Leggings That Kill - The Lululemon Murder (Part 1)

Part 1
Leggings That Kill

Bethesda, Maryland. March 12, 2011. 8am.

Rachel Oertli walks up to the doors of the local Lululemon store she manages to start her day. As she proceeds to unlock the front door, she notices that the doors have already been unlocked. This concerns her but assumes the closing crew from the night before possibly forgot to lock it. Upset, she pushes the doors open, probably thinking about the items that could be missing (it is a luxury clothing store after all) and what disciplinary action she’ll have to make. As she walks through the store, she notices that the front of the store had items that were out of place; a mannequin on the floor, a clothing rail that was knocked over, and clothing that was scattered throughout the tables.

Still taken from Qxygen’s SNAPPED, Episode 14

Immediately, Rachel becomes extremely worried and runs out of the store to call the police. Next door to this Lululemon, was an Apple store that had a crowd of people lining up for the new release of the iPad 2 that morning. One of the men in line noticed a panicked Rachel and walks up to her to make sure she’s fine. Rachel proceeds to tell the man everything that she felt and saw walking through the store. She asks the man how long he had been in line and if he saw anyone walking in or out of the store at that time. This bystander is named Ryan Haugh, and told Rachel he had only been waiting outside for about an hour, not very long but didn’t see anyone even walk up to the store in that time. To calm her nerves, he offered to walk in the store with her to make sure everything was alright and she could start her workday at ease.

Image still from Oxygen’s SNAPPED, Episode 14

The two of them push through the unlocked doors of the Lululemon store, and the further into the store they walked, the more items they found damaged and out of place. Once they got a view behind the registers, they found open tills emptied of their cash. The safe was also opened and emptied. This was no doubt in their minds, a robbery. They continue their cautionary walk into the 1st back room, where they find shattered glass, merchandise all over the floor, but even more concerning… there’s blood, and there was A LOT of blood.

Image courtesy of lifedeathprices.com

The bloodstains looked like a trail left by someone that had been dragged across the floor and were two sets of bloody footprints found; one large set of footprints (approximately a US size 14) and the other was significantly smaller, possibly a woman’s shoe. On the wall beside them was a smeared hand mark. Ryan and Rachel immediately leave the back of the store and dial 9-1-1. Rachel would wait in the front of the store until the police arrived, but Ryan decided he really needed to go back and assess the situation as he was worried there could have been someone in need of help left in the store. Following the trail of blood, he was lead further into the back room until he found the body of a woman. The woman was lying face down in a thick pool of blood and had a rope tied around her neck. He becomes flustered and panicked and begins to make his way back to the front of the store when he hears a noise coming from another room in the back. He apprehensively walks to the noise, which is coming from the employee restroom. In the restroom, he found another body of a woman on her back, bound with zip ties, and covered in her own blood. This time, he realized that the woman was still breathing.

Ryan runs to the front of the store and through nervous breaths tells Rachel what he just found, and that they needed immediate medical assistance. That’s when Rachel realizes who the two women he was describing were… Brittany Norwood (28) and Jayna Murray (30). They were the two employees scheduled to close the store the night before.

The woman who was still breathing was Brittany Norwood, who not only was found zip-tied with her hands above her head, but had several cuts to her arms, legs, and torso along with a gash on her forehead and was found with a Lululemon branded shirt wrapped around her neck. While she was fully clothed, her leggings had the crotch portion ripped off leading authorities to initially believe she was sexually assaulted. Jayna Murphy unfortunately didn’t survive the attack. Authorities reviewed the scene where Rachel and Ryan discovered the struggle and found various items covered in blood; items that they felt were used as part of the attack. There was a bloodied hanger, a bloodied rock, and an opened toolbox that was mainly for use around the store. They found the contents that belonged to the toobox box scattered throughout the back room and the store: a hammer, wrench, knife and peg used to hold up a mannequin which police also believed to be weapons used to attack the girls.

Contents of box found - Image courtesy of The Associated Press

As the investigation continued, they performed an autopsy on Jayna’s body. It revealed that she was stabbed at the very least 331 times. They mentioned that this was just the wounds that they could count as one stab mark, noting that she could have been stabbed far more than 331 times, as the marks had been hit various times, making layers over layers of stab wounds. “This was a brutal, slow attack,” Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy would later say in the trail. He would then say this was equivalent to an injury inflicted on you every 3 seconds for 16 minutes straight. Of these 331, she had 200 stab wounds on her face, head, and neck, and 131 stabs to her chest, shoulders, arms, and torso. The coroner also reported self-defense wounds to her hands and arms, 13 skull fractures alongside other bruising to her body. Her skull was so badly damaged, a portion of her skull had collapsed from the attack. The worst part was, the coroner believes that she was alive during the entire attack, up until the very last blow to her body which was a hit to the back of her head, that detached her skull from her spinal cord. Based on the injury patterns to her body, the forensic team felt that the tools they found at the scene were all used to murder Jayna.

Now, let’s go back to Brittany…

Brittany was rushed to the hospital with cuts and wounds to her body, but she was not nearly as injured as Jayna. Most of her wounds were very superficial, with a couple of stitches needed here and there and had a rape kit performed on her. Because her wounds weren’t as severe, police interviewed her ASAP as they had a murderer on the loose. Brittany told the police everything she recalled from the night of events.

Brittany’s recollection of the night was that it was a normal closing shift. She and Jayna closed the store after the last customer left. They counted the tills, had finished cleaning up, left, and Jayna locked the front doors. She recounts Jayna getting in her car and driving off while she started walking to the local subway station to head home. She says she got all the way to the station and realized she had forgotten her Metro Pass in the store, and needed to go back and pick it up. Brittany was only hired at this store about 6 weeks earlier, so she phoned a couple of other coworkers that she did have contacts for, and asked them if they could provide her with Jayna’s phone number. Once she got the information, she called Jayna, who was possibly halfway home at this time and asked her to turn around and reopen the doors as Jayna was the closing keyholder. Jayna actually didn’t mind as she also left her laptop behind, so figured she’d use it as an opportunity to pick it up then instead of the next day. Brittany stated she walked back and waited for her in front of the store until Jayna finally pulled up and parked in front of the store. They unlock the door, close it but don’t lock it as they were only running in and out. They proceed to the backroom to retrieve their belongings. According to Brittany, her Metro Pass wasn’t where she thought she placed it, and the two of them started to look around for the pass together, taking up a little more time than they had planned. As they were walking to the front of the store, they noticed that the double doors were wide open, and they immediately were ambushed by two men, dressed in all black and ski masks, hiding behind clothing racks.

During the interrogation, she recalls the events as follows:
One man who was about 6’ grabs Jayna, hits her in the head, and knocks her to the floor, while the other man who was about 5’5” grabbed Brittany and started dragging her to the backroom by her hair. Brittany states that this was the last she saw of Jayna for a while, as they separated both girls during the attack. She then claims the smaller man dragged her to the registers and demanded she put all the money into his backpack and after she did what she was told, she was dragged into one of the backrooms of the store. He then proceeded to zip tie her and “torture” her. He was careful to not inflict any injuries that could potentially kill her, but more so put her in so much pain she begged him to stop, which explained why her injuries were so superficial. She said the man threatened to slit her throat, ripped a portion of her leggings off, raped her, and just left her on the floor after he was done. A few moments later, she said the shorter man came back with a wooden store hanger and continued to sexually assault her with it.

Courtesy of WJLA.com

She said during this time, she heard Jayna screaming and yelling for help in the other room. As time went on, the screams were getting fewer and far between until they eventually stopped and the room got quiet. Brittany recalls her attacker picked her up and took her to the other room where Jayna and her attacker were and was thrown on top of Jayna’s body to make some sort of statement to her, as if they were saying “you’re lucky this isn’t you”. The men laughed and told her they were going to spare her life simply because “she was more fun to fuck.” They grabbed her off Jayna’s body, and threw her in the employee restroom where she would eventually be found. She gave a very convincing testimony to them as she was visibly distraught and profusely blamed herself for the attack since she was the person who asked to go back into the store after closing for her Metro Pass. She even asked how Jayna was doing, acting unaware of her coworker’s death, making it seem she was only aware that Jayna was badly injured.

Now that police had this information, the next thing they needed was CCTV footage. The issue was that none of the surrounding stores had cameras near this Lululemon… except for one. The Apple store.

Once the Apple store handed over the security footage, police actually found two white males, dressed in all black with black beanies walking by the store around the time Brittany says they were ambushed. The police immediately put out news coverage looking for these two men as they were now suspects in a murder-robbery.

Screen Grab from Oxygen’s SNAPPED - Episode 14

The city was in a panic as this was considered a nice and safe area, and now there was two men out there who were capable of murdering again. The city was so afraid, the entire shopping center had sales drop by 50% due to the consumer fear that these men would attack again. Police then start to question people in the Apple store that were working during the time of the murders to see if there was anything they saw or heard that could help them. Surprisingly, the employees that closed the Apple store heard it all. Three employees and a security guard were working that night and heard shouting from the other side of the wall, like two women who were arguing. One woman was heard yelling “Talk to me. Don't do this. Talk to me. What's going on?" which was then followed by screams, wails, and yells until eventually, they heard the woman say “God help me, please… help me.” One Apple employee, Jana Svrzo, stated that the screams were so loud that they could hear it crystal clear throughout the store as if it was happing IN their store. This was all followed by grunting noises and the sound of something dragging, like something heavy was being moved across the room. Ricardo Rios, the manager of the Apple Store, testified that he thought the noise was "just drama” while the Apple security guard ignored it all and continued to listen to music on his iPod. This was all recorded on the store’s security footage. It was later reported that they hadn’t called 9-1-1 or even tried to check what happened next door to make sure everything was okay.

Apple Store employees listen to slaying. Screen grab from ABC7 news

Police needed to now interview Rachel, the store manager who opened the store the day the women were found. In her interview, she told the investigators that she was on the phone with Jayna that night as she was driving home before she came back to let Brittany back in the store which was right at 10 pm. They reviewed the store security system and showed the store was first alarmed at 9:45 pm when they first left the store. It was disarmed again at 10:05 pm which is believed to be when the women returned to the store. As the investigation continued, the investigators realized that according to Brittany’s recollection of the night, Jayna had parked her car in front of the store, but Jayna’s car wasn’t there when the crime scene was discovered. Police presented the possibility that the robbers stole Jayna’s car after fleeing the scene, so now they need to find her car. All officers were given a description of her car, and it was noted that she had Texas plates on her car. Being in Maryland, it surely would be easy to spot… and it was. Jayna’s car had been spotted by a patrol officer, parked a few blocks away from Lululemon around midnight the night of the murder. The officer recalled that the car was parked with the lights on and there was a passenger inside. Two hours later, around 2 am, the officer drove past her car parked in that same location but this time the lights were off and there was no one inside. With this information, the investigating officers drove to the location her car was last seen and luckily it was still there and was impounded as evidence.

They searched the car for prints, DNA samples, and other forensic evidence and submitted them for testing. While they waited for the results to come in, they went back to the only real bit of evidence they had which was the CCTV footage from outside the Apple store. They needed to figure out who these men were, but because of the placement and angle of the camera, they were striking out and not getting very far. The detective assigned to the case, Dimitry Ruvin, decided he was going to run a stakeout in front of the store, hoping the attackers would return. So he sat in that location essentially people watching for days until he finally sees two men that fit the description given to him by Brittany; 2 white men, one with a height of 6’ and the other 5’5” both wearing all black. He stops both men and shows them the images of the security footage and asked, “do you know who these guys are?” and they openly admit that it’s them. They worked as waiters at a restaurant a few doors away from Lululemon, and they walked together often because they lived in the same direction. That’s also why they’re seen wearing all black then and now; it was the uniform. Detective Ruvin was able to verify their alibi.

This evidence was no longer evident and really all the investigating team could do was wait on the forensics from Jayna’s car. As he was reviewing all the crime scene evidence and Brittany’s testimony in closer detail, he realized her story just didn’t add up…