00:00:05
[soft tapping]
[loud crack] - [Richard] When a murder's
committed, it's always a race
00:00:09
against time. To find the truth, to
separate fact from fiction, to catch the killer and to make
sure that justice is served.
00:00:20
But what happens when the
truth vanishes with the victim? I'm Dr. Richard Shepherd and
I've spent my entire career
00:00:27
as a forensic pathologist, performing nearly
23,000 autopsies. I've learned that the
dead don't hide the truth
00:00:38
and they never lie. Through me, you'll be hearing
directly from the victim. With the aid of a
state-of-the-art laboratory,
00:00:47
using groundbreaking technology, I'll be investigating a
series of intriguing crimes,
00:00:54
where from the victim's bodies
I'll reveal to you the truth behind these murders.
00:01:00
[camera clicking] In March, 2011, the manager of
the Lululemon clothing store in an upmarket shopping center
in a suburb of Washington, DC
00:01:14
arrived to open up for
the day, but once inside she found herself faced
with a terrible scene.
00:01:20
[suspenseful music] [radar beeping] - [John] The manager
of the store, Rachel, came over to open the store.
00:01:34
When she got there and she
began to push the door open, it went open. It had not been secured,
it had not been locked.
00:01:41
She glanced inside of the store and saw some racks that
had had clothes on them had been knocked to the side.
00:01:51
There appeared to be maybe
slightly a moan or something coming from the back room,
and the lights were on
00:01:56
in the store. [phone dialing] - She was afraid to enter
the store by herself, so she walked outside
00:02:28
and there was a young man
waiting for the Apple store to open. She walked over to him, this
young man, who she didn't know,
00:02:34
and said, "Look, can
you do me a favor? Will you walk in
my store for me? Something's not right."
00:02:40
So the young man walked
in, she waited at the door. He walked in and he
found a young woman
00:02:48
laying on the ground in
the women's bathroom, and she was bound both by
her feet and her hands.
00:02:56
Her face was bloody, her
clothes had been ripped and torn in multiple areas, and she appeared
to be unconscious.
00:03:05
- [Richard] That woman
was Brittany Norwood, a 29-year-old
employee at Lululemon.
00:03:12
She was still alive, but
appeared badly injured. Brittany Norwood had cuts to
several parts of her body.
00:03:21
She had a laceration
on her forehead. She had a small laceration
on her right hand
00:03:27
parallel to her thumb, and
she had multiple superficial abrasions on her abdomen.
00:03:33
It looked like she'd
been sexually assaulted because her trousers were torn and her hands were bound
together by zip ties.
00:03:42
But there were no injuries
to the neck, to the back, or to the extremities. At first sight it had all of
the hallmarks of an assault,
00:03:52
but there was worse to come. [siren wailing] With the police on their way,
the man who'd found Brittany
00:04:00
continued to search
the premises. - He pushed through a side
door that led to the back
00:04:07
of the store, and he
found a second person, and he couldn't even open the
door 'cause when he walked,
00:04:14
he pushed the door open,
it hit against the body of a person who was
laying on the floor.
00:04:19
He glanced inside, saw
the body on the floor, quickly ran out,
and the police came
00:04:26
and basically made the same
discoveries he had made. It was very clear that the
body that was behind the door,
00:04:35
that individual was deceased. - [Richard] Brittany
was rushed to hospital with signs of life
for treatment.
00:04:42
The deceased victim
was quickly identified as the store's duty manager,
30-year-old Jayna Murray,
00:04:48
who had been working
the previous night. Police found her in a
pool of blood with a rope
00:04:53
around her neck and
her clothing torn. - This was a brutal killing. The number of injuries that
were documented at the time
00:05:03
of autopsy in this case were
the largest number of injuries that the medical examiner's
office in this state
00:05:10
had ever found on a single body. - [Richard] It was now up to
the postmortem to determine
00:05:18
exactly what had
happened to Jayna. When faced with a body
like Jayna Murray's with so many injuries,
the first question is,
00:05:27
where do you start? And the answer is,
there are no shortcuts. As a pathologist, I examine
the whole body methodically,
00:05:36
starting at the head and working
my way right the way down to the toes. Sometimes when there's an
injury that looks very likely
00:05:44
to be the cause of death,
it can be all too easy to ignore everything else. But if you only
focus on the obvious,
00:05:51
you can miss the truth. In Jayna's case, she was found
with a rope around her neck
00:05:57
and there were some
injuries to the chin and a ligature mark. So the most obvious conclusion
00:06:03
was that she'd been strangled. But if she had been
strangled, you'd expect to see far more evidence in
the muscles here and bruising
00:06:12
and damage to the blood vessels and the other
structures in the neck. In Jayna's case, there
simply wasn't enough damage
00:06:19
to her neck to
explain her death. So the next step is to examine
all of the other injuries,
00:06:24
more than 300 of them,
to determine which was the fatal blow. [suspenseful music]
00:06:31
With fatal
strangulation ruled out, an investigation was launched. A violent killer was
potentially on the loose
00:06:38
in the small suburb of Bethesda. [music continues]
[graphics thudding] - First of all, you
are trying to maintain
00:06:49
the integrity of
the crime scene. They put some crime
scene tape up up front. They called out the tech
services unit of scientists
00:06:57
that do forensics and take
photographs and video. [music continues] Now, the processing of
the crime scene, you know,
00:07:10
they did some initial work. Take DNA samples. In this case, we also took
evidence of footprints track.
00:07:18
There were a lot of
bloody footprints all over this crime scene. So at some point in time,
you're processing the,
00:07:26
what they called, "Track
and trail evidence" To determine whether or
not you could get an idea
00:07:30
from the impressions of the shoe what were the sizes of the
shoes that were walking around
00:07:35
in this blood. It may ultimately help
you try to identify who the assailant was
that caused the injuries
00:07:41
to these two young women. [siren wailing] - [Richard] At the hospital,
Brittany was receiving urgent
00:07:47
medical treatment while
the scene was processed. - [Angela] It's a really
complicated, confused,
00:08:01
and very bloody scene. Jayna would've been left
there while the pathologist attended and had a look at her
in situ, took some samples.
00:08:15
Took her temperature,
for example, took a sample of the
fluid from her eye 'cause that's particularly
useful in order to try
00:08:22
and determine time of death, look at the extent of rigor. So they would've been
doing all of that
00:08:28
to try and work out
when this happened, and also give an initial
assessment of injuries.
00:08:33
And so everybody could
understand generally what they were dealing with. [suspenseful music]
00:08:39
- As they were processing the
crime scene they sent a female officer to interview
Brittany at the hospital.
00:08:46
She was conscious,
they were told, and they were trying to get
leads on who was responsible
00:08:53
for this attack on
these two young women. - [Richard] In the interview,
Brittany told detectives
00:09:34
that she'd been
working in the store with Jayna on Friday night. But after locking
up and heading home,
00:09:41
she realized she'd left
her train pass behind. - Brittany very early on,
within the first hour or two,
00:09:49
is saying, "I forgot my
card to get on the metro. I called Jayna, she had
the keys to the store,
00:09:56
"Can you get me back in
there so I can get my card to take the metro home?" As we walked back in, we
were followed in by two men
00:10:04
all dressed in black,
one taller, one shorter." [suspenseful music] - [Richard] Brittany's
account was terrifying,
00:10:54
but for the police, it
provided vital leads. Was it possible the two men
had been captured on CCTV?
00:11:03
- As it turned out,
within the first few hours of the investigation,
we found out
00:11:07
that the Apple store next door
did have an exterior camera to the rear parking lot
of the establishment
00:11:14
and we found a photograph
of two men, one taller, one shorter, all dressed
in black at about 11:07 PM
00:11:22
in the evening. So we had a picture of
two men very early on in this investigation
that fit the description
00:11:32
that was being given by
the surviving young woman who's then being treated
at a local hospital.
00:11:38
- [Richard] The hunt was
now on for the two men captured on CCTV. [eerie whirring]
00:11:56
[suspenseful music] On the outskirts
of Washington, DC, shop assistant Brittany
Norwood told police
00:12:09
that she and her
colleague, Jayna Murray, had been the victims of a
robbery at the clothing store
00:12:13
where they worked. She said the robbery
had turned violent and resulted in Jayna's murder.
00:12:21
[ethereal music]
[birds chirping] - ]John] Jayna Murray was an
extraordinary young woman.
00:12:30
She, at the time of her
death, had earned three master's degrees, worked
in four or five different
00:12:40
foreign countries. She came from an
affluent family. She was a brilliant young
woman on the eve of,
00:12:45
about to get married
to a young man. But this happened before. She was probably six weeks away.
00:12:57
[music resumes] Brittany Norwood
is a great athlete. She was a great soccer player.
00:13:04
She was the captain of the team. And she went to a school
up in Long Island. Full scholarship, soccer
athlete, division one school.
00:13:15
[graphics thudding] - [Richard] Violent crime
was a rarity in Bethesda. That it should happen
to two young women
00:13:28
working in an upmarket clothing
store shocked the community. - Bethesda Maryland
is an upwardly mobile,
00:13:38
very high-end, expensive
neighborhood to live in. Very safe, peaceful area that
you would not have thought
00:13:46
twice about letting your
adolescent kids to go down there to go to the movies or
for you to go out there
00:13:51
for a late night stroll
without a care in the world. - [Richard] By Saturday
night, police had a CCTV image
00:14:02
of two suspects captured
at the back of the store on the night of the murder. The race was on to
track them down.
00:14:12
- [John] We sent people out
door to door to knock on doors and say, "Hey, did
you see anything?
00:14:17
I mean, this was a bizarre, vicious crime against
two innocent women. Has anybody noticed anybody
in the neighborhood?
00:14:24
You know, are any weird guys hanging around in
the neighborhood? Like, can you give us a lead?"
00:14:29
And there were a couple
of names mentioned, and the police began
to run down those names
00:14:34
of those individuals. - [Richard] One name
that kept coming up was that of a
local homeless man.
00:14:43
He'd been seen outside the
Lululemon store on the day of the murder with two
men dressed in black.
00:14:51
- When they found him, he
had some cuts and things on his body. He had actually been in
the hospital on Saturday
00:14:58
here in the county for
treatment for injuries. He claimed that he'd
gotten in a fight
00:15:03
with another homeless man and got injuries that
required medical treatment. Now, if you're a
detective, they're saying,
00:15:11
"Go look at John." You go and you find John and John has physical
injuries on him.
00:15:18
This attack are brutal
physical attacks, and he's a little bit out there. His story seemed pretty suspect
00:15:26
'cause he was the guy
in the neighborhood that was kind of strange. Everybody was like,
"Hey, who's that guy?"
00:15:32
- [Richard] While detectives
quizzed the homeless man, back at the crime scene, the
police stepped up their search
00:15:37
for clues, and they quickly
discovered many objects that might have been
used in Jayna's murder.
00:15:46
- Knives. Rope. Hammers. Box cutters. Look, I think that were
probably close to 10 different
00:16:04
instrumentalities
that were used. - [Richard] These weapons
appeared to have come from
00:16:09
a red toolbox
belonging to the store found on top of Jayna's body. But the postmortem
would reveal the truth
00:16:17
about which one had killed her. [suspenseful music]
[pen scratching] Jayna's body was found
with more than 330 injuries
00:16:31
all over her body. There were cuts, bruises,
abrasions, lacerations, all of which could have been
caused by the hammer, wrench
00:16:41
and knife that were
found at the scene. We know that Jayna fought back because more than a hundred of
the injuries were defensive,
00:16:50
revealing that she
was using her arms and her legs in a vain
attempt to protect herself.
00:16:57
But she would've been
very quickly immobilized by this sustained
and savage attack
00:17:03
that left her covered
in blood and bruises. Bruising and bleeding occur
when the heart is still beating,
00:17:09
so these hundreds of injuries
must have been inflicted when Jayna was still alive.
00:17:15
So the question
remains, what was it that finally killed her? The ferocity and number of
injuries certainly supported
00:17:24
the working theory that one
or two men had overpowered and attacked her. To help build up a picture of
what had actually happened,
00:17:34
the police began
photographing the bloodstains found at the crime scene
for experts to interpret.
00:17:42
Dr. Angela Gallop is one
of the world's leading forensic scientists and
has studied the details
00:17:47
of this case. - [Angela] Blood
pattern analysis is one of the most powerful
forms evidence we have
00:17:55
in trying to work out what
happened at a crime scene. When blood is shed from
the body, it can form
00:18:05
so many different
kinds of patterns and each different kind of
pattern tells you something
00:18:11
about how it arose. - [Richard] Of most
interest to investigators were the blood stains
in the storeroom
00:18:18
where Jayna's body was found. - You can see really large blood
stains, which are too large
00:18:26
to contain the amount
of blood that's in them. So you see these elliptical
stains with these vertical runs,
00:18:33
and that tells you that they
have come from a breached artery, so presumably from
some of the knife wounds
00:18:39
that Jayna suffered. And so they've been
pumped out of the body so they're under that
kind of internal force.
00:18:45
Jayna was still alive at
this point, obviously. And so you get these
big heavy droplets
00:18:50
coming out on the wall, and because they're
so heavy with blood, the blood can't just
stick on the wall
00:18:56
so it runs down
in vertical drips, so they're really
characteristic. And then there are a lot
of stains of varying sizes,
00:19:05
but a lot of them very small, which are what we
call impact spatter. So they've been created
by blood being split up
00:19:13
by some external force. And here we know that there were sort of blunt instruments used.
00:19:20
So as the implement
struck Jayna's head, probably it forced blood
out into these droplets
00:19:27
and forced them
away onto the walls. - Look, if you look at
where Jayna was found
00:19:34
and you look where the blood
is at about the six foot level, there's almost none.
00:19:39
She was standing when
the attack occurred, probably facing her
attacker, went to her knees
00:19:43
'cause it was quite
a bit of blood at about the three
and a half foot level. She was probably on
her knees for a while.
00:19:48
Then she went down to the ground probably protecting her head. And the vast majority of
the injuries, she is down,
00:19:56
probably not even
facing her attacker, but the blood spatter
tells you all of this.
00:20:02
- [Richard] The blood
pattern analysis supported the
pathologist's findings. Jayna had suffered a
prolonged and vicious attack,
00:20:10
and it matched the
description Brittany had given from her hospital bed. [suspenseful music]
00:20:57
- [Richard] The horror
of Jayna's ordeal was slowly being revealed. So what else did the
blood patterns show?
00:21:07
- [Angela] You also have got
large amounts of pooled blood, which is what happens
when a body lies there
00:21:13
and is just draining out, the
blood's draining out of it through the injuries. And connected with that you
get, in this case, very clear
00:21:21
shoe marks, so marks of
whoever was around at the time, walking in some of this
pool blood and then walking
00:21:28
to different parts
of the premises. So you also get that. So lots of interesting
and connected patterns.
00:21:39
- [Richard] And it was from
those connected patterns that the police would uncover
their next piece of evidence.
00:21:46
- [John] There's blood
everywhere, but there within the blood there are clearly
two different distinct
00:21:53
shoe impressions. One of those shoe impressions
is a man sized 14 shoe. - [Richard] Could those prints
have been from the shoes
00:22:02
worn by the tall attacker? It seemed possible until one
of the detectives moved a table
00:22:10
to reveal a shelf and
two pairs of trainers. - [John] A Montgomery County
detective found these shoes,
00:22:17
looked at them, and he looked
at the bottom of the shoe, looked at the impression
on the bottom of the shoe,
00:22:22
goes, "That impression
exactly matches that blood impression
over here on the floor."
00:22:30
So now you have what
appears to be the shoes that caused the impressions,
but they're cleaned
00:22:36
and they're put away on a shelf. Now, so you're beginning to say, "Would a person do
this vicious murder,
00:22:42
assault these women, walk
all over this crime scene with shoes they found in
the store, wash them off
00:22:50
and put them into this shelf?" No. - [Richard] Something
just didn't add up about this crime scene.
00:22:59
And as time ticked on,
the pressure was mounting to find Jayna's killer. - There are so many little
loose ends all over the place
00:23:08
in this case, and forensic
scientists and investigators absolutely abhor loose ends.
00:23:18
[graphic thuds] [siren wailing] - Back in 2011, police were
chasing all possible leads
00:23:33
into the killing of a
young shop assistant in an upmarket clothing
store on the outskirts
00:23:39
of Washington, DC. This case became known
as the Lululemon murder. At the crime scene, whilst
police continued to search
00:23:49
for clues in their hunt for
the killer of Jayna Murray, her coworker Brittany
Norwood was in hospital,
00:23:57
revealing to detectives
the horror of the attack. - [Richard] Brittany's
torn clothing
00:24:40
seemed to support her story. And in the store room nearby,
Jayna Murray had also been
00:24:46
found with her
trousers cut open. So did she suffer
a similar fate? - Brittany is telling
us, besides the fact
that she was not
00:24:56
in a position to help
Jayna because the man was attacking her sexually,
but she could hear effectively
00:25:04
and essentially the
same thing happened to Jayna with the other man. They sort of divided
them up, one with her
00:25:10
and one with Jayna. - [Richard] So were
Brittany's claims backed up by the medical evidence?
00:25:18
- There was a sexual assault
nurse expert who did in fact examine Brittany Norwood.
00:25:29
This is the hangar that she said she was being sexually
assaulted with. It was a scary looking
instrumentality.
00:25:38
If what had happened
to her had happened, there would've been
massive internal injuries.
00:25:42
And despite her description
of what happened to her, she had no vaginal
injuries whatsoever.
00:25:52
She could present a
certain presentation, but the expert testimony
did not support the version
00:26:01
of her story about what
had happened to her. - [Richard] The police
were becoming suspicious
00:26:06
of Brittany Norwood. So did the pathology confirm
her claims about Jayna Murray?
00:26:15
Norwood told police that
two men had raided the store and that they'd sexually
assaulted both her and Jayna.
00:26:22
And when Jayna's body was found, a hole had been cut
in her leggings, but an internal examination
showed there was no evidence
00:26:31
of a sexual assault. So Jayna's body revealed
that Norwood was lying. What else had she lied about?
00:26:41
With suspicions mounting
about Brittany Norwood, the police reviewed
their evidence,
00:26:47
beginning with the first
photos taken of her on the morning of the attack. And to the experienced eye,
something didn't add up.
00:26:56
[graphics thud] - Her story is, the
initial story was she was attacked, assaulted,
tied up, and then left there
00:27:12
and she slipped into
unconsciousness on the floor. Well, but when you
looked at her that day,
00:27:18
there was no blood in her hair. If you lay like this, gravity will make some blood
seep down into your hair.
00:27:25
No blood in her hair. And the blood went
straight down her face. Now, the only way you get blood
this way is if I'm bleeding,
00:27:36
I stand up, the blood
goes down this way. But if I'm this way, the
way she claims she was,
00:27:41
the way she was in the picture, the blood would be in her hair and the blood would've flowed
back into her hair this way.
00:27:47
It would not be this way, 'cause that's what
we jokingly say that even in Bethesda
gravity works.
00:27:55
[suspenseful music] - [Richard] Meanwhile,
further examination of the shoe patterns found at
the crime scene had revealed
00:28:06
more confusing results. There were only two present. Brittany's shoe print
and the size 14 trainer,
00:28:15
and neither followed
a believable pattern. - Well, I think there is the
thing about the footprints
00:28:22
and purpose, you know,
where the footprints went at the scene and
whether that reflected
00:28:28
what was supposed to
have happened there according to Norwood. Oh yes, they went there.
00:28:32
This is what happened there. And then with blood
on their soles, they went there and did that,
they went there and did that,
00:28:37
and then they escaped there
and they had to do this to get out of that. You know, here I'm
not quite so sure
00:28:43
that it's as coherent as that. - [Richard] Investigators
discovered that the size 14
00:28:48
trainer prints mysteriously
ended at the sink in the bathroom where
Brittany was found.
00:28:54
But why? They'd have to use a
specialist chemical enhancement technique to find out.
00:29:01
- There are a wide
range of different sorts of enhancement techniques, and some of them are
used for fingerprints,
00:29:09
just bringing up fingerprints that you can't see because of
the sweat that they contain.
00:29:15
You can get that to react with
certain sorts of chemicals and it can give
you a color change
00:29:21
and make it much more
visible to the naked eye. And the same is true of blood. You get it to, you know,
different chemicals
00:29:28
to react in a different way. - [Richard] In this case,
a purple chemical stain showed instant results.
00:29:36
The sink had been
covered with blood. Could this have been where the
size 14 trainers were cleaned
00:29:42
before being put
back on the shelf? It was yet another puzzle
for the police to solve.
00:29:48
- So I think as, you know,
you think about this, who would've known about that? Who would've known
about the toolbox
00:29:55
and all the weapons
that were available? You know, all of these
things make you wonder
00:30:01
whether or not it wasn't
just an inside job. - [Richard] With evidence
mounting, the police continued
00:30:08
their door-to-door inquiries,
keeping an open mind about who might have
been responsible
00:30:14
for this shocking crime. - We now interview manager
and the assistant manager of the Apple store
directly next door.
00:30:24
And they give us a
piece of information we didn't have before. The woman who was the assistant
manager heard an argument,
00:30:33
a verbal argument
between two women. She heard things like,
"Tell me what's going on.
00:30:39
Tell me what's going on. Don't do this. Oh my God, somebody help me." She heard this, but the
voices were of two women.
00:30:47
[suspenseful music] - [Richard] The argument seemed
to be coming from Lululemon next door.
00:30:54
What happened next was captured on the Apple store's internal
CCTV at 10:14 Friday evening.
00:31:04
- [John] And she went
and summoned the manager of the Apple store and said, "Look, should we call somebody?"
00:31:14
At some point in time,
for whatever reason, those two individuals who
heard that conversation
00:31:19
discussed it, and ultimately
the decision was made, "It was just an argument
between two employees,
00:31:25
we're staying out of it"
And they did nothing. - [Richard] This
revelation stunned police.
00:31:33
Was this an argument
between Brittany and Jayna? And if so, had the
men caught on CCTV
00:31:39
been a red herring all along? - [John] We found those men. They were two gentlemen who
had just gotten off of work.
00:31:48
They worked at a
Tex-Mex restaurant that was on the corner. They were dishwashers
00:31:55
and they were on their
way to their cars to go home at the
end of their shift. They had nothing to
do with the crime.
00:32:03
- [Richard] Not only that,
but the police also released the homeless man
they'd been questioning
00:32:08
after they tracked down the
man he said he'd fought with and confirmed his story.
00:32:15
But there was another
twist to come, this time involving a phone
call on the night of the murder
00:32:21
from Jayna Murray to Rachel, the manager of the
Lululemon store. - Jayna Murray,
who was our victim,
00:32:30
who died this
terrible death here. When she left the store, she
immediately called Rachel
00:32:37
and said to Rachel, "I caught Brittany stealing
tonight from the store." And she claims that
she, that, you know,
00:32:45
I'm making this name up, that
Mary sold her these shorts. She had just stuck
them in her bag
00:32:50
and she was stealing them. And so I think that there
was a failed attempt by Brittany to convince Jayna
that everything was fine,
00:33:02
that she had paid for
the items that she had. Jayna could not confirm that, but brought it immediately
to the attention
00:33:10
of the store manager when
she got to her car that night to drive home. - [Richard] Despite being
found apparently unconscious,
00:33:19
covered in blood and then
claiming to have been attacked and sexually assaulted,
it seemed Brittany Norwood
00:33:27
was fast becoming the prime
suspect in this brutal murder. - I'd say Saturday,
Sunday, Monday.
00:33:38
I think this entire community
embraced Brittany Norwood and felt awful for this
young woman who had suffered
00:33:46
what appeared to be an
unspeakable terror at the hands of a stranger when she
was simply going back
00:33:53
to get a train card. But the story began to
unravel when you heard about it was a fight between women.
00:34:05
When you see that the shoes
that are involved are there, that she was accused of theft,
00:34:16
bit by bit by bit the
story began to crumble. - [Richard] Meanwhile, the
police had found Jayna's car
00:34:24
half a mile from the store,
and there were traces of blood in it they suspected
were Brittany's.
00:34:32
To test their theory, the lead
detective invited Brittany to the station for what he said
was routine fingerprinting.
00:34:40
But they'd set a trap. [suspenseful music]
[graphics thudding] - And he asks a very
simple question,
00:34:50
"Do you know what
Jayna's car looked like?" And her exact response is,
"Well, I think I saw it once,
00:34:57
but I'm really not sure." She leaves. Police
let her leave. The next day she calls and says,
00:35:04
"Look, I need to
tell you something. Something I've not been
truthful with you about."
00:35:09
And they said,
"Well, come on down." She comes down, her
brother drives her there.
00:35:14
And she now says
"Something I've left out." [suspenseful music] [suspenseful whirring]
00:35:40
- In Maryland, police
investigating the
Lululemon murder were closing in on
Jayna Murray's killer
00:35:47
as her body finally began
to give up the truth about what and who
had killed her.
00:35:56
- Thanks for coming back in. - [Richard] Six days after
Jayna's murder, her coworker,
00:36:04
Brittany Norwood, was at the
police station to explain what she knew about Jayna's car.
00:36:11
It had been found with
traces of blood inside half a mile away
from the crime scene.
00:36:18
The police suspected
it had been moved from outside the
store by the killer. Brittany still claimed
that was one of the two men
00:36:25
who had attacked them. - [Richard] With Brittany
sticking to what police knew was a false story, they brought
her brother and sister in
00:37:32
to the interview room and
spelled out what they believed had happened. - [John] She was never
overly emotional.
00:37:55
She was quiet. Probably the most that she
ever left her guard down. And this is a police tactic.
00:38:04
"I'm gonna leave you
alone with your brother." And when she talked to her
brother, which is beautiful,
00:38:10
the brother says,
"Don't worry about it. They're not allowed
to listen in. I looked around, there's
no cameras here."
00:38:15
We were filming
the entire thing. - He did a brilliant job of
interrogating his own sister
00:38:47
as we watched. - [Richard] But the
motive was clear. Brittany had been exposed
and reported by Jayna
00:39:20
as a shoplifter. - Without any question, Brittany
asked Jayna to come back. She said she had
forgotten this bus token
00:39:30
to get onto the train. I think that was a complete lie. I thought she called her
back to basically say to her,
00:39:39
"Look, I'll put the pants back. Please don't report me." Jayna comes back
in and she said,
00:39:47
"It's too late, I've
already called." And Brittany goes nuts on her. That was when the
decision was made
00:39:55
that she had to be arrested. - [Richard] The police
charged Brittany Norwood with first degree murder.
00:40:03
[eerie music]
[graphics thudding] At the trial, it was up
to the prosecutors to show
00:40:13
that Jayna's murder
was premeditated. - Now, as a lawyer, the
fact that she changed
00:40:19
instrumentalities, the
fact that she struck her as many times, made
it easier to make
00:40:24
a premeditated argument. And there were many,
many facts that made that argument very easy
00:40:32
and very logical for me to make, and for a jury to understand. The killing had to take
at least 20 minutes
00:40:42
because Jayna wouldn't die. Now, the primary murder
weapon was a merch peg. It was about eight pounds.
00:40:49
It was about 15
to 16 inches long, Weighed about eight
pounds, and it was metal.
00:40:57
It was very sturdy 'cause
it would go into a bracket in a wall, and then it
would hang like this.
00:41:02
And then you could take a
hanger and hang clothes on it. And the merch peg,
which was used
00:41:11
like you might use a hammer,
but that was what caused the most massive injuries
to the back of her head,
00:41:16
which included six
skull fractures. And these injuries were vicious. You could literally
see the imprint
00:41:23
of this merch peg
into her skull. - It had been a brutal
and sustained attack. But what did Jayna's body
reveal about the weapon
00:41:33
that finally killed her? Of the 331 injuries,
37 were to the head with no less than
26 to the right side
00:41:44
of the face alone. This repeated blunt
force trauma to the head has resulted in severe
bruising to the brain.
00:41:52
It's the type of injury
you might see in someone from a car accident. The skull is effectively
a closed box.
00:42:00
So if there's bleeding inside,
it creates a huge amount of pressure because the
blood has nowhere to go to.
00:42:06
And the effect of pressure on
the brain can be devastating. And although it can be lethal,
00:42:13
it doesn't necessarily
kill you quickly. The postmortem concluded that
it wasn't the blunt force
00:42:19
trauma to Jayna's head
that had caused her death. When Jayna's body was found,
she'd lost a lot of blood
00:42:26
from her numerous injuries, but only one was clearly
the cause of death. At the back of the neck,
there was a stab wound
00:42:34
consistent with a
large kitchen knife. The knife had been
used with such force that it had penetrated the
neck, chipping a vertebra,
00:42:43
severing the spinal
cord, piercing the skull, and finally terminating
deep within her brain.
00:42:50
Severing the spinal cord
this high up in the neck will cut the nerves responsible
for the most basic functions
00:42:56
of life like keeping the
heart and the lungs working. It's simply not a
survivable injury,
00:43:02
and Jayna would've been
dead within a minute. Jayna's battered body proved
that this had been an assault
00:43:09
with deadly intent, and
added to the evidence of Jayna's murder
being premeditated.
00:43:16
- The last knife that killed
her, it was on the other side of the store in a kitchen area,
00:43:22
and they used it to cut bagels. But she had to leave Jayna
and go and get the knife,
00:43:32
come back, kneel on top of her,
and deliver the final blow. She basically had to
finish what she was doing.
00:43:39
- [Richard] With Jayna dead,
Brittany had begun staging the crime scene. Opening tills, making
the bloody footprints,
00:43:46
and giving herself
superficial knife wounds. But she made one final mistake. - [John] She's laying
in blood on the floor,
00:43:56
supposedly, right? If you're laying in blood,
it should be encrusted and dried on the back of
the clothes you have on.
00:44:05
Reality, there was no blood
in the back of the clothes she was laying on the
floor in, no blood,
00:44:13
which means she
created that scene. She went over to
where Jayna was, probably with some
kind of a towel,
00:44:20
soaked it in Jayna's
blood, brought it over, put it underneath where she was. Now she's gonna
lay in that blood,
00:44:27
but she's not gonna lay in
that blood for 10 hours. By the time she
lays in it, it's dry
00:44:33
'cause nothing transfers
to her clothing. She never laid down in
that spot where she's found
00:44:38
until 10 seconds before the
person walked in the store. [graphics thudding] [eerie music]
00:44:49
- [Richard] It took the
jury just 18 minutes to find Brittany Norwood
guilty of first degree murder.
00:44:56
She was sentenced to life
imprisonment without parole. - It's one of the cases
that I'm most proud of.
00:45:07
Jayna Murray was an
extraordinary young woman. She was not the person
who was found on the floor
00:45:14
in Lululemon, she was
much more than that. She was a very, very special,
brilliant young woman.
00:45:22
[music continues] - Jayna Murray suffered
appalling injuries at the hands of Norwood.
00:45:30
She sustained over 300
wounds to her body, including blunt force
trauma to her skull.
00:45:36
Norwood used weapons like
a hammer, wrench, a knife to inflict these injuries,
finally killing Jayna
00:45:43
by severing her spinal cord. Norwood will spend her life
in prison for what she did.
00:45:51
Despite using all her
guile to stage the murder and make it look like a robbery,
Jayna's body didn't lie.
00:45:58
It revealed the terrible
truth about her murder, ensuring that in the
end, justice was served.
00:46:06
[upbeat music] [music continues] [music continues] [music continues]