to not publicly discuss Brittany’s tenure.