The Closing Shift

Jayna Murray was thirty, a graduate student who worked two jobs, one of them at the Lululemon Athletica store on Bethesda Avenue in Bethesda, Maryland. Brittany Norwood, twenty-eight, worked there too. On the night of March 11, 2011, the two were alone in the store after closing.

Norwood killed her with a hammer, a wrench, a metal display peg, knives and other things she gathered from around the store; the medical examiner counted at least 331 separate injuries, up to 105 of them defensive. Prosecutors said the fight started over merchandise Norwood had taken. She then wrecked the store, emptied the safe, moved Murray’s car, pressed bloody prints into the floor with a pair of men’s size fourteen sneakers from store stock, cut and bound herself, and waited to be found the next morning with a story about two masked men who had attacked them both.

The story failed within days. Employees at the Apple store next door had heard the noise through the wall and heard only women’s voices. There was blood in Murray’s car, and only two sets of footprints were at the scene. Norwood was charged with murder that week. A jury convicted her of first-degree murder on November 2, 2011, and on January 27, 2012, she was sentenced to life without parole.