The Yoga Store Murder (36 page)

On a concrete level, lululemon had to decide what to do with its store in Bethesda once the police completed their forensic testing. Retain the store’s marquee location, next to the Apple Store and across from the cobblestoned pedestrian avenue called Bethesda Lane, and risk upsetting customers, who’d be asked not to dwell on the fact that they were shopping in a former crime scene? Ultimately, yes. As spring turned to summer in 2011, lululemon executives revealed their plans in a carefully worded statement: “It is with warm and grateful hearts that we are announcing the reopening of our newly renovated Bethesda store on Friday, June 24. The reopening will embrace the theme of ‘love’ in honor of Jayna Murray. More than ever, we remain committed to the people of Bethesda and look forward to continuing to share with this community the same love, passion and grace with which Jayna lived her life.”

The renovation featured a new stained-glass window across the top of the storefront, which spelled
love
in cursive script. The next day—with traffic blocked outside the store along Bethesda Avenue—lululemon held a community yoga class. Loyal customers showed up with mats, rolled them out, and struck poses for an hour.

Not everyone was thrilled. Employees returned to a store that had been renovated but not overhauled. The location of bathrooms—in one of which Brittany had staged her own attack—were the same, as was the layout of the fitting area where Brittany had laid down bloody, size-14 shoe prints in an effort to implicate intruders who had never existed. A door led to a small closet where Jayna had been beaten and slashed and stabbed to death.

Customers who followed the case closely could look around and see the similarities. Some asked saleswomen questions about the case: “Where are the shoes? You had shoes at the store that day.”

These days, Saturday mornings along Bethesda Avenue look very much the same as they did before the murder. Couples stroll the sidewalks, holding their children’s hands and their dogs’ leashes. Shoppers walk in and out of the Apple store and Georgetown Cupcake. Most customers no longer view the lululemon store as a crime scene. Many support the company’s decision to reopen it, even those like labor attorney Ellen Silver, who had misgivings the first time she returned. But speaking outside the store recently, she wondered aloud what good it would have done to have the space now playing host to a restaurant. That would have meant pretending the murder didn’t happen. “This is somehow reaffirming of life,” she said.

Lululemon executives consistently declined reporters’ requests for interviews about the case. Margaret Wheeler, the company’s top human-resources executive—or, in lulu parlance, the “Senior Vice President of People Potential”—agreed to speak by phone for thirty minutes only on the condition that the questions broadly covered the company’s culture and what it looked for in employees. Wheeler said lululemon looks for sales workers who are outgoing, smart, lead a healthy lifestyle, and are committed to setting and achieving goals. “Even though we teach it,” she said of goal setting, “we actually look for people who are predisposed to being goal setters and being up to really big things in their lives in lots of different things.”

Regarding the murder case, although Wheeler was the company’s point person after the tragedy—she attended the trial and got to know the Murrays and the workers at the Bethesda store—she deferred to remarks by then-lululemon CEO Christine Day after the verdict. That 217-word statement remains the most detailed from the company about the case. “We have all been deeply affected by the loss of Jayna Murray and the violation of our safe and loving store environment,” Day said. “The actions of Brittany Norwood that night are the antithesis of the values of our company and are not reflective of the outstanding people who work for lululemon.”

As for its business, lululemon is facing furious competition from companies such as Gap and Nike, which have both spread into yoga-apparel sales, and recently endured a controversial recall of thousands of pairs of yoga pants that were mistakenly made of see-through fabric. But lulu’s moneymaking magic has remained intact, as has its aura of meeting more intangible goals. “Reaching a billion dollars in revenue is clearly an important milestone that as a company we can all be very proud of,” Day said in 2012 as she announced record-setting sales. “But far more important than the number itself are the beliefs, values, culture and people that achieved it. We really are so much more than our numbers; it is the everyday actions of our dedicated team that translates into an unparalleled guest experience and allows us to achieve our ultimate goal of elevating the world.”

THE APPLE MANAGERS

The Apple Store managers and security guards in Bethesda took a public flogging for not calling 911 the night they heard screams coming from the adjacent lululemon athletica store. On November 3, 2011, the day after Brittany Norwood was convicted of murder, someone placed white flowers on the sidewalk outside Apple that were arranged into the number “331,” the number of injuries Jayna Murray had suffered. Commentators and bloggers wrote that their inaction raised broader questions about society, or even reflected poorly on their parents.

As of this writing, the only public remarks that Jana Svrzo and Ricardo Rios have made about that night were those from the witness stand during the trial. Svrzo declined to comment for this book, and Rios did not respond to messages. Apple’s corporate public-relations officials declined to talk about the case or make the managers available for interviews. In discussions with detectives and prosecutors, Jana broke down over what had happened; although Ricardo showed less emotion, those who interviewed him couldn’t tell if that was his natural disposition or his feelings about what happened. Ricardo still works at the Bethesda Apple Store next to lululemon. Jana transferred to Apple’s store in Georgetown, where she is a senior manager.

The murder also weighed on security guard Wilbert Hawkins, who no longer works at the Bethesda Apple Store. “I feel sad that happened on my shift, right next door,” he said. Wilbert described the noises from the lululemon store as yells and crashing sounds, and he remembered telling Ricardo not to worry because he’d heard noises there before. He said his sense of danger had been shaped by his past: growing up in a rough neighborhood in Washington, D.C., then working a series of security jobs in office buildings, construction sites, and housing projects before his Apple posting in Bethesda. Had he been working somewhere else, Wilbert said he wouldn’t have dismissed what he was hearing. “I would have done something different, much different,” he said. “I would have been expecting it.”

The lack of action by the Apple managers and security guards bore hallmarks of what scientists have long called the “Bystander Effect,” which holds that a person is less apt to call 911 when others are around. “The key phrase is ‘diffusion of responsibility,’” said Joel Lieberman, a psychologist who chairs the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “It’s a pretty powerful effect. It’s robust.”

Lieberman has studied group behavior for decades. He and others believe that people’s brains often work against them in such situations, telling them that if someone is truly in trouble, someone else will call 911. “That really shocks the layperson. But these situations don’t surprise me,” says Lieberman. “The more observers there are, the less likely people are to get involved.” People also are more apt to call 911, he said, when specifically asked to do so.

Several factors conspired to invoke the Bystander Effect that night: the calm and safety of downtown Bethesda, creating the mind-set that even harsh screams didn’t mean violence; the terrible fact that Jayna Murray couldn’t point to one person and ask for help; the diffusion of responsibility, in which the Apple managers looked to the security guards for guidance, and the guards deferred to the managers; and the fact that lots of people were still out and about at 10:10 P.M. on a Friday in downtown Bethesda.

“It almost sounds like a perfect recipe,” Lieberman said.

Of course, he and other bystander experts are quick to add, other factors could also have been at play—such as an individual’s character, or his or her sense of empathy, or level of “self-efficacy,” a psychology term describing a person’s belief that he or she can complete a goal. In the end, though, Lieberman came back to this: “When things like this happen, the people who don’t call 911 seem like monsters. How can people be that cold? But time and time again, we’ve seen this happen to people who are not monsters.”

THE DETECTIVES

Detectives Jim Drewry and Dimitry Ruvin still work murders for the Montgomery County Police Department.

Drewry has moved to the cold-case squad, giving him regular hours and Fridays off ahead of his planned retirement in late 2013. The job has other rewards as well. In April of 2013, Drewry sat in a courtroom as sixty-four-year-old Richard E. Ricketts was sentenced to life in prison for a vicious rape he’d committed more than thirty years earlier. The squad had found Ricketts in Florida after testing old evidence in the case for DNA and matching the results against a database of known offenders. “You are a wretched and warped man,” Montgomery Judge Terrence McGann said during the sentencing, an opinion Drewry had no quarrel with. Because so much of cold-case work is based on forensics, Drewry rarely interviews suspects anymore, but he hopes to get one last chance—with Brittany Norwood—before he retires. But he remains pessimistic about what the interview will bring, even if he manages to see her. “Can anybody really figure out someone like Brittany?” he says.

Ruvin and the other Montgomery County detectives have moved into more spacious, more modern headquarters, but the space doesn’t yet feel right to Ruvin. Maybe it’s the higher cubicles, making each detective feel more isolated. Maybe it’s the size of their floor, which allows officers and civilians from other departments to wander through. Maybe it is the interrogation rooms—new and improved, sure—but too far from their computers to enable them to go check something quickly. Maybe it’s none of that. “We’re cops. We bitch about everything,” Ruvin deadpans, sitting inside his high-walled cubicle and fielding a call about a long-running case he is working. The detective still sees evil erupt out of nowhere in his county. On June 10, 2013, Ruvin also found himself at a sentencing hearing—watching forty-seven-year-old Curtis Lopez get sent away for life for crushing his estranged wife’s skull with a thirty-pound dumbbell and her eleven-year-old son’s skull with a baseball bat. Ruvin has stayed in touch with Jayna Murray’s family, and, like Drewry, he plans to pay Brittany a call in prison. But he wants to wait a few more years—until Brittany has exhausted her appeals, until she feels she has nothing to lose by being candid with him. “I think her mind has to get used to the fact she’s not getting out,” the detective says.

Sergeant Craig Wittenberger, who supervised the lululemon investigation, retired from the Montgomery force after thirty-one years, and took a job with the federal government. “There were no winners in this case,” Wittenberger said shortly before he retired. “Jayna was brutally murdered. Both Jayna’s and Brittany’s families have been torn apart. Brittany’s probably just been conniving people her whole life.”

Another person dragged into the case was Keith Lockett, the homeless Bethesda man who had the misfortune of showing up in an emergency room after the murder while talking about having just been in a fight. Wittenberger, Drewry, and Ruvin had no choice but to go full-tilt at him, even as they could never really get comfortable with the idea of him unleashing such brutality. Keith has largely stayed out of trouble since being questioned in the investigation, picking up a minor trespassing charge and two drinking-in-public citations, according to court records. Reached on a cell phone he keeps, Keith declined to talk about the case.

THE LAWYERS

Marybeth Ayres, the Montgomery County Assistant State’s Attorney who helped prosecute Brittany Norwood, was promoted to head the office’s gang unit, taking on crimes often committed in the county’s middle-to lower-class neighborhoods. These areas aren’t as rough as those in inner-city Baltimore or Queens, where Ayres worked before she came to Montgomery, but among some residents, there is a parallel: violence, particularly in the form of protection or retribution, is a way of life. Ayres often thinks that Brittany should have been different, given how she was raised and the opportunities she had. “True evil,” she says these days from behind her desk, “comes from a complete lack of empathy.”

In the summer of 2012, State’s Attorney John McCarthy considered a run for Maryland attorney general, but as he found himself weighing his family life against the eighty-hour weeks that would come with a new and bigger office—and when a political ally and popular state senator decided to run for attorney general—McCarthy had his answer. He’d remain Montgomery County’s State’s Attorney.

The public’s fascination with the lululemon case continues to amaze him. He speaks regularly about the trial to civic groups and other attorneys, and even, on May 10, 2013, to about forty Maryland judges at their annual training conference. “We don’t have many murders in Montgomery,” he began, “but the ones we have are often completely bizarre.” He clicked through a PowerPoint presentation, projecting evidence photographs. He played video shot from inside the Apple Store, showing the managers approaching the wall to better hear the screams and thuds—as McCarthy himself moved closer to his audience. “The murder is happening closer than Judge Salmon is to me,” he said, indicating a distance of eight feet.

Brittany’s defense lawyers, Doug Wood and Chris Griffiths, returned to their winning ways after the trial. On November 15, 2012, their client Alexis Simpson was acquitted on all charges after being accused of stabbing her college roommate to death in the throat. “Clearly, the jury felt she acted in self-defense,” Griffiths told reporters after the verdict. He and Wood still maintain a public silence about the lululemon case, in part, they say, because Brittany is still pursuing her appeal, and also out of the wishes of the Norwood family.