♪
[phone line trilling]
♪
[line clicks]
- Montgomery County 911. What is the emergency?
- In the 21st century,
we leave behind a digital story of our lives,
a chronicle of our greatest triumphs
but also our darkest nightmares.
♪
- Joining us today, we have Hugh Murray.
Hugh Murray is the older brother of Jayna Murray,
and you may know Jayna Murray from the Lululemon case
back from 2011.
Thank you for joining us.
You are Jayna's older brother.
How old were you when she was born?
- Eight years old, so I have, yeah, eight years on her,
and then I have a younger brother
that's three years younger than me.
My dad was in the oil industry,
and my mom was a flight attendant.
Because of my dad's job, we moved around quite a bit.
Jayna was born in Wichita, Kansas,
and then soon after she was born, we moved down
to Houston, and then probably within a year
of living in Houston, we moved to Perth, Australia,
and really, that's where
she learned how to walk
and was talking and, you know,
doing a lot of the toddler type activities.
[dramatic music]
During her elementary years,
we moved back to Houston after Australia,
and in Houston, that's where she really got involved
in dance and gymnastics
and running and all of the--
kind of the athletic activities
that she carried on
throughout the rest of her life.
The three of us were all pretty athletically inclined,
and Jayna was the best athlete of the three of us.
She really didn't shy away
from any type of outdoor athletic activity.
She enjoyed going out sailing.
She enjoyed rock climbing, hiking, you know,
all of those types of activities.
She's best recognized for
her accomplishments in dance,
and she was an absolute great performer.
♪
She had kind of a unique high school experience,
going to four different high schools
over the four years.
People generally have a hard time meeting new people
in new locations with different cultures
and always being the new kid on the block type of thing,
but Jayna, she was very outgoing.
She enjoyed meeting these people,
so every opportunity she had,
she would not hesitate to go up
and introduce herself and make friends.
- Jayna Troxel Murray.
[cheers and applause]
all: ♪ Happy birthday
♪ To Amanda
♪ Happy birthday to you!
[cheers and applause]
- Do you think that all of that moving around
may have inspired
Jayna's love of travel?
- Oh, without a doubt, yeah.
Every opportunity she had,
she got on a plane to travel and explore.
She absolutely loved excitement or adventure
of going and learning about
other places and new cultures.
[didgeridoo droning]
[laughter]
[dramatic music]
- Late in 2010,
I was in the army, and I was notified
that I was on the deployment schedule
to go to Iraq
in early January, mid-January
the following year.
♪
Jayna, at the time,
was attending Johns Hopkins MBA program
and a master's in communication.
So she was getting a dual master's degree at the time,
and she was living up in D.C.
She was also working at Lululemon at that point,
part-time.
So she had a very full school schedule
and work schedule,
but she also kind of recognized
the uniqueness of being present
during the deployment ceremony.
♪
So Jayna drove down from D.C.,
got in super late one evening,
and then I think we had about a day
to kind of go get dinner
and kind of hang out a little bit
and everything before the following day
when I was supposed to show up to actually deploy,
and then we had the entire ceremony,
and then I'd have to get onto the bus
and say goodbye to everybody,
and they'd take us out to the airstrip,
and, you know, I clicked a picture out the bus window
of my mom and dad and my wife and Jayna
all standing there kind of waving,
and that was the last time
that I saw Jayna alive.
♪
You know, I went to Iraq,
and every once in a while, we were in a location
that allowed us to call back to the States,
and so I remember calling her,
and she was preparing for the marathon.
She was, you know, working out,
so I was trying to, you know,
match her workouts and prepare for the marathon.
Even though I wasn't gonna be able to run it,
I was kind of doing some of the workouts with her
from a distance.
♪
You know, it was still in Mosul.
It's northern Iraq,
and it was a little bit cold in March,
and so she told me
that she was gonna try to send me
a Lululemon running shirt--
long-sleeve running shirt
and one of their beanie caps.
And so I, you know, gave her the address
and said, "Hey, you know,
"even if I'm not in that location,
"it's gonna sit there until I get back to it,
"so just send it to the Baghdad address,
"and then, you know,
"every couple weeks, I go down there,
and I'll catch up with it."
♪
[phone line trills] - [whimpers]
[line clicks]
- She's tied up in there.
[suspenseful music]
[siren wailing]
- We're joined here at "True Crime Garage"
with Detective Dimitry Ruvin.
Could you describe for us
the moment that you were called to the crime scene?
What information were you given?
- It was a Saturday, and I got a call
from my supervisor at that time, my sergeant,
saying that we had a homicide
in a Lululemon store in Bethesda, Maryland,
and the basic story that I got on the phone
was that these were two women
that were inside the store.
They were assaulted. They were raped.
♪
You know, we're kind of trained not to assume things,
but I was thinking to myself, "Is this a robbery?"
I mean, this was very early in the morning.
I think it was, like, 8:30.
So I knew the store couldn't have been open.
So all these things were going through my head
before I even got there,
and once I got there,
we learned that one of the two women
was murdered
and the other one was transported to the hospital.
♪
And then we did our initial walk through the scene.
The cash registers were open.
There were receipts just kind of spread out
on the floor.
As you go to, like, the middle of the store,
like, stuff was just overturned.
Mannequins were on the floor.
There was, like, glass and rocks
and, like, random things
just spread throughout.
There was a TV knocked off the wall,
so it looked like there was a big fight
in the middle of the store.
Once you passed, like, the middle of the store,
there's a blood trail that leads to, like,
the rear of the store, where the fitting rooms were.
To the left was the men's room and the women's room,
and in the women's room, there was this door,
and once you pushed the door,
there was, like, an enormous amount of blood there.
Brittany Norwood, the surviving victim,
was transported to a hospital,
and Jayna Murray, the deceased victim,
was still in the store.
♪
Initially it was just so bloody
that we had no idea
how bad her injuries were.
So me and the medical examiner picked her up,
and we took her out to examine her
in the middle of the store, and once we turned her,
it was just, like--I mean,
I've never seen
this amount of injuries on a human being.
♪
She had all kinds of cutting wounds
to her face,
her neck,
a lot of blunt force trauma to her head.
Her skull was fractured.
So the amount of violence was just unbelievable.
It was unheard of.
- Police say Murray's 27-year-old coworker
was bound, beaten, and sexually assaulted.
She survived the attack.
♪
[camera clicks]
- Mm-hmm.
♪
- Okay.
- Mm-hmm.
- It's not your fault.
- Given that story and looking
at what we were looking at the store,
A, this doesn't happen in Bethesda,
and, B, these two guys
are just completely crazy,
and Brittany described these two guys as, like, basically
two unknown-race males wearing all black.
They had, like, knit hats on
that could be definitely pulled down
and used as ski masks.
♪
There was a Apple store next door,
and they had a video of two guys
walking very quickly from the area
of, like, the back of the Lululemon store,
passing the Apple store,
and when we looked at that video,
we were like, "Wow.
Are these our guys?"
♪
"Are these the guys that she's talking about?"
[camera clicking]
- Police are on the hunt for two suspects
involved in the murder of a woman
and the sexual assault of her coworker.
- These two suspects showed up
prepared to commit a crime.
They were gloved up.
They had masks. [camera clicking]
[dramatic music]
- Jayna Murray is described as a valiant fighter
who would not have hesitated to protect herself
and her 27-year-old coworker,
who was beaten but survived.
The attack has residents on edge.
- In March of 2011,
the United States was trying to extract itself
from Iraq.
I was kind of in a remote area at the time.
The most senior attorney in Iraq at the time called me,
and he said, "Well, I have to--
I have to tell you something."
So I was very kind of confused
with the way that he was talking,
and then he just came out and said,
"Your sister has died."
♪
I thought that he had made a mistake.
I could not believe that,
and I said, "I don't think that's possible."
My sister is, you know, up in D.C.
She's fine.
She was 30 years old.
She was training for a marathon.
She was super fit. She was in school.
She was working.
You know, she didn't have
any risk factors that would've indicated that,
okay, this is a possibility.
And then he said that she had
been murdered
and that they were able to verify that news.
[sniffles]
- You're heartbroken, and you're confused
all at the same time.
You probably never felt further away from home
than at that moment right then and there.
How long does it take you to get back onto U.S. soil?
- It probably took close to 50 hours.
It felt like a long time.
It was a long time.
I landed in D.C.
As a service member, I think the expectation and the hope
is that you return, and there's big celebration
after a year of deployment,
that you're reunited with your family
and everybody's safe and everything's good,
and it's kind of a happy time.
This was not.
I met my family right after the gate areas.
There was a relief that I was finally with them,
because they were hurting just as much as I was.
All of us wanted to go down to the store.
We had seen on the news that there was a--
kind of a makeshift memorial,
and we thought that it was important
for us to try to get as close to Jayna as we could.
We drove down there, and as soon as we parked,
we saw the memorial,
and there were a lot of people gathered.
♪
So we didn't stay long, but we did look at the notes.
We did kind of see, like,
somebody left a business textbook.
Somebody left a Diet Dr Pepper,
which was one of Jayna's favorite drinks.
Tons and tons of flowers.
Tons and tons of notes.
The community support really felt good.
♪
[siren wailing]
It was not an open-and-shut assault case.
There was a lot of confusion
in trying to resolve how the murder occurred.
And I remember
talking to a couple of Jayna's friends.
Like, Bethesda was basically in a lockdown state.
And at dusk,
I mean, people left the streets.
It was very noticeably empty because of the concern
of these two murderers on the loose.
♪
Obviously the internet is full of speculation,
and in Jayna's case,
there was a ton of discussion about what happened
and how it happened and who did it
and what the truth was.
♪
That same afternoon,
we had an appointment with the detectives
on the case.
We were very anxious to meet them
and to get kind of an update
on where the investigation was headed.
[camera clicking]
They were as transparent
about what was going on
as they were able to be.
They kind of laid out what the situation was,
where they were at that point.
♪
- We had a bunch of tips, 'cause the--
you know, there was a lookout for two guys, unknown race,
one shorter and one taller,
and that was it.
So we got people calling in
on weird guys all over Bethesda
and Washington, D.C.,
and, well, we really had nothing solid.
♪
I got a call from one of my coworkers
that said that basically the entire Bethesda
called on this one guy.
♪
That he was kind of a suspicious guy.
He's always in the area.
He's kind of harassing people, especially women.
He gets in their faces.
And his name was Keith Lockett.
♪
And there's a local bar
that he hangs out at every night.
The night of the murder, he wasn't there.
♪
- I was doing a neighborhood canvass
where we go to various establishments.
We were looking for, you know, cameras
and things like that,
and I walked into a local--
like, a hardware store, and I was just asking them,
"Hey, is there any suspicious people here?
Like, have you seen anything weird lately?"
- Mm-hmm.
- And the manager there was like,
"Yeah, this guy Keith Lockett."
♪
"The night of the murder,
"I seen him with this white guy,
"and the white guy had a backpack,
"and they were just kind of walking around,
looking suspicious."
And he was like, "Keith is usually alone,"
and I kind of zoned in
on the fact that the guy had a backpack on,
'cause I remembered on the video,
it had two guys walking away.
One had a backpack on.
So we started looking into Keith,
and we learned that he was at a hospital.
They said he was all beat-up looking.
He had blood everywhere.
So everything kind of started adding up for this guy.
[siren wailing]
We end up picking him up at the hospital,
and we brought him in,
and pretty quickly,
we were like, "I don't know if this guy's
responsible for this," 'cause he couldn't put
sentences together.
[camera clicks]
That crime scene seemed pretty planned,
where this guy was just all over the place.
[camera clicks]
So we swabbed his blood.
We got a search warrant for his DNA,
and we quickly eliminated him.
♪
After that, we really had nothing.
It was just, like, on the back of my mind
that something's not right here.
And that was bringing up all these issues
that were kind of there in my back of my head,
you know?
We had bloody shoe prints throughout the store
that never left the store.
We has zip ties that were in the store
that were used on the victims
as if somebody knew that they would be there.
By this time, we found Jayna's car,
and we knew that the car was moved,
and we knew there was blood in it,
like, on the gearshift, on the steering wheel--
just a lot of weird stuff.
So our next step was reinterview Brittany
and see if she remembers,
you know, anything else.
Maybe, you know, we missed something.
- [sighs] Thanks for coming in.
As far as, like, you guys, like,
getting into the store then--
as far as the whole assault and everything--
- Do I have to go through it again?
- Yeah, because...
you left out some things, okay?
So let's, like, see
if you remember some other stuff.
- Left out what?
- Well, as far as, like, the car thing is concerned.
- I know, and that's the only thing.
- Okay.
Well, then let's do the car thing.
- Prior to him
sexually assaulting me
and zip-tying me,
they made me move her car.
- How did they go about telling you
that you had to move the car?
- I don't--
- Well, you were there.
- I know I was there. - Okay.
- They...
asked where her keys were.
- Okay. - I said, "I don't know.
I don't know."
And one of them hit me in my head.
- With what? - His fist.
- Okay.
- They said to look or something--I don't know.
[crying] And when I finally found her keys
in one of her pockets--
- They knew the-- - Yes.
- Where the car was parked?
- They just said, "It's up this way."
[sniffles]
- And so what did you do?
- I did what they said.
- Okay, well, walk me through it, okay?
When you went out of the store,
then what did you do?
I don't, I don't remember.
- Well, just-- - They would not--
[sighs]
Do you know how many times they hit me in my head?
- Mm-mm.
- I don't know why.
At that point, I just did whatever they said.
- Is that when you got the cut on your head, or was that--
- Hmm?
- And so you left the store,
and you went to the right.
How did you get to the car?
- Walked. - Okay, were there
other people around?
- I remember seeing a couple
when I was walking back.
There was a cop car.
- Okay,
and which way was the cop car going?
- I think the opposite direction.
- And then what did you do?
- Went to the parking lot.
- Okay.
- How did you get in the store?
- The door was unlocked.
- And? - That's when
he sexually assaulted me.
- Okay, now, how did that go down?
I know it's hard for you, but, you know, try--
- I just--it's--
[sighs]
I understand I didn't tell you that part.
I understand. - Mm-hmm.
- I am also not safe.
- Dimitry, can you think of anything else right now?
- Yeah, the only thing I'm still a little confused on
is--remember you said
you saw a police officer, right?
Was that, like, when you left the store
or when you were parked?
- When I left the store.
- So when you first left the store, okay.
- Let's take a break.
♪
- That was obviously weird on so many levels--
not that she just went through
this pretty traumatic experience
and she left and she had her freedom
and she had cops out there that she could've approached,
but on another level, there's that these bad guys
are so trusting that they waited for her
for, like, 15 minutes.
They were like, "Okay, let's hope she comes back
and doesn't come back with the cops."
So it was just goofy, and--on so many levels
that it almost started to sound like this was made up.
♪
- I just wanted to clarify a couple things.
Brittany,
comes a point sometimes
when we have to break down
and get everything off of our chest, okay?
I'm sure that you have been going absolutely nuts
as far as...
what the cops have found out,
what the cops have figured out, what the cops know--
- No one will tell me anything. I can't even watch the news.
- I can only imagine.
But you gotta tell us what really happened.
- I'm telling you.
- Okay, 'cause I know what really happened.
- I told you what really happened.
- No, what you have done is,
you've concocted an incredible story
that doesn't make any doggone sense.
I guess we can start off
with the injuries that you have.
They're self-inflicted.
- Mm-mm. - Yeah.
They're self-inflicted. You did this to yourself.
- No, I didn't. - And I'll tell you why
I know this. - [crying] I would never
do this to myself. - Yes, you did.
Yeah. They're perfectly parallel.
They're superficial scratches.
It's incredible that you want me or anyone
to believe that
They're true.
you're lying like this
overnight, haven't moved.
Okay, that's posed.
Yeah. - No.
- You even said that, like,
you thought about, like, going to your cell phone.
You could've gone to your cell phone, okay?
- I couldn't.
- Brittany,
these guys give you the keys,
tell you to go move her car, okay?
A cop goes by, and you don't flag him down?
- No, because I was scared.
- You get in the car, and you drive off
and park it and then come back so that they can kill you?
- That's what they told me to do.
- Come on. You want me to believe
that you walked down the street
covered in blood,
people are walking past you--
no one's looking at you?
- I didn't pass anyone. - Oh.
It's 10:00 Friday night in Bethesda.
Brittany, come on.
You told me what you want us to think happened.
- No. - But that's not the truth.
- We know there's a fight.
♪
- Yeah, we heard screaming,
and so we go downstairs,
and all of a sudden, we hear a scream.
Then I get closer to the wall...
- Mm-hmm.
- And I can hear what they're saying.
- What are they saying? - So it was two females.
One was hysterically crying,
and the other one was, like--
she was trying to talk to her, like,
"What's going on?"
The other girl eventually calms down and starts talking,
but I don't hear at that point.
She's kind of mumbling. - Okay.
- And then that's when I turned, and it's like,
"Oh, seems like there's drama going on."
- Did you ever hear any other voices or just the two?
- Just two, two female voices. - Two girls.
- You want to tell us why the fight started, though?
What happened?
I think that, like, you need help.
- [crying] No. - Okay?
- No, I don't. - I think that you need to,
like, really get this off your chest.
- I would never kill her.
I would never kill anyone.
- For yourself and for your family,
you gotta tell us what happened.
- Can I go home? - In a minute--
well, I'm gonna have, like, Chris come on in here.
Let me get your brother down here, okay?
I'll be back in a minute. - Okay.
♪
- Brittany.
[speaking indistinctly]
- Hmm?
♪
- So what did happen?
- I just don't have anything else to say.
- Okay, well, you already told Chris.
I mean, like, this is recorded.
We heard you when you admitted that, like, you know,
you fought with Jayna.
- I didn't tell anybody.
- Yeah, you did.
- I didn't. - We heard what you said
to Chris.
So...
let's just, like, get it over with.
I know it's hard, but there's no sense in holding back,
because there weren't two guys in there.
It was just you and Jayna.
- Mm-mm. - Mm-hmm.
♪
How did it start?
It's not going away.
We ain't going away.
♪
You're gonna be under arrest
and charged with murder, Brittany.
Now, before we walk out, do you want to tell us
how it started?
- I just don't want to be in here at all.
♪
[siren wailing]
- We had flown back from D.C.
to Houston,
and because of Jayna's injuries,
we were not able to have an open casket.
♪
We were actually preparing to go to the visitation
when Dimitry, one of the detectives, called
and said, "We just made an arrest."
And then he said that they had arrested Brittany Norwood.
♪
- It was a relief that she was arrested.
There was a little bit of closure there.
We understood a little bit more about what had occurred
and why or how.
But in a lot of ways, it also just raised
even more questions.
[camera clicks]
We viewed Brittany as the last person
to be with Jayna
and trying to help save her.
I can't understand it.
- Police say Norwood attempted to cover up the murder
by pretending they were both beaten
and sexually assaulted during a robbery.
♪
Why would she kill her coworker?
There are indications that Murray
may have confronted Norwood
about stealing store merchandise.
♪
- After the fact, we learned
this whole backstory about Brittany,
that she was fired from another Lululemon store
for buying more than she's supposed to on a discount.
But then they hired her back,
and they moved her to the Bethesda store.
As Brittany starts, that's when they start
having all these incidents of shoplifting.
Items are disappearing.
Cash is disappearing.
And she's, like, the only new person,
so they all suspected her
of stealing, but they could never prove it.
♪
- Had you been told that, like,
Brittany was suspected of stealing stuff?
- Mm-hmm. - Okay.
♪
- Brittany Norwood admits that she killed Jayna Murray
during an argument at the Lululemon store
in Bethesda, but her lawyer asked the jury
to find her not guilty of first-degree murder.
- Prosecutors say that Brittany Norwood
lured Jayna Murray back to the store
after they had closed for the night
and that's when the murder happened
and that it was therefore premeditated.
The defense, though, says it was not like that,
that it was not premeditated.
Norwood simply lost it.
And the defense says the sloppy cover-up
that happened after proves that fact
that she didn't have a concrete,
well-thought-out plan.
- The family of murder victim
Jayna Murray left the courtroom
for the very first time during this trial
so they would not have to look at the graphic photographs
of their daughter taken during her autopsy.
♪
At least five weapons were used,
according to the medical examiner...
[camera clicking] A knife,
hammer,
wrench,
box cutters,
a rope around her neck.
Murray was alive throughout all of this
until the last strike of the knife.
♪
- This was an horrific, difficult case.
These were difficult facts
to listen to and to judge.
It took just under an hour
for a jury to convict Brittany Norwood
guilty of first-degree murder.
- I know the trauma
our family has been through.
I want no other family
to go through this.
♪
[light music]
♪
- I had talked to her, I think,
just days before she was murdered.
So I knew that she had at least thought
and started to prepare a care package for me,
and as soon as I got back to Iraq,
that's--I started to search around
to try to find out where it was.
♪
And one of my friends had collected it
and had it at his desk.
I got it and opened it up,
and, you know, sure enough,
she had given me a card,
had the long-sleeve running shirt
and hat.
♪
About a month had passed
since she had already mailed it to me,
and in that month,
she had died.
♪
I still have the card.
I still have the hat. I still have the shirt.
♪
I absolutely love thinking about Jayna.
I talk to my kids about her all the time.
She just loved life.
If somebody was going dancing,
she was there to dance the flamenco.
If somebody wanted to run a marathon,
she would be right there running right next to 'em.
She absolutely just participated in life.
♪