Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (11 page)

“Then where did you get it? Did you bring it with you? Did you get it there in Arizona?”

“I didn’t have . . . actually, like have it my possession.”

“Then who had it? If you didn’t have it, and Travis didn’t have it, then who had it? Jodi,” Flores implored, “please.”

“I can’t,” she said in her best B-actress angst.

“Why not? Are you protecting somebody else? Why would somebody else do this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did someone catch you there, someone not expecting you to be there?”

Arias’ reply was inaudible.

“Then who was it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking up at the ceiling and nervously pulling on her hand, likely trying to figure out which direction her story should pivot to next.

“Okay, what do you remember from the time you were taking pictures and the time you left, what happened? What happened after that last picture was taken?”

After they went back and forth, Flores finally began to push her. “If somebody else was there with you, we need to know that. Why would somebody do that just because you’re there with Travis?”

“They didn’t say,” she replied. For the first time, there was an answer—not much, but something he could build off.

“Hmm . . .” he murmured.

“They didn’t say,” Arias repeated in a faint voice.

“
He
didn’t say?”

“They.”

And with that, Arias had the beginnings of her second story, one in which she had been present for Travis’ death, but it wasn’t her committing the crime, it was “they.”

“What was the first thing they did to him? You were there, you saw it.”

Flores hoped that what Arias was about to tell him might actually be what happened, because it could be that two people had done this. If she were to give him names, it wouldn’t be so implausible.

“I actually didn’t see it. I heard it . . . first,” Arias began.

“Was there an argument?”

“Not between Travis and them.”

“Any argument between anybody?”

“Yeah.” She paused, patting tears from her eyes. “Is there any way I can see those pictures?” It was a telling moment of lucidity during a moment that at least superficially appeared emotional, and it was a strategy of hers that I would encounter later on. Even in the midst of crafting this new story, she had not lost sight of her true aim—the crime scene photos and how they could enable her to fabricate a story that matched the events depicted in the photographs.

“No,” he told her. “Not right now.”

“Can I see them soon?” she begged. By this point, her request had morphed into a desperate plea.

“You need to start letting me know what happened,” Flores instructed her. “You are saying that other people were there, you know how much that concerns me?”

“I don’t know . . . They . . . they know where I live, or they know where my parents are. I don’t know if they know where my grandparents are. They know my address. They know where my family is,” Arias contended, sobbing and wiping at her tears. “Sorry.”

“So you are trying to say you’re doing this to protect your family? Why would somebody do this to you and to him?” Flores asked incredulously.

“I don’t think they really intended to do anything to me.”

“So you are saying somebody followed you all the way to Arizona from here?”

“I think I was an element of surprise for them.”

“You were an element of surprise?” Flores parroted, an air of frustrated disbelief in his tone.

“I am guessing . . .”

“They didn’t expect you to be there?”

“I mean they had to have seen my car.”

“Is this someone who lives in Mesa locally?”

“I didn’t recognize them.”

“Well, you have to give me a motive,” Flores told her. “Why would they do this? Were they going after Travis?”

Arias collapsed onto the table, resting her head in the crook of her elbow.

“You tell me this, but you give me no reason.”

“They didn’t discuss much,” Arias said, popping back up to look at Flores. “They just argued.”

“About what?”

“About whether or not to kill me.”

“For what reason?”

“Because I’m a witness.”

“A witness to what?”

“Him . . . to Travis,” Arias said, cupping her face in her hands.

“Travis’ murder?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t really witness it. I didn’t see much,” she said, hiding her face in her hands as if frightened at the recollection.

“You need to make this believable, because this is
not
believable to me right now,” Flores directed. “You need to give me something.”

Arias seemed eager to indulge the detective. “Okay, just listen . . .”

“Jodi, I am listening, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. People just don’t go in somewhere and kill somebody for no reason and then let a witness go. That doesn’t happen. They’ve already killed one person, why not just take care of the other? You know who they are, if you are telling me the truth.”

“I don’t know them.”

“Then I don’t believe you. I can’t. You can’t expect me to.”

As if to buy more time, Arias then launched into a long-winded rendition of the events of June 3, her first day on the road, beginning with her departure from Yreka and going through her arrival at Travis’ house in the middle of the night. After arriving there, she said they slept in until about 1:00
P.M
.
the next day, June 4, and almost immediately upon waking, they engaged in sexual interplay, which as she told Flores earlier, included videotaping as well as photographs. At least this part of her story appeared to have been true, since the photographs from the camera confirmed them posing nude starting around 1:30 in the afternoon.

She claimed afterward that they went downstairs to his study, where they tried to view some CDs that she had brought with her containing pictures of various trips they had taken, but they were having problems because either the computer couldn’t play them or the CDs were damaged. It was around this time that they engaged in sex for a second time. She said they went back upstairs, where Travis shaved before he took a shower. As he stood in the shower, she convinced him to allow her to use his newly purchased camera to photograph him. She believed that the photograph of him with the water running down his face was a very nice image.

That was where her story took a drastic detour, once again stretching the boundaries of credulity. As she knelt down outside of the shower reviewing the photos, she said she heard a pop and almost simultaneously felt a strike to the back of her head, which she believed caused her to lapse into unconsciousness for a short period of time. Upon regaining consciousness, she saw two attackers wearing ski masks, a man and a woman, one armed with a gun and one armed with a knife. She turned her attention to Travis and realized that he had been shot and was screaming and bleeding profusely. He told her to go to his neighbors and “go get help.” She did not follow his instruction because, she said, the attackers prevented her from leaving.

According to her story, in the middle of this melee, the male attacker took the time to find her purse and rummage through it, looking to find her identification information. He found both her driver’s license and car registration, which included her parents’ address in Yreka. She was then told by the male
attacker that she must be “that bitch from California,” leading her to believe they somehow knew her.

She immediately became afraid for her family and decided to follow the attackers’ instructions. After returning the registration and driver’s license to her purse, the male attacker went through the pockets of her Levi’s, which she claimed were in a backpack she had brought with her, and found eighty dollars, which he pocketed.

According to her, the attack took a more serious turn when the female assailant tried to convince her companion that Arias should also be killed. But he prevailed, saying “That’s not why we are here.”

At some point, Arias claimed that she began to fight with the woman, who apparently was now holding the knife. Although Arias was barefoot and unarmed, she appeared to have escaped the encounter unharmed, with the exception of a cut to one of the fingers on her left hand.

The attackers finally decided to let her leave with a stern warning, counseling against telling anyone what she had just lived through. They allowed her to take her purse and backpack and shoes, and leave out the front door, apparently confident that their threats would silence her and stop her from calling police to aid a dying Travis.

“You just left? You didn’t run to the neighbors, you didn’t try calling?” Flores asked with a tone of disbelief. “You knew they were in his house. You had time to run to the neighbor, why didn’t you do that?”

“I was really scared,” Arias whined. “I was freaked out of my mind.”

“I don’t believe you,” he responded, in a raspy Godfather-type voice, extending his left hand to emphasis his point. “I came in here hoping you would tell me the truth, and this is not the truth, Jodi.”

After some final back and forth, Flores left the room, and the lined legal pad he had left behind on the table became the
focus of her attention. Tearing three sheets from the pad, she folded them and stuck them in the chest pocket of her orange top. But when she looked down at them, she appeared to realize that they would be visible to anyone who entered the room, so she tucked them into the waistband of her orange pants, making sure her top was covering them.

When Detective Blaney entered the room a few moments later, she asked if Arias had any paper. The police had been monitoring her from outside the room and saw what she’d done. Arias hesitated for a moment before lifting her top to reveal the hidden papers. Although Blaney ultimately allowed her to keep the items, her attempts to hide them showed she had no compunction about trying to get away with as much as she could, even if it was something as insignificant as three sheets of paper.

Approximately two weeks later, Arias mailed a letter from the jail to Travis’ grandmother Norma Sarvey, who lived in Riverside, California. Interestingly enough, Arias listed the return address on the envelope as her parents’ address on Oregon Street, although the jail’s official address was stamped in black ink over her handwritten one.

“Of all of the letters I must write, this is one of the most difficult, second only to the one I must write to my parents,” Arias began the eighteen-page handwritten letter, which was dated Monday, July 28, 2008—which would have been Travis’ thirty-first birthday.

“I don’t have all of the answers that you seek,” the letter continued, “but as I sit here today and put pen to paper, even on Travis’ birthday, I’m going to try to answer as many as I can. . . . Since things have culminated in this way, and since the detectives have already made it clear that my case is hopeless and theirs rock-solid, I have no reason to hold anything back at this point. . . .”

She proceeded to provide a “brief synopsis” of the history of her relationship with Travis.

“I met Travis at the Rainforest Café at the MGM in September 2006. We later marveled and mused at the irony of meeting in such a place, as we later discovered our mutual passion for a healthy planet and the environment in general. He confidently walked right up to me, stuck out his right and said, ‘Hi, I’m Travis.’ I cordially responded with the usual niceties and figured that would be it, since in that moment, he was just another of the many new names I was trying not to forget.”

Arias claimed she didn’t feel any sort of “magnetic attraction” to him, but also did not turn her back on his entreaties. Although she tried to meet and mingle with other people, he monopolized her attention by walking alongside her and keeping up a running conversation. In the short time they talked, they discovered they had a few things in common: traveling, the 49ers, the UFC, and “the drive to create an amazing life.” She said she didn’t expect to hear from Travis again, but “surprisingly,” he called her the very next day. As she described it, the relationship was on a very fast track.

Within days, he invited her to spend the weekend at the home of his friends Sky and Chris Hughes in Murrieta, California, one of the reasons being so that she could attend church with them, and the following Wednesday, he gave her a copy of the Book of Mormon
.
By November 2006, Travis was baptizing her as a Mormon at the church in Palm Desert, California. “He said he’d never met anyone more prepared to receive the Gospel,” she wrote. Arias went on to say she was very happy, because she claimed joining the LDS church was one of the best decisions she ever made. “I know that Travis will be richly rewarded for the role he played in bringing me into the fold.”

Arias explained that they were mutually attracted, but they were not officially dating. By Christmas of 2006, Travis had grown to mean a lot to her. For his part, he was determined to
“Mormonize” her, so he gave her gifts to serve that purpose, including a CTR ring and scriptures with her name engraved on them, a painting of Jesus Christ, and a biography of church president Gordon B. Hinckley. “His generosity never wavered the entire time that I knew him, not once.”

Arias wrote in that same letter that on February 2, 2007, they began to officially date. “Things went really well despite one small hangup: Deanna Reid.” Deanna Reid was one of Travis’ former girlfriends, whom he had dated during two separate periods, and the two had remained very close friends. According to the letter, she and Travis even talked of marriage. This included discussions about baby names and the number and sexes of children they wanted; she believed this was a “natural progression.”

According to her letter, in May 2007, Arias could no longer handle the mortgage of her home in Palm Desert and she had to move out. “Travis insisted that I move closer to him, so that we could have a more normal relationship,” although he expressed concern for Deanna’s reaction, saying that if she found out it would be “World War III.”

The two took a trip to Daniel’s Summit, Utah, in June 2007, and after their return, according to Arias, she did something completely dishonest. “I acted on an impulse and a gut feeling. . . . You see, I had been in a few relationships before when my partner was not being completely faithful, and there is a distinct feeling that comes with it. Travis had been interacting with some girls in my presence that gave me cause for concern. I knew he was a flirtatious type, and I had witnessed it on countless occasions prior to that point.