Disclaimer: The article contains mention of assault and murder. Reader discretion is advised.
The infamous 2011 Lululemon murder case involved the disturbing death of a 30-year-old woman named Jayna Troxel Murray. The individual responsible for this ordeal was the then-29-year-old Brittany Norwood.
According to All That’s Interesting, Murray was a student at Johns Hopkins University and worked in a Lululemon Athletica store in Washington, D.C. While working there, she met Norwood. The two women reportedly didn’t have animosity. However, everything changed on March 11, 2011. Per the Baltimore Sun, Murray caught Norwood stealing leggings from the store on the fateful night. The former informed a store manager of the latter’s actions, and the pair left the place at 9:45 p.m. A few minutes later, the 30-year-old received a call from Norwood and learned her co-worker had left her wallet at their place of work. The pair returned to the Lululemon Athletica store at 10:05 p.m. Moments later, neighboring Apple store employees heard a ruckus.
Apple employee Jana Svrzo heard a woman say, “Don’t do this. Talk to me. What’s going on?” and then ten minutes of grunting and yelling. Eventually, the same voice said, “God help me, please help me.”
The next day, in the store, manager Rachel Oertli discovered Murray’s lifeless body, and Norwood tied to the bathroom. Brittany Norwood claimed that on the previous night, two masked assailants followed the pair into the store and raped them. They supposedly killed Murray but let Norwood live because they had more fun assaulting her. Eventually, authorities learned that the 29-year-old’s narration of the incident was untrue and it was she who committed the murder.
The brutal Lululemon murder case was explored in detail in a 2012 episode of Oxygen Snapped.
Where is Brittany Norwood now?
Per CBS News, for the first-degree murder of Jayna Troxel Murray, Brittany Norwood received a life imprisonment sentence without the possibility of parole. The Maryland Correctional Institute for Women in Jessup, MD, is currently her place of stay.
Authorities initially treated Norwood as a victim, but they soon began noticing inconsistencies in her story. Detective Dimitry Ruvin, who interrogated her several times, stated that she had an intuition that the survivor was lying about the ordeal mentioned above. She said, “It’s just this little voice in the back of my head. Something’s just not right. The way Brittany’s describing these two guys — they’re racist, they’re rapists, they’re robbers, they’re murderers — it’s like the worst human being that you could possibly describe, right?”
During Brittany Norwood’s trial, the truth came to light. The 29-year-old reportedly attacked and murdered Jayna Troxel Murray using tools such as a merchandise peg, a rope, a hammer, a knife, and a box cutter from the store’s tool kit. She then left the store, parked the deceased’s car in a nearby parking lot, and devised a plan to cover her tracks. 90 minutes later, she returned to the crime scene and strategically made it look like whatever she told the police was true.
Murray’s body had more than 331 injuries. The condition of her corpse was so gruesome that her family could not have an open casket at her funeral.
