The Yoga Store Murder (2 page)

“No,” Ryan said, leaving his spot in line to go to her.

“Do you want me to go in?” he asked her.

“Would you mind?” Rachel answered.

The two walked in. Ahead of them was a long narrow space with wooden floors and high ceilings. Ryan had never been inside a lululemon shop. He thought it looked kind of like a Gap, with lots of low racks and tables full of bright-colored clothes. He walked to the back as Rachel waited up front. “Anybody here?” Ryan called out. “Anybody here?” No response.

On the floor, Ryan saw scattered bloodstains, which grew more concentrated as he advanced to a back corner, near a five-foot chalkboard inscribed with colored chalk: “May each of us equally enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.” He noticed even more blood at the base of a purple door, as if it had seeped from the other side. He gently pushed the purple door. It stopped, hitting the side of a body.

Ryan saw a pair of legs extending from a body facedown surrounded by more blood. He reached down. No movement. “There’s somebody back here!” he shouted back to Rachel. “It looks like they’re dead!”

He headed back toward the front of the store, for the first time noticing two bathrooms to his right. Their doors were both open, and he saw another pair of legs, bound at the ankles and extending from one of the doorways. “There’s somebody else in here!” Ryan called out.

He approached the second woman, noting that her hands were bound over her head, and her face was bloody. “Are you okay?” he asked. She moaned, barely.

Rachel rushed outside and called 911 again. The other Apple customers waiting in line overheard her. “One person seems dead,” she was saying, her voice shaking, “and the other person is breathing . . . Someone tied her up.”

Seconds later a police car zoomed down Bethesda Avenue, stopping in front of the crowd. The officer jumped out and told the crowd to get back. The Apple customers retreated toward the Apple Store, still keeping some semblance of a line. The officer drew her gun and went into the store.

Then, silence. No shots. No screams. More cops arrived and rushed into the store, then paramedics, who rolled a stretcher into the store. Minutes later, they wheeled it out. There was a woman on top, covered in a blanket, writhing in pain. The customers could see blood on her face. “Is she going to make it?” one of them asked.

Bethesda, Maryland, is a classic “inner-ring” suburb, close enough to a major city for quick commutes but just far enough out to boast great schools and little crime. Home to economists, lawyers, lobbyists, and biochemists, Bethesda ranks as the most educated place in the nation as measured by recent U.S. Census Bureau figures of graduate degrees per adult. It’s part of Montgomery County, which itself spreads out for another twenty-five miles and has nearly one million people. Among that population, there are about twenty murders a year—far fewer than in Washington, D.C., but certainly enough to warrant an on-call homicide detective. The morning of March 12, 2011, that detective was sixty-year-old Jim Drewry.

Drewry had gotten up early inside his two-story home in Silver Spring, where he and his ex-wife had raised three kids, now grown. Drewry was ready to go when his cell phone rang at 9:05. Minutes later, he was driving his unmarked, county-issued Dodge Intrepid west toward the yoga store.

To his younger colleagues, Drewry was a real-life version of Lester Freamon, the cerebral African American detective from the TV series
The Wire
. A gray-haired grandfather with a bushy mustache, Drewry wore wire-rimmed glasses, sweater vests, and loafers, and spoke with a cadence that harkened back to the 1960s. Something suspicious was “funky.” A house was a “joint.” He refused to carry a BlackBerry, believing e-mail was robbing people of their ability to think, and didn’t socialize much with his colleagues. At his redbrick house, he relaxed by reading fiction and listening to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and other jazz legends.

He’d grown up in Cleveland, the son of a schoolteacher and funeral-home director. In summer, he would eat lunch with his dad in the embalming room, where as a thirteen-year-old he watched his dad work on a body marked by several large-caliber bullet holes. “The man was tapped lightly four times with a .45,” Drewry’s father told him.

Drewry’s older brother, who went on to Harvard University, was the first African American to serve as president of his high school’s student council. Drewry was elected vice president of his own class, before going to Howard University to study pre-med. He eventually dropped out and took a full-time job delivering mail for the U.S. Postal Service. He began having nightmares about towering stacks of mail surrounding him, so he left that job and, partially on the advice of his father-in-law, who was the director of the D.C. Department of Corrections, became a cop in 1979. He joined the major crimes unit eight years later.

Over the years, Drewry had developed a relaxed interrogation style that prompted suspects to do the last thing they should do: talk. What came out of their mouths was rarely the full story, but that was often just as good. “Lie to me. Please lie to me,” Drewry liked to say, repeating a mantra he’d picked up years earlier. “Sometimes a provable lie is just as good as the truth.”

He also saw firsthand how some murders came out of the blue—not the sadly predictable inner-city killings tied to drugs and turf, but the sudden ones fueled by passion and rage that Montgomery County’s relatively well-off environs often specialized in. And of those, some of the most violent murders Drewry had worked involved female victims: the mother of two young boys hacked more than sixty-five times with a knife and machete; a molecular biologist dragged off her doorstep to a side yard, beaten, strangled, and raped; an artist killed in her studio by a man who rammed a pair of scissors into her ear canal.

Drewry’s work included countless rape cases and death investigations (suicides, drownings, workplace accidents), and the long hours had taken their toll. He was weighing a move to the cold-case squad, which would afford him set hours and weekends off. A little time there to reach the thirty-four-year mark to boost his retirement benefits, and then—he liked to joke—he’d open a hot-dog vending truck on the National Mall near the Washington Monument.

As Drewry drove toward the yoga store crime scene, he called his boss, Sergeant Craig Wittenberger, who’d been around almost as long as Drewry. Drewry gave him the initial reports he’d received—two victims found in a store in downtown Bethesda, one killed and the other unconscious and possibly raped—and Drewry and Wittenberger didn’t even have to discuss how the case would unfold. They knew there’d be TV trucks, daily newspaper reports, elected officials asking questions, top brass needing updates.

Drewry pulled up to the store at 9:25 A.M., seeing yellow crime-scene tape outside the front door. He asked the patrolmen to extend the tape farther out from the store to keep passersby from walking across possible evidence. The expansion pushed into the line of Apple customers, who dutifully rerouted their line to head in the opposite direction from Apple’s front door. Drewry saw no reason to rush in—not before more detectives and crime-scene investigators arrived—and turned his attention to a sergeant on the scene, Evan Thompson, who brought him up to speed. One store employee had been found dead in a rear hallway of the store, and the other had been taken to Suburban Hospital. The responding cops had searched the store, found no suspects, and were guarding the front and back entrances.

Sergeant Thompson had been inside the store himself, the fourth cop that morning. As he’d waited for the paramedics to arrive, he was able to take five photos of the survivor. He’d also given his digital camera to another officer, who took four photos of the victim in the rear hallway. Thompson now handed the camera to Drewry, who scrolled through the images.

The surviving victim, a young African American woman, was bound around her ankles and wrists. It appeared the assailants had used plastic zipties, which stores and other businesses use to cinch packaging, and cops and soldiers use as handcuffs when they have to make group detentions. The victim wore white footie-style socks stained with blood, black yoga pants that had been torn open at the crotch, and a bright, striped top that looked like a sports bra. Something was twisted around her neck. Several of the images zoomed in on her face, revealing how young she looked—maybe early twenties. Her face was caked with dried blood. On the tile floor next to her head was a white rock about the size of a flattened baseball, which sat in a wide streak of blood.

Those photos were disturbing enough, but the images of the murder victim in the narrow hallway looked like something out of a horror movie.

Two walls and a metal bookshelf were heavily spattered with blood, which ran in streaks to the floor. A Caucasian woman lay facedown in the middle of a blood pool so thick that it still had a wet sheen. Beneath her tangled and matted hair was what looked like a wide, open gash in the back of her head. Two ends of a rope extended from under her neck. A red metal toolbox rested on her shoulder. The back of her pants appeared to have been cut open.

Thompson told Drewry that word was starting to filter back from the hospital. The surviving victim had spoken briefly with an officer there, telling him that two masked men had slipped into the store after closing time the night before, and had attacked her and her coworker.

Drewry handed the camera back to the sergeant, and turned his attention to the two laypeople who’d been inside the store that morning. He started with Rachel Oertli, the yoga store manager with the orange sneakers. The detective introduced himself and, not wanting anyone to overhear their conversation, suggested they talk in the front seat of his car.

Rachel told him about the store, part of a nationwide chain. This one had twenty-two employees, and on Friday nights the place closed at 9:00
P.M.
, after which employees cleaned up and got the store ready for the next day. Drewry asked Rachel who had closed the night before, and wrote down her answer: Brittany Norwood, a twenty-eight-year-old saleswoman, and Jayna Murray, a thirty-year-old supervisor. The first name he’d just heard from the patrol sergeant. She was at the hospital. Therefore, Jayna Murray, Drewry figured, was probably the dead woman in the store.

Rachel told him that Jayna had called her shortly before 10:00
P.M.
from her car. Their conversation had been about a store procedure typical in retail called bag checks, where workers check each other’s bags and purses on the way out to make sure no one was stealing. As Drewry made notes, Rachel said she and Jayna “spoke briefly about suspecting Norwood of putting merchandise in her bag.”

Drewry wasn’t sure what to make of that. If Jayna and Brittany had gone through the bag checks and left, why had they been found in the store? But Rachel explained that, according to what she’d learned from other workers, Brittany had accidentally left her wallet behind when they’d closed, and called Jayna to let her back into the store. As a supervisor, Jayna had a key. As an entry-level saleswoman, Brittany did not. Drewry asked Rachel for the phone numbers of the other store employees who’d spoken to either Brittany or Jayna the night before. He would talk to them as soon as he could. For now, he didn’t want to overreact to the bag check, not this early in the case, not before they’d even been in the store, and certainly not before they’d had a chance to speak with the survivor.

Drewry walked Rachel back to her coworkers, who had huddled off to the left, hugging and crying on one another’s shoulders, starting to figure out who was back in that hallway. Drewry could see lives starting to turn upside down, like he had countless times before.

The detective had barely arrived, and the story of what had happened here was already getting complicated: a series of phone calls that brought the victims back to the store, two masked men, a gruesome murder, a surviving witness at the hospital.

Next, Drewry spoke with Ryan Haugh, the Apple customer in the red Phillies cap who’d entered the yoga store. “He went in and saw stuff knocked over, blood on the floor and broken glass,” Drewry wrote, summing up what Ryan told him. “He opened the purple door in the rear of the store and saw a body facedown on the floor. There was a girl on the bathroom floor.”

As the two spoke, more Bethesda shoppers began arriving for the day, people who hadn’t seen the stretcher wheeled out of the yoga store. To them, the police presence and yellow tape meant the possibility of vandalism, at worst a burglary. A woman carrying a cup of coffee approached the tape, casually lifted it, and continued walking toward Drewry. He was startled by her indifferent attitude to the police tape, but ultimately not surprised. He’d long ago concluded that for all their high-powered jobs and world travels, many Bethesda residents were clueless to the evil that humans could unleash on each other—any time, any place.

“Hey, hey, hey!” the detective said, raising his voice, holding up his hands and directing the woman back outside the yellow tape. “This is a crime scene.”

Like so many people in the Washington, D.C. area, the two women found in the yoga store were transplants. Brittany Norwood, the survivor, had grown up in Washington State, just south of Seattle, with eight brothers and sisters. Her mother, Larkita, sixty-one years old, was a homemaker who did part-time advertising work. Her dad, Earl, sixty-five years old, ran a specialized upholstery shop. One of her sisters was a doctor, and three of her brothers were engineers. Brittany was particularly close with her sister Marissa, older by only seventeen months; growing up, they’d shared the same bedroom, the same hairbrush. When both ended up in Washington, D.C., it was only natural for Brittany to rent the basement apartment in the century-old, $555,000 renovated town house owned by Marissa, a business consultant, and her fiancé, an operations research analyst. But Brittany had her own outside door and a roommate she wasn’t particularly close to, so when she hadn’t come home the night before—Friday—it went unnoticed.