The Yoga Store Murder (3 page)

“Good morning! Are you awake?” Marissa had texted Brittany early Saturday morning. She sent another one thirty seconds later, indicating that Brittany’s two young nephews—the sons of their sister Candace, who also lived nearby—had spent the night. One of the boys was eager to see Brittany. “A little person in striped pants is asking for you.” No response. Brittany was probably sleeping.

To many people in her life, Brittany was a bubbly and caring presence—a former college soccer star with plans to one day open her own gym. A key first step to that goal was securing a personal-trainer spot at Equinox, the upscale health-club chain. Brittany had impressed the people at the Bethesda location so far, and a key interview was set for that Monday.

An hour after Marissa sent Brittany the text messages, she tried to call her sister but only got voice mail. Marissa handed the phone to their nephew, who, along with his brother, beamed whenever Brittany picked the two up from elementary school or took them out for pizza. “Call me back, Auntie B,” he said. “I love you. Bye-bye.”

As the morning progressed, those kinds of calls—greetings of affection, calling to discuss everyday matters—started to give way to calls of growing concern among those who knew both women.

Phyllis wrapped up the call and walked outside toward her husband, David, who at sixty-eight years old and with two titanium hips still ran oil-drilling projects around the world. He was pulling weeds from their flower garden. The two had married in 1969, and had three kids: thirty-nine-year-old Hugh, who’d spent ten years as a professional triathlete, gone on to law school and the U.S. Army’s JAG Corps, and was now serving as a captain in Iraq; thirty-six-year-old Dirk, who’d competed in rodeo bull-riding as a kid, worked as a pilot, and had two young sons; and thirty-year-old Jayna, the girl who’d tagged along with Hugh and Dirk to Boy Scout campouts led by their dad, the teenager her parents shuttled to dance lessons, and the adult professional and world traveler fluent in Spanish. Jayna was now poised to take the next step in her career, just two months shy of getting two master’s degrees, one in business administration and one in communication from Johns Hopkins University’s campus in Washington, D.C. Like Brittany Norwood, she, too, was adored by her two young nephews, who called her “Tia T,” a name derived from the Spanish word for
aunt
and the first initial of Jayna’s middle name, Troxel, her grandmother’s maiden name. That afternoon, in fact, David and Phyllis were due at one of the boys’ fourth birthday party.

Phyllis made her way to the flower garden. She told David about the phone call with Jayna’s boyfriend.

“Fraser feels that Jayna is missing.”

Sergeant Craig Wittenberger, the homicide supervisor whom Detective Jim Drewry had called on his way to the yoga store, had quickly headed to the crime scene himself, calling in more detectives on the way. The sergeant selected “lead detectives” for cases based on a rotating system. On this Saturday, a relative newcomer to the homicide unit, Detective Dimitry Ruvin, thirty-one, was at the front of the queue. He’d only been working homicides for the past thirteen months, but he knew computers and cell-phone technology (an increasingly important skill in homicide work), had seemingly limitless energy, and meshed well with Drewry, whom Wittenberger wanted to keep on the case as well. By 10:15 A.M., Wittenberger, Drewry, and Ruvin were all gathered outside the store. They put together a plan for examining the place, and slipped on rubber gloves and rubber booties that looked like clown shoes. At 10:40 A.M., joined by crime-scene investigator Amanda Kraemer, they walked through the front door.

The detectives knew how critical the clues in front of them would be. Unlike convenience stores or banks, places where robberies were anticipated, the yoga store didn’t have interior surveillance cameras. Also working against the detectives were the surviving witness’s hazy recollections and the amount of time that had already passed, giving the attackers plenty of time to hit the road, dispose of evidence, or marshal alibis.

Documenting the crime scene was Ruvin’s job. As new as he was to homicide, however, the detective was certainly no stranger to chaos, having grown up in the nation of Azerbaijan as it broke off from the Soviet Union. Violence there forced his parents, ethnic Russians, to seek political-refugee status in the United States in 1995, and the Ruvins settled outside Baltimore. Dimitry boned up on his English, enrolled in high school and later the University of Maryland’s computer-science program, and secured an internship, designing websites at the prestigious National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda. His parents, who’d been chemical engineers back in the home country, couldn’t have been more proud. As happens a lot in front of computers, though, Ruvin found himself surfing to other sites. He began reading about police work, and thought it sounded exciting. He secured a second internship, at the Montgomery County Police Department, and enjoyed it enough to apply for a slot in the academy. He was an appealing candidate. He seemed eager; his computer skills certainly were in demand; and in a county like Montgomery—peppered with foreign service workers, international economists, and new immigrants—how often did the academy get to produce a cop fluent in English, Russian, and Azeri? Ruvin was accepted right away, went on to patrol, then burglary and robbery investigations, and now, homicides.

On one of his first murder cases, which he’d worked with Drewry, Ruvin had learned both how critical small details could be and how well he and the older detective worked together. They’d been standing over a corpse of a man who’d been cut and stabbed thirty-six times outside an apartment building in Silver Spring. A lanyard holding a key and three plastic cards rested on the victim’s right ankle. Ruvin figured the lanyard had been pulled from a pocket while the killer rifled through it. Drewry had other thoughts. He bagged the evidence, took it to the victim’s sister, and asked if she’d ever seen it. She had not. Nor did the key fit in the victim’s front-door lock. The detectives started making calls based on the plastic cards on the key-ring—one for a gym membership, one for a bookstore, and another for purchases at CVS drugstores. Within hours, they had their killer, Alexander Chambers, who—during the confusion inherent in violently murdering someone—had managed to leave the lanyard behind. Chambers didn’t say much to detectives when questioned, but Drewry got this out of him: “I just need to pray. Things didn’t go real well.”

Inside the yoga store, things up front looked largely intact.

Like Apple customer Ryan Haugh, Ruvin was seeing the inside of a lululemon athletica store for the first time, and he noted the spotlit tables and racks of clothes; the cubbyholes displaying yoga mats; the mannequins dressed in yoga pants, thin tank tops, and, in some cases, running gear. The feel was athletic and high-end. When Ruvin later checked out some of the price tags, he saw just how high-end: $25 for a water bottle, $98 for yoga pants, $148 for a running jacket. There was even a small men’s section, with a pair of $64 shorts.

He was quickly picking up on the store’s aspirational theme. On one shelf, he saw a series of framed photographs of staff members, with long-term goals well beyond their current jobs spelled out alongside their pictures. Ruvin had spoken minutes earlier with four store employees who had come down to the scene, and although they were rattled and scared, he’d found them poised as well. Now, as Ruvin stood behind the cash registers, he spotted a supply of bright red reusable shopping bags displayed so customers could see them. The bags showed the silhouette of a woman in a yoga pose and were covered with all kinds of sayings. Some advised taking a break, slowing down: “Breathe deeply and appreciate the moment.” Others advised gearing up to succeed in today’s competitive world. “Successful people replace the words ‘wish,’ ‘should,’ & ‘try,’ with ‘I WILL.’”

The detective looked into the store ahead of him. From what he could see, and from what witnesses and employees had just told him, the place broke down into four main areas: this front section; a large fitting area beyond that; a rear stockroom; and—behind the purple door—a rear hallway leading to the emergency fire exit. Ruvin knew the body was in that hallway. He didn’t want to rush to it, worried that doing so would impair his effort to document as much as he could in the other parts of the store.

Ruvin walked through the front section. For the most part things were in order, but two mannequins had toppled over, one with its hand dislodged and resting about eight feet away. There were blood drops scattered around the floor, and Ruvin could see faint bloody shoe prints that appeared to lead up to the front door. Where they went from there wasn’t clear. By his count, at least a dozen people had crossed the tracks that morning, between the store manager, the Apple customer, the responding officers, and the medics. The shoe print was dry, though, and Ruvin hoped a shoe-print expert could later find more of them and re-create the exact movements of the person wearing them.

The detective gingerly stepped around the sales counter in his crime-scene booties, jotting down observations. “Safes behind front register opened. Receipts on the floor.”

Ruvin moved on, and as he walked around a display rack, he could see trouble laid out before him. A flat-screen television rested on its back, having apparently tumbled off a table. A black athletic bag appeared to have been dropped suddenly, spilling out a white candle, a tube of lip balm, and a pair of headphones. Clothes and green water bottles were strewn about. “Visible signs of a struggle,” Ruvin wrote.

Ruvin walked into the next part of the store, the fitting area, which was surrounded by full-length mirrors, changing rooms, and two bathrooms. He and Kraemer, the crime-scene investigator, looked at the walls and noted what looked to be a partial, bloody palm print in a corner. On the floor below them, red shoe prints crisscrossed each other. Kraemer measured the clearer ones, which stretched past twelve inches.

Ruvin stepped into the bathroom where the survivor had been found, noting blood and rocks on the floor. He looked at the sink, and saw drops of blood near the drain, a smudge of blood across the mirror. There was a severed zip-tie, presumably removed by the medics from the victim’s wrists, and on the floor just outside the bathroom, a wooden coat hanger, a bottle of Windex, used paper towels, and a knocked-over, solid-looking Buddha statue, perhaps ten inches tall.

Ruvin walked up to the purple door. He pushed it forward until it bumped into a body, just as he’d been told it would. Ruvin eased off and let the door close. He knew he’d better take a different, less disruptive route to the body—but he’d check the other parts of the store and make sure he understood them first.

Ruvin walked into the rear stockroom. Shelves and racks stretched over his head, lined up in different directions and creating blind spots. He was thankful the patrol officers had come in here earlier, guns drawn, and made sure no one was squatting down, ready to strike. The floor here was also covered with bloody shoe tracks, but no real signs of trouble. Ruvin walked carefully to the side of the shoe prints, working his way to a back office, where a desktop computer was on and a white laptop sat closed atop a file cabinet.

Ruvin turned his attention back to the main stockroom. Near a wall, and to the side of a chair, he spotted a cream-colored woman’s wallet. Kraemer carefully looked inside, finding the driver’s license for Brittany Norwood. To the right, on the floor, the bloody tracks grew more concentrated in the far corner, where there was a little kitchenette—a sink, small refrigerator, and microwave. On the ground was another bottle of Windex, a bottle of Formula 409, and a lime-green scrub brush. Above the sink, Ruvin spotted a foot-long serrated knife, resting horizontally across two hooks. The blade was shiny and clean, the handle gray and shaped like a shark.

Ten feet away, back toward the entrance to the stockroom, Ruvin and Kraemer spotted a royal-blue lululemon athletica gym bag that did not appear to be part of the carefully grouped products on the shelves. They studied the contents: computer cords, a digital camera, a tangerine, a bottle of Argentinean wine, and a book,
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. There was also a brown wallet, holding a Johns Hopkins University student ID and a Texas driver’s license, both showing Jayna Murray’s smiling face. Two things were noted by their absence. “No keys,” Ruvin wrote. “No cash.”

Less than two miles away, at Suburban Hospital, in Bethesda, Maryland, a uniformed police officer named Colin O’Brien had by chance been at the hospital that morning, and was told by a supervisor to meet the ambulance when it pulled up with Brittany Norwood. Officer O’Brien followed the gurney inside, stood near Brittany to protect her, and collected her garments as doctors and nurses removed them. “All of the victim’s clothing was bloody and her pants were ripped/slashed in numerous places,” O’Brien wrote in a three-page statement documenting his early involvement in the case. “When the victim was rolled onto her side, I observed several pieces of bloodstained glass on the victim’s back.”

One by one, O’Brien had placed the articles in evidence bags—pants, socks, a sports bra, a gray shirt that had been wrapped around Brittany’s neck. The shirt was from lululemon’s collection of running gear and was printed with motivational sayings: “Set your goals/Life is too short for the treadmill, get out and run!”

O’Brien watched the doctors and nurses treat Brittany’s wounds, and he took particular note of an inch-long laceration between her thumb and her forefinger on her right palm. O’Brien had seen similar injuries repeatedly in his previous career in the U.S. Army, when he was a tactical medic on a Military Police SWAT team. In field exercises, when SWAT members used knives, the blades sometimes slipped and sliced into their own palms. O’Brien didn’t say anything about his recollections to the doctors, and certainly not to Brittany—not even as he helped place large, loose fitting gloves over both of Brittany’s hands to preserve any evidence on her skin.