The Yoga Store Murder (5 page)

“We aren’t going down this route unless you are 100 percent, dead-on certain,” Gillespie said.

Wittenberger said he wasn’t anywhere near certain. Even with his doubts, he knew there could be another side that explained them. Rape victims can sometimes take days to sort through the trauma and remember exactly what happened. Maybe Brittany’s story would start to make more sense. And he knew where Gillespie was coming from regarding the sensitivity of the case. If they got on the Brittany train and it derailed, there’d be hell to pay.

“Just work the scene,” Gillespie told him.

The detectives did so, continuing to avoid a detailed study of the victim’s body. They knew that once detectives started to focus on her injuries, the energy of the whole scene would naturally focus on that, and they could miss their best chance to pick up something critical twenty or thirty feet away. At 1:45 P.M., three hours after the detectives had entered the store, Detective Ruvin decided that the time had finally come to examine the rear hallway. Ruvin and an assisting detective, Randy Kucsan—a six feet two, forty-seven-year-old with a spiky hairdo and a goatee—walked out the front of the shop, past the Apple Store, and turned left down a narrow walkway to the rear parking lot. It was secluded, bordered by bushy pine trees, a fence, and, now, yellow police tape.

Patrol officers guarded the store’s rear-door, emergency exit. Ruvin and Kucsan examined the bloodstained push-bar inside. On the right side of the bar, they saw a key inserted into the lock, indicating that the fire alarm had been deactivated. Had the assailants slipped out this way? That ran counter to what the detectives saw when they looked down the store’s rear hallway. There were dried, bloody shoe tracks coming at them, but the tracks stopped at the doorway. The detectives couldn’t pick up a track on the pavement outside. “The blood stops,” Kucsan said.

They discussed possible explanations. Maybe the assailants had gone out the front, though that seemed risky. Maybe they came out this door, but just before doing so, put their bloody shoes in an athletic bag—there were certainly plenty available in the store. This would have allowed them to get to a car without tracking blood. Criminals often tried a lot of things to cover up evidence these days, having watched just enough
CSI
episodes to believe they might work. The detectives stepped into the hallway. They had a clear sight line to the body, fifteen feet away, and the blood-spattered walls surrounding her. Could Jayna have tracked the blood to the rear emergency door, even touched the push-bar, trying to escape? Then gotten dragged back? Whatever the case, the killer was able to trap her in that far end. The detectives stuck with their methodical, inch-by-inch observations.

This part of the hallway was cluttered. Full trash bags sat ready to be taken to the Dumpster. The bags were transparent, another common antitheft practice in retail that kept employees from hiding goods and sneaking them out. Columns of cardboard boxes, filled with clothing, and stamped “lululemon,” were stacked to the ceiling. On the floor next to one of them, detectives saw a turned-off or disabled BlackBerry—likely the latter since its center scroller button was missing. Ruvin hoped it belonged to the killer, but it was almost certainly Jayna’s, likely swatted away during the attack. Nearly ten minutes had passed since they entered the hallway. Kucsan now noticed a box that had been obscured by the clutter. “These are the fucking zipties,” he said. The detectives pulled one out. Kucsan asked Ruvin, if two guys rushed into the store and attacked both saleswomen, how would they know to come all the way back here to find these things? It was possible that the men had brought their own zipties, or had forced Brittany or Jayna to tell them where they could find restraints. But both scenarios seemed like a stretch.

Kucsan and Ruvin finally arrived at the victim. They saw the red, open wound to the back of her head, the one that had been so visible in the photographs taken earlier by the patrol officer. The wound seemed to be about four inches across, and the product of repeated blows. Up close, the volume of blood spatter on the walls was stunning. And the detectives knew it could have gotten there one of two ways: as the killer drew back a blood-drenched weapon, flinging blood onto the walls, or as the killer pounded a weapon into a surface already covered in blood.

Looking directly down at Jayna’s body, the detectives could see that her right arm was actually crossed under her body, coming out on the left side—an indication she had been faceup at some point during the attack and may have been rolled over. Resting on her left hand was a Buddha statue similar to the green one they’d seen hours earlier near the bathroom. “Maybe she was hit with that,” Ruvin said to Kucsan. “Maybe she tried to defend herself.” The detectives noted other weapons near Jayna’s head: rope, a claw hammer with blood on the handle, a wrench, and three box cutters: essentially, razor blades with handles. Also lying across the victim’s left arm and shoulder were a blood-spattered, orange Dyson vacuum cleaner and a red metal box labeled with masking tape: “Everyday Tools.” The detectives didn’t want to open it, fearing disruption to any trace evidence on the body. Other items were scattered near her head—two paintbrushes, a roll of duct tape, a bicycle reflector. Some of the items, the detectives and crime-scene investigators figured, might have spilled out of the toolbox.

The body still hadn’t been formally identified, though there was little doubt this was Jayna Murray. Detective Ruvin tried to make the match with Jayna’s photo from her driver’s license and student ID, but all he could really see was matted and bloodstained hair on the back of her head. That was as far as Ruvin wanted to go until a forensic investigator from the state autopsy lab arrived.

As detectives continued to comb through the store, the Montgomery County Police Department’s media-affairs captain, Paul Starks, had begun talking to the gaggle of reporters parked outside. The hope was to give out information that could draw in potential witnesses. Starks gave reporters the basics: two male suspects, last seen wearing dark clothes, gloves, and masks, had managed to slip into the lululemon athletica store after closing time. They had killed one of the workers and sexually assaulted the other, who’d survived and was at a local hospital. “We only have one eyewitness, and she’s been through a lot,” Starks said.

As a news story, it had all the elements that the media and public craved: innocent female victims, madmen on the loose, an unfolding mystery in a place that was supposed to be so perfect. Reporters stopped people walking down Bethesda Avenue and interviewed them. “It’s just shocking that it could happen here in this neighborhood at a time when seemingly there’s a lot of people around,” a man told the local NBC television station. “It’s really just scary.”

For Brittany Norwood’s family, it was all that and much more, of course. At the hospital, she’d given nurses a phone number for her sister Marissa, her upstairs neighbor in the town house. Marissa had rushed over to see her, and the two were soon joined by their sister Candace, an obstetrician whose sons were so fond of Brittany. She spoke with Brittany’s treating physician about administering drugs and vaccines to combat possible exposure to HIV or hepatitis B. Candace was able to help explain the risks of the drugs to her sister. Everyone agreed it was the prudent course. Out in Washington State, Brittany’s parents made plans to fly across the country the next day. They wondered if they would have to put their daughter back together. And they thought about Brittany’s poor coworker’s family, knowing her parents would never get the chance.

Back at the store, Detective Jim Drewry already had spoken once with Brittany’s mother, Larkita, and Jayna Murray’s mother, Phyllis. With Larkita, he could stress the positives: her daughter was safe, under doctors’ care at the hospital, and being protected by police officers there. With Jayna’s mother, however, he’d had nothing positive to tell her, and instead was forced to dodge her questions. At the time of that call, the detectives hadn’t even been inside the back hallway. Drewry was pretty sure the body there was Jayna, but certainly not sure enough to tell her mother.

That horrible dance had started after a police dispatcher called Drewry to tell him that Phyllis Murray had called to report her daughter missing. The dispatcher passed along Phyllis’s phone number, which had been confirmed as legitimate. Drewry called, and Phyllis answered, speaking with the quiet confidence of someone telling herself it would still work out. “I understand that my daughter is missing, that she was closing the store,” she’d told Drewry in her decidedly Midwestern accent. Phyllis said she’d heard there was a robbery at the store, with a survivor, maybe a kidnapping, maybe someone who was dead. She gave Drewry her daughter’s driver’s license number, passport number, and the VIN to her 2009 two-door Pontiac. She told him about Jayna’s nervous habit of chewing her fingernails. “She has no fingernails,” Phyllis said. “Another thing is, she will have an orange sapphire earring in one ear.” Drewry knew what she wanted to hear—that somehow the information she was giving him would rule her daughter out as dead. Since he couldn’t give her that, he assured her they were working hard on the case, and wrapped up the call quickly. “I will call when I know more,” Drewry said.

Hours passed, until finally, at 5:30 P.M., Drewry’s phone rang. It was a Houston area code, but a different number than Jayna’s mother. Drewry answered it, and listened as a man with a slight Texas twang introduced himself as David Murray, Jayna’s father. Drewry was stuck. This number hadn’t been confirmed by the dispatchers. There were sensible rules to follow in times like this, since anyone could be calling him, claiming to be Jayna’s father. Drewry politely said he had to go, hung up, and considered what to do. There really was no more doubt about who was in the rear hallway. Brittany had said Jayna was attacked there; Jayna’s wallet had been found in the store; her car was discovered three blocks away; no one—Jayna’s coworkers, her friends, her family—could reach her.

Drewry didn’t want Jayna’s parents to hear it from anyone else, but despite his decades in police work, death notifications never got easier. In fact, Drewry had noticed them getting more difficult. Maybe it was the compound effect of having delivered them so many times. Maybe it was the fact that each time made him think of his own kids, now grown and probably about the same age as the Murrays’ children. Drewry picked up the phone and called Jayna’s mother. Phyllis answered. Drewry said he had just heard from David Murray.

“Yes, he’s my husband. He’s sitting right here.” The detective apologized for not being there in person to say this. “I’m so sorry to tell you,” he said, “that your daughter is deceased.”

By late afternoon, Dale Giampetroni, a forensic investigator from the state autopsy lab, had arrived and was led to the rear hallway. She took photographs of Jayna Murray’s body and slowly pulled away items resting against her shoulder and head. Giampetroni unfolded a white plastic body bag and laid it on the floor near Jayna’s feet. For now, the bag would serve as sort of a plastic gurney—a way to move the body into the main part of the store, where they’d have more room to examine it. Giampetroni and Detective Dimitry Ruvin lifted Jayna’s body, placed it on the bag, grabbed the bag’s corners, and carried it out of the hallway.

Behind them, two crime-scene investigators collected the items that had been near Jayna’s head. The red toolbox, as it turned out, was empty, so the investigators placed some of the bloodstained items inside it: the box cutters, paintbrushes, a bicycle reflector, and something that had been obscured by several items resting atop it—a foot-long metal bar. The crime-scene investigators closed the toolbox, assigned it a crime-scene number (CS-35), and placed the toolbox inside its own evidence box.

The main part of the store, where Jayna’s body now was, became the center of attention. The store’s stylish lights offered a flood of bright light under which to work. The brown-paper shields over the front windows offered privacy. Giampetroni and about ten detectives, supervisors and crime-scene investigators went to work, bending over Jayna’s body, still facedown on the plastic bag.

They looked at Jayna’s fingers, at the chewed-down nails her mother had mentioned. Detective Jim Drewry saw clumps of hair, which she must have pulled from somewhere, in Jayna’s clenched fingers. On the backs of her hands were cuts and bruises, but the dried blood made it hard to figure out too much about them. At the base of her neck, they noted two significant stab wounds, the depths of which would be measured the next day during the autopsy. Giampetroni lifted Jayna’s shirt and saw another wound in the middle of her back.

Their work was accompanied by constant chatter—notes to be compared, pictures to be snapped, cop wisecracks to be made. The time came to turn Jayna over.

What they saw shut them up fast.

Her face, Ruvin thought, was destroyed. Deep gashes and gouges—too many to count—crisscrossed Jayna’s forehead, cheeks, lips, and chin. Beyond all the wounds, Jayna’s face was bruised and bloodied into a grotesque shade of purple. It didn’t seem human anymore. Ruvin thought back to Jayna’s smiling image on her driver’s license. He couldn’t recognize her.

Ruvin tried to break the silence. “Someone say something.”

“Oh my God,” Giampetroni said.

She and the others bent closer. Their thoughts turned to weapons. Which ones had done this? The hammer found in the rear hallway was a good possibility. The box cutters seemed too small. What about the serrated knife hanging in the kitchen? It was in pristine condition, and didn’t have the look of something that had been jabbed into a skull.

Conversation slowly picked up again around such topics. Giampetroni took photographs from every angle. She could see how the rope had fallen away from Jayna’s face. She pulled it away and told Ruvin to take it with him to the autopsy the next day so the doctor could compare it with the wounds to Jayna’s neck.