Murder at the Lululemon

Early in the morning of March 12th, 2011, the Lululemon store in Bethesda, Maryland, was about to open. The manager arrived at the front door, ready to open the shop for the day, when she noticed that the door had been left unlocked. Looking through the windows, she realized that this wasn’t just a situation where an employee had failed to lock up properly the previous night. Clothing had been torn off racks and thrown across the shop floor, and some of the mannequins had been knocked over.

Now believing that there had been a break-in, the manager approached a nearby man and asked him to look inside. The man followed a trail of bloody footprints to a hallway out the back, where he saw a woman lying face-down in a pool of her own blood. It was Jayna Troxel Murray, one of the store’s employees. It was clear that she had been the victim of some kind of violent attack, and had died several hours before. Another employee, Brittany Norwood, was located in the bathroom, lying on the floor. Her face was covered in blood, and somebody had tied her wrists and ankles with zip ties.

When the police arrived at the scene, they were able to speak to Brittany and find out more details about what had happened. She told them that she and Jayna had been rostered on a closing shift the previous night. The two women had closed up as they usually would, but after they left, Brittany realized that she had left her wallet inside the store. She called Jayna, who had the keys, and asked to be let back inside. The store’s alarm system records confirmed the timeline, showing that the door had been unlocked again just after 10pm.

Shortly after the door was unlocked, Brittany told the police that two unidentified men wearing ski masks had followed her and Jayna back inside the store. The men had quickly overpowered the two women, violently attacking and then sexually assaulting both of them. 

For investigators, there were some things about Brittany’s story that just didn’t make sense. Jayna’s injuries were consistent with the kind of vicious attack that Brittany had described - she had received more than 330 wounds on her body, which had come from a minimum of five weapons. Police couldn’t think of any reason why a pair of violent attackers would carry out such a brutal attack on one employee, while leaving the other employee with only a few cuts and bruises. Despite Brittany’s insistence that she and Jayna had been raped by the men, there was no forensic evidence suggesting that either of them had been sexually assaulted. The only sign that rape had taken place was a hole that had been deliberately cut into Jayna’s pants - as if somebody had been trying to make the police believe that the crime had been sexually motivated.

Even though there were a significant number of bloody footprints inside the store, none of them led to any of the store’s exits. In fact, there was no sign that the attackers had left the store at all. Even more strangely, while one set of bloody footprints had come from a pair of men’s sneakers, which had been taken off and abandoned inside the store, the other set of footprints weren’t made with men’s shoes. In fact, the other footprints belonged to one of the victims - Brittany Norwood.

Investigators searched for anybody who had been close to the Lululemon store that night, hoping that a witness would be able to confirm whether the two masked assailants had even existed. They spoke to two employees at the neighboring Apple Store, who had heard a loud argument coming from inside the Lululemon store at around the time that the supposed attack had taken place. However, both the employee and the manager insisted that they hadn’t heard any male voices - in fact, the altercation had sounded like it was between two women. One of the women had been saying, “Talk to me. Don’t do this…talk to me, what’s going on?” Then, there had been the sounds of screaming and loud banging noises, which sounded as if something was being hit. After that, a quieter voice said. “God help me. Please help me.” At the time, the Apple store’s manager hadn’t thought the argument was anything serious, believing it was “just drama.”

In the early hours of the investigation, the police had been treating Brittany as if she was one of the victims of the attack. But the more information they discovered, the more they began to believe that she wasn’t a victim at all. When Brittany had been found, she had been lying on the bathroom floor, supposedly drifting in and out of consciousness since the attack. She didn’t have any serious head injuries that could have led to her losing consciousness - in fact, the one wound that was found on her forehead suggested that her story was a lie. A forensic expert analyzed the pattern of blood from the forehead cut, confirming that it had dripped downwards in a straight line, showing that Brittany had actually spent most of the night standing or sitting up, instead of lying on the floor.

The police located Jayna’s car, which was parked three blocks away outside a nearby farmer’s market. They found a significant amount of blood inside the car, which belonged to two people: Jayna, and Brittany. Because Jayna’s injuries were so severe, it was impossible for her to have driven the car after the attack. The only person who could have left the blood inside the car was Brittany. When she was confronted with this evidence, Brittany eventually told the police that she had been forced to move Jayna’s car by the two attackers, who had told her that if she didn’t return to the store within ten minutes, she would be killed.

This was just another detail which didn’t make any sense to the investigators. Why would the attackers insist on Jayna’s car being moved - and if they wanted it to be moved, why didn’t one of them leave the store and drive it? Brittany didn’t have any answers, and she also didn’t have a credible explanation for returning to the store after she had been sent to move her car. She told police that she was too scared to make a run for it, because she knew that the two men knew where she lived. She believed that if she had just driven Jayna’s car to safety, the men would have hunted her down and killed her.

One week after Jayna’s death, Brittany Norwood was arrested for her co-workers murder. The masked men who had broken into the store had never existed…instead, Jayna had died after a petty argument with Brittany. Before leaving the store that evening, Brittany and Jayna had followed the usual security procedures at the store, including both women checking the other one’s bag for any Lululemon merchandise. While she was searching Brittany’s bag, Jayna found a pair of Lululemon pants which hadn’t been paid for. Believing that her coworker was trying to steal the pants, Jayna placed a phone call to the manager, who said that she’d deal with the potential theft the following day.

Then, Jayna received a phone call from Brittany asking her to unlock the store so that she could go back in and get her wallet. Jayna agreed, and when she arrived at the store, Brittany attacked her, using a hammer, a knife, a metal bar, box cutters and a wrench to inflict hundreds of injuries. She hit Jayna in the head so forcefully that her spine was broken, and her skull was shattered. Once Jayna was dead, Brittany then decided to stage the crime scene, hoping that the police would believe Jayna had been killed in a robbery. She put on a pair of men’s Size 14 sneakers to leave a blood trail around the store, threw clothing and cleaning supplies around the store and knocked over mannequins to make it appear as if the store had been ransacked.

Finally, Brittany tried to make herself look like a victim - but she couldn’t bring herself to injure herself as extensively as she’d injured Jayna. Instead, she used a knife to cut her own forehead, and then used zip ties to bind her wrists and ankles.

On the 27th of January, 2012, Brittany was found guilty of her co worker's murder, and sentenced to life in prison. It only took the jury 21 minutes to make their decision.