The Yoga Store Murder (4 page)

All that had taken place about an hour earlier, before O’Brien started writing his statement. In the time since, any memories of SWAT team injuries had become overwhelmed by the broader picture of the tiny woman, a victim, shaking with fear, her face caked with blood. There could have been other explanations for the cut to her palm, such as fighting off an attacker—which was what O’Brien theorized in his report.

“There were numerous lacerations on the victim’s chest, stomach, back and legs,” O’Brien wrote, “as well as what appeared to be defensive wounds on the victim’s right hand.”

Brittany was wheeled into room 12, a private area in the emergency wing. When a detective named Deana Mackie walked in, she saw Brittany on her back, her face still caked in blood—the way it would stay until it could be swabbed for clues. Nurses had pulled a white blanket to just below Brittany’s shoulders, leaving her arms and hands extending over the front of it. The young woman looked tired, dazed, and bloody, but nonetheless strikingly pretty. Detective Mackie sat down next to Brittany, introduced herself, and turned on a digital recorder.

“We want to kind of figure out what’s going on and what we can do to help you,” Mackie told her quietly. “I know that you’ve been through a lot.”

Brittany interjected, barely above a whisper. “Would you mind just telling me how my friend is doing?”

“Well, I haven’t been down to the scene yet,” Mackie said.

That much was true. Sergeant Craig Wittenberger had sent Mackie straight to the hospital. But Mackie knew the coworker was dead. She just didn’t want to rattle Brittany, and instead told her she’d check on her friend when they were done speaking.

“Do I have to talk right now?” Brittany asked.

“You don’t have to. We can’t make you,” Mackie said. “But if it’s something that you can tell us that will help us find out who did this, you know, that’s really important to us, and to find these people.”

The detective projected a natural compassion, which is why Wittenberger had sent her to the hospital.

“If you want, you can just ask me questions,” Brittany said.

Mackie agreed, and the two spoke for forty-eight minutes. When they finished, Mackie headed to the yoga store to tell the others the harrowing account Brittany had shared with her.

Back at the crime scene on Bethesda Avenue, things were taking shape just as detectives had predicted. TV news trucks had quickly dug in for the day, their radio towers extending skyward for live coverage. Reporters and photographers crowded up to the yellow tape, gazing into the store’s windows to try to figure out what was inside, until the detectives covered the inside of the windows with wide sheets of brown paper that had been brought in to pack up evidence.

Detectives Jim Drewry and Dimitry Ruvin and Sergeant Craig Wittenberger—the core team on the case—were joined by about ten detectives and commanders in the store. The whole crowd gathered in a semicircle to hear Detective Deana Mackie’s report from surviving victim Brittany Norwood.

She and Jayna Murray had been the only two employees working late the night before, Brittany told Mackie. They had both left the store at 9:45
P.M.
, Brittany walking toward a nearby subway station and Jayna heading in the opposite direction, toward her car. Minutes later, Brittany realized she’d left her wallet behind, so she called Jayna’s cell phone and asked that she return to let her back in. Jayna told Brittany she’d left her laptop in the store, too, so she didn’t mind going back. The two met outside the store, then went in and deactivated the alarm, but didn’t lock the front door behind them because they thought they’d be in and out quickly.

After they were inside, however, two men, covered head to toe in dark clothes—with gloves, ski masks with narrow slits cut out for the eyes, and hoodies over their heads—slipped in behind them. They unleashed a brutal attack on the women. One was about six feet tall, and he dragged Jayna by her hair as she yelled for help.

The shorter one—closer to Brittany’s height of five feet three inches tall—threw Brittany to the ground, knocking her bag to the floor. “Where’s the money?” he demanded, making her open three small safes at the front of the store, then forcing Brittany back to the rear of the store, where he tied her up and raped her, at one point also violating her with a wooden hanger. He struck her in the forehead, hard enough to make it difficult for her to remember much of what happened next. Brittany said she never saw the skin color of the assailants, but when pressed by Mackie, said they’d sounded young and white.

Mackie told the crowd around her that Brittany was a believable witness. If she couldn’t remember something, she said so, and didn’t seem to make things up to fill in voids. “I didn’t doubt what she told me,” Mackie told the other detectives.

*

With the core team focusing on the crime scene, assisting detectives fanned out to talk to nearby store workers, hoping one of them might have seen or heard something. At 12:25
P.M.
, Detective Mike Carin walked into the adjacent Apple Store. The place was about the size of a tennis court, filled with customers who’d come for second-day sales of the iPad 2. Everyone had noticed the yellow crime-scene tape on the way in, all the cop cars and the media trucks, but none of them knew what was unfolding on the other side of the wall. Shoppers examining software products along the wall near the back of the store and asking questions to the Apple sales staffers were unaware that they were only five feet from Jayna’s body.

Detective Carin was five feet eight inches tall, and was nicknamed “Bucket” because of his large head. That he answered to the moniker, and was often the first to joke about it, was part of a disarming manner that had strangers easily opening up to him.

He said there’d been an “incident” next door, and asked to speak privately with anyone who had been working the night before. Carin was led to an upstairs office, and introduced to store manager Jana Svrzo. She told Carin that she’d started her shift the day before at 1:00
P.M.
, and that final customers hadn’t left until around 9:30. Then she began closing up.

“Did you hear anything?” Carin asked.

“Yes, screaming,” the manager said.

Carin tried not to change expression, though he could see the manager processing all that was going on—the hubbub outside, the detective asking questions. Still, she seemed intent on telling him exactly what she remembered, even if backpedaling at this point might’ve been in her own interest. The screams began sometime after 10:00
P.M.
, she said, and sounded like they were coming from the yoga store next door. And there were other sounds she could hear as well. “Dragging,” Carin wrote in his notes. “Something heavy hitting.”

Then, the manager said, she heard parts of what sounded like two women’s voices. Again, Carin jotted the recollections down.

“Talk to me. Don’t do this,” one of the women said. “Stop. Oh God,” said the other.

The voices would rise and fall, Jana said, and she couldn’t make out everything. She didn’t hear any male voices.

Carin could tell that the manager was getting more and more upset. She finally asked him what had happened. Someone had been killed, Carin told her.

At that, she started to sob.

*

Detective Carin walked back to the yoga store to tell his colleagues about the screams Jana Svrzo had heard. The screams’ timing tracked with information the other detectives had just gotten from ADT Security Systems, the company that monitored the yoga store’s burglar alarms. Someone had set the alarms the night before at 9:45 P.M., the same time Brittany and Jayna left. The alarms were then turned off at 10:05 P.M., when they would have returned. ADT said there was no further activity for the night, meaning people could have gone in and out unnoticed anytime after 10:05 P.M.

More clues flowed in. A patrolman found Jayna’s car, a silver Pontiac, parked about three blocks from the yoga store in a lot behind the farmers market. That seemed a little strange. If Jayna had driven back around 10:00 P.M., wouldn’t she have been able to get a closer spot?

Then the story of the parked car got really strange. A patrolman named Justin Tierney arrived at the front of the store and asked to see Drewry. Officer Tierney told Drewry that he had just heard about the recovered Pontiac and its connection to a murder, and realized he had seen that same car parked in the lot at 12:30 A.M. that morning—with someone sitting behind the wheel. Come again? Drewry asked, as he was quickly joined by others who wanted to hear the patrolman’s story.

So Tierney went through his story from the beginning. He’d worked an overnight shift in Bethesda. Just after midnight, he eased his patrol car through the parking lot, looking for anything out of the ordinary. He took note of the silver Pontiac, parked headfirst into a spot, because it had its lights on. Tierney said he drove by the back of the car, going 5 to 10 mph, and saw the car’s Texas plates.

“There was somebody in the car. Sitting in the car, in the driver’s seat,” he told the crowd.

Tierney added that he didn’t know if the person was a man or a woman. He’d considered stopping his cruiser to talk to the driver, but at the time it hadn’t seemed like a big deal. He was familiar with the county’s restrictions about smoking inside bars and restaurants, and he figured it was someone grabbing a smoke on a cold night.

Two hours after spotting the car, Tierney continued, he drove through the lot again—and again saw the car with its lights on. He didn’t notice if anyone was behind the wheel or not. About an hour later, Tierney said, he returned to the lot. The Pontiac was still there. Its lights were off. Tierney looked for occupants and didn’t see any.

The account seemed weird and tantalizing and a near miss now, of course, but one part of Tierney’s story also made a lot of sense: at the time, how could he have known it would matter?

Hunches are tricky things for detectives. They can create tunnel vision, blinding detectives to unexpected leads, or lend focus and halt investigations from spiraling off into fruitless directions. By early afternoon inside the yoga store, Craig Wittenberger, the sergeant supervising the case, had a strong hunch. It was tied to his favorite motto: “Evidence doesn’t lie. People do.”

The fifty-year-old knew Montgomery County inside and out, having grown up in the county as the son of two PhD researchers at the National Institutes of Health. As a kid he considered pursuing architecture, but leaned toward police work at about the time he started at the University of Maryland, where he picked up a degree in criminal justice. With his closely cropped hair, slight paunch, and dead-serious expressions, Wittenberger projected a first impression right out of Hollywood central casting of a grizzled, blunt-force detective. But at home in the placid, northern Montgomery community of Damascus, where he and his wife had raised three kids, Wittenberger liked nothing more than retreating to the woodworking equipment in his garage to build furniture. And at one point in his career, wanting a change of pace, he spent several years teaching constitutional law at Montgomery’s police academy, becoming so well-versed in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments that prosecutors began calling him to discuss U.S. Supreme Court opinions.

Inside the yoga store, Brittany Norwood’s story wasn’t adding up for him. To begin with, Detective Jim Drewry had told him about the phone call between Rachel Oertli, the store manager, and Jayna Murray, the woman now dead—the one in which Jayna had told her she suspected Brittany of shoplifting. What did that portend about Brittany’s character? And her descriptions of the attackers seemed too vague: ski masks generally exposed some amount of skin around the eyes, yet Brittany said she wasn’t sure of their race. But what really troubled the sergeant were photographs he was now reviewing that had been taken at the hospital. Yes, the bloody cut to Brittany’s forehead looked serious. But what about all those long, superficial cuts across her back, thighs, stomach, and breasts? They were straight, and appeared to be the same depth, as if Brittany hadn’t moved or squirmed when they were inflicted.

Wittenberger’s hunch was that whatever had happened the night before, Brittany might somehow have been in on it. He suspected that she knew the robbers, and had helped get them into the store. But then maybe things got way out of hand, and Brittany came up with a cover story that included injuring herself.

“I’m telling you. Something’s not right,” Wittenberger told Drewry and Captain David Gillespie, ticking off his troubles with Brittany’s story, notably the massive injuries to Jayna compared to all the superficial ones to Brittany.

Gillespie, whose command included the homicide unit, was relatively new to the post. One of the first cases he oversaw, oddly enough, also involved yoga. Two miles from where they stood now, an American University accounting professor had been found beaten to death inside her home. Thirteen hours into the investigation, patrolmen in Washington, D.C., spotted the professor’s stolen Jeep and tried to pull it over, prompting a wild chase, a crash, and the apprehension of the eighteen-year-old driver, who couldn’t quite explain how he came to be driving the Jeep. But detectives were unable to tie him to the killing and held off on charging him with murder. That turned out to be the right move, since new evidence had pointed them to the professor’s at-home yoga instructor—and the sole beneficiary of her half-million-dollar life-insurance policy—as the killer. The theory was that after killing the professor, staging a burglary, and ditching the Jeep (with keys inside for someone else to find), the yoga instructor had fled to Mexico, where detectives had established that he had settled into a life of teaching yoga, writing poetry, and trying to cash in the professor’s life insurance. With a little more information, the detectives were almost ready to make their move on him.

In this latest case, Gillespie didn’t discount what Wittenberger was saying. It was just that what he was saying was so potentially explosive. What if it got out that they were investigating a victim—a tiny, female rape victim—while the two madmen she described were on the loose? And what if the two struck again? Judging by the crime scene they’d evidently just created, they were crazy enough to do so, and soon. Nor did it escape Gillespie that this was Bethesda, home to many of the county’s politically elite residents, who’d be closely watching any development.