The Yoga Store Murder (7 page)

*

By 3:00 P.M., Ripple and her physician colleague Johnson were inside Ripple’s fifth-floor office, having finished the main exam downstairs. Of particular difficulty was analyzing all the wounds to Jayna’s face and head. The doctors laid out the printed photographs, now diagramed with little marks that mapped out all the injuries. Johnson used a red pen to circle the slashing and stabbing injuries, and a black to circle the pounding injuries. The doctors tried to be conservative in their totals. The wounds atop wounds were difficult to measure, so each one was counted as a single wound. Ripple knew it could be weeks before she had a precise total, after they’d had a chance to study their notes and all thirty-seven autopsy photos. Preliminarily, though, the doctors had found more than two hundred injuries to Jayna’s face, head, and neck, and more than one hundred to her hands, arms, and shoulders.

Ripple and Johnson also counted at least five different wound patterns, meaning at least five different weapons had been used. Ripple noted quarter-inch-wide circles that surrounded smaller circles on Jayna’s hands and skull. “I bet that’s the back end of a wrench,” she told Johnson.

The kind of wrench she had in mind was one she’d seen in two previous homicides—an adjustable, crescent-shaped tool, which the killer would rotate 90 degrees to deliver the most forceful blow. The resulting mark mirrored part of the wrench’s adjusting mechanism. Ripple headed downstairs, found a maintenance worker’s tool cart and borrowed a wrench to compare with the photographs. Perfect match.

The medical examiners had also found two rope-burn injuries on Jayna, one to her throat, the second to her chin, perhaps made after she’d been able to loosen the rope. And another horrific pattern emerged from all the injuries: blood in the wound paths. That meant Jayna’s heart was still beating, that she had still been alive for all of them. Ripple hoped that, even as Jayna’s heart was still pumping blood, she was unconscious toward the end.

Of all the injuries, the worst wasn’t the four-inch long gash; it was a stabbing wound at the base of her skull. The opening measured one inch long and only one-sixteenth of an inch wide. But a thin knife of some kind had gone deep enough to chip off a piece of vertebra, pierce her skull, and cut the base of her brain. She couldn’t have survived for another ninety seconds after that. That wound path also showed blood, indicating it was probably the fatal blow.
Jayna’s murderer finally figured out a way to kill her
, Ripple thought.

As 5:00 P.M. approached, the case weighed on the doctor in a way that only a handful of cases ever had before. Ripple dwelled on the dozens of wounds to Jayna’s hands and arms. Most, if not all, appeared to come from Jayna defending herself, not from her trying to deliver blows herself. In Ripple’s mind, that meant Jayna likely received a powerful strike early in the assault that dazed her.
Goddammit
, Ripple said to herself.
I wish she could have been able to fight back
.

Mario Alston, the autopsy technician, was also affected by the case. Maybe it was in part because of Jayna’s age, so close to his and his wife’s own. When he went home that evening to the town house in downtown Baltimore he shared with his wife and two young sons, he found himself telling his wife about the case, something he rarely did.

There wasn’t a whole lot the thirty-one-year-old hadn’t seen. One of his first jobs out of college had been helping FEMA identify the bloated bodies of drowning victims in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Since joining the Baltimore state lab, he’d helped perform more than 3,000 autopsies. But he couldn’t remember another murder so horrific.

What he kept going over in his head was how Jayna Murray’s killer or killers had had time to watch her suffer, time to watch any emotion she had fade away, time to think about what they were doing. Eventually, though, Alston walked to the refrigerator, pulled out a cold Guinness, sat down, and tried to put it out of his mind.

The Montgomery County detectives discussed what kind of men could have invaded the yoga store and unleashed such an attack. It seemed unlikely they were experienced robbers, who preferred to hit cash-heavy businesses and dash out with their money. What fit better, unfortunately, was a pair of crazed men, or at least one crazy man who had convinced a buddy to go along with him. One of them murdered Jayna while the other assaulted Brittany; then they both dashed off. Maybe they were locals, familiar enough with Bethesda to know about the yoga store and its staff of pretty young women?

Already, the initial wave of what would become more than 300 telephone calls and e-mails had poured into the department’s tip lines. Most were too vague and unrelated to pursue. Others centered on the same person, a forty-year-old character named Keith Lockett. “All of Bethesda has called on this guy,” Detective Randy Kucsan, the investigator who’d found the box of zipties in the rear hallway, told Detective Dimitry Ruvin when he’d returned from Baltimore.

The investigators were skeptical, wondering if Keith Lockett stood out in the area simply because he was a tall, black homeless man with a tendency to get drunk and obnoxious. In a way they were right; homeless people largely went unseen in Bethesda, even as they were being helped. Bethesda Cares, a local nonprofit where Keith was a regular, operated from a nondescript storefront a half-mile north of the yoga store. One of its staff members made regular rounds to homeless people to invite them to come inside the Bethesda Cares building during the daytime. There, they could receive counseling, send and get mail, shower, shave, drink coffee, eat lunch, and get help finding a shelter or a subsidized apartment. Bethesda Cares also ran a “Clothing Closet,” much of it designer stuff donated by Bethesda residents. Once cleaned up and outfitted in nice, if not perfectly fitting, clothes, Bethesda Cares’s clients filtered back into the streets, some making their way to the library or the second-floor café at Barnes & Noble. Keith could be inconspicuous as well, having recently held a job stocking produce at a grocery store. But among some Bethesda merchants and beat cops, he was also known to drink too much beer and uncork sexually charged comments to women. “I’m terrified of him,” one of the callers had told Kucsan.

It was all pretty squishy. None of the callers put Keith near the store at the time of the murder. And Brittany had said the assailants sounded white. But other callers noted that Keith hung out with a short guy and hadn’t been seen at the store where he bought his beer since the afternoon of the murder. The detectives printed out his ten-page, single-spaced rap sheet and talked to Bethesda patrolmen who knew Keith. A portrait of instability emerged. Born in Washington, D.C., he’d graduated from high school and had a long career as an amateur boxer. The arrests started by the time he was nineteen years old: cocaine possession, assault and battery, robbery, carrying a loaded gun, disorderly conduct, beating someone with a stick. Not all the charges stuck, but it seemed clear that Keith Lockett was no stranger to trouble. The detectives found an active warrant charging Keith with furnishing alcohol to a fifteen-year-old. That was relatively small-scale stuff but would allow them to bring Keith in for questioning if they found him. He was definitely someone they wanted to speak with.

The detectives headed to Bethesda to visit the shops and try to find more outdoor surveillance video. They arrived to find reporters staking out the yoga store, asking for interviews. The detectives declined and called their media-affairs colleague, Captain Paul Starks, who hustled down to Bethesda, then stood outside the yoga store in front of the cameras and announced that detectives were canvassing the neighborhood.

Around the corner, Ruvin found himself inside a store, speaking with a manager and asking if he knew anyone suspicious in the area.

“Yeah, there’s this guy, Keith Lockett,” the manager answered. On the morning of the murder, the manager continued, he’d seen Keith and two white guys walking toward the street where the yoga store was, Bethesda Avenue. “He had a backpack, and I’ve never seen him with a backpack before.”

Ruvin immediately thought of the video images from behind the store: two men, one tall with a backpack, the other short. He walked back to the yoga store, where his colleagues were searching for more clues, and told them about the backpack witness. Sergeant Craig Wittenberger was intrigued.

More than that, though, the sergeant had a sneaking feeling there was more to be learned right around them. He kept looking, walking up to a table in the fitting area. There were drawers underneath it. The table slid easily and was rotated slightly off center. Wittenberger kicked himself, realizing the table had probably gotten pushed against the wall during the melee. Yet no one had examined the backside, underneath the table, facing the wall.

With the table now pushed away from the wall, Wittenberger bent down and looked at items on the shelves. He saw two pairs of running shoes without laces. A women’s pair rested on a large men’s pair. What were they doing in a store that didn’t sell shoes? With his gloved hands, Wittenberger placed them on the wooden floor. Both pairs showed traces of small red stains, as if someone had cleaned off blood but not gotten it all. Wittenberger picked up one of the size-14 Reeboks, and turned it over. His eyebrows rose toward his nearly bald head. He carried the shoe to the back stockroom, where the bloody shoe prints were particularly clear. Ruvin followed him. Wittenberger compared the sole to one of the prints. All of the wavy, waffle patterns lined up perfectly.

You gotta be kidding me,
Wittenberger thought.

“These are the shoes,” Ruvin said.

The two talked about Keith Lockett and his backpack. Homeless guys carry extra clothes around. That kind of fit. But why leave the shoes in the store? Why not toss them in a Dumpster? Then again, some of the behavior in Keith’s police file didn’t make sense either.

They decided to amp up the search for Keith, calling in a team of undercover officers to try to find him. It didn’t take long. In short order, the undercover officers called in a report that perked up the detectives. Keith had turned up six miles away, at Washington Adventist Hospital, with bloody clothes and a swollen eye, and the undercover officers were heading there quickly. “Maybe Jayna put up a good fight,” Ruvin said.

The undercover officers called the detectives back at the store, recounting the conversation. Excitement grew. Maybe Jayna’s DNA would show up in blood on Keith’s clothes. Ruvin speculated that Keith had avoided a closer hospital in Bethesda because he didn’t want to be recognized. “I think this is our guy,” he said.

The officers found Keith in a hallway of the emergency room, lying down on a bed with an ice pack over his left eye, a swollen jaw, and a bloody nose. Keith recognized one of the officers, Curtis Jacobs. “I know you,” the patient said. “We go way back, man.”

Jacobs asked Keith what had happened to his eye and nose. His first account: a black guy in dreadlocks hit him the night before at a club. It was a lucky shot, the former boxer said, and had caught him off guard. Keith didn’t know the guy’s name, but said he was in his thirties. Keith repeated the story, but this time said the assailant punched him on a street outside of Bethesda Cares—and tried to rob him. Keith said the man hung out with a short “Spanish dude,” the pair had robbed stores in Bethesda recently, and they had cut “that girl.” Jacobs asked Keith how he knew this. By hanging out on the streets, Keith said. Then he got teary eyed, and said he was across the street when the woman got hurt. “The black dude and the Spanish dude robbed the lady and cut her. I seen it with my two eyes.”

Detective Jim Drewry hurried over to Washington Adventist Hospital to get Keith before he was discharged. The detective arrived at 7:20 P.M., and found the suspect still wearing a hospital gown. The undercover officers gave Drewry Keith’s bloody clothes, which had been placed in evidence bags. Drewry took them to his car, came back, and waited for Keith to be discharged. At 9:30 P.M., the two walked out of the hospital, Drewry in a leather jacket and steadying his handcuffed prisoner, who was wearing socks, undershorts, and the gown. Drewry laid a white bedsheet on his front passenger seat, which he found to be a safer way to transport someone, particularly when he didn’t have a partner with him. The suspect asked Drewry about his clothes, and allowed that the man who hit him was named Ricky. Drewry stayed away from direct questions about the yoga store, wanting to first get Keith to the station, where he could advise him of his rights to remain silent and contact a lawyer.

Just before 10:00 P.M., the pair arrived at the police station. Drewry led his gowned suspect through the side door, past the detectives’ cubicles, and into a gray, dank interview room—nine feet long, seven feet wide, outfitted with a black metal table, three black chairs, and a secret audio and video recording system that had been activated upon their arrival.

“In here, Keith, you can sit down in here,” Drewry said.

“I gotta pee, man,” Keith said.

“Okay, we’re going to let you do that.”

“I can’t pee with two handcuffs on me.”

“I’m going to get those off, okay. Trust me dude.”

The two left, returning several minutes later. Drewry guided Keith to a seat and handcuffed his left wrist to a metal ring on one of the table legs. Keith looked around. “Where are my clothes at?”

Drewry assured Keith he had his clothes. “I’ll be back witcha’ in a minute,” he said, and left the room.

Left by himself, Keith quickly dozed off. Out in the squad room, Drewry, Ruvin, and Wittenberger slowly started going through Keith’s clothes. There were dried blood drops on his Lakers cap, sweatshirt, jeans, and white-leather Air Jordans. All intriguing signs. Keith’s black Nike jacket was also streaked with blood. But it seemed too fresh to have been left Friday night. The detectives felt no real hurry to go back into the interview room. They wanted Keith sober enough to answer yes to question 6 of the “Advice of Rights” form: “Do you understand what I just said?”