The Yoga Store Murder: The Shocking True Account of the Lululemon Athletica Killing
By Dan Morse

The crime:

On the night of March 11 2011 twenty-eight-year-old Brittany Norwood beat her co-worker Jayna Murray to death in a Bethesda, Maryland Lululemon Athletica store. Norwood claimed the store had been invaded after hours by a pair of masked men who had killed Murray and tied Norwood up in the course of robbing the place, but that story soon unwound and it became clear that Norwood had staged the murder to make it look like a break-in. Norwood was convicted at trial of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.

The book:

This was a very dumb crime that was easily figured out by the police after Norwood’s initial explanation of what happened started to come undone. You have to put a lot of planning and work into such a complex false narrative to pull it off, and Norwood seems to have given little thought into what she was doing at all. And that’s where the real mystery comes in.

It’s the same mystery that Dan Morse returns to again and again in this book: Just why did Norwood kill Murray? And in such a savage way?

Murray was beaten on by at least five and maybe as many as seven or eight different weapons. Norwood just grabbed whatever was at hand, including a knife, a hammer, a wrench, and a merchandise peg (a short, bent iron bar with a plate at the end used to hang clothes from). Forensics figured Murray was struck over three hundred and thirty times. There were also slicing and cutting wounds that experts interpreted as signs of sadism. It’s estimated that the beating continued for around fifteen minutes.

Obviously this was an act of extreme rage. But investigators couldn’t figure out why Norwood went off like this. The lead prosecutor even made the decision to try the case without putting forward a motive: “he knew he had to leave out one important detail that might prey on jurors’ minds: he couldn’t tell them why Brittany killed Jayna.” Later, during their deliberations, the jurors did indeed puzzle over this but finally had to shrug their shoulders and move on. They didn’t need to know her motive. “You know what?” one of them said. “Maybe in ten or fifteen years, Brittany Norwood will come out and explain why she did this. But the fact of the matter is we don’t have to know.”

It remains a mystery – Norwood didn’t testify at her trial and refused to be interviewed for this book – but maybe not as big a one as Morse makes it out to be. The murder was not deeply premeditated but a crime of passion. And Norwood was a hothead already, whose life was coming undone. She enjoyed living a lifestyle beyond her means, and working in a high-end shop in a tony neighbourhood probably didn’t help with her bad financial habits (a.k.a. “a taste for nice things”): eating at pricey restaurants and bars, buying fancy clothes, getting a membership at expensive gyms, attending NFL football games (in good seats), and having her hair done by top stylists.

No need to ask how she could afford any of this. She couldn’t. By the time of the murder she had ambitions to become a personal trainer but was in fact working as an escort as a side hustle, finding dates on sugar-daddy websites. Having reached such a point, and then being confronted by Murray with being fired (for a second time) on proof of theft from the store, she lost her shit. Or as her attorneys more diplomatically put it, “Ms. Norwood became overwhelmed with emotion during a confrontation, and before she could regain her composure, she committed the unthinkable.”

Morse looks into the possibility of psychopathy as well, but I’m not sure I’d go that far. Norwood was immoral, self-centered, and had a lack of empathy and poor impulse control (her out-of-control spending is evidence of that). But I don’t think she was a full-blown psycho. She wasn’t a good person, but I think her meltdown was the kind of thing that happens to a lot of people. It played out in a spectacular and tragic fashion though.

Noted in passing:

Morse puts Lululemon Athletica in lowercase throughout the book. So “lululemon athletica.” I think this is the way the company styles it for branding reasons but I don’t think it’s necessary or appropriate for a writer or journalist to follow those same guidelines and I found it really irritating.

Lululemon is a successful Canadian brand of athletic wear. I don’t know much about them, even though they seem to be what all the women are wearing at the gym these days. I guess they’re a good product, but the whole lifestyle-branding thing they push makes them sound like a cult to me. And a creepy corporate one at that. But this seems to be the way brands work these days.

Takeaways:

Norwood had worked previously at another Lululemon location but been fired by the store manager for suspicion of theft and abusing the discount privileges given employees. However the company did an internal investigation and found there were other cases of “discount abuse” that did not result in termination so they overturned the store manager’s decision and reinstated Norwood, telling her she could work at another location.

This is not the way to do it.

I’ve dealt with difficult and maybe even crazy people in workplace environments. People who just get warnings or who get moved around. I’m not saying it should be easier to fire people in general, but what I do advise is avoiding any half measures in cases like this. You can’t call bad employees in for a little talk and think things are going to improve. You get your ducks in the row and once you’re sure, you fire them. Lululemon should have got rid of Norwood when they had the opportunity – that is, before she came to the Bethesda store – but they dropped the ball.

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