Brittany Norwood

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Brittany Norwood was an ambitious young woman with a bright future.

She's friendly, she's engaging, she's athletic.

She wanted to be a personal trainer.

But her dreams were put on hold when a shocking crime occurred at the upscale yoga shop where she worked.

One person seems dead and the other person is breathing.

No one would have expected something like that to happen there.

Was the brutal slaying the result of a robbery?

Being taught me if they said another word, it slit my throat.

Or was the truth even more shocking?

Wait, one of them killed the other?

She had to have lost her mind.

This is someone who just snapped.

March 12th, 2011.

It was a beautiful Saturday morning in the upscale suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.

Bethesda is a very affluent community, a place that's very safe.

There's low crime.

There's a lot of pedestrian traffic and shops where people will do a lot of window shopping.

It's also very pricey and very nice, and everything's put together just, you know, almost perfectly.

And in Bethesda, the trendy sportswear store called Lululemon Athletica fit right in.

It's a yoga store that preaches, you know, serenity and peace.

However, the scene awaiting the store manager when she walked in at 8 that morning was anything but peaceful.

The door was unlocked.

The store ransacked.

She noticed their clothing that was strewn on the floor.

There appeared to be some blood on the floor.

She moved a few feet in and then heard moaning.

That panicked her.

Frightened, the manager dashed outside and dialed 911.

Okay, we're counting 911.

What is the emergency?

I'm opening up my Lululemon store, and the door was completely open.

And I hear someone moaning in the back and it looks like it's been vandalized and i'm just really scared to go in the police were soon on their way while the manager waited outside for them to arrive a bystander approached and asked the visibly distraught woman what was wrong when the manager explained the situation the bystander volunteered to check things out the man goes inside and

walks all the way to the the back of the store.

He starts to see blood.

The blood trail appeared to lead to a hallway in the back of the store.

He tries to open this door to this back room and there's something heavy leaning against the store.

Finally, the man managed to force the door open a few inches.

He kind of

peeks in, is able to look in and then sees the body laying there.

It was a 30-year-old store clerk named Jaina Murray and she was dead.

There was an extraordinary amount of blood at the scene.

It was horrific.

We're talking about a victim who sustained over 300 different blows to her body.

It was horrific.

The violence was terrible.

But as the man began to hurry back outside, he suddenly stopped.

He turns around and hears this moaning sound.

Was the young woman lying dead on the floor the only victim?

Racing to the source of the sound, the man found another young woman lying on the floor in a nearby bathroom.

Her hands are tied up, her legs are tied up,

and you know she's kind of moaning, kind of making these sounds like maybe she's conscious, you know, maybe not, but she's hurting.

She was another clerk, 28-year-old Brittany Norwood, and she appeared to be clinging to life.

Originally from Washington State, Brittany grew up in a small town and a big family.

Brittany is one of nine children.

Her father ran a small upholstery business.

This was not a family that had a ton of money.

But Brittany and her siblings had ambition and a willingness to work hard.

Most of her brothers and sisters are college educated.

There's engineers in the family.

There's a management consultant, a physician.

That's the background she grew up in.

A star on her high school soccer team.

Brittany appeared destined to follow her older siblings' example.

She was a tremendous athlete that was recruited across the United States of America to play college soccer.

She eventually signed with Stony Brook University on Long Island.

She got a scholarship to Stony Brook.

She went across the country to play soccer there.

But she left Stony Brook suddenly in 2003.

She was accused of stealing from her teammates, from people that she went to school with, from her current roommate.

No charges were filed, but the allegations had cost Brittany dearly.

She got thrown out of school.

She lost her soccer scholarship.

Devastated, Brittany drifted to Washington, D.C.

Settling near two of her sisters.

She got a job at the Posh Willard Intercontinental Hotel and tried to rebuild.

She started off working at the front desk and quickly was promoted to managing VIP guests.

She would make sure that everything was taken care of from these most important people.

It was a good job, but it wasn't what the former soccer star wanted to do with her life.

She wanted to be a personal trainer.

That was a long-time goal that she'd had for herself.

She was a real

fanatic of physical fitness.

She was kind of into everything, you know, she'd do weight training, she'd do boot camp, she did spin classes.

Hoping to make connections in DC's competitive market for fitness trainers.

In 2010, Brittany took a job at the Georgetown location of Lululemon, an upscale retailer specializing in yoga and workout clothing.

She's friendly, she's engaging, she's athletic.

She's the kind of person that Lulu customers would want to talk to.

She was, you know, in some ways, a perfect saleswoman for Lululemon.

Then in February of 2011, she transferred to the Lululemon store in Bethesda, but it was only supposed to be a temporary job.

She was looking for a new job.

And it was a fitness center around the corner from the Lululemon store.

And she was applying to be a fitness trainer.

Brittany was about to realize her dream.

However, she was hardly the only ambitious young clerk at the Bethesda store.

Jaina Murray was born in Kansas but grew up in Texas.

Jaina Murray was in many ways just like Brittany Norwood, came from a good family, a respected family.

Her dad's

special operations guy in Vietnam, did two tours there.

He and other of Jaina's family members talk about a household in which there was a very strong sense of right versus wrong.

Like Brittany, Jaina had been a star athlete growing up.

In high school, a track coach Tsar

you know, at a dance and sort of recruited her as a discus thrower.

And she was such a good athlete that she set, you know, a local record for throwing the discus.

Studying for her business degree at George Washington University, Jaina spent a year studying in Spain and did a semester at sea.

Directly out of college, she accepted a job, in fact, with Halliburton, and it allowed her to travel and see the world.

After three successful years as a marketing rep for Halliburton, Jaina went back to school to pursue an MBA at Johns Hopkins.

She wrote her MBA master's thesis on the Lululemon corporate model.

It's a really interesting company,

very successful, interesting place.

They promote a lot of goal setting among their employees.

You know, you're supposed to set your personal goals, your health goals, your professional goals.

To research her thesis hands-on, Jaina also took a job at Lululemon.

And they like to hire really ambitious people.

You know, Jaina was sort of the perfect Lululemon employee.

Like Brittany, the job was only supposed to be temporary, a stepping stone to bigger and better things.

The only reason she was there, it was a research project for her,

for her master's degree.

But after she finished her thesis, Jaina decided to stay through the end of the semester.

She became fascinated with Lululemon and how smart their retelling techniques were.

She'd gotten friendly with the other girls, and then she decided just to see it through because she liked the girls.

The women Jaina worked with liked her too.

You ask them about Jaina Murray, every person says the same thing.

Jaina was my best friend.

Everybody that we ever spoke with about Jana just describes her as full of life and loving life and

just

adventurous.

Jaina and Brittany weren't close, however.

It wasn't that they didn't get along.

They just hadn't had the time.

They were only co-workers for three and a half weeks.

Brittany had only recently got there.

They were co-workers.

They did not socialize together.

They just were coworkers who'd probably had a handful of shifts that had overlapped.

Their last shift together would be on Friday night, March 11th, 2011.

Her and Jaina were closing the store around 9 o'clock.

They cleaned up.

It was pretty uneventful.

But as the two women cleaned and locked up, their uneventful evening took a tragic turn.

On Saturday morning, March 12th, minutes after they'd received a 911 call reporting what appeared to be a break-in at Lululemon Athletica's Bethesda location, Montgomery County police received a second frantic call.

Exploring the crime scene while waiting for the police to arrive, the store manager and a bystander had discovered two victims at the back of the store.

One person seems dead and the other person is breathing.

The dead woman was Jaina Murray.

She was found in a back hallway face down with a substantial amount of blood around her a pooling of blood on the floor from her injuries as well as a great deal of blood spatter on the adjacent walls the other victim was 28 year old brittany norwood

someone's tied her up she's still breathing

okay i need an ambulance right away Within minutes, the police were on the scene.

Inside Lululemon, they found what looked to be a robbery there's a series of registers cash registers and this there's safes underneath them and they're open and there's receipts just scattered throughout the floor but there's no money there were plenty of signs of a struggle however

there was clothing and shelving that was strewn about the store definitely looks like there was a big fight

in the middle of the store.

And when the police got to Jaina's body in the back of the store, they found yet more evidence of a brutal struggle.

On top of Jaina's body, there's this red toolbox and there's tools scattered throughout.

There's a hammer, there's some wrenches,

and they're just, they're covered in blood.

Nearby, the police found Brittany Norwood bound and bloody on the bathroom floor.

Her hands are tied up, her legs are tied up,

and you know, she's kind of moaning.

She was alive, but appeared to be badly injured.

She's not responding.

She's not opening her eyes.

She had an injury to her forehead, and there was some blood on her face.

She had some cuts to her chest and to her stomach area.

She looks like she was beaten, and we were just like,

wow, this is crazy.

Coming up, Brittany gives a harrowing account of her ordeal.

He had me by the hair, told me, slit my throat.

But will the witnesses next door confirm her story?

Witnesses reported that they heard a voice saying, oh God, please help me.

On Saturday morning, March 12, 2011, police in the affluent Washington, D.C.

suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, faced a shocking crime.

Lululemon, an exclusive yoga shop, had been robbed.

Worse, one of the store's clerks, 30-year-old Jaina Murray, had been stabbed, beaten, and bludgeoned to death.

Jaina's body was virtually mutilated.

There were a number of

head wounds, facial injuries, neck and back wounds

that

really

would shake even the most experienced homicide investigators.

It was a terrible, horrific, and extremely gruesome crime.

The other clerk, 28-year-old Brittany Norwood, had also been attacked and apparently left for dead.

She had razor blade cuts to her breasts, to her stomach, to her legs.

But Brittany wasn't dead.

Unlike Jaina, she had survived the ordeal.

And that night while the crime scene technicians processed the store, the investigators spoke to Brittany at the hospital.

She was awake, she was alert, and she was able to talk.

She told me that she and Jaina had closed the store, that she and Jaina left the store around 9.45 p.m.

But then a few minutes later, Brittany said they had both returned.

I got to the Metro and actually realized I didn't have my wallet.

According to Brittany, she had called Jaina, who had the keys to the store.

She was like, well, I noticed I didn't have my laptop anyway, so it's fine.

So I just met her back in front of the store.

Brittany said she and Jaina searched for her wallet, but couldn't find it.

According to Brittany, Jaina just says, well, here's my Metro card.

Just take it and, you know, we can look for the wallet tomorrow.

But then, as the two women left the employee break room at the back of the store, they suddenly realized they hadn't locked the front door behind them.

Then according to Brittany, a second assailant grabbed her from behind.

He had me by the hair, told me if they said another word, he slit my throat.

And

Jaina kept yelling and fighting.

According to Brittany, Jaina's attacker dragged dragged her into the back of the store.

And, you know, her screams kind of

die down.

Meanwhile, the suspect with Brittany was asking where the money is, where's the money kept.

Brittany said she had done as ordered.

She says her suspect walks her to get the keys to the safes.

But once he had the money, Brittany said her attacker had dragged her into the back too.

Then he forced her into the bathroom and began slashing at her with a knife.

He cuts her pants open and

then he proceeds to sexually assault her.

And the only thing was it was my mom.

He was my lost

moment.

So I couldn't help her.

Brittany said that she had blacked out at some point during the attack.

She says she comes to when she's being carried out of the store in the ambulance.

But while Brittany had been left alive, she couldn't give the police a description of her attackers.

All she knew was that there were two men.

They were masked, all dressed in black, one slightly taller than the other.

Back at the crime scene, the investigators found clues that appeared to confirm at least part of Britney's story.

We have two sets of shoe prints in blood leading to the area where

the keys were kept.

One was smaller and appeared to be Brittany's.

But the other was much larger, a size 14 to be exact.

We're assuming that this is the shoe of

one of the unknown male assailants.

But strangely, those two were the only sets of footprints the detectives found.

There's no signs of the second suspect.

Nor did the footprints appear to leave the store.

Maybe the guy took the shoes off and

left in his socks.

Things got even more puzzling when the investigators followed up with the manager who had walked in on the bloody scene that morning.

The manager told the police she had received a phone call from Jaina at around closing time the night before, a call that concerned Brittany.

There's this allegation that Brittany had been stealing the night of the homicide.

They had a policy of checking bags on a nightly basis for all the employees.

The night of the murder, Jaina actually found some items in Britney's purse that she believed were stolen because Brittany didn't have any receipts.

And the general manager of the store said, well, we'll deal with it tomorrow.

And that's how that conversation ended.

Did the allegations of shoplifting have something to do with the murder?

The timing certainly seemed suspicious, but the police weren't quite ready to consider Brittany a suspect just yet.

You've got to remember, we've got a woman who was covered in blood, razor blade cuts.

clothes shredded, tied on the floor.

And that Saturday afternoon, when the police pulled surveillance camera footage from the surrounding stores, they found more evidence that appeared to confirm Britney's account of two black-clad intruders.

It was a recording of the alley behind Lululemon, taken a little after 11 o'clock on the night of the murder.

There are two guys that were walking really fast in the back of the Apple store, which is just adjacent to the back hallway.

of the Lululemon store.

Both men were dressed in black.

Was it a glimpse of Jaina's killers?

That first 24 hours or 48 hours of the investigation, we were looking for those two guys.

Hoping to find a witness who could identify the two men, the detectives questioned employees at the Apple store next door to Lululemon.

As luck would have it, most of the staff had worked late the night before, prepping for the release of Apple's latest gadget.

There was a lot to do as far as all the sales they had for the iPad 2, and they're also having meetings to get sort of geared up for the next day.

None of the employees could recall seeing either of the men in black, but one of the managers had heard something strange at around 10 o'clock.

She hears noises on the other side of the wall.

She hears this sort of heaving sound as if maybe heavy furniture had been moving.

Then she hears screaming.

The manager had even mentioned the noise to several other employees.

There were witnesses who reported having heard a voice saying, oh God, please help me, please help me.

And then another voice in response saying, just talk to me.

Unfortunately, none of the employees called 911.

A murder was going down next door.

Nobody called the police.

It was just, it was just sad.

But they did give police a vital piece of information about the shouting they'd heard from next door.

It was two women.

No male voices.

Coupled with what the police already knew about the allegations of shoplifting, the fact that employees of the Apple store had heard two women arguing before the murder cast considerable doubt on Britney's story about massed intruders.

It became apparent that

Brittany was not telling the truth about what happened.

Even worse for Brittany, the police were about to make a shocking discovery about the bloody shoe prints left at the scene.

It started on Sunday afternoon as the police continued to process the crime scene.

My sergeant finds these shoes and they're in the mid-rack, which is a table that they use to fold the clothes home.

And

it's a large pair of like size 14 male shoes.

And something about the tread pattern appeared to be awfully familiar.

We'll look at the large footprints that we have in blood.

And

they match that pair of shoes.

Michael, what is this?

Did the killer like leave his shoes behind?

On Monday morning, the police followed up with the manager of Lululemon, who explained how the shoes got into the store.

The store people says, no, no, no, those shoes are always here.

We have them here for fitting.

You slip into the sneakers, they hem your pants so you look great when you go to work out in the local gym.

But could someone also slip into them to stage a crime scene?

Those shoes are not from somebody who walked in here and attacked these girls.

These are shoes that were here from the very beginning that have now been cleaned off and put back into the shelf.

Coming up, the police find another crucial clue.

There's traces of blood that are found on the steering wheel and use it to bait a trap for Brittany.

Do you know what kind of car she is?

Um,

I don't.

I saw it once.

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By the morning of March 15th, 2011, it had been 72 hours since Bethesda, Maryland, had been shocked by a brutal murder in an upscale boutique.

It just shocked everybody because no one would have expected something like that to happen there.

Even more frightening, as far as the community knew, store clerk Jaina Murray had been killed during a robbery, and her fellow clerk Brittany Norwood was lucky to be alive.

She exhibits all the signs that you would think a victim would exhibit.

What the community didn't know was that over the last 72 hours, the police had uncovered a series of clues suggesting that Brittany may not be an innocent victim.

First, the store manager said that Jaina had called her shortly before the murder and accused Brittany of shoplifting.

That night, Jaina checked Brittany's purse and found some items that she believed to be stolen from the store.

Then, employees at the Apple store next door reported hearing two women arguing the night of the murder.

Brittany is saying the attack was two men.

Finally, the police had traced the bloody footprints at the scene to a pair of sneakers they had found in the store.

Shoes they believe Brittany had used to stage the fake crime scene.

The only person that would want to alter the scene is the person that's in the scene, which was Brittany.

The bloody footprints at the crime scene weren't all the police believe Brittany faked either.

Following up with the doctors who had treated Brittany in the ER cast doubt on her own bloody injuries.

They were like small lacerations or scratches.

And the sexual assault Brittany reported, it never happened, according to the doctors.

We actually looked at the report

and there was no evidence of sexual assault.

Brittany's injuries may have been superficial, possibly even self-inflicted, but Jaina's were not.

When the police received her autopsy report that morning, the gruesome details were enough to rattle even the most jaded investigator.

This wasn't just one

stab wound that did it, one gunshot that did it.

You know, it wasn't any of those things.

It was more than 300 separate wounds on her upper body, her hands, her face, her chest, her back.

Really, her entire upper body was covered in wounds.

Most appeared to have been inflicted by the tools that police had found scattered around Jaina's body.

Every implement that was used to assault Jaina

came from the store.

And that included the weapon used for the fatal blow, a deep stab wound to the back of her head.

In the back, there's a sink and there's like a little kitchen and that's where we found a knife.

For the investigators, the fact that all the weapons used in the attack came from within the store also argued against Britney's robbery scenario.

We got two guys that go in the store to rob the store,

yet they bring no weapons.

But what about the two men in the alley?

Clad in black, just as Brittany described, a security camera had recorded them hurrying down the alley behind the store shortly after the murder occurred.

The exterior camera to the Apple store showed two people almost at precisely the time that would have fit with her story.

Unfortunately for Brittany, by Tuesday, the police canvas of the shopping center had identified the two men.

We finally found those people.

They were two dishwashers that worked in a store up the street, had absolutely nothing to do with it.

With the mystery men ruled out, that left the police with only one option.

Brittany killed Jaina.

That's what the police believed.

But could they prove it?

So far, all the investigators really had were the manager's claim that Jaina had caught Britney shoplifting and a lot of circumstantial evidence.

Basically, you're going to be arresting because you think, wow, the story just doesn't make sense.

That's a big decision.

However, there was still one thread that could tie Brittany to the crime.

During their canvas at the shopping center, the police had found Jaina's car parked several blocks from the store.

There's traces of blood that are found on the steering wheel, on the gear shift.

Clearly, the car had been driven after the murder.

But why?

From what the police could determine, Brittany's story about the two clerks returning to the store to look for her missing wallet had been true.

She lured her back to kill her, which some people think.

Or she was bringing her back and she was going to say to her, look, please don't tell.

But the fact that Jaina had driven back to the store left Brittany in a bit of a dilemma.

Jaina's car was outside the store in an area that you weren't allowed to park in.

So

Brittany had to go move the car so that people wouldn't get suspicious.

She needed to drive up Petes Avenue, find a parking lot, park the car, and then return back.

That was the theory.

To prove it, the detectives asked Brittany to come in and submit fingerprints and a DNA sample on Wednesday, March 16th.

We told her we need to eliminate her from any prints that we could have found in the store.

The police didn't specifically mention the blood they found in Jaina's car, although the car did come up indirectly.

He's just super casual talking to her.

And he sort of buried this question late in the interview.

Did Jaina say where she was going after she got got off work?

As far as I knew home.

Okay.

She said she lives in Arlington.

Um,

and she drives.

Do you know what kind of car she has?

Um,

I don't.

I saw it once.

But she'd never driven it or even ridden in it, according to Brittany.

She leaves the police station on Wednesday, having told us, I've never been in her car.

That's not what the preliminary DNA results said, however.

When the DNA came back, it just,

it just totally contradicted what Brittany said.

It was Brittany's blood in Jaina's car.

The authorities spent the next day preparing an arrest warrant.

And Brittany apparently spent that Thursday thinking over the interview.

Because that afternoon, she contacted the investigators and asked to come in.

and speak to them again.

I think it became apparent to her that we knew that there was something in the car or that she may have been in the car.

Brittany knew forensically we're going to tie her to that car.

So when she came in on Friday, March 18th, she offered the police an explanation.

Yes, she did move Jaina's car, but according to Brittany, her attackers forced her to do it.

Prior to

him

sexually assaulting me.

and zip tying me, they made me move her car.

Brittany didn't know that the medical evidence had already cast considerable doubt on her claims of a sexual assault.

But that fact wasn't the main reason the police didn't believe her new story.

According to Brittany, the attackers had sent her out to move the car alone.

Police said if I was to pass to anyone and open my mouth, I can consider myself dead.

And that one of them would be watching the entire time.

Why would you have come back to the store when all of this is happening?

Why would you have

put yourself back into that situation?

So they just were jumping on the story that she had told and really trying to pick it apart.

Why didn't you just keep on going and not go back?

Because I told you.

She says, they told me that if I didn't come back and if I told to anybody, they knew where I lived and they'd come and kill me.

But that night, Brittany wouldn't be going home.

At the end of her interview, the investigators placed Brittany under arrest for the murder of Jaina Murray and transferred her to the Montgomery County Jail.

I was very confident that we had the right person.

When she left the store, she could have gone and never come back.

Coming up, the prosecutors suffer a serious setback.

That's just classic hearsaying.

And the defense takes a desperate turn.

Niggas, she just lost it.

On October 26, 2011, Brittany Norwood's murder trial began at the Montgomery County District Court in Rockville, Maryland.

The 29-year-old was accused of killing co-worker Jaina Murray seven months earlier.

It was just a complete shock how this vicious murder could have been done by

this girl.

But make no mistake, she had done it, according to the prosecutor's opening statement.

The prosecution in this case characterized Brittany Norwood as a liar,

as a cold-blooded killer.

And the prosecutors claim they had plenty of proof, too.

Everything from witness accounts of two women arguing inside the Lululemon store on the night of the murder to evidence that Brittany had faked a robbery and assault to throw the police off her trail.

It really is something you might see on TV.

It's almost as if she

watched just enough CSI to think she could get away with it.

But there was one angle of the story that the jury wouldn't hear.

Brittany, who'd already lost a soccer scholarship over allegations of stealing, had been accused of it yet again by Jaina barely an hour before she had been murdered.

The judge ruled that it was inadmissible because he deemed it was hearsay.

The only proof prosecutors had was what Jaina allegedly said during a phone call to the store manager on the night of the murder.

They wanted to bring that witness up to the stand and say, this is what Jaina told me.

That's just classic hearsay.

In its open, the defense seized on the fact that the prosecutors couldn't present a motive for the crime.

And the way Britney's attorney did it shocked the courtroom.

And he goes, my client did it?

There was this kind of very silent gasp, if you will, throughout the entire courtroom.

Nobody was expecting this.

This attorney just coming out and flat out saying, yes, my client did it.

was pretty shocking for everybody.

The defense conceded that Britney was responsible for Jaina's death.

But according to the defense, there was nothing premeditated about the killing.

The two women had argued, and things had simply gotten out of hand.

And he goes, she just lost it.

She just lost it.

And he must have repeated that five or six times.

And that became their theme.

The defense

has characterized her as someone who simply lost it.

No planning, no deliberation, no prethought to commit a murder.

It was an important distinction according to the defense.

First-degree murder under Maryland law is the specific intent to kill.

It's with premeditation, deliberation, some thought forming in the mind of the person who is charged in committing the act.

Therefore, the defense argued, Brittany was guilty of second-degree murder, which was also an important distinction.

First-degree murder.

The penalty that she faced was maximum sentence, was life without the possibility of parole.

A second-degree murder, Brittany's sentence could have been as short as 15 years.

Whatever sentence Brittany ultimately served would depend on whether or not the prosecutors could prove premeditation.

And that might be tricky since they couldn't introduce the supposed shoplifting.

That was a victory for the defense that they really weren't going to be able to put a motive on.

Instead, when the prosecution started presenting its case that afternoon, they focused on just how Jaina had died.

It was so brutal to say that she just lost it, but then to look at the pictures, this is more than just losing it.

To walk jurors through those pictures, prosecutors first turned to a blood spatter expert with the Metropolitan D.C.

Police Department.

He testified that the first blow had apparently been struck with a heavy metal bar, part of a merchandise rack found within the store.

Simply comparing the wounds and the available weapons, I was able to find one that matched some of Jaina's head wounds.

And there was also blood spatter on the side of this weapon.

Then, based on the blood trail, Brittany had apparently pursued Jaina into the store's narrow back hallway.

He was able to show in this back, narrow hallway

blood droplets starting at, you know, five or six feet.

and and and going down the wall.

And the way the blood spatters traveled down the wall was very revealing, according to the expert.

Beaten to a crouching position and then all the way to the ground and then on the ground.

Next, the prosecutors called the medical examiner to the stand to impress to jurors just how brutal the attack had been.

Her testimony was that there were more than 330 injuries.

The whole thing was really tough to look at.

You're seeing these photos of this woman's hands that are covered in bruises.

You know, the back of her head

is just

totally mangled.

The type of violence involved in this attack, the number of cut wounds, the number and the intensity and the seriousness of these injuries, it's really just unbelievable.

But as shocking as the extent of Jaina's injuries was, that wasn't the worst part of the medical examiner's testimony.

I said to the medical examiner, how many of these 331 blows did she live through?

And the answer was, every one of them.

Jaina was alive until the very end, and that was crucial.

It showed that

Brittany could have stopped the attack.

But Brittany hadn't stopped.

According to the medical examiner's estimate, she bludgeoned Jaina for over 15 minutes.

This was way beyond overkill.

Then, as Jaina lay bruised and bleeding on the floor, Brittany found a knife in the break room and finally managed to strike a fatal blow.

The final blow was a knife wound to the back of her head that went into her brain.

Something in your mind has got to snap.

I mean, she had to have lost her mind for that brief amount of time because I don't see any other justification for how this could have happened.

Would the gruesome details of her attack on Jaina prove equally damaging to Britney's defense?

On November 2nd, 2011, it was her attorney's turn to present their case.

People really wanted to hear from Brittany.

I think everybody was wondering why, why, why.

The crowd in the courtroom would be disappointed.

It would have been almost impossible for Miss Norwood to explain herself in a way that was believable.

The fact that the prosecutors had her statements that they could play at trial,

It limited the defense because of all the lies that Brittany had said.

The defense didn't call Britney to the stand.

In fact, the defense didn't call any witnesses at all.

Instead, Brittany's attorney closed his case by arguing that the prosecution had failed to make its case for first-degree murder.

The defense argued it, ladies and gentlemen, there's no motive here for this.

How can it be premeditated?

Finally, the defense argued that the gruesome details that the prosecution presented only strengthened the case for second-degree murder.

The very facts that the state wanted to use can also be argued to show there was no plan.

This was a crime of passion.

This was explosive.

This is someone who just snapped.

Coming up, the jury reaches its decision.

What's at stake is how much time Brittany's going to spend in prison.

Will the lack of motive make the difference?

That we never got a motive was was unsettling, for sure.

On November 2nd, 2011, the jury filed back into a Rockville, Maryland courtroom for the reading of the verdict in the murder trial of Brittany Norwood.

The 29-year-old was charged with the brutal March killing of Jaina Murray, a fellow clerk at an upscale Bethesda clothing store.

It was a huge story because it went from this heinous crime, these girls were attacked, oh no, who could have done this, to, wait, one of them killed the other?

At trial, the defense admitted that Brittany had killed Jaina, but her attorneys argued that she should be found guilty of second-degree murder, not the first-degree charge that the prosecutors sought.

What's at stake is how much time Britney's going to spend in prison.

Whether she served life or as little as 15 years depended on whether or not the prosecutors could prove premeditation.

A tricky prospect since the judge had ruled testimony about Britney's alleged shoplifting off limits.

We were afraid that the jury needed to know the motive.

And I guess we were frustrated because I think in our mind's eye, these were arguments we wanted to make.

And it was a toss-up whether the jury would fine for first-degree murder without hearing those arguments.

The fact that we never got a motive for why this happened, you know, why did this horrible thing happen, that was unsettling for sure.

But in the end, Despite their reservations over motive, jurors found Brittany Norwood guilty of first-degree murder.

Her face kind of dropped and her body dropped a little bit, but it was

very subtle, like she was disappointed, yet she expected it.

And it was sad

to think how young she was and that she's going to spend the rest of her life in jail.

At her sentencing hearing on January 27th, 2012, Brittany finally spoke in court, begging for mercy and a chance at parole.

Brittany gets up to ask the judge for some sort of leniency in the sentence.

And she even makes the point of saying that this isn't for me.

This is for my mom and dad.

This is for my family to have some hope.

The judge appeared unmoved, sentencing Brittany to life without parole.

He made the point that So many people I sentence, you know, I think he said 99% of them come here with no family, no support.

And,

you know, you have the support and you had this support.

But that hadn't stopped her from ending another young woman's promising life.

He talked about that in the context of it being all the more inexcusable.

The crime wasn't just inexcusable.

It was almost inexplicable in light of what Jaina Murray had died for.

Why would you kill somebody over a pair of $80 yoga pants?

Brittany is currently being held at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women.

Brittany filed to appeal her sentence but lost in April 2015.

The court affirmed her conviction of first-degree murder and sentence of life without parole.

It's all a light-hearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid.

We're your hosts.

I'm Alina Urquhart, and I'm Ash Kelly.

And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy.

The stories we cover are well researched.

Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group.

With a touch of humor.

Shout out to her.

Shout out to all my therapists out there.

There's been like eight of them.

A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing.

That motherfucker is not real.

And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tale of the paranormal, or you love to hop in the Way Back Machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes, you should tune in to our podcast, Morbid.

Follow Morbid on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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