Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (12 page)

“I am not a jealous person, but something about the way he conducted himself at that time caused me to question his level of commitment to our relationship and to me. The dishonest deed that I had mentioned was that I looked at the text messages in his phone. I thought to myself, he said he had nothing to hide, so why not? A flawed logic, I know. I fully expected to
find a few mild flirtations with other girls, as this was his MO anyway. And he was not secretive about it. What I found, however, was far more, including several references made of the many, separate, intimate rendezvous he had with other girls including plans in the making for further associations of the same kind.”

Arias said she attempted to verify that he had been dishonest by checking the dates; as she feared, the activities that she’d uncovered had been during the time they had been dating, supposedly exclusively.

But rather than confront Travis, she chose to go on vacation with him, and they traveled to Niagara Falls and the Sacred Grove, in New York State, as well as to Huntington Beach, California. It was only after they returned from their trip that she spoke to him about her concerns. Although he was very apologetic, she found there was no way she could forgive him, so she broke up with him on June 29, 2007, because she could not trust him. “This was a very difficult decision for me, because I loved him very much. It was especially difficult because he begged me to marry him that same day. Up to that point, a proposal was expected at any time, but once the trust is gone it is hopeless.”

In July 2007, Arias wrote, she decided to move to Mesa, after Travis persuaded her to make the move, reiterating the story she’d told Flores. She used to wonder what it would have been like to accept his marriage proposal, but she didn’t think things would have changed, because a month before she moved back to California in April of 2008, she and Travis had a conversation about previous relationships, and he confessed that most of the time that she’d been living in Mesa, he’d been dating Lisa Andrews. She had asked him about it, and he had lied by telling her he wasn’t dating anyone. She said she’d never had a reason not to believe him, so she couldn’t understand why he hid it from her, since she was not the “type to have a crying emotional meltdown over something like that.”

She would have been happy for him. The shock that she experienced was related not to the fact that he had lied again, not that he cheated on yet another girlfriend, but that this time,
she
was the other woman, and it made her feel ashamed. Arias claimed her first thought was not of herself, but of “poor Lisa.” She said she even thought about telling her, but decided that it would destroy her relationship with Travis and “cause a lot of unnecessary drama and pain.”

According to Arias, when it was her turn to come clean his attitude changed and “all hell broke loose. . . . He lost his temper completely and flew into a rage, he began punching himself in the head so hard that he injured his neck and his back and could barely turn his head from side to side.” She even claimed that he beat her on two separate occasions, but she never told anyone about it because he was not her “partner” any longer, and “besides, it would be a matter of days before she rolled out of town in a U-Haul truck.”

“I know you all probably hate me even more than before you started reading this letter,” Arias wrote on page 8 of the eighteen-page attempt to exonerate herself in the eyes of Travis’ grandmother. “Well hang on, because the plot thickens, and by the time you’re done reading this, you most likely won’t consider me worthy of your own spit.”

She went on to describe Travis’ killing in the same fashion as she did to Detective Flores, with a few embellishments. In this version, the male assailant “held the gun to my head and tried to fire but nothing happened, just a click.” She also detailed a scuffle with the female attacker who she claimed came at her with a knife and during the struggle, stomped on her bare feet. “I didn’t notice the pain, maybe it was adrenaline, but my left foot was later throbbing and bruised so I know she got me at least once, probably more on that foot, and she had caused two of the toenails on my other foot to bleed, which I didn’t discover until later as well.”

She also claimed that she felt awful because she hadn’t looked before backing out of the driveway as she fled the scene. “I probably should’ve never been driving in that kind of state.”

Her seemingly heartfelt letter sent to Travis’ grandmother, supposedly offering solace, appeared more like a taunt, as she described a scenario that was impossible to believe.

A
lmost two years after Travis’ murder, the case should have been ready to go to trial according to the timeline set out in the Arizona Rules of Criminal Procedure. The police reports had been reviewed, witness interviews were under way, and Jodi Arias’ version of events had been consistent ever since she told Flores that she had merely been present when two strangers broke in and killed Travis. But in spring 2010, the defense began to shift in ways that would permanently alter the makeup and tone of the case.

These changes had actually started to take root in August 2009, when Arias’ initial court-appointed counsel was allowed to withdraw and a second set of attorneys, also appointed by the court, took over the defense. Laurence Nurmi was assigned as lead attorney, with Victoria Washington assisting him. I didn’t know much about either attorney—our paths had never crossed before—but I understood that Nurmi was qualified to represent defendants charged with a capital crime.

On the face of it, the presence of these new attorneys wasn’t particularly significant because my interactions with Arias’ defense team were fairly limited. As is standard, the only time I would see them was during our periodic status conferences, which occurred every thirty to forty-five days. During these appearances, the prosecution and defense were asked to update the judge on their progress and alert the court to any problems that had arisen. In these conferences, neither side is required to disclose details of the approach or tactics they intend to
use, enabling the prosecutor and defense counsel to pursue avenues that best advance their cause without having to tip their hand.

But with the arrival of these new attorneys came new requests. The prosecution is required to provide defense counsel copies of police reports, photographs, and other documentary items. Over the course of this prosecution, more than twenty-four hundred pages of documents alone were provided to defense counsel. The state is also required to list the names and addresses of those it expects to testify at trial.

Defense counsel has a similar duty to disclose the claims that will be advanced at trial, along with the names of persons who may be called to testify for their side. Their disclosure obligation includes providing the state with copies of any materials that they think are important and might be used at trial.

In April 2010, Arias’ defense counsel requested that the prosecution provide text messages from Travis’ cell phone and instant messages and e-mails from his computer. The production of this electronic correspondence initially proved problematic for different reasons. Technology had not advanced sufficiently to allow recovery of the text messages without making it unduly burdensome and extremely time consuming. As for the instant messages and e-mail, the service provider, in this case Google, had ignored the subpoena I sent requesting the correspondence. Eventually each of these issues was resolved once the electronic correspondence was made available to the prosecution, allowing for copies to be made and turned over to the defense.

The state provided defense counsel with thousands of texts, e-mails, and instant messages from Travis’ various accounts. It was a massive trove of information with the messages and e-mails covering everything from the mundane to the inflammatory. What emerged was a portrait of a tumultuous relationship, one laced with sexual overtones and bad feelings on both sides.

The instant messages were particularly troublesome because they portrayed Travis as someone who may have verbally crossed the line of good taste as he and Arias argued via electronic means. In one angry instant messenger chat between the two on May 26, 2008, Travis complained that Arias was “nothing but a liar from the beginning.” It was clear that she had done something to upset him greatly, but that catalyst wasn’t discernible from the lengthy exchange. What was clear was that Travis felt that she had lied to him:

TRAVIS:
you have not felt as much pain in all your life than what you have repeatedly caused me with your lies and your invasions and the phycho [
sic
] shit you have subjected me to

TRAVIS:
you have made me want to die

TRAVIS:
on countless occasions

TRAVIS:
you have hurt me so bad over and over again

TRAVIS:
and how do you repay me forgiving you by doing the same thing

TRAVIS:
couldnt you ever try to love me

TRAVIS:
you only showed that you hated me

TRAVIS:
never love

TRAVIS:
only hate

TRAVIS:
ur words were lies . . . cant you just tell the truth

Throughout the entire exchange that followed, Arias avoided answering Travis’ ongoing requests for the “truth.” Instead, she portrayed herself as the victim, writing:

JODI:
There have been times when you’ve screamed into the phone so loud at me that the speaker was distorted and then you hung up. The pain was so sharp and so deep that I just couldn’t process it. I could only scream in response to the air. And I would scream at the top of my lungs until my throat was raw, “I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! I HATE
YOU!” until I had no energy left to say it and it had wittled [
sic
] down to a little whimp [
sic
], “. . . i hate you . . .” And I just sobbed and cried until I couldn’t breathe.

JODI:
But you know what? I deserved all of that. Every angry phone call. Every unpleasant word.

JODI:
doesn’t compare to what I’ve put you through.

The conversation continued with Travis attempting to get Arias to admit that she had slashed his tires. He also accused her of stealing his journals. At one point, Travis’ frustration with Arias’ refusal to take responsibility was boiling over when he said: “write something you stupid idiot.”

Arias picks this moment to respond, “I may be a liar, I may be a whore, I may be evil, I may be a coward, I may not be worth the air I breathe, I am most like the most horrible person you’ve ever had the misfortune of knowing, but one thing I am NOT, is violent. I did not and would never slash your tires.”

This appears to infuriate Travis, who again demands that Arias “tell the truth.” The heated exchange continues for several more pages until his anger finally boils over and he lashes out in derogatory fashion, calling her a “3 hole wonder.”

The first time I read those words, I realized that they were extremely harsh, so I went back to the beginning of this section of the conversation to understand the context of the remark. The way this conversation had been reproduced required it be read from the bottom of the page to the top, rather than the customary top to bottom. This time, I read the conversation from top to bottom rather than the way I had been reading it before. I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t been mistaken, that Travis had actually referred to Arias in this way. Either way I read it, it brought me to the same uncomfortable place.

While I understood from the conversation that Travis had made the comment in anger, it felt inappropriate under any circumstance because it was so derogatory. Even if they were talking in a sexual context, and even if Arias prompted the
comment by saying she was a “whore,” it still didn’t lessen its impact. It was the kind of comment that could shape a jury’s opinion and garner sympathy for Arias.

I took solace in the belief that this comment would probably not be admissible at trial because it was hearsay and would unfairly go into an area of Travis’ character that had nothing to do with the killing. Up to this point, Arias was still maintaining that Travis had been killed by two intruders as he posed for pictures in the shower so his being verbally abusive to Arias was irrelevant to the reason he was murdered.

In the same conversation, Travis also indicated that he felt he was meaningless to her, writing that he “was little more than a dildo with ah eartbeat [
sic
] to you.” It seemed that Travis had very conflicted feelings about his sexual relationship with Arias and believed that she had been using him for her sexual gratification.

Arias was no shrinking violet and pushed the sexual envelope by sending Travis explicit text messages encouraging the sexual interaction between the two. She sent the following on February 25, 2008: “The ‘things’ I had to do today consisted of waxing my pussy so it was nice and smooth—just in case, showering so I was fresh and clean for U. . . .” Arias sent other text messages along the same lines in January and February 2008: “Will do. The reason I was asking about later tonight is because I want to give u a nice bj and I’d like a generous facial in return. Waddya say?”; “O-my-Gosh!!! That is so freaking hot I want to lick it up and then sit on it! U are so tasty. My goodness. . . .”; “Oh yes. I want to fuck you like a dirty, horny little schoolgirl.”

Although Arias may have been a willing participant in their sexual repartee, defense counsel’s inordinate interest in Travis’ texts, instant messages, and e-mails hinted that they might be contemplating a change in strategy and moving away from the story that Arias had been alleging for the nearly two years since her arrest.

Another change in her story would be risky because it would contradict both her allegations to Flores that two masked intruders killed Travis, and the tale she’d told during interviews with two national television news magazines in which she said the same thing, tying herself to that fantastical rendition of events.

One of the TV interviews had actually occurred in Yreka less than a month after she was taken into custody, when she had granted a jailhouse interview to
48 Hours
. She then did a follow-up interview with that same news show in September 2008 after her extradition to Phoenix. She also spoke to
Inside Editi
on around the same time as the second interview with
48 Hours
.

Her interview with
Inside Edition
aired first. Arias, dressed in black-and-white-striped jail garb, her long brown hair neatly brushed and falling over her shoulders, smiled demurely as she emphatically proclaimed her guiltlessness. “I know that I am innocent, God knows that I’m innocent, Travis knows I’m innocent. . . . I absolutely did not kill Travis Alexander. I had nothing to do with his murder. I didn’t harm him in any way.”

She again went on to tell the story of two assailants who entered Travis’ home and “attacked us both.” “In a nutshell, two people took Travis’ life, two monsters,” she claimed, her voice never higher than a raised whisper.

As believable as her denials may have sounded, what was most compelling about this interview was her indignation. “No jury is going to convict me,” she said with certainty. She then followed up this statement with an even more emphatic one, “Because I’m innocent. You can mark my words on that one . . .”

The interview with
48 Hours
aired some months later, and it was telling for totally different reasons. When asked about her childhood, Arias described an idyllic upbringing and maintained that she and her parents and siblings were very close. I couldn’t help but think back to the interviews Detective Flores
had conducted with Sandy and Bill Arias and how they had described a secretive, disrespectful daughter who had been shutting them out of her life since she was fourteen. As far as I was concerned, here was yet another indication that she would make things up if it suited her, even under inconsequential circumstances such as a media interview.

More importantly, though, she had made it difficult to present a story of an abusive childhood as a possible excuse for her behavior or to help understand the killing because she had told a national audience something contrary to what Bill and Sandy had expressed to police. Her statements had served to effectively preclude her parents from testifying at trial, because the idyllic family portrait she had just painted for the television audience was in stark contrast to the statements her parents had made to police about her inability to get along with her mother and being extremely secretive.

When it came to the murder of Travis Alexander, Arias stuck to her story, continuing to adamantly deny any plans to visit Travis in Arizona on that fateful day. She again recited her masked intruder story, making sure it was consistent with the one given to Detective Flores and to
Inside Edition
. In addition to the incredible nature of the story itself, her failure to alert police immediately or to tell them about the two intruders during her first interviews with Detective Flores continued to stand out as problematic. It sounded more like a slip of the tongue than a reason when she told the interviewer she hadn’t called police because she “didn’t want to implicate” herself.

The highlight of the
48 Hours
interview was the assertion that she intended to take the witness stand and testify at trial. That told me that she was confident in her public speaking abilities and that she believed she was persuasive enough to make the charges go away just by telling her story. She was masterful in front of the camera, playing the part of someone
who couldn’t have committed this murder. The way she could look straight at the camera lens and answer the interviewer’s questions with apparent sincerity was impressive. She clearly wasn’t going to be intimidated.

“I don’t believe that I am going to be convicted,” she confidently told
48 Hours
’ Maureen Maher, just as she had advised the interviewer from
Inside Edition
. “I don’t think that I’m going to spend one day in prison.”

While she hadn’t given another interview in the almost two-year span since these aired, her initial decision to tell her story to the media had elevated both the case and her account to mythical heights. It was one thing to concoct this kind of narrative when confronted with overwhelming evidence during a police interview, but quite another to volunteer those same claims to a national audience. The account of the masked intruders had become synonymous with the case.

Perhaps the feedback from Arias’ TV interviews, which called into question the believability of her story, led her and her defense counsel to rethink their approach in defending the case. Even though no notice of a change in defense had yet been filed with the court, I could see that one was in the offing. The graphic and hurtful nature of the text messages, IM chats, and e-mails had the potential to taint Travis’ reputation and character, which would only be important if Arias changed her existing story.