The Lululemon Murder in Bethesda

The wall between the Lululemon store and the Apple Store at 4860 Bethesda Avenue in downtown Bethesda, Maryland, was thin enough that on the night of Friday March 11th, 2011, two Apple employees closing up next door could hear what was happening on the other side of it. They heard a thud. They heard a woman's voice say something like, "Talk to me, don't do this." They heard another woman scream. They heard a male voice, low and rough, saying, "Don't do this." The shift was almost over. They finished cashing out, locked the Apple Store, and went home. They did not call the police. The male voice, it would turn out later, did not exist.

Jayna Murray was thirty years old. She had moved to the Washington area from Texas to start an MBA at Johns Hopkins, and she was working part-time at the Lululemon Athletica yoga-wear store to pay for it. Brittany Norwood was twenty-eight, a former Stony Brook soccer player, and the store's other closer that night. The two had locked up together at a little after nine. Norwood, on her way out, said she had left her wallet inside, and asked Murray to come back in with her so she could retrieve it.

Murray had spent part of the day confronting Norwood about merchandise that had been disappearing from the store. Lululemon's loss-prevention numbers had narrowed the suspect list to Norwood; one item had reportedly been found on her on a previous shift. The wallet was a pretext. Whatever Murray expected when the alarm was disarmed and the door re-locked, what she walked into was a fight she could not finish. Over the next half hour or so, Norwood beat her with a hammer, slashed her with a knife, struck her with a wrench taken from a fire-suppression panel, hit her with a metal merchandise peg from a display, used a metal hanger, and finally tied a rope around her neck. The autopsy logged 322 separate wounds. The cause of death was blunt-force trauma to the head with multiple skull fractures.

When the attack was over, Norwood undressed, cut and bruised herself, bound her own wrists and ankles loosely, and lay down on the bathroom floor a few feet from Murray's body. The first employees opening the store on Saturday morning found them both. Norwood told the first responders that two large masked men in their thirties had broken in after closing the night before, attacked them both, sexually assaulted her, killed Murray, and fled.

Bethesda is one of the lowest-crime postal codes in Maryland. The story produced an immediate police response, a community vigil, a rape kit, and within twelve hours, problems. The first problem was the scene itself. The store's emergency exit had been locked from the inside, with no sign of a forced entry anywhere else. The second was Norwood's injuries. The wounds on her body were shallow and angled in directions consistent with a person cutting herself; her wrists showed no ligature marks of the kind a real binding leaves; her hands had none of the defensive injuries a victim of a violent struggle would have. The third was the merchandise. Lululemon yoga pants from that store were found in the trunk of Norwood's car the next day, with the price tags from the Apple Store of all places attached — Norwood had been quietly building a small inventory of stolen goods.

The fourth problem was the floor. Detectives worked the bloody footprints inside the store. There were two sizes. Size nine, Murray's. Size seven, Norwood's. The size-nine prints staggered and skidded. The size-seven prints did not. Walking over a body and through arterial spray, the size-seven shoes left clean, even, weight-balanced impressions — the gait of someone who was not bleeding, not concussed, not panicked, and who had walked the same path more than once. The forensic reconstruction showed Norwood had moved between Murray and the back of the store after the attack: dragging weapons, staging the bathroom, applying her own injuries.

The fifth problem was the camera across Bethesda Avenue. Surveillance from the building opposite showed exactly two people entering the store after closing the previous night: Murray and Norwood. Nobody else.

The Apple Store employees were re-interviewed. They had heard what they had heard, but the male voice they remembered, in the hands of a competent prosecutor, fit Norwood faking a struggle aloud to seed the false narrative. Norwood was arrested on March 18th. The trial began in October 2011 in Montgomery County Circuit Court before Judge Robert Greenberg. The defence conceded that Norwood had killed Murray and argued for second-degree murder on the ground that the killing had not been premeditated. The prosecution put up the 322 wounds, the six weapons, and the staged scene as evidence of deliberation: somebody who has reached for six different weapons during a single attack has had time to make a series of decisions. The jury came back on November 2nd, 2011, after roughly an hour. First-degree murder. On January 27th, 2012, Greenberg sentenced Brittany Norwood to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Lululemon changed its policy. From that month on, no employee anywhere in the company was permitted to close a store alone with a single co-worker on the floor — at least two staff members had to leave the building together, every shift, every store. The killer was the second person on the floor.