The Yoga Store Murder: The Shocking True Account of the Lululemon Athletica Killing Mass Market Paperback Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  THE YOGA STORE MURDER

  “A true-crime tour de force, with all of the features that make a whodunit great: a suspenseful, intricately constructed plot; a taut prose style that wastes no words; memorable characters brought to vivid life in a few deft strokes; and of course, a dogged murder investigation that leads to a stunning revelation. Readers will tear through the book—as I did—to learn the solution to the dark mystery at its core.”

  —Harold Schechter, author of Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of and The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook a Nation

  “Dan Morse has written a true-crime thriller that reads like a ripsnorting novel. With a storyteller’s flair for the cinematic and a keen eye for detail he has honed as a crime reporter, Morse unveils the fast-paced investigation into a killing that captured the nation’s attention. The murder was as brutal as its setting was unexpected: behind the closed doors of a hip retailer in the wealthiest and safest of suburbs.”

  —Del Quentin Wilber, bestselling author of Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan

  “With its riveting narrative and precise, unflinching rendering of a murder that isn’t what it seems, Dan Morse’s The Yoga Store Murder rises to the level of the finest crime novels. Except that it’s all true.”

  —Bryan Gruley, Edgar®-nominated author of the Starvation Lake trilogy

  “Cerebral and thoroughly frightening, The Yoga Store Murder takes the reader on a moment-by-moment hunt with a group of wily detectives as they sort through a tangle of lies and bloody sneaker prints. It will keep you up way past your bedtime.”

  —Michael E. Ruane, coauthor of Sniper: Inside the Hunt for the Killers Who Terrorized the Nation

  To Dana

  THE YOGA STORE

  MURDER

  THE SHOCKING TRUE ACCOUNT OF THE LULULEMON ATHLETICA KILLING

  DAN MORSE

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  THE YOGA STORE MURDER

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2013 by Dan Morse.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

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  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

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  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-60153-2

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley premium edition / November 2013

  Cover art of Yoga Mat © discpicture/shutterstock; Footprints © Igor Kovalchuk/shutterstock; Abstact Grunge Texture © Ursa Major/shutterstock; and Detailed View of Yoga Mat Texture © Ambient Ideas/shutterstock.

  Cover design by Jane Hammer.

  Contents

  Praise

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Copyright

  SECTION I: BETHESDA

  1. It Couldn’t Happen Here

  2. “Is She Going to Make It?”

  3. Evil Unleashed

  4. Auntie B and Tia T

  5. Successful People

  6. Starting to Talk

  7. Tension Mounts

  8. Working the Scene

  9. Hoping Against Hope

  10. Caught on Video

  11. Hundreds of Wounds

  12. Locked In

  13. A Bit of Magic

  14. Storming the Walls

  SECTION II: BRITTANY AND JAYNA

  15. The Soccer Star

  16. Mediocre Lives Are Lousy Lives

  17. A Narrow Gray Zone

  18. Coming Together

  SECTION III: ZEROING IN

  19. Monday Night: Piling On

  20. Tuesday: “Let Me Throw This at You”

  21. Wednesday: Setting a Trap

  22. Thursday: Tracking and Trailing

  23. Friday: Offering an Out

  SECTION IV: WHY?

  24. Neuropsychiatry

  25. Murders in Montgomery

  26. Skirmishes

  27. Without Conscience

  28. “I Think We Can Live with This Guy”

  29. Losing It

  30. More Than Three Hundred Blows

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Photo Insert

  SECTION I

  BETHESDA

  CHAPTER ONE

  It Couldn’t Happen Here

  The sounds—were they screams?—reached Jana Svrzo as she walked across the sales floor of the Apple Store, now closed for the night. Jana (pronounced “Yah-nah”) was twenty-nine years old and wore funky black sneakers and a ready smile—an easy fit among Apple’s hip, young sales army. It was just after 10:00 P.M. on Friday, March 11, 2011, in downtown Bethesda, an affluent area just north of the nation’s capital, and Jana, the store’s manager, had about an hour’s worth of record-keeping ahead of her, following the opening day sales for Apple’s hot new product, the iPad 2, which had created a nearly four-hundred-foot line of eager buyers down the sidewalk.

  Now, though, she looked to her right and listened. The sounds were high-pitched yelps and squeals, and low-pitched grunts, thuds, a dragging noise, as if something heavy was being moved. Jana thought they might be coming from a room near the back exit or a room upstairs, where technicians were still on duty. She asked one of the two security guards to help her search.

  Jana and the guard split up, meeting two minutes later upstairs, where they spoke to another young manager, Ricardo Rios, who wore a dark baseball cap and a bright blue Apple employee shirt.

  “Screaming,” the guard said. “It sounded like some lady was screaming.”

  They checked out the technicians’ room. All clear. They walked downstairs to the sales floor and heard more yelling. Suddenly, Jana felt sure of the origin. “It’s coming from next door,” she said—from lululemon athletica, the luxury yoga store with which Apple shared a wall.

  She and Ricardo walked closer to the wall. Jana now could hear someone saying: “Talk to me. Don’t do this. Talk to me. What’s going on?”

  Then she heard what sounded like a different voice, maybe the one that had just been screaming. Now it was quieter: “God help me. Please help me.”

  Ricardo also could hear that first voice, the one saying “Talk to me,” but couldn’t make out the words of the second one. They were muffled, covered by crying and panting, as if a woman was trying to catch her breath. Ricardo kept staring at the wall, walked away from it, returned, then knocked on it, trying to get the attention of whoever was on the other side. “What’s going on?” he asked, his voice raised.

  No response.

  “Maybe I should just call the cops,” Jana said.


  “That’s up to you,” Ricardo answered. He thought it was a private matter, and told Jana it sounded as if one person had just heard tragic news and the other was trying to get her to talk about it. “I think it’s just drama.”

  Ricardo said he was going back upstairs and did so. It was 10:19, eight minutes after Jana had first heard the noises.

  Wilbert Hawkins, the second of the two security guards, had been observing the commotion without feeling overly concerned. The crashing sounds, he figured, could have been a merchandise display falling over, the yelling some kind of horsing around. It didn’t seem threatening. Maybe if they were somewhere in nearby D.C., where, even in a high-end area like Georgetown, danger could erupt without warning—but not here, Wilbert thought, not along the tony, walkable streets in the middle of Bethesda.

  Jana sensed the noises growing fainter. To her left, outside the glass front doors, the sidewalks were slowing down but still active. People huddled in coats against the chilly March air, walking to and from restaurants and bars. In the few months Jana had worked at the store, she’d come to see how safe the area was. Jana shared Wilbert’s view: surely the noise was something explainable. She went upstairs. For the next half hour, she and Ricardo went through their closing duties, typing away on computers, adding up receipts for the day.

  Ricardo left at 10:56 P.M. Jana finished ten minutes later. She walked downstairs again, across the sales floor to the front door. A new security guard on duty let her out. The restaurant to her left was still open. To her right, the yoga store and the store beyond it were dark and closed. It was March 11, 2011, and all seemed normal.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Is She Going to Make It?”

  The morning of Saturday, March 12, twenty-six-year-old Ryan Haugh walked up to the Apple Store in Bethesda. He’d tried to buy an iPad 2 the night before and waited in the long line outside for more than two hours, but the prized computer tablets were sold out by the time he got to the door. Ryan didn’t want to make the same mistake again, so he’d thrown on some jeans and a bright red Philadelphia Phillies baseball cap and dashed out of his home that morning without a shower.

  It was now 7:45 A.M., more than two hours before the store would open at 10:00. The skies were cloudy, the temperature 41 degrees. No other customers had yet arrived, so Ryan took a seat on a solid teak bench near the Apple Store, whipped out his iPhone and began reading the New York Times. Ryan didn’t typically spend much time in this five-block area, called Bethesda Row, finding the prices a bit high and jokingly comparing it to elements of the 1998 movie Pleasantville, which captured safe and perfectly ordered streets. But the biotechnology-industry salesman certainly enjoyed the place when he did come. In the carefully developed retail blocks around him, stores offered serenity, luxury, and virtue—sometimes rolled into a single product. Spas served up $130 facials. An ecofriendly toy store sold $73 toxin-free, German-made fire trucks. A furniture place called Urban Country had a distressed-wood dinner table for sale at $2,513. Chic restaurants and bars stayed open late and gave patrons a sense of urban energy without the danger.

  Others started to join Ryan in the line. Shortly after 8:00 A.M., he saw a woman approach, her orange running shoes bright against the gray morning, and go into the store next to Apple, clearly an employee about to start her day. Moments later, Ryan heard a voice.

  “Hello? Hello?!”

  There was an edge to it. The woman in the orange shoes came back out and was talking on her phone. “I hear someone moaning in the back,” she was saying, “and it looks like it’s been vandalized and I’m just really scared to go in.”

  To Ryan it was clear she had called 911. The woman’s panic was growing. She answered a few more questions, giving her name, Rachel, and the address of the store. The police were coming. She ended the call and turned toward Ryan. “Have you seen anyone go in or out of this store this morning?” she asked him.

  “No,” Ryan said, leaving his spot in line to go to her.

  “Do you want me to go in?” he asked her.

  “Would you mind?” Rachel answered.

  The two walked in. Ahead of them was a long narrow space with wooden floors and high ceilings. Ryan had never been inside a lululemon shop. He thought it looked kind of like a Gap, with lots of low racks and tables full of bright-colored clothes. He walked to the back as Rachel waited up front. “Anybody here?” Ryan called out. “Anybody here?” No response.

  On the floor, Ryan saw scattered bloodstains, which grew more concentrated as he advanced to a back corner, near a five-foot chalkboard inscribed with colored chalk: “May each of us equally enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.” He noticed even more blood at the base of a purple door, as if it had seeped from the other side. He gently pushed the purple door. It stopped, hitting the side of a body.

  Ryan saw a pair of legs extending from a body facedown surrounded by more blood. He reached down. No movement. “There’s somebody back here!” he shouted back to Rachel. “It looks like they’re dead!”

  He headed back toward the front of the store, for the first time noticing two bathrooms to his right. Their doors were both open, and he saw another pair of legs, bound at the ankles and extending from one of the doorways. “There’s somebody else in here!” Ryan called out.

  He approached the second woman, noting that her hands were bound over her head, and her face was bloody. “Are you okay?” he asked. She moaned, barely.

  Rachel rushed outside and called 911 again. The other Apple customers waiting in line overheard her. “One person seems dead,” she was saying, her voice shaking, “and the other person is breathing . . . Someone tied her up.”

  Seconds later a police car zoomed down Bethesda Avenue, stopping in front of the crowd. The officer jumped out and told the crowd to get back. The Apple customers retreated toward the Apple Store, still keeping some semblance of a line. The officer drew her gun and went into the store.

  Then, silence. No shots. No screams. More cops arrived and rushed into the store, then paramedics, who rolled a stretcher into the store. Minutes later, they wheeled it out. There was a woman on top, covered in a blanket, writhing in pain. The customers could see blood on her face. “Is she going to make it?” one of them asked.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Evil Unleashed

  Bethesda, Maryland, is a classic “inner-ring” suburb, close enough to a major city for quick commutes but just far enough out to boast great schools and little crime. Home to economists, lawyers, lobbyists, and biochemists, Bethesda ranks as the most educated place in the nation as measured by recent U.S. Census Bureau figures of graduate degrees per adult. It’s part of Montgomery County, which itself spreads out for another twenty-five miles and has nearly one million people. Among that population, there are about twenty murders a year—far fewer than in Washington, D.C., but certainly enough to warrant an on-call homicide detective. The morning of March 12, 2011, that detective was sixty-year-old Jim Drewry.

  Drewry had gotten up early inside his two-story home in Silver Spring, where he and his ex-wife had raised three kids, now grown. Drewry was ready to go when his cell phone rang at 9:05. Minutes later, he was driving his unmarked, county-issued Dodge Intrepid west toward the yoga store.

  To his younger colleagues, Drewry was a real-life version of Lester Freamon, the cerebral African American detective from the TV series The Wire. A gray-haired grandfather with a bushy mustache, Drewry wore wire-rimmed glasses, sweater vests, and loafers, and spoke with a cadence that harkened back to the 1960s. Something suspicious was “funky.” A house was a “joint.” He refused to carry a BlackBerry, believing e-mail was robbing people of their ability to think, and didn’t socialize much with his colleagues. At his redbrick house, he relaxed by reading fiction and listening to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and other jazz legends.

  He’d grown up in Cleveland, the son of a schoolteacher and funeral-home director. In summer, he would eat lunch with his dad in the embalming room, wher
e as a thirteen-year-old he watched his dad work on a body marked by several large-caliber bullet holes. “The man was tapped lightly four times with a .45,” Drewry’s father told him.

  Drewry’s older brother, who went on to Harvard University, was the first African American to serve as president of his high school’s student council. Drewry was elected vice president of his own class, before going to Howard University to study pre-med. He eventually dropped out and took a full-time job delivering mail for the U.S. Postal Service. He began having nightmares about towering stacks of mail surrounding him, so he left that job and, partially on the advice of his father-in-law, who was the director of the D.C. Department of Corrections, became a cop in 1979. He joined the major crimes unit eight years later.

  Over the years, Drewry had developed a relaxed interrogation style that prompted suspects to do the last thing they should do: talk. What came out of their mouths was rarely the full story, but that was often just as good. “Lie to me. Please lie to me,” Drewry liked to say, repeating a mantra he’d picked up years earlier. “Sometimes a provable lie is just as good as the truth.”

  He also saw firsthand how some murders came out of the blue—not the sadly predictable inner-city killings tied to drugs and turf, but the sudden ones fueled by passion and rage that Montgomery County’s relatively well-off environs often specialized in. And of those, some of the most violent murders Drewry had worked involved female victims: the mother of two young boys hacked more than sixty-five times with a knife and machete; a molecular biologist dragged off her doorstep to a side yard, beaten, strangled, and raped; an artist killed in her studio by a man who rammed a pair of scissors into her ear canal.

  Drewry’s work included countless rape cases and death investigations (suicides, drownings, workplace accidents), and the long hours had taken their toll. He was weighing a move to the cold-case squad, which would afford him set hours and weekends off. A little time there to reach the thirty-four-year mark to boost his retirement benefits, and then—he liked to joke—he’d open a hot-dog vending truck on the National Mall near the Washington Monument.