The Yoga Store Murder (6 page)

Brown paper bags were placed over Jayna’s hands to contain any evidence, though her chewed-off nails may have limited her ability to scratch skin cells off her assailant. Clear tape was wrapped around Jayna’s forearms, sealing the top of the bags. Several people lifted the corners of the body bag, now bloodied from Jayna’s body, into a second, clean bag, and the sounds of closing zippers could be heard inside the quiet store.

Everyone weighed what to do next. Jayna’s body needed to be loaded into a van and driven to the forensics lab in Baltimore, thirty-five miles away. Taking Jayna out via the front door would pass over the least amount of blood tracks. And the detectives could use a wheeled gurney. But reporters, cameramen, and photographers were all waiting to catch that very image—producing footage and pictures Jayna’s parents would inevitably see. Going out the back meant having to carry the body bag down the narrow rear hallway, across the bloodiest footprints. But the investigators were all wearing their booties, and knew to step over the thick pools of blood that were finally drying. The entire back parking lot was still taped off, and shielded by the bushes and fences. So that’s the direction they chose.

*

Detective Ruvin walked around to check in with the patrol officers who were guarding the front of the store along Bethesda Avenue. A woman approached, and told Ruvin she’d been outside the store walking her dog at 11:15 the night before and heard a woman shouting. She’d thought the sounds were coming from the street, though, not the store. The woman went on to say that at the end of the block, outside the Barnes & Noble, she saw a parked 1965 Dodge convertible with windows down and keys in the ignition. Near the car was a dark-skinned black man in a gray jacket. Anything remarkable about him? Ruvin asked. No, she said. The young detective went back into the store, shaking his head—as he knew, the police description of the suspects released to the public hours earlier had said nothing about race, because Brittany said she wasn’t sure herself. What stood out to Ruvin about the woman’s story was how it apparently exemplified her own fears.

At 8:00 P.M. Drewry and others were still in the store looking for clues, as they would for the next several weeks. Lululemon had given them “control” over the place, along with a set of keys, and not too surprisingly didn’t seem to be in a hurry to try to reopen for business. But Ruvin was anxious to do one more thing before he went home for the night: study surveillance video given to him earlier in the day by an Apple manager. It captured images from the night before in the parking lot behind their store, and with any luck, it also captured something behind the yoga shop.

Ruvin grabbed the taped-up, brown-paper evidence bag that held the bloody rope, walked to his car, and drove ten miles north to Montgomery’s police headquarters, a glass and brick structure nestled among a series of gleaming office parks along Research Boulevard, a name befitting all the biotech firms stationed there. Inside headquarters, though, the place was dingy and dated, the result of the department having moved in thirty-three years earlier in what was supposed to be a temporary stay. As the department grew, the building’s layout became ever more dysfunctional—carved up, partitioned off, overcrowded. Ruvin went in through a side door, wound around a kitchenette, and took a left down a hallway toward his cubicle with its four-foot high walls. He sat at a desk adorned with photos of his wife, Yasra, a native of Morocco, and their six-month-old son—and one of his favorite dumb criminals, a teenager who’d snapped his own picture in front of a bathroom mirror, which Ruvin had captioned: “Mohawk Haircut: $10. Shower Curtain with Sea Creatures: $40. Taking a photo of yourself with the victim’s stolen phone: $$$ Priceless $$$.”

For the most part, the young detective enjoyed his work. But it involved a staggering amount of “death calls”—not necessarily murders, but any passings that had to be checked out for signs of foul play: drug overdoses, suicides, drownings, healthy people not waking up in the morning. Talking about all the gloom with his wife the previous year, Ruvin had come up with an idea to create some balance in his life by starting a side business as a wedding videographer. He’d discovered a talent for the work when editing the lousy footage from their own wedding a friend had taken, which Ruvin had been able to salvage by editing with a program that allowed for cuts, fade-ins, background music, and other effects. It had been relatively easy for him to do, and all their friends thought the video had been done professionally. The side business shooting and editing wedding videos might not make him rich, but being around the happy gatherings—with their dancing, drinking, and laughing—seemed about as far from death as you could get. So the couple bought two cameras, placed an advertisement on Craigslist, spread the word, and launched their business, doing a handful of weddings a year.

Ruvin popped the surveillance DVD into his computer and scrolled to shortly before 10:00 P.M. For more than an hour he saw nothing helpful, just cars, couples, individuals in light-colored clothing. Just after 11 P.M., two men suddenly appeared from the left, walking right. One looked to be about six feet tall. The other was shorter. Both were dressed head to toe in black clothing. One wore a knit cap, similar to the way robbers were known to roll up their ski masks after leaving a crime scene. Ruvin scrolled the DVD backward, slowed it down, kept repeating the images. He couldn’t see the men’s faces, but he could see one of them talking on a cell phone. Tremendous, Ruvin thought: if they found the guy, they could use exact cell-phone call logs and GPS tracking technology to further tie him to the area. Ruvin called Wittenberger. “I think I see these two guys,” he said.

The sergeant was about to leave the store anyway. Twenty minutes later, he stood over Ruvin’s shoulder, watching the video snippet over and over. Wittenberger strained his neck to look to the far left of the image, trying to make out a piece of lululemon athletica’s back door. He couldn’t. But the men were moving quickly. One had a backpack.

If Brittany had been in on it, Wittenberger thought, surely she wouldn’t have described the guys so exactly; she would have at least come up with different heights and different colored clothes for these guys. And why say it was a pair of assailants? Why not one, or three? “Well, my fucking theory’s out the window,” he told Ruvin. “I guess it is two masked men.”

Early on Sunday, March 13, 2011, Detective Dimitry Ruvin had two things to pick up before driving to Jayna Murray’s autopsy in Baltimore: the rope at Montgomery County Police headquarters and Detective Mike “Bucket” Carin at his home. By 8:00 A.M. the skyline of downtown Baltimore appeared, burnished by new office buildings and high-rise hotels. But off to the left and right, as the detectives knew, were the low-slung, row-house neighborhoods that served up more killings in a given month than Montgomery County might see in a year.

The detectives drove into an area just west of downtown, parking in a garage across from the state’s five-story, brand-spanking-new, $43 million Forensic Medical Center. Ruvin grabbed his paper bag and notebook. The two detectives eventually were led into one of the building’s two cavernous autopsy rooms—fifty feet long, thirty feet wide. The gurney holding Jayna’s body had already been wheeled into position, next to a stainless-steel table that held knives, scalpels, clamps, and other dissection tools. The body bag was zipped open. Jayna was still on her back, just how they’d last seen her in the store.

A thirty-one-year-old autopsy technician in a white coat introduced himself as Mario Alston. “What happened?” he asked.

Ruvin explained about the crime scene at the yoga shop in Bethesda. He told him about the suspects they were looking for—two guys in masks, and how they’d attacked two workers inside the shop. “These two assholes go into the store, kill this girl, rape this other girl. It’s crazy.”

Alston was shocked. Moments before, when he’d unzipped the bag and seen Jayna’s distorted face and the athletic clothes she was wearing, he’d thought maybe she’d been hit by a car while riding a bicycle, maybe even slammed headfirst into a tree.

“Are you kidding me?” Alston asked Ruvin, who said he wasn’t, and handed over the brown paper bag.

Two doctors joined them: Mary Ripple and Kristin Johnson. They cut open the bag and looked at the rope, noting its dark-red stains and coarse fibers. A lab photographer started taking pictures. Ripple bent down to look at Jayna’s hands and forearms, quickly noting what the detectives had seen the night before: dozens of defensive wounds. Entangled in Jayna’s bloodstained fingers were fibers similar to those on the rope, and hairs similar to her own.

Dr. Ripple knew this autopsy would take all day. “Uh-oh,” the forty-eight-year-old Ripple had said to herself as she’d looked through pictures from the scene in her office earlier that morning. She was one of the agency’s deputy directors, and supervised the work of other doctors. For cases like the Montgomery one—numerous injuries, unknown weapons—she often took part herself. Twelve bodies had arrived from around the state over the previous twenty-four hours. Eleven of the cases seemed fairly straightforward, including a gunshot victim from Baltimore, a traffic fatality from a rural part of the state, and several drug overdoses. But the murder case from Montgomery County was something else.

Ripple, Johnson, and Alston removed Jayna’s blood-soaked clothes, putting them in individual evidence bags. They looked over Jayna’s body and took swab samples that later could be tested for DNA. Ripple stared at Jayna’s long hair, and wondered aloud if they could get away without shaving it off. It wasn’t a question so much as a remark of frustration. If they didn’t, how else could they evaluate, let alone count, the injuries? And Jayna’s face was so distorted, Ripple knew her family wouldn’t want an open-casket funeral. “We have to,” she told the others.

Everyone paused to watch Alston delicately go to work with a pair of scissors, antibacterial soap that acted like shaving cream, and an orange disposable razor. He tried to collect as much of Jayna’s long hair as he could so it could be returned to her family. Maybe they would want it washed and sewn back in before she was buried. Every inch or so, he came across a red gouge in Jayna’s skull that he had to work around. Some were circular—as small as the tip of a ballpoint pen or as large as a quarter. Others were straight, stretching for two inches and in some cases turning at right angles. Alston carefully worked his way to the four-inch wide, open wound on the back of Jayna’s head. As he cut and shaved, everyone could clearly see how the wound corresponded to a section of skin on Jayna’s scalp that flapped open.

After he’d shaved her head, Alston washed down Jayna’s face, head, and body with a narrow hose, as the red outflow ran down little canals on the edges of the exam table and into a collection sink.

It was time for the two medical examiners, Ripple and Johnson, to begin individually documenting each injury. They typically did so by mapping each wound on relatively simple forms—one that was an outline of the body, another that was an outline of the head—but the doctors quickly realized that their simple head outline was too small for them to list the extent of Jayna’s injuries. They instead went to plan B: printing out color photographs of different portions of Jayna’s head and drawing wound diagrams directly on those printouts. The doctors also had to measure the length and depth of each injury. They sorted through wounds on top of wounds, and tried to determine whether each injury was caused by something sharp that cut into the skin or by something blunt that had caused the skin to burst open. The injuries were extraordinary, but their notes reflected the dry medical nature of it all: “Irregular curvilinear lacerations . . . subcutaneous tissue of the right frontal scalp . . . helix and the antitragus of the right ear . . . outer table of the skull oriented on the 10 to 4 o’clock axis with the convex aspect of the fracture.”

Ripple could envision broad outlines of the murder. With the first blows, Jayna probably reached for her head reflexively, which is how what appeared to be her own hairs ended up in her hands. She tried to shield herself as the blows kept coming. The killer, or killers, probably used the rope late in the attack, maybe after Jayna had fallen to the ground. Those fibers in her fingers, Ripple figured, meant that Jayna had been able to get her hands under the rope and loosen it even as she was dying.

Ripple could feel anger swelling. Such an immediate, emotional reaction was unusual, but she couldn’t help identifying with the victim. Ripple had always been strong-minded, growing up on a small dairy farm in western Maryland and playing all kinds of high school sports. In college, she taught volleyball to help pay tuition. And now, on the table was a younger version of herself—someone who’d tried to fight off the attack even after becoming dazed and disoriented. Ripple knew she’d have done so as well.

She and Johnson examined in detail the open wound on the back of Jayna’s head. Within its borders, they counted thirteen fractures, which had caused that portion of the skull to cave into Jayna’s brain. The doctors compared the area with Jayna’s forehead, which was gouged with similar patterns that hadn’t caused fractures. The doctors noted that the front of Jayna’s skull was unusually thick. “Maybe that’s why the front of her head didn’t break,” Johnson told Ripple.

As the autopsy entered its second hour, the detectives moved to a second-floor observation deck where they could sit down, talk on their phones, and still watch. They knew the autopsy was their best chance to connect Jayna’s injuries to the various tools they’d found in the store. From there, they hoped to connect the tools to her killers.

Ripple eventually came up to visit. She said they hadn’t totaled the wounds yet, and that she couldn’t tell if Jayna had been raped, but based on bloodstains they’d seen early in the exam, it appeared that she had been. The doctor went back downstairs to continue her work.

Ruvin’s phone beeped. It was his sergeant, Craig Wittenberger. Ruvin told him about the possible rape. “They beat this girl down,” he said. Wittenberger let out a long, slow sigh. Then he got to his point: he needed Ruvin and Carin’s help researching a suspect. “Come on back in,” Wittenberger said.