“Culture” is defined as “the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society”, and what we wear often clearly indicates what culture we associate ourselves with. If you’re reading this article, you can likely picture almost any form of traditional wear from anywhere in the world, and the chances are that you would almost instantly know what culture or country it belongs to.
For most people though, what we wear also indicates our level of income or adherence to current fashion trends, and yoga pants have become a fashion staple in the last few years. In 2018, an article published by Bloomberg described the US as the “Nation of Yoga Pants”, and you only have to spend a minute on social media platforms like TikTok to see the truth of that statement.
The company that is credited with introducing yoga pants to the world is a Canadian athletic apparel retailer called Lululemon.
According to journalist Peter Ross Range’s book, Murder in the Yoga Store, Lululemon offered its employees free yoga classes on Sunday mornings, gave them free passes to fitness clubs, and encouraged them to wear Lululemon clothing to work by offering them discounts on the products they sold, essentially turning their employees into walking-talking advertisements for the store.
According to an interview with a “Lulu Girl” Michelle Malia did for her article called “What It’s REALLY Like to Work at Lululemon” —
“[Lululemon] hire[s] people who all have that athlete mentality, who are into working out, fitness, eating healthy. It’s a lifestyle, so they usually hire people who have a lot in common.”
30-year-old Jayna Troxel Murray and 28-year-old Brittany Norwood were both a part of Lululemon’s “Sisterhood of Lulu Girls”. They worked at the Bethesda branch in a tree-lined shopping district along Bethesda Avenue that is known as Bethesda Row. Because the store had an all-female staff, company policy was that at least three people had to work the closing shift, but on the 11th of March 2011, they were short-staffed, so Jayna and Brittany were working the closing shift from 3 pm to 9 pm on their own.
The store wasn’t particularly busy that evening, but the Apple store next door had been buzzing all day since Apple had just launched the Apple iPad 2. By 9 pm the crowds that had queued down the block that afternoon had dissipated, and Bethesda Row was mostly deserted by the time the two girls closed shop.
As a part of the Leadership team, Jayna was responsible for cashing up while Brittany, one of the newest hires, ensured that the displays were neat and in order. They then met up in one of the back rooms where the store employees stored their belongings, and as a part of the store’s closing procedures, the two girls checked each other’s bags.
Since Lululemon’s employees are encouraged to purchase clothing at the store, it isn’t unusual for them to have Lululemon merchandise in their bags. Usually, the price tags would have been cut off, and the girls just have to present their slips as proof that they’d purchased the clothing that day, but that evening Brittany didn’t have a slip to prove that she’d bought the pair of yoga pants that Jayna came across in her bag.
Jayna wasn’t surprised though. The Leadership team at the Bethesda store suspected that Brittany had been stealing from the store and her fellow employees ever since she started working there six weeks earlier, and now Jayna could prove it.
When Jayna asked Brittany when she’d bought the pair of yoga pants, Brittany claimed that Chioma, one of the day-shift employees, had processed the sale. The system was down for the night, so Jayna couldn’t double-check the sales for the day. So instead, Jayna confiscated the pants and told Brittany that she was going to have to follow up on the purchase the next day.
Brittany agreed, insisting that she’d done nothing wrong, and the two girls left the store. Brittany headed towards the nearest train station, and Jayna got into her car and started following up on Brittany’s claims that she’d purchased the pair of yoga pants.
Jayna called Chioma first and asked her whether she’d sold anything to Brittany that day. Chioma denied it, so Jayna then called Rachel Oertli, the Store Manager, and told her that she suspected that Brittany had attempted to steal from the store.
Rachel told Jayna that she would deal with it the next day, and Jayna switched on her car and started heading home. Then her phone started ringing. It was Brittany, and she claimed to have forgotten her wallet back at the store. Since her Metro card was in her wallet, she was stranded, and Jayna agreed to head back to the store and let Brittany back in so that she could retrieve her wallet.
Jayna parked her car in front of the store and the two girls met up at the store’s entrance. Jayna unlocked the door, disabled the alarm, and led the way inside, not bothering to lock the door behind them. She escorted Brittany to the back of the store to keep an eye on her, and Brittany brought the subject of the yoga pants up again. Jayna refused to talk about it, telling Brittany that Rachel was going to deal with it the next day, and the two girls argued, with a desperate Brittany trying to convince Jayna not to tell the others what she’d done.
An impatient Jayna ended up giving Brittany her Metro card instead, wanting to bring an end to the argument so that she could head home. Then Jayna turned around and led the way back to the sales floor.
She never saw the first blow coming.
The Nightmare on Bethesda Row
Fair warning, things are about to get ugly. The details surrounding the attack on Brittany and Jayna are crucial to the case, so bear with me.
Rachel realized that something was wrong when she arrived at the store at 8 am the next morning. The store was unlocked, and when Rachel stepped inside, she noticed that mannequins had been knocked over, clothes were strewn over the wooden floors, a flat-screen tv that they used for marketing purposes had crashed to the ground, and the floor was covered in bloody footprints.
And then she heard someone moaning in pain at the back of the store.
In a panic, Rachel called 911, and soon police officers from the Montgomery County Police arrived on the scene. Jayna’s body was discovered in the rear hallway that was used as a storage area. She was lying face down, her body facing the rear-exit door, and she was covered in blood. A toolbox had fallen off the storage shelves and onto her body at one point during the attack, and its bloody contents were scattered all around her.
The crotch of her yoga pants had been cut open, exposing her, and based on the piece of clothing around her neck, she’d been strangled.
The police found an unconscious Brittany lying in a pool of blood in the staff bathroom. Her hands and ankles had been tied with zip ties, the crotch of her black yoga pants had also been cut open, and she lay stretched out on her back with her arms above her head. The paramedics weren’t sure just how severely she’d been injured, so Brittany was rushed to a nearby hospital.
There the hospital staff reported that Brittany had a deep cut on her forehead, various parallel cuts on her stomach, back, arms, and legs, fine cuts all over her body, and a cut between her one thumb and forefinger. She was also tested for possible sexual assault.
Veteran detective Deana Mackie went to interview Brittany at the hospital. She specialized in homicide and sex crimes, and even she was shocked at the sadistic nature of the attack on the two girls.
According to Brittany, she had followed Jayna out of the back room the previous night, and they’d made it to the middle of the sales floor when two men dressed in black attacked them. One of them hit Jayna on the back of her head while the other attacked Brittany.
“He had me by the hair, told me if I said another word he would slit my throat.”
The man dragged Brittany by her hair to the staff bathroom, then proceeded to cut her all over her body, insulting her with every cut, calling her “a dirty bitch, a dirty whore, and a dirty nigger”.
“I was still trying to fight him and tried to get up and he hit me across the head. I just fell back and hit my head on the ground, he pushed me back…he had a knife of some kind…he told me if I didn’t shut up and stop moving he’d make sure I’d never have kids…and was cutting me down my stomach…he said something along the lines of ‘being with a dirty nggr, I’ve never been with one of these,’ and he was cutting my pants and he was gonna rape me.”
The man then cut the crotch of Brittany’s leggings open and proceeded to rape Brittany, but the initial assault didn’t last long. Instead, he took one of the wooden clothes hangers that they used in the store and used it to continue to assault her while Jayna’s screams sounded from further down the hallway. All the while, Brittany could hear people talking and cheering in the adjacent Apple store. But none of them came to their aid.
“Jayna kept yelling and fighting, and he just kept hitting her. I think he dragged her to the [other] bathroom and she was still trying to fight with him but then I just heard something break…he was just repeatedly hitting her and she was just screaming and yelling and I couldn’t do anything…I don’t know if she was able to stand up, I don’t know if she was on her knees or what…he was dragging her by the hair.”
Brittany was taken to the front of the store where her attacker demanded that she should open the cash registers and the safe for him, when she saw the first attacker drag Jayna into the back hallway where he continued to assault her. Jayna’s screams echoed down the hallway until they grew weaker, and eventually faded into nothing.
At one point, Brittany tried to go and help Jayna. She made it to the rear hallway and noticed all the blood, but her attacker caught up with her and dragged her back to the bathroom by her hair before tying her hands and feet together with cable ties and leaving her crying and alone in the bathroom. Eventually, she blacked out, only coming to when the police arrived on the scene.
“There was so much blood! I remember trying to help her. I tried to help Jayna…she was bleeding so much!”
But despite the blood, despite Jayna’s fading cries, Brittany didn’t seem to realize that Jayna hadn’t survived the attack. She reportedly kept asking Detective Mackie —
“Can you tell me how my friend is doing?”
But Detective Mackie didn’t have the heart to tell the sobbing girl that Jayna was dead and dodged the question by saying that she hadn’t yet been to see Jayna.
When asked to describe her attackers, Brittany said that one of them was quite tall, easily over six feet, while the other one was barely taller than her. They were of medium build and wore black clothes. Her attacker had been behind her most of the time, and they both had masks covering their faces, so she couldn’t describe what they’d looked like, but based on their voices she guessed that they were both white.
The news of their attack spread quickly, with the Washington Post reporting that both victims had been sexually assaulted and one of them had been killed. Police spokesman Captain Paul Starks said that —
“We do believe robbery was part of the motive here, but we haven’t been able to clarify what was taken. We can’t rule out [that the crime] was random, but the suspects were clearly prepared to do something. They had gloves and masks with them. Whether they had planned to rob the store or planned to commit some other type of crime, we do not know.”
For many, this was a nightmare come to life, and the businesses surrounding the Lululemon store implemented measures to protect their staff, going so far as to shorten their business hours and hire additional security until such a time as the two men who’d attacked Brittany and Jayna were caught. A local real-estate agency offered a $10,000 reward for any information that could lead to an arrest, resulting in locals calling clothing stores in the area to ask whether they’d sold face masks to anyone in the days leading up to the attack.
Soon a real-life version of Chinese Whispers turned “two men wearing black masks” into “two black men wearing masks”, and every black man who walked down Bethesda Avenue became a suspect to the people working there.
”The Footprints Never Left the Store”
Detectives Jim Drewry and Dimitry Ruvin were assigned to the case, and when they walked into the Bethesda branch of Lululemon that Saturday morning, the store’s glass windows had already been covered by brown paper, yellow police tape kept the gawkers at bay, and Bethesda Avenue was crawling with journalists.
But the inside of the store looked like something out of a horror film. Assistant State’s Attorney Marybeth Ayres would later say that —
“They had this weird, dim overhead lighting. The store was quiet. There were mannequins and racks of clothes and it was almost like in a movie, like someone could jump out from anywhere. It was really creepy.”
For the two detectives, however, it looked like ‘an episode of CSI come to life’.
“Everything was there, right where Brittany had said it was.”
The floor was covered in bloody footprints of varying sizes, receipts were strewn all over, the cash registers had been left open, and the safe had been emptied. In the bathroom where they’d found Brittany, they found the box cutters that had been used to cut her, the wooden hanger that she’d been assaulted with, and the bloodied shards of a vase that she’d been lying on for hours before the police found her.
In the rear hallway, they found clumps of Jayna’s hair on the floor, and the whole area was covered in blood — the floor, the walls, and the ceiling.
The police found the box of zip-ties that had been used to tie Brittany up on the storage shelves and collected all the tools that had fallen out of the toolbox. The majority of them were covered in blood, and bloody piping was also recovered and added to the mounting pile of evidence that needed to be sorted through.
What they didn’t have was video surveillance. Lululemon didn’t have security cameras installed. Neither did the majority of the businesses in the surrounding area. But the Apple store did — both inside and outside the store. And as their luck would have it, the Apple store’s surveillance cameras had captured footage of two men wearing black casually walking away from Lululemon shortly after the murder took place. Now the police just had to identify them.
But wait, there’s more! Two of the Apple Store’s employees who’d been working the previous night reported that they might have heard something around the time of the attack.
The Apple store shared a wall with Lululemon, and just after 10 pm, one of the managers was busy cashing up at the back of the store and heard strange sounds coming from the other side of the wall.
“It sounded like something heavy was being hit or dragged. Some grunting, some thudding, some kind of high-pitched squealing, yelping…a female voice, like hysterical sounds.”
The manager called the senior manager over, and together the two of them listened to the sounds coming through the wall. They could make out two female voices. One of the voices said —
“Talk to me! Tell me what’s going on! Why won’t you tell me? Talk to me!”
Followed by grunting and screaming and someone crying —
“Stop, oh God! Please help me!”
The surveillance video from inside the store would show that the two of them had stood and listened for NINE MINUTES as the sounds died away, unsure of what to do or how to react, reportedly thinking that it was just —
“some drama”
And that they shouldn’t interfere.
But someone else reported that they’d seen someone suspicious outside of Lululemon the night of the attack. A local homeless man had been hanging around outside Lululemon for most of the afternoon, and at one point, he was seen talking to two men dressed in black.
Hoping that they’d finally tracked down their suspects, the police went looking for the homeless man and found him that Sunday night in the same hospital where Brittany was being treated. The clothes that he’d arrived in were covered in blood, and the police confiscated them to have them tested. The blood turned out to be his own since he’d been involved in a fight in a club on Saturday night.
The police did manage to track down the two men in the surveillance footage though, and they turned out to be two busboys who worked at a local restaurant. They’d been heading home after their shift, and it didn’t take the police long to realize that they had nothing to do with the Lululemon murder.
So once again the police were without a suspect. But the forensic reports were starting to come in, and they were poking holes in Brittany’s story.
First, there was the autopsy report. Jayna had sustained hundreds of injuries — 232 blunt force injuries and 99 sharp force injuries. She had over 100 wounds to her head and face. She’d also been strangled, and her legs were bruised as if she’d been kicked.
The majority of her wounds were defensive, showing that she’d fought for her life. The killing blow was a stab wound at the back of her head where she’d been hit with a metal peg. In total, there were 331 identifiable wounds on her body, and she’d been alive when every single one of them was made. When compared to the few scratches that Brittany had on her body, it seemed like overkill.
What also bothered the police was the fact that all of the weapons that had been used on the girls came from the store. Surely, if you were planning on robbing someone, you’d bring your own weapons?
Then there were the rape kits. The cuts to Jayna and Brittany’s yoga pants indicated that they might have been sexually assaulted — but neither of them were. Brittany had claimed that she’d been assaulted with a wooden clothes hanger, but the nurse who’d examined her noted that her genitals weren’t tender or swollen or damaged in any way. Brittany’s clothes were also covered in blood, and when the results came back, it turned out that the blood belonged to both Jayna and Brittany.
And then there were the sneakers.
You see, Lululemon didn’t sell sneakers, but the store had a pair of men’s size 14 sneakers that their clients wore whenever alterations to their clothes had to be made. The police found the sneakers stashed away on a shelf in the store, and they matched one of the sets of bloody footprints perfectly. Their soles were clean, but the sneakers had drops of blood on their tops, blood stains on the inside, and their laces were missing.
Furthermore, David McGill, one of the forensic specialists, had expected that there would be four sets of bloody footprints. After all, there were four people in the store during the attack. And yet he only found two — the size 14, and a woman’s size 7 ½.
He made note of other strange details as well — whenever the shoe prints overlapped, the larger footprints were on top of the smaller ones. The footprints also circled all around the store in an odd kind of chicken dance, but they all led back to a sink in the back room before coming to stop in front of a chair. The only prints that moved all around the store were odd wiggly lines or “slap slap” marks that were made whenever a pair of bloody laces hit the ground as the person was walking. Not one set of footprints left the store at any point during the attack.
And then they found Jayna’s car. According to Brittany’s testimony, Jayna had parked her car in front of the store when she returned to Lululemon that night. And yet, her car wasn’t there when the police arrived the next morning. A patrol car found Jayna’s two-door Pontiac G5 three blocks away in a parking lot next to a farmer’s market, but according to Jayna’s friends, she never parked her car there.
Forensics found blood on the car’s stick shift, the driver’s side door, and the steering wheel. They also found a black Lululemon cap in the back of the car that had traces of blood on the headband. Forensics drew up DNA profiles for all of the blood stains, and they matched one person — three guesses who.
Thanks to the forensic reports, Brittany Norwood had gone from fellow victim to murder suspect within the course of two days. Detective Ruvin would later explain that —
“It bothered us from the beginning that the footprints never left the store. But now, in the context of Brittany being involved, it made sense. The footprints never left the store because the killer never left the store."
"Brittany Killed Jayna”
I’m sure that you figured out or at least suspected that she’d done it way back at the beginning of this article — It was obvious, right? And yet the police didn’t want to believe it at first. There are two passages from the book, Murder in the Yoga Store, that sum up the disbelief that the police felt when they were faced with the reality that Brittany had killed Jayna —
“…many people thought that the cops and investigators must have seen through her fabrication all along. Hindsight got a good ride with folks who were not working the case, who didn’t walk into the crime scene and find all the pieces exactly as Brittany described them from her hospital bed. They had not seen the Apple Store video of two men in black walking from the direction of Lululemon.”
“You don’t think that a woman is going to expose her vagina, cut her breasts and her legs. It’s just so pathological, the level of deception, that [a cover-up] is just not what people are going to immediately think. As human beings, we want to believe it’s the masked men. You don’t want to believe it’s the articulate, educated, attractive girl next door.”
Nothing about Brittany seemed to suggest that she’d be capable of murdering anyone in such a brutal way. She was from a large, close-knit family. When she still lived at home, she’d attended church every Sunday. She’d done well in school and was a phenomenal soccer player, earning herself a scholarship at Stony Brook University in Long Island.
But Brittany had a few quirks — she was a neat freak who always wanted to look her best. She had expensive tastes and liked eating at pricey restaurants. She was also a compulsive liar and a kleptomaniac.
According to the Washington Post, her old teammates at SBU said that Brittany was —
“as nice as they come, really friendly, a leader on the team,”
But Megan Healy, one of her old teammates, also told reporters that —
“Other girls on the team told me things like, ‘Watch your locker, keep it locked.’ She’s been known to steal things.”
And Leanna Yust, an old friend of Brittany, said,
“She was my best friend in college. We had a falling out because the girl was like a klepto.”
Whenever she was caught, however, Brittany would go on the defensive and claim to be a victim, that her teammates were picking on her because of her race. Her behavior cost her the scholarship before she could finish her degree, and Brittany would go on to take jobs that paid minimum wage.
She’d also had a restraining order issued against her in 2008 after she’d reportedly started stalking an ex-boyfriend of hers. He claimed that she’d been abusive during their relationship and would often punch and push him during arguments. Once he started seeing someone else though, Brittany broke into their apartment and stole his new girlfriend’s belongings, and in May 2008 an arrest warrant was issued for her after she’d broken the terms of her restraining order, but it was never carried out.
Of course, the leadership team at Lululemon in Georgetown didn’t know any of this when Brittany applied for a position as a salesperson. But after a few weeks, her true colors started showing, and the Leadership team at the Lululemon in Georgetown started to suspect that she’d been stealing from the cash registers.
Eventually, she would be fired after she’d taken advantage of a special staff shopping night. All of Lululemon’s employees were given $1,000 each just before Christmas and told to shop to their heart’s content. And shop Brittany did — racking up a bill of almost $2,000.
After Brittany was asked to leave the store, she vented to her friend Eila, telling her that —
“She felt she was wrongfully fired. She thought she had her manager’s permission to go over the limit.”
Brittany appealed the decision to fire her and won. But of course, her relationship with the Georgetown store was broken, so she was transferred to the Lululemon in Bethesda instead.
But the police didn’t know any of this when they went to interview her the Monday after the attack. They found that Brittany’s family had flown down from Seattle to support her, and she was still visibly shaken after her ordeal. She also remembered a few details that she hadn’t told the police during her initial interview.
In stops and starts, crying the entire time, Brittany told the detectives that her attackers had laughed a lot during the attack as if it was a game to them. When she’d tried to escape through the back door, one of the men had jerked her back, and she’d fallen onto Jayna’s body, explaining why her clothes had been covered in both her and Jayna’s blood. Worst still, her attackers had gone through her wallet and warned her that they now knew where she lived. As a result, she was living in terror at the idea of them returning for her, and initially, the detectives fell for her story.
“She was crying, she was shaking – it was hard listening to her. I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe what she went through.’”
But as they drove back to police headquarters that night, Detective Ruvin mentally picked through everything Brittany had told them so far — and realized that Brittany’s story didn’t make sense. Her attackers sounded like the incarnation of pure evil.
“If you’re going to make up somebody evil, what are they going to do? They’re going to rape, they’re going to rob, they’re going to kill, they’re going to be racist. It’s like you’re creating the most evil person in the world.”
Detective Ruvin was quickly coming to the conclusion that Brittany might be their killer, and he ran his theory past Detective Drewry.
“Her story seems so exaggerated. Two really evil guys just doesn’t make sense. But does one evil woman make sense? I’m beginning to think there weren’t any masked men. I’m beginning to think Brittany killed Jayna.”
Now that Brittany had stepped into the role of the killer, a lot of the evidence started to make sense. Like how all the weapons came from inside the store. Like how the killer knew where to find the zip ties — something the police had to search for. The footprints that never left the store, the sneakers that had supposedly been left behind by the killers, the way Brittany’s body was posed when they found her, the fact that nothing had kept her from getting up and calling for help the moment their attackers had left the store.
And then there were the cuts that had been made all over her body. If you knew what to look for, it was obvious that they were self-inflicted. They were all skin-deep, parallel cuts — even the ones on her back. Furthermore, the cuts on her back were hidden by her clothes at first. If they’d been caused by a struggle, her clothes would have been ripped in places as well. They weren’t.
And last but not least — the blood stains on the insides of her size 7 ½ sneakers matched those on her bloodied socks and the stains inside the size 14 sneakers.
Now the police were gathering everything they needed to build a solid case of murder against Brittany Norwood. And just three days after she’d become a suspect in a murder investigation, Brittany called the police headquarters to tell them that she’d remembered something else that they should know.
Detective Drewry and Detective Ruvin were — to use one of my favorite idioms — as pleased as punch. They hadn’t had a valid excuse to call Brittany in for another interview, and here she’d just given them a reason to talk to her.
Brittany spent the first part of the interview spinning more lies, reminding them over and over that she was a victim, trying to explain away the traces of her blood that they’d found in Jayna’s car by saying that she’d been forced to move it, but eventually, Detective Drewry crossed his arms, sat back in his chair, and said —
“Brittany, [there] comes a point sometimes when we have to break down and get everything off of our chests. I’m sure that you have been going completely nuts for these past couple of days, with worry, with fear [about] what the cops have figured out…You got to tell us what really happened. Because I know what really happened.”
Detectives Drewry and Ruvin confronted Brittany with every fact of the case, with every theory they had regarding why she’d killed Jayna, trying their best to get her to admit that she’d murdered her, but Brittany denied everything. When he realized that they weren’t going to break her, Detective Drewry read Brittany Norwood her Miranda rights and arrested her on the spot for suspicion of first-degree murder.
The Evidence Tells A Story
Brittany might have told her own twisted version of what had happened that Friday night, but the forensic evidence would give Jayna a voice of her own, and it painted a dark picture.
The fight broke out in the back room. As soon as Jayna turned her back, Brittany bent and picked up a heavy metal merchandise peg. She walked up behind Jayna as she made her way back towards the front of the store and hit her over the head with it.
Jayna, shocked and dazed, dropped her bag, turned around to see where the blow had come from, and confronted Brittany, asking her what the hell she was doing.
After all, this wasn’t some random attacker, some monster that had sneaked into the store unseen. It was someone she knew. Someone she’d worked with all day. Someone who’d just attacked her out of the blue. Surely, they could talk it out? Resolve whatever issue Brittany had with her?
We don’t know what Brittany responded with, but Jayna was freaked out enough that she made a run for it.
Jayna managed to reach the sales floor before Brittany caught up with her, grabbed onto her jacket, and pulled her off balance. A fight ensued, and the television was knocked from the wall and crashed onto the floor. Somewhere along the way, Jayna left a bloody handprint on the wall, and managed to get out of her jacket, loosening Brittany’s hold on her, and leaving it on the sales floor for the police to find.
Jayna made another dash for the door, knocking over a mannequin, but Brittany grabbed a hold of Jayna’s hair, pulling chunks of it out as the two girls continued to struggle. Jayna would eventually run to the back of the store and try to escape through the rear exit instead, but it was locked. She tried to call 911 for help, but Brittany knocked her phone out of her hand, and its pieces would be found next to her body.
Now Jayna was cornered, and Brittany descended on her in a mindless fury.
For twenty minutes, Jayna tried to defend herself, tried to fight back, but she was without a weapon and already at a disadvantage. She would end up on her knees, then her side, crying and screaming for help as the blows descended on her, until, eventually, one of the sharp edges of the metal peg hit her at the back of her head, severing her spine and killing her instantly.
At the end of it all, Brittany stood over Jayna and probably realised what she’d done. For a moment she must have considered running away and claiming ignorance. But she’d called one of their co-workers to ask for Jayna’s number when she’d realised that she’d forgotten her wallet back at the store. They knew that she’d headed back to the store with Jayna. So she couldn’t go home and pretend like nothing had happened. She had to cover her tracks.
In an adrenaline-fueled panic, she realised that Jayna’s car was still parked illegally in front of the store. Thinking that it would draw attention, Brittany donned a black Lululemon cap so that no one would recognise her, and parked Jayna’s car three blocks away, not realising that she was not only covered in Jayna’s blood, but that she’d sustained a cut on her hand that was also bleeding, leaving her DNA all over the inside of Jayna’s car. I can imagine her screaming and crying as she realised that she’d just murdered someone and that her life was over, and she tossed the black cap into the back of the car as she panicked.
She would end up sitting in the car for more than two hours as she calmed down and contemplated her options. We know this because at 12:30 am, two hours since Jayna had died, a passing police officer noticed that a car was parked in the otherwise empty parking lot with its headlights still on. Realising that someone was inside, he made a note of it, then continued on his way.
Eventually Brittany would walk those three blocks back to the store, then stage it to look like a robbery had taken place. She noticed that she’d tracked bloody footprints throughout the store, so she pulled on the pair of men’s sneakers and added some more so that it looked like a man had been there as well, staining the insides of the sneakers with her blood-soaked socks. She then washed the soles of the sneakers and placed them back on the shelf.
Now she had to make herself look like a victim. She collected the zip-ties from a storage shelf above Jayna’s lifeless body and picked up a box cutter that had fallen out of the toolbox during their struggle. She staged the scene of her own attack in one of the bathrooms and used the box cutter to make shallow cuts all over her body. Then she sat down on the floor, zip tied her ankles together, and did the same to her hands, leaving her teeth marks on the zip ties.
She must have gone over her version of events multiple times as she lay there for hours, her arms stretched out above her head, waiting for someone to discover her. And the moment Rachel entered the store, it was Brittany’s time to shine.
”One Hell of a Liar”
On the 18th of March 2011 at 1:54 pm, Brittany Norwood was arrested for the savage murder of Jayna Murray. Her arrest was a shock to everyone who’d been following the news regarding the Lululemon murder, but ironically it was also a relief to those who’d been convinced that two monsters had intruded on their peaceful community, when in fact, the reality was far more sinister.
Brittany would be held at the Montgomery County lockup for the next seven months. The State prosecutors wanted the toughest possible sentence — life in prison without the possibility of parole (Maryland doesn’t have the death penalty) — and they had their work cut out for them.
According to Peter Range, the State prosecutors didn’t feel that they could prove without any doubt that Brittany had been the one to kill Jayna. The forensic evidence was only circumstantial, not concrete proof. Brittany’s lawyer argued that Brittany had “snapped,” and wanted to negotiate for either a plea deal and a stay in a state mental institution, or second-degree murder.
But the Murray’s wanted Brittany to face the music, and they wanted to know exactly what had happened that Friday night. Jayna’s brother Dirk would say that —
“The trial was my last opportunity to hear my sister speak.”
To say that Brittany Norwood’s trial was hard on the Murray family would be an understatement. But it was just as hard on the Norwoods who had to listen as their sister and daughter was described as —
“…a monster, a torturer, a mutilator.”
Both families would spend six days going through every detail of what had happened that night and listen to the 25 witnesses who were called to testify. They had to look at over 200 photos — some of which were of the wounds that Jayna had suffered during the attack. State Attorney John McCarthy would point to every one of the eight weapons that had been used in the attack, and told the jury to —
“Think about how long this took. Jayna is alive through almost all of this. The last wounds are from the knives. This was not slow. This was not painless.”
At the end of those six days, the jury found Brittany Norwood guilty of premeditated first-degree murder, and three months later, Judge Robert Greenberg listened as Brittany apologized to the Murrays for murdering Jayna and asked him to have mercy on her and grant her the possibility of parole — even if it was only for her family’s sake.
Judge Greenberg felt no sympathy for her though, describing her actions as ‘the worst of human behavior’, telling the court that —
“This woman was a phenomenal actress. She whimpers and cries on cue.”
Then, addressing Brittany, he said —
“You’re a helluva liar, ma’am. An entire community was terrorized.”
He told her that she had plenty of opportunities to stop the attack, but she didn’t, instead continuing to brutally attack a woman who didn’t deserve any of it.
“After every blow, you had a chance to think about what you were doing…[instead] you mutilated this woman.”
“I have no doubt, Ms. Norwood, that you are a deeply troubled woman. [However] my sympathy for your plight, ma’am, does not begin…to approach what I feel for the Murray family.”
“You will live. You will see another sunrise, another sunset. It may be through a prison window. There’ll be Christmases, there’ll be telephone calls, there’ll be visits. The only visits Jayna Murray will have are those to her grave.”
The 28-year-old Brittany Norwood received a life sentence without the possibility of parole. And just like that, one of the most bizarre murder cases that had ever been heard in Montgomery County was over.
In Loving Memory of Jayna Troxel Murray
As with every case we cover, it is important to remember that Jayna wasn’t just a murder victim, but a daughter, a sister, and a friend. So today I’d like us to end by honouring her.
Jayna was born on the 22nd of November 1980 and was the youngest of 3 kids. By all accounts, Jayna was outgoing, adventurous, loud, and bubbly. She did a lot of volunteer work and liked to travel the world. She often went hiking, spelunking, trapezing, rock-climbing, and trampolining.
She’d already been sky-diving, so for her 30th birthday she went bungee-jumping, voluntarily leaping off a bridge into the 191-foot Columbia River Gorge in Oregon, and uploaded the video to YouTube, calling it “Learning to Fly on my 30th Birthday”. If she had any faults, it was her self-proclaimed lack of a fashion sense and her love for junk television.
Jayna loved to dance, and even though she reportedly didn’t have the right body for ballet, she was a natural tap dancer and performed all over the US alongside Savion Glover — who is apparently a tap-dancing sensation. Realizing that she didn’t want to become a professional dancer, she studied at St. Louis University in Spain for two years before obtaining a degree in business and communications at George Washington University.
She then worked at an oil field services company for a while before enrolling at Johns Hopkins University to work towards earning two master’s degrees in business administration and communications. Working at Lululemon was a means to an end since she admired what the company stood for and was using Lululemon as a case study for her business administration classes.
It could be said that she’d lived life to the full, taking every opportunity that she’d been given, and that she could be an inspiration to us all. But she isn’t done leaving her mark on the world. The Bethesda branch of Lululemon remembered Jayna by hanging a photo of her in the store and installed a 6-foot-long “love window” in her memory, where it soon became a local landmark. Jayna’s parents also set up The Jayna Troxel Murray Foundation which aims to support and promote the interests that had made Jayna the person that she was and set up a scholarship program that gives its recipients the opportunity to study at Jayna’s alma maters.
Despite the fact that her life had been brutally ended when she was just 30 years old, Jayna’s legacy continues to live on, and fifty years from now, I hope that it’s her name that people will remember, and not that of her killer.
Dismembered Appendices
Judge Greenberg made a point of criticizing the Apple Store staff for not acting when they heard Jayna’s cries, voicing the Murray family’s outrage at —
“The callous indifference of the people who…heard this [crime] happen and did not a blessed thing to stop it.”
In December 2017, the Bethesda branch of Lululemon moved to new premises. The “love window” was removed and given to the Murray family. It now hangs in Jayna’s brother’s house.
Every year, The Jayna Troxel Murray Foundation sells a Christmas ornament that is inspired by Jayna in one way or another. The funds that they raise are then distributed among the many programs that they support.
Key Takeaways
- Brittany Norwood murdered coworker Jayna Murray at a Lululemon store in Bethesda on March 11, 2011, after Jayna caught her stealing yoga pants.
- Norwood staged an elaborate fake robbery and assault, inflicting shallow self-injuries and claiming two masked men attacked both women.
- Forensic evidence including bloody footprints, Jayna’s moved car with Norwood’s DNA, and self-inflicted cuts exposed Norwood’s fabricated story.
- Apple Store employees heard the attack through the shared wall for nine minutes but dismissed it as ‘some drama’ and did not intervene.
- Norwood was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole; Jayna’s family established a foundation in her memory.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Lululemon and what is its connection to yoga pants?
Lululemon is a Canadian athletic apparel retailer that is credited with introducing yoga pants to the world. According to journalist Peter Ross Range’s book ‘Murder in the Yoga Store,’ Lululemon offered employees free yoga classes, free passes to fitness clubs, and encouraged them to wear Lululemon clothing to work by offering discounts, essentially turning employees into walking advertisements for the store.
What happened on March 11, 2011 at the Bethesda Lululemon store?
On March 11, 2011, Jayna Troxel Murray and Brittany Norwood were working the closing shift alone at the Bethesda Lululemon store because they were short-staffed. During closing procedures, Jayna discovered yoga pants in Brittany’s bag without a receipt, suspecting theft. After leaving, Brittany called Jayna claiming she forgot her wallet. Jayna returned to let her in, and after an argument about the theft, Brittany attacked and murdered Jayna in the store.
How did Brittany Norwood initially explain the attack to police?
Brittany claimed that two men dressed in black attacked her and Jayna. She said one man hit Jayna on the head while the other dragged her by her hair to the staff bathroom, cut her all over her body while insulting her with racial slurs, and threatened to slit her throat. She claimed the man cut open her pants and was going to rape her, and that she heard Jayna being beaten in another room. She also claimed she tried to help Jayna but was dragged back to the bathroom, tied with zip ties, and left unconscious.
What key forensic evidence contradicted Brittany Norwood’s story?
Several forensic findings contradicted Brittany’s story: (1) The autopsy showed Jayna had 331 identifiable wounds while Brittany had only minor scratches; (2) All weapons came from inside the store rather than being brought by attackers; (3) Rape kits showed neither woman was sexually assaulted despite cut pants; (4) Only two sets of bloody footprints were found in the store—a men’s size 14 and a woman’s size 7½—despite four people supposedly being present; (5) The larger footprints were always on top of smaller ones; (6) No footprints left the store; (7) Brittany’s blood was found inside Jayna’s car and on the size 14 sneakers; (8) Brittany’s cuts were shallow, parallel, and self-inflicted in appearance.
What was Brittany Norwood’s background and prior behavior?
Brittany was from a large, close-knit family, attended church, did well in school, and was a phenomenal soccer player who earned a scholarship at Stony Brook University. However, she was also a compulsive liar and kleptomaniac. Teammates warned others to lock their lockers around her. She lost her scholarship due to this behavior.
In 2008, a restraining order was issued against her for stalking an ex-boyfriend, and she allegedly broke into his new girlfriend’s apartment and stole belongings. She was fired from a Georgetown Lululemon store for suspected theft but won an appeal and was transferred to Bethesda.
How did the Apple Store employees respond to hearing the attack?
Two Apple Store managers heard strange sounds coming through the shared wall around 10 pm, including ‘something heavy being hit or dragged,’ grunting, thudding, and ‘high-pitched squealing, yelping’ and ‘hysterical sounds.’ They stood and listened for nine minutes as the sounds died away, hearing one voice say ‘Talk to me! Tell me what’s going on! Why won’t you tell me?’
and someone crying ‘Stop, oh God! Please help me!’ However, they reportedly thought it was just ‘some drama’ and didn’t interfere. Judge Greenberg later criticized their ‘callous indifference.‘
What was the outcome of Brittany Norwood’s trial?
Brittany Norwood was arrested on March 18, 2011. After a six-day trial with 25 witnesses and over 200 photos of evidence, the jury found her guilty of premeditated first-degree murder. Judge Robert Greenberg sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole, describing her as ‘a phenomenal actress’ who ‘whimpers and cries on cue,’ and ‘one hell of a liar.’ He noted she had multiple opportunities to stop the attack but instead ‘mutilated’ Jayna, and that while Brittany would see sunrises and have visits and phone calls, ‘the only visits Jayna Murray will have are those to her grave.‘
What legacy did Jayna Murray leave behind?
Jayna Troxel Murray was born November 22, 1980, and was described as outgoing, adventurous, loud, and bubbly. She did volunteer work, traveled extensively, and enjoyed hiking, spelunking, trapezing, rock-climbing, trampolining, sky-diving, and bungee-jumping. She was a natural tap dancer who performed with Savion Glover. She studied at St.
Louis University in Spain and George Washington University, and was pursuing two master’s degrees at Johns Hopkins University while working at Lululemon. The Bethesda Lululemon store hung her photo and installed a 6-foot ‘love window’ in her memory. Her parents established The Jayna Troxel Murray Foundation, which supports her interests and provides scholarships to study at her alma maters. The foundation also sells annual Christmas ornaments to raise funds.
What happened to the ‘love window’ memorial for Jayna Murray?
The Bethesda branch of Lululemon installed a 6-foot-long ‘love window’ in Jayna’s memory, which became a local landmark. In December 2017, when the Bethesda Lululemon moved to new premises, the ‘love window’ was removed and given to the Murray family. It now hangs in Jayna’s brother’s house.
Why did Brittany Norwood murder Jayna Murray?
The murder occurred after Jayna discovered Brittany had attempted to steal yoga pants from the store during closing procedures. Jayna confiscated the pants and said she would follow up the next day. Brittany called Jayna back to the store with a story about forgetting her wallet, then argued with Jayna, desperately trying to convince her not to tell others about the theft.
When Jayna refused to discuss it and gave Brittany her Metro card to end the argument, Brittany attacked her from behind. The attack was motivated by Brittany’s fear of being exposed as a thief, which would have consequences given her history of theft and previous firing from another Lululemon store.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: Caught in the Act - The LuluLemon Murder
- Hero image source by IAEA Imagebank / openverse, by.
