The Yoga Store Murder (30 page)

“Are you hard of hearing?” Wood asked the detective.

“No,” Drewry said.

“Okay,” Wood said, chuckling at the candor. “So during the interview when you tell her you’re hard of hearing, that’s just to get her to speak up into the microphone, so to speak?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t have a bad back, right?”

“Yeah,” Drewry said, pausing. “I do have a bad back.”

“Okay, so that part was true.”

“That much is true.”

Greenberg interjected. “You had me convinced you were hard of hearing.”

“Oh, he’s good, your honor. No question about it,” said Wood.

Greenberg listened to the attorneys’ final arguments, took a brief break, then came back to issue his ruling. He opened with remarks that he acknowledged went beyond the legal issues at hand: “Let me begin by saying that there’s been a suggestion here that the police conduct in this case indicated that very early on, they should have known, or did know, that their suspect was in fact Ms. Norwood.”

The judge went on to list the immediate pressures the detectives had been facing.

“We had a community, a rather affluent part of our county, which was in an uproar. This appeared to be the work of some unknown assailants on a night when people typically are out at restaurants or shopping. It was shocking in its nature and immediate police action was required. Now, police action in a case such as this, by its very necessity, takes a while to unfold. We sit here today and look back in hindsight at what investigative techniques were used and what leads were pursued and so forth. But hindsight is twenty-twenty. And what we learned here today was that not every police officer investigating this case knew everything that was going on. Indeed, there were forensic tests that were being conducted, the results of which didn’t become immediately available. And it strikes me as taking a somewhat cynical approach in the society in which we live, where we are trying to be more sympathetic to victims than perhaps we’ve been in the past, that immediately we ought to suspect a young woman who appeared to have been, by all accounts, the victim of a heinous crime.”

From there, things only got worse for Wood.

Greenberg said that when it came to detectives’ interviews of his client, it didn’t matter that at some point the detectives considered her a suspect. What mattered was what the suspect thought. And in this case, Greenberg said, the suspect thought she was in control.

“What really struck me in all of these interviews was the expansiveness of the defendant,” Greenberg said. “This woman is a woman of frankly striking intelligence and lucidity. And at appropriate times, as was also pointed out by the state, she could tug on your heartstrings.”

The judge ruled that the interviews could be played almost in their entirety to jurors. He tossed out part of the final interview, agreeing that Drewry had kept asking questions without informing Brittany of her rights even as she insisted she wanted to go home. But prosecutors would be allowed to use key statements Brittany made earlier that day, including her dubious explanation of how the masked men had forced her to move Jayna’s car and return to the store.

But Greenberg’s larger message seemed to be that Brittany thought she had the detectives duped until the end.

“It just came across as very calculated,” he said.

The two hearings had an immediate impact on both Brittany Norwood’s and Jayna Murray’s extended families.

To the Norwoods, Judge Robert Greenberg had forcefully declared that Brittany was in full command of her faculties, and had not been in some kind of psychotic daze after spending all night in the middle of a bloody crime scene that made her incapable of being herself. Nor had any evidence been presented supporting Brittany’s claims about masked attackers. In fact, her own attorneys had argued that the story was such nonsense that detectives should have seen through it immediately.

But her family’s support, steadfast since the arrest, didn’t waver. They visited Brittany at the jail and talked with her on the phone. As was their legal right, prosecutors and detectives listened to recordings of the calls, hoping she’d say something incriminating, but instead heard only encouragement from her parents and siblings. One of Brittany’s sisters, who was engaged to be married, told Brittany she wouldn’t have bridesmaids because Brittany couldn’t be her maid of honor.

“No, have bridesmaids,” Brittany said. “I don’t want to take anything from you.”

She called her dad in suburban Seattle at least once a week, often reaching him at his upholstery shop. On one call, a ringing bell could be heard in the background, as if a customer had come through the door.

“Do you need to go?” Brittany asked.

“No, it’s okay,” her father said, telling Brittany he’d been waiting for her call. He always ended conversations by telling her they loved her, missed her, and were praying for her.

Inside his shop, Earl Norwood received visitors who wished him well, even if they didn’t quite know how to say it. Tim Longmead, who worked across the street at a woodworking shop, was one of them. “I’m doing fine,” Earl told him, but his voice seemed about to crack with every word. The initial hearing hadn’t gone well for his daughter.

The import of the judge’s rulings and comments were even clearer to the attorneys in the case. In early September 2011, State’s Attorney John McCarthy was pulling into a conference-center parking lot to attend a political gathering when his phone beeped. One of Brittany’s attorneys, Doug Wood, said he wanted to come in and talk about a plea deal—one that would give Brittany a chance at parole.

“Doug, I don’t know,” McCarthy said. “I’ve got to ask the family.”

McCarthy wanted a trial, but felt compelled to talk to Jayna Murray’s family about the proposed deal first. As it turned out, David and Phyllis Murray, their sons, Hugh and Dirk, and their daughters-in-laws, Kate and April, were all coming into town the following week for a road race to raise money for a foundation to be established in Jayna’s honor. McCarthy invited them all to his office.

The outlines of the proposed deal meant that Brittany would plead guilty, but her sentence would be capped, making her eligible for parole in as soon as fifteen years. The prosecutor told the Murrays he had a strong case, but warned that anything could happen during a trial. He cited the much-publicized acquittal of Casey Anthony in Florida, whom a jury had recently found not guilty of murder, aggravated manslaughter of a child, or aggravated child abuse—even after the skeletal remains of her daughter, Caylee, were found near her home.

“Why don’t we leave you all alone to talk about it?” McCarthy said as he and Marybeth Ayres got up to leave. It had been 191 days since Jayna’s murder, each one horrifying for the Murrays in its own way.

Few were as bad as the morning the family entered Jayna’s apartment in Northern Virginia just outside D.C. and tried to decide what to do with her possessions, tried to select the clothes Jayna would wear in her closed casket. Phyllis could tell that her daughter had dashed to work quickly on her last day of life. Jayna’s Murphy bed was still folded down. An empty Diet Dr Pepper can sat on her desk. For some reason—perhaps because she could so clearly envision Jayna drinking from it, maybe because she’d seen it at the store memorial—Phyllis couldn’t throw the can away. She packed it up. Other things she didn’t feel the need to keep, such as Jayna’s sheets and towels, but she found herself folding them before throwing them away. It was like that, the grief, prompting behavior that didn’t always make sense. Phyllis couldn’t take walks anymore, even with other people, because they made her feel even more alone. She could go to the grocery store, but avoided the aisle where powdered drink mixes were kept because she had liked to buy them for Jayna. And every day, she dreaded the hour between 3:00 and 4:00 P.M., which was when Jayna would have called. She had learned to turn her ringer off for that hour. “Some days you’re so down you just ache” was how she later described it.

After his daughter’s murder, David’s thoughts still ran to his combat days, but only in vague terms. The vivid images and bad dreams were instantly replaced by thoughts of his daughter’s final minutes. He forced himself back to work, knowing he had to occupy his mind. Alone in his office, tears would often overcome him. But David found that if he put in twelve hours at work and two hours at the gym, then fell into bed, he might get to sleep within a few minutes. If not, he’d be up all night, thinking about how Jayna died.

Jayna’s brother Dirk had agonized over how much to tell his young boys, something he’d faced since the opening hours of the tragedy, when he attended his son’s scheduled birthday party knowing Jayna was missing, trying to pretend nothing was wrong. Since then, he struggled with how much to tell the kids, well aware of how fast kids grow up when they’re surrounded by hundreds of TV channels, computers, video games. In the days after the murder, when masked men were supposedly on the loose, Dirk’s six-year-old son told him the police needed to review store surveillance video. “They can go look at the tapes,” he’d told his dad.

Hugh, Jayna’s other brother, who after the murder had flown to Washington from Iraq, had had to return there several weeks later. When he did, he found a package awaiting him from Jayna, which she had mailed just before her death. Hugh took it to his private quarters, hesitating before he opened it, knowing he was about to read Jayna’s last words to him. Inside was a running cap, along with a card that listed things that didn’t work when they were apart:
Chips without Dip . . . Macaroni without Cheese . . . Me without You
. She thanked him for his e-mails. “It’ll be even better once you’re back telling the stories and showing pictures in person. Take care and be safe! Love you and miss you, Jayna.”

Now he was in McCarthy’s office, listening to the prosecutor ask how he and his remaining family felt about taking a plea deal in Jayna’s murder. The family didn’t have much to discuss. Hugh and his wife, Kate, as lawyers, had spent countless hours studying Maryland law, studying which homicide statutes applied, and what prison sentences they carried. The family already had asked McCarthy whether Maryland law allowed an inmate’s wages from prison jobs to be garnisheed, and whether the state had a “Son of Sam” law preventing inmates from profiting from books or movies about their crimes. They’d created a flow chart of possible plea deals and their effects on sentences. Every one of them was convinced that Brittany had committed first-degree, premeditated murder, and over something as senseless as a pair of yoga pants. Kate got up to find McCarthy, who hadn’t even made it to his administrative assistant’s office, twenty feet away. “We made our decision,” she said. They would go to trial.

So the conversation resumed, this time veering toward Brittany. The Murrays had always been inquisitive people—led by David as an engineer and Phyllis as a trained family therapist—and they couldn’t stop themselves now. What would drive someone like Brittany to kill?

Ayres, the prosecutor who had tried killers in Baltimore and rapists in Queens, had wrestled with that question as never before. She told the Murrays about a book she was reading,
The Sociopath Next Door
, which suggested that one in twenty-five people possess little or no conscience. Some of these people were successful businessmen. Others were senseless killers.

“What fuels them is this deep-seated insecurity,” Ayres told the Murrays.

The Murrays soon found themselves all reading the book. The first paragraph seemed particularly revealing.

Imagine—if you can—not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools. Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

The author, Martha Stout, wrote that the condition went by a more familiar term,
psychopathy
, and cited one of the most well-known authorities in the field, Robert D. Hare.

Jayna’s brother Hugh also bought Hare’s book,
Without Conscience
, a more clinical take on the subject. Hare had interviewed murderers in prisons for twenty-five years. The term
psychopath
was too loosely used, he wrote, conjuring up images of crazed killers depicted in horror movies. Instead, Hare asserted, “Their acts result not from a deranged mind but from a cold, calculating rationality combined with a chilling inability to treat others as thinking, feeling human beings.”

Hare acknowledged that compared with widely studied conditions such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness, the contours of psychopathy were only starting to take shape. He estimated that there were more than two million psychopaths in North America, existing on a sliding scale of severity. Some had been shaped by their environment. Others were simply wired wrong.

On the outside, psychopaths could charm anyone, making it difficult to know if that carried over to genuine affection. At their worst, Hare wrote, psychopaths weren’t governed by an emotion that drives so many daily decisions—the ability or desire to see the world from someone else’s perspective. “In short, a complete lack of empathy, the prerequisite for love,” Hare wrote.

Hugh read the book while at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he’d been sent after his Iraq deployment had been cut short so he could be closer to the court proceedings in Maryland. He couldn’t help but think of that country and his final assignment there, as the legal chief of detention operations—and all the prisoners he’d met face-to-face. Among them were insurgents willing to blow themselves up or blow up others. They believed in a greater cause, and in that sense, at least their actions carried logic. Not so for the woman who killed his sister, Hugh thought. “They selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret,” Hare wrote. “Their bewildered victims desperately ask, ‘Who are these people?’”