Brittany Norwood’s journey from supposed victim to brutal killer ended Wednesday when a jury convicted her of first-degree murder in the slaying of a co-worker at an upscale Bethesda yoga-clothing store.
It took Montgomery County Circuit Court jurors less than an hour to reach the guilty verdict in one of the Washington region’s most sensational murder cases, which became known for both its savagery and surprises.
A homicide in Bethesda
The Crime Scene
The decision culminated a six-day trial during which prosecutors detailed the gruesome March attack against Jayna Murray, 30. The woman endured at least 331 stabbing, cutting, beating and choking wounds before she succumbed in a back hallway of the Lululemon Athletica store.
Murray’s father, David Murray, sobbed as the verdict was read, his arm around his wife, Phyllis, who also cried. Norwood showed no emotion.
“More than anything, I know the trauma our family has been through,” Phyllis Murray said after the trial. “I want no other family to go through this.”
David Murray said the experience had left him numb. His daughter, he said, “contributed 30 years of beauty, and we believe she would have contributed another 90 years of beauty.”
There was never a question of whether Norwood, 29, killed Murray — defense lawyers admitted her guilt from the start. The trial came down to what was in Norwood’s head that Friday night.
Montgomery State’s Attorney John McCarthy stressed that the attack was continuous and brutal, proving that it was premeditated. Norwood grabbed any makeshift weapon she could find. Prosecutors said she probably used, among other items, a hammer, knife, wrench, a rope and a metal peg used to hold a mannequin. He asked jurors to imagine a wound inflicted every three seconds — a rate that would stretch the attack to 16 minutes.
“There were dozens of opportunities, multiple times, that she could have stopped this,” McCarthy said in his closing argument Wednesday.
Norwood’s attorneys didn’t call a single witness. They tried to convince jurors in their closing that the killing wasn’t planned, hoping to earn a conviction for a lesser charge of murder that carries a shorter prison term. They left jurors Wednesday with an impassioned plea: Norwood was “not in her right state of mind.”
“This, ladies and gentlemen, is the product of an explosion,” Douglas Wood said in his closing, holding up an autopsy photograph of Murray’s mutilated head, “the product of someone who lost it.”
But jurors were not swayed. One member of the panel, Ron Harrington, 35, of Germantown, said that as soon as deliberations began, jurors took a vote on a first-degree murder charge. “Everyone’s hand went up immediately,” he said. After that, they discussed a lesser charge, but no one was convinced.
Harrington was swayed by the number of wounds inflicted on Murray. “Basically, it took a long, long time,” he said. “Brittany had . . . many opportunities to stop.”
Another juror, who asked not to be named to protect his privacy, said Norwood “constantly kept making the decision to continue” the attack. “It was just not really a hard conclusion to come to. How do you hit someone 300 times and not think that you’re going to kill them?”
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