The Yoga Store Murder (8 page)

At 11:15 P.M., Drewry went back into the interview room and offered Keith something to drink.

“I want cappuccino,” he said.

“Well, that one we don’t do,” Drewry said, “because this ain’t the Ritz.”

Keith laughed. He said he’d take some water.

Drewry left, eventually returning with Ruvin.

“How you doing, Mr. Lockett?” Ruvin asked.

“I wish I had some clothes on,” Keith said.

Ruvin retrieved a dark-green prison jumpsuit, which Keith declined to wear, saying they were trying to make him look like a criminal. “How about a blanket instead?” Keith nodded, and Ruvin helped tuck in the suspect, his left wrist still handcuffed to the table leg.

Drewry started going through some basic biographical questions. Keith spoke of his boxing career. “Five-time Golden Gloves champion of the world! No joke! No joke!” He grew quiet when telling Drewry that both of his parents had died young. “I went off the hook and started drinking and stuff.”

Drewry began to read Keith his constitutional rights. But the suspect kept interrupting him, careening from one subject to the other: “I was drinking and he hit me . . . Guys I know killed somebody in front of my face; they’re trying to kill me . . . I need protection . . . I’m schizophrenic affective . . . I need to be on my medication . . . I gotta hang out on the street and watch my back . . .”

Drewry got nowhere. “Let’s take a break.”

“Don’t leave me here,” Keith said. “I can’t stay by myself.”

Ruvin stayed behind. The detective unlocked Keith’s handcuffs, hoping that might put him at ease. Keith poured ice cubes out of a red plastic cup, placed them on a paper towel, folded over its corners, and held the cold compress up to his swollen eye. Ruvin moved one chair closer to him, again trying to establish a bond. Every time Keith said something bizarre, Ruvin thought, it showed that he might be off-kilter enough to have attacked both women. Finally, at 1:15 A.M., after the two had been alone for more than an hour, Ruvin brought Keith to the cusp of talking about a recent robbery he had seen in Bethesda. The detective leaned back in his chair, allowing the suspect to describe it in his own words.

“I just seen them young kids run away,” Keith said, lifting his hand and making a fluttering-away motion. “That’s the only thing I seen, the young kids just run away. Them young kids be on their skateboards who hang out at the Metro station. You need to be talking to them.”

Out in the squad room, Drewry watched part of the interview on a monitor, confirming the feeling he’d had since meeting Keith at the hospital: the man seemed too addled to partner up with another assailant, to use the zipties, to clean off evidence, as suggested by the Formula 409 bottle and scrub brush found in the back stockroom. Yes, Keith appeared to know something about the yoga store murder, but at this point who in Bethesda didn’t? Wittenberger shared Drewry’s views, and Drewry decided he would go back in, act like he thought Keith killed Jayna, and see what happened. It went against Drewry’s nature to confront someone without having any good evidence. But it was also 1:30 in the morning, and Keith had started going in circles again.

Drewry walked back into the interview room, sat down, and told Keith he was going to check the blood on his clothes to see if it matched the blood of the murdered woman.

“You think I had something to do with that?” Keith asked.

“Yup.”

“Check my blood!” Keith yelled. “Check my blood! And you’re going to be wrong!”

More ramblings, more assertions about the skateboard kids. Drewry tried again.

“This woman that got killed inside the store. Did you do it?”

“No. No. Hell no! Nah. Nah.”

“And this woman that got raped inside the store, did you do it?”

“No, no, no. I swear to God no!”

“Because that’s what people are thinking: that you’re playing all these silly games because you killed this woman and raped this woman inside this store.”

“Why would I do that? I would never do no shit like that, man. I got a woman,” Keith said. “The blood on my jacket came from me. The guy hit me in my nose.”

Drewry and Ruvin wanted to get a sample of Keith’s DNA by drawing a cotton swab from the inside of his cheeks. Legally, they could do so if they asked him and he said yes, but the two worried the evidence wouldn’t be allowed into court because Keith hadn’t understood their request. They decided that they had better do this the more deliberate way, by getting a court order. Drewry retrieved the jumpsuit and told Keith he was taking him to jail. “Put this on. That way you’ll stay good and warm.”

This time Keith accepted the garment. But he was concerned about how he’d get to the jail.

“I can’t be in the back of no paddy wagon.”

“You’re not going to be in the back of a paddy wagon. You’re going to be in the front seat of my car like you were when we came up here.”

As they walked out, Wittenberger approached, still hoping to garner something from Keith. “I think you could have helped us out. Because I think you know who killed that woman.”

“I don’t know,” Keith said. “I am being straight up on my mother’s grave and my father’s grave, man. I don’t know who done that.”

Drewry drove Keith to the county’s jail in Rockville, three miles away. Ruvin followed. They booked Keith on the relatively minor alcohol charge, hardly what they were hoping for. It was 2:45 A.M. If the detectives were lucky, they could get three hours of sleep before starting up again on the case.

By Monday morning, residents in and around Bethesda were growing alarmed. The masked killer-rapists were still on the loose. And they hadn’t struck in a distant ghetto or the closed-off home of a nearby neighborhood. They’d invaded a carefully designed “Urban Village,” where thousands gathered daily to decompress a little from the hectic, high-pressure lives they led in the shadow of the nation’s capital.

The five-block area hadn’t always been such a draw. Until the 1990s, it was home to car-repair shops, drab government buildings, and a concrete plant, where drivers who lined up to get their trucks loaded were known to put the truck in park and run into a nearby tavern for a quick cold one. Detective Jim Drewry knew the area well; it had been part of his route when he’d been a mailman, and he’d enjoyed the laid-back feel of the place, even if it had fallen further behind the ever-more-prosperous neighborhoods stretching for miles in other directions.

But a smart local company named Federal Realty Investment Trust had smelled opportunity. Its planners studied the neighborhoods, whose residents were described in adjective-laden and affirmative terms:
I look at the work I do as a career, not just a job . . . It’s important to continue learning new things . . . I am interested in other cultures . . . I make a conscious effort to recycle . . . It’s important to feel respected by my peers . . . Store environment makes a difference where I shop . . . I prefer food presented as an art form.
They had a lot of money, were eager to spend it, and they wanted to do so in a safe, walkable area.

Federal Realty began buying up the aging properties, pouring more than $190 million into a project designed around principles called “placemaking.” Buildings were leveled, and new ones constructed, as was a large but concealed parking garage, wider sidewalks, attractive landscaping, a community fountain. Soon enough, there was what Federal Realty called Bethesda Row, a five-block area lined with popular branded stores like Apple and Barnes & Noble, as well as clothing boutiques, specialty shops, and restaurants that stayed open late into the night offering food from around the world on tables that opened onto those new, wider sidewalks. There was even a pedestrian-only, cobblestone avenue called Bethesda Lane, bordered by fetching little stores below a chic five-story apartment building. A canopy of lights stretched across Bethesda Lane, evoking a lazy evening in the plaza of an old European town, albeit one that offered lemon-ricotta gelato for $5.30 a serving.

The whole thing was a bit of magic. People drove to Bethesda Row, parked, and walked around. They joined forces with the people who lived in Bethesda Row or close enough to walk there. It created a critical mass of humans who kind of appeared to all be living there. And placemaking adherents loved it. “A vibrant urban gathering place,” said the Urban Land Institute, which gave Federal Realty an Award of Excellence. “A retail icon,” was the title of a presentation at a conference of the American Institute of Architects.

Of the more than seventy-five stores and restaurants, few businesses understood the aspirations of their customers better than the one with a funny name, lululemon athletica, a wildly successful chain of yoga-gear stores that announced its 2008 arrival in Bethesda with a press release describing its planned immersion into the community. “Guests are invited to kick off the opening weekend with a complimentary yoga class on Saturday, June 7, at 9:00 A.M. The celebration continues throughout the day with yoga demos, a live DJ and kids’ face painting.” The store targeted educated, professional family women. “By creating products that help keep people active and stress free,” the company said in its press release, “lululemon believes that the world will be a better place.” A year later, in a presentation to Wall Street investors, the company described target customers of its own:
Affluent . . . Confident . . . At the top of her game . . . Looks for quality . . . Shops organic.

What businesses like lululemon and Apple understood—really, really understood—was how a growing segment of consumers had begun to question the belief that consumption would bring happiness . . . but they still liked to shop. It led down a path of virtuous consumption, or what retail guru Martin Lindstrom, who wrote a book called
Buyology
, described as the subconscious answer to a subconscious question: “How do I still accumulate my way to happiness?”

Beyond that core Bethesda shopper, of course, the place offered a broader experience: families strolling down sidewalks, people stopping to pet dogs, the whole notion that they were more apt to meet a guest from
Meet the Press
than anyone out to do harm. The idea of mayhem, to say nothing of murder, erupting inside a yoga store was unimaginable. At Ginger, an upscale women’s boutique two hundred feet from lululemon athletica, the owner gave her saleswomen mobile panic buttons and had them close the store early, before dark. Customers talked almost exclusively of the murder and masked men. “Oh my God, are you guys afraid?” they’d ask. Workers walked to their cars together, passing white ribbons tied on doors in honor of the two victims from the yoga store, and reported their progress with text messages: “In the car . . . Made it home.” The nearest place people knew to buy pepper spray, Ranger Surplus, saw sales of the product triple in the days after the murder. Business at nearby restaurants dropped by as much as 50 percent. Even patrons who still came to Bethesda at night moved more quickly, eyes peeled for a tall man and a short man, walking together.

For years, Bethesda Row had been safe, comfortable, and cozy. All of a sudden it wasn’t, and wouldn’t be again until the men were caught. “Is Bethesda going to get hit again?” people wondered.

All weekend, reporters barraged the phones of officials with questions about the case, and the wave was still cresting Monday morning. Leads? Suspects? Bethesda still safe? Responsibility for the answers, or deflections, fell to Captain Paul Starks, the police department spokesman. He asked Captain David Gillespie, the major crimes commander, who had a simple message for his longtime friend:
I’ve got nothing for you Paul, and tell the press to quit calling down here.
Starks went to see his boss, Montgomery Police Chief Tom Manger.

A onetime journalism major before switching to criminal justice, Manger was well seasoned in media. Between his six years as police chief of Fairfax County, in northern Virginia (another large, prosperous area outside D.C.), and his seven years at the Montgomery post, it amounted to thirteen years of navigating the kinds of public and political fallout that came from someone getting killed in a wealthy enclave where such things weren’t supposed to happen. Manger knew he had to stand in front of news cameras, flanked by his commanders, with a clear, two-part message: that he understood how scared people felt and that his detectives were working tirelessly. Absent such declarations, residents would start calling their elected officials, who’d start calling him. Or they’d light up their neighborhood e-mail discussion lists and write letters to the editor, raising a stink.

Until then, Gillespie had kept his updates to Manger and Starks limited—the parking-lot video of the two men, the homeless suspect. But he had not mentioned Sergeant Craig Wittenberger’s early suspicions of Brittany, for instance. “We haven’t yet been able to get a full story from the rape victim,” Gillespie told the chief. Now the idea of having a press conference made him nervous, but he liked the idea of drawing more attention to the case, if that was possible, to scare up possible witnesses—and he figured that playing up a mounting reward fund couldn’t hurt.

In addition to his media background, Manger was also a polished public speaker who’d performed in community theater and musicals. The three decided he would do the talking. And they thought it would be good to hold the press conference outside the store. That’s where all the reporters were camped out anyway.

Down in their squad room, the detectives didn’t have to be in the meeting to know what a high-octane story this had become. To work murders in a large county like Montgomery—which was generally affluent but had sections of middle-and lower-class areas as well—was to inherently understand a weakness in American society. Statistics bore out what they knew: in the United States, nearly 5 of every 100,000 residents are killed every year, a markedly higher rate than most all of the developed world, and yet many pockets of America go along just fine. Residents rarely dwell on the possibility of murder—until a killer strikes, and there’s the sudden sense that danger is storming the walls. It was a phenomenon that Detective Jim Drewry, Sergeant Craig Wittenberger, and other longtime Montgomery detectives always groused about as a simple matter of class and race: how people viewed victims from places like Bethesda as innocents, while those murdered in Montgomery’s less ritzy areas—the Wheatons, the White Oaks, the Germantowns—they, well, somehow, someway, must’ve been doing something they weren’t supposed to.