Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (16 page)

As I reviewed the copies of last few documents found in the box, I came across something I hadn’t seen before, an undated letter that had been written by Travis Alexander to Arias.

“Dear Jodi, a note a note, a note! blah, blah, blah,” it began
.

Maybe it’s ego and pride then that constrain me from being so personal. I am very a [sic] matter of fact with you. Towing the line sort of speak [sic]. I know at times it makes me seem without soul. Who knows? I think sometimes I am. Let me just be short and uncharmingly sincere. You are a person of great worth and potential. There’s (sic) difference to be made in the world by you. All of us (most of us our entire lives) walk the earth shrouded in heavy locks and chains of of [sic] self doubt, limitation and despair. Holding tightly and unconsciously in our hand the key to the locks and chains. It only drops from our hand with death or when it is has finally been used to free us from those binding self limitations. . . . I hope you will take this interregnum from who you have been and who you really are and never look back. To be ruled by your best self, to yield your best results. Remember everything is perfect and there is a road in front of you that leads to an exceptional life. I love you! Sincerely yours, Travis

The letter itself didn’t add much to the investigation, but its inclusion with the receipts in the shoebox sitting on the bed appeared to give it significance. It was as if Arias had prepared the items in the shoebox for police to find in the event she were arrested. The letter would show that she had no motive to kill Travis because its content and tone seemed to indicate they had a wonderful relationship. The receipts supported her story that she had not been in Arizona at the time of the murder. As she had told her mother when Sandy had asked her if she had gone to Arizona, she was “nowhere near Arizona” and she had the “gas receipts and everything else to prove it.”

I spent the next several weeks trying to figure out other ways to see whether or not the third gas can Arias bought in Salinas had actually made the trip with her. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later when I opened the file cabinet to put away a copy of a motion from Arias’ defense attorneys that I noticed a purple folder. It caught my attention because I don’t normally use purple folders for my cases. The tab on the folder was labeled
Washington Mutual,
and the handwriting belonged to my legal assistant. The folder appeared to have been misfiled, so I figured I would put it away in its rightful place. When I looked inside to see where it belonged, I noticed they were Washington Mutual bank statements for Jodi Arias.

I browsed through the statements until I came to one, which covered the period from 6/01/08 to 6/30/08, the time of Arias’ trip. But it didn’t show any transactions for June 6, the day Arias bought gas at the Tesoro station in Salt Lake City. I was momentarily disappointed until I noticed three transactions identified as
MC-Tesoro 62097 Q39 Salt Lake Cty UT
that had been logged in on June 9.

Because of the rental car records, I knew that Arias was already back in Yreka by then, so I wondered if the date on the statement was incorrect. I called Washington Mutual, now
part of JPMorgan Chase, to get more information about those entries, and a bank employee informed me that because they did not typically record transactions over weekends, they were left as pending until the following Monday. This meant that transactions that may have occurred on Friday, June 6, would not have been recorded until the following Monday, June 9, as indicated by the bank records. I then called Tesoro Corporation, and a representative named Chelsey Young confirmed that all three transactions had been on June 6.

Young told me that the first charge was for $41.18, for 10.672 gallons of gas; the second charge was in the amount of $19.65, for 5.091 gallons of gas; and the last transaction was for $36.98, representing 9.583 gallons. I recognized the first and third transactions from the Tesoro receipts, but the second transaction for $19.65 was new to me. An expletive escaped from my lips as I took in that number—$19.65, the cost of filling the third gas can in Salt Lake City. I now knew she had carried the third gas can with her for the entire trip and realized that Arias had used the cans to avoid having to put gas in the car in Arizona, so that she could drive through the state undetected and no one would know that she had killed Travis.

In order to back up this theory, I decided to mathematically compute the gas usage to see if the extra fifteen gallons would have allowed her to make it through Arizona without stopping for gas. My research indicated that the 2008 Ford Focus had a fuel tank capacity of 13.5 gallons, with a U.S. Department of Energy fuel economy rating of twenty-four city miles per gallon and thirty-five miles per gallon on the highway. This meant that the car had a minimum range of 324 miles and a maximum range of 472.5 miles to its tank, depending on whether it was city or highway driving. Arias’ three gas cans represented an extra fifteen gallons, which increased the car’s minimum driving range an additional 360 miles to 684 miles.

Between the gas tank in the car and the cans, Arias had at least 25.868 gallons of gasoline when she left the ARCO
station in Pasadena, meaning she could drive between a minimum of 620.83 city miles and a maximum of 905.38 highway miles without stopping to buy fuel. The approximate distance between Pasadena and Mesa is four hundred miles of mostly highway driving. Interstate 10 eastbound through the Sonoran desert is mostly flat, with no city driving. There is a checkpoint just east of the California/Arizona border, but it is only for trucks and passenger vehicles are not required to stop there.

The distance from Mesa to Las Vegas, Nevada, is approximately three hundred miles, and Highway 93 North is the shortest route. It includes minimal city driving through Wickenburg and Kingman, both cities in Arizona. The total distance from Pasadena to Las Vegas via this circuitous route through Mesa is roughly seven hundred miles, well within the fuel range of Arias’ Ford Focus and the extra fifteen gallons in her three gas cans. There was no doubt in my mind that Arias had gone through a similar computation, and that’s why she made the stop in Salinas to buy the third five-gallon gas can.

The cans were not in the rental car when she returned it a day late, on June 7, 2008. The agent who originally rented the car to her conducted a walk-around inspection, documenting that the car had been driven 2,834 miles, which surprised him because he remembered Arias telling him that she was only renting the car to drive around town.

The extra gallons had assured that she would drive undetected through the Arizona darkness.

Arias appeared to have thought of everything, but one thing that she could not have foreseen was that her defense counsel would turn over these interview summaries. The detail that Darryl Brewer had lent her two gas cans turned out to be the key in unraveling her plan to travel to Arizona undetected, and it exposed that she planned the murder of Travis Alexander.

Premeditation refers to a person’s thoughts before they act on them. It is characterized by planning prior to carrying out an objective, such as murder.

Buying the third gas can was not the only step Arias would take to achieve her ultimate goal of ending Travis’ life. But as helpful as those containers were in carrying out her plan, they would be her undoing when she took the witness stand at trial.

A
lthough my discovery of the three gas cans went a long way toward disproving Jodi Arias’ self-defense claim, I still faced an uphill battle with Travis’ offensive instant messages and the ten highly inflammatory “Bob White” letters.

The risk with each of these was palpable. Circumstances like these can be challenging for the prosecution in a jury trial, because jurors can be forgiving if they view the accused as the one who has been victimized. Juries have been known to show compassion, even to someone accused of first-degree murder, when presented with evidence that paints the deceased victim in a bad light. Sometimes this compassion can motivate them to return a guilty verdict on a lesser charge such as manslaughter or, in an extreme case, even an acquittal.

The materials that showed an unflattering side of Travis’ character hung like a dense fog, making it difficult to discern Arias’ conduct through the haze. But instead of rushing forward and blindly defending Travis’ reputation by saying “he wasn’t like that” or arguing “this behavior wasn’t in line with who he was,” I decided to focus my attention on the materials themselves, rather than get drawn into the specific allegations they contained.

I started with the Bob White letters. When I sat down to read them again, my task was made more difficult because they were second-generation copies, and the writing was faint in many places. Experience had taught me that any item appearing under such dubious provenance needed to be viewed
with suspicion. I wanted to give these letters a closer read on the off chance that I might identify any irregularities.

It didn’t take long to see that there were numerous problems with the letters. For one thing, the misdeeds detailed in them seemed to be described too specifically, and the prose seemed unusually stilted. What also caught my eye was that none of the letters, which had been written on unlined 8½-by-11-inch paper, had creases, which surely would have been present had they been folded and put in an envelope for mailing.

Thinking back to the letter from Travis to Arias that had been found by police in the Airwalk shoebox, I noticed that these ten letters were all dated in the upper right-hand corner, whereas the one from the Airwalk shoebox was undated. I also observed that the language and word choices in these letters did not seem consistent with the language of that Airwalk shoebox letter—or, for that matter, with the entries I had read in Travis’ journal.

I decided to put the letters in chronological order by date to see if anything else of note stood out for me. As I examined the dates and the content of the letters, I immediately realized there was a major error in the date of the most damaging one. This mistake added to my suspicion that all ten of the letters were forgeries.

Comforted by that discovery, along with all the other inconsistencies I’d found, I decided to follow up with a more scientific approach and see if the Bob White letters could be discredited by handwriting analysis. I set out to locate anything original that Travis had written and signed, so that a handwriting analyst at the Arizona Department of Public Safety, which is contracted to handle all handwriting analyses for the Mesa Police Department, could make a comparison to the Bob White letters. I began my search by calling Travis’ family and friends to see if anybody had kept any of the letters he may have sent to them.

After a bit of calling around, I soon learned that one of
Travis’ old girlfriends, Deanna Reid, had saved all the letters Travis had written to her while she was on an LDS church mission to Costa Rica from June 2001 to November 2001. At the time, Deanna was twenty and Travis was twenty-one, and they had broken up by letter in the summer of 2001. They had been apart for a while, and Travis was thinking of dating someone else. After Deanna returned from her mission about six months later, they rekindled their relationship and dated exclusively until 2005, when Deanna expressed a desire to get married and Travis told her he wasn’t ready. The breakup was amicable, and the two remained close friends.

I’d never spoken to Deanna myself, but I knew from police reports that she had been close to Travis. Of all his friends, she was the one who ended up caring for his pug, Napoleon, after his death. The police had already met with her and determined she had no useful information about the killing.

When I called Deanna to schedule a time to meet and collect the letters, she had other news to share. Some weeks earlier, Arias’ two attorneys and their investigator had shown up unannounced at her house in Riverside, California. According to Deanna, they failed to identify themselves as Arias’ counsel and were vague about their motivation, telling her only that they wanted to speak with her because they were somehow “involved” in the Jodi Arias case. They wanted to ask questions about Travis.

Deanna recounted that the three of them assured her that their conversations would not be on the record. She also remembered that the female defense attorney was being very “chummy,” seeming to imply that their discussion would be just between “us girls.”

Deanna explained that during the visit, defense counsel had allowed her to read one of the Bob White letters, and Deanna recalled initially becoming upset at the reproachful things it said about her. But, as Deanna kept reading, she noticed word choices and phrasing that Travis would never use. Although
the handwriting resembled Travis’, she believed the letter to be a forgery.

It appeared that this surprise visit did little to assist Arias’ defense team. Even after reading the unflattering things Travis had supposedly written about her, Deanna had nothing disparaging to say about him. That the defense team had presented themselves to Deanna in this ambush-type fashion told me they didn’t have anyone to corroborate the allegations in the Bob White letters.

As I listened to Deanna’s story over the phone, it became clear just how important the genuine letters in Deanna’s possession were. With seemingly no one on Arias’ side to verify the truth of the White letters, a handwriting comparison showing they were forgeries could be enough to have them excluded as evidence. Deanna’s letters were so crucial that I decided to make the five-hour trip to Riverside that very day to pick them up, because I didn’t want to chance their getting lost in the mail. Deanna agreed to see me that afternoon, so I began the drive to Southern California within minutes of hanging up the phone.

Deanna came out to greet me before I could knock on the front door of the house she shared with her parents. I had not met her before, so I had no idea what she looked like and I didn’t know what to expect. She was dressed casually in jeans and a blouse, her straight black hair falling past her shoulders, and she immediately put me at ease with a welcoming smile. Deanna seemed to be the opposite of Arias—warm, genuine, and sincere.

After inviting me in, she directed me to the breakfast nook off the kitchen, where we sat down at a table. Travis’ dog Napoleon had been outside when I arrived, and as soon as he saw me through the sliding glass door, he started to bark, so Deanna let him in to meet me. His tail was wagging as he sniffed at my hands, snorting. He looked old but appeared to be well taken care of and in good spirits. I found myself think
ing back to that first walk-through at Travis’ home, when it was still a crime scene, and how Flores and I wondered whether the dog had been cared for during the days that Travis had been upstairs lying dead on the shower floor. Napoleon had been in the house during Travis’ murder, a four-legged witness to the identity of the killer.

Deanna had twenty-one handwritten letters on the table ready for me to take back to Arizona. All but one was still in its original envelope. I chose not to read them in front of her, as I understood they were private in nature. When I later reviewed them, I saw that they were the kind of letters a boyfriend would write to a girlfriend with whom he is in love. Deanna agreed to let me keep the original letters for our investigation but requested that I mail her back copies, as the sentiments they contained were very meaningful to her.

As soon I arrived back in Phoenix, I turned the letters Deanna had given me over to the Arizona Department of Public Safety for a handwriting analysis by Alan Kreitl, an experienced document examiner.

Not long after, I spoke with another of Travis’ friends, a young woman named Sky Hughes, who told me she had also been contacted by defense counsel Laurence Nurmi in regard to one of the Bob White letters. Sky and her husband, Chris, were among Travis’ closest friends. The Hugheses were members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, and Chris was Travis’ colleague and mentor at PPL. I spoke with Sky over the telephone to learn the circumstances under which she had been contacted.

After introducing myself as the prosecutor in the Arias case, I asked if she would be willing to speak to me about her interactions with defense counsel, and she was happy to cooperate. She told me that Nurmi had contacted her in early June 2010 to alert her to the existence of a letter that he claimed contained offensive information about Travis. Nurmi also informed her that the letter had been “100 percent verified” by
a handwriting analysis as having been penned by Travis. Sky explained that Nurmi had followed up his call with an e-mail, to which he attached a copy of that one letter.

“To relieve your initial concern it contains no graphic images but I suspect you will find the contents disturbing,” Nurmi wrote as part of the accompanying e-mail, in which he also provided his reason for sharing the letter with Sky instead of waiting to show it to her at a pretrial interview he had scheduled. “By providing it to you now you won’t have to see it for the first time in the view of strangers.”

Sky admitted to being upset when she first read the letter, believing it to be authentic. But like Deanna Reid, upon further review, she became certain that Travis could not have written it, nor could he have done the things the letter alleged. Once again, a defense attempt to enlist the help of one of Travis’ friends came up empty.

A few days later, I received a call from Kreitl informing me that the signatures on the ten Bob White letters had probably not been executed by Travis Alexander. He explained that because all ten were copies and not the originals, he was unable to reach a definite conclusion. The poor quality of the second-generation copies prevented him from going forward with a more complete examination.

Kreitl’s expert determination that the letters were likely forgeries bolstered my belief that they had been created for the sole purpose of supporting Arias’ self-defense claim, but I wanted more definitive proof that I could use to discredit them. I knew that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office conducted random searches of all inmates’ cells, including Jodi Arias’, so I called the office’s intelligence unit asking whether they had seized any contraband items from her cell. My interest was piqued when one of the intelligence officers told me that they had confiscated a number of postcards from her cell and that I could view them.

I put aside my other work and drove to the Estrella Jail,
about seven miles from my office. When I arrived, the intelligence officer was waiting for me and escorted me to a room in the office adjacent to the security desk, where about fifty postcards that had been sent to Arias during her stay at the jail were waiting for me to review. They had been seized as contraband because Arias had evidently peeled the top layer of paper—the layer with writing on it—off the back of each one so that she could reuse them, which was a violation of jail policy.

I had been sifting through the pile for a few minutes when I came upon a number of blank three-by-five index cards. One of them caught my eye because it had writing on one side. A while back, Travis’ sister Samantha had shown me similar cards on which Travis had written out daily to-do lists. I had also seen one of these three-by-five cards pictured in a crime scene photograph taken by police in Travis’ office. The upper right-hand corner of each card was dated, and one side of the card was lined, with Travis’ numbered lists on the unlined backside. These lists were a mixture of aphorisms and encouragement—“Visualize,” “Prayer,” “Finish goals”—with practical tasks and chores—“Water grass,” “Workout,” “Yoga,” “Fold clothes,” “Wash linens,” “Dust,” “Mop floor.” The lists were often numbered up to fifteen or sixteen and were always written in this concise style.

I was somewhat familiar with Travis’ handwriting, having read his journal and the Deanna Reid letters, and the handwriting on the three-by-five card from the jail looked very similar. It seemed an odd coincidence, because the subject matter being addressed on this card could not have been more different from Travis’ to-do lists. In blue ink, it said, “Just so you know I followed you so don’t try to play ‘stupid’ later when I ask you where you were and with whom. And if you don’t answer your phone tonight I’ll know your [
sic
] just a whore. P.S. Anyone who takes you to that dive is a loser.”

As soon as I read that message, I began to doubt that this
card had been written by Travis. The tone of the message was different from all of the index card lists I’d seen. Travis’ lists were always fragments, never complete sentences, and never angry or emotional—this message was clearly addressed to someone else, unlike the “to do” lists that he had on his index cards.

When I brought the index cards to the attention of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, they were unable to determine how they had been smuggled into the jail or how Arias came into their possession. After I prepared and served a subpoena, the cards were released at my request to Detective Flores, who picked them up and submitted them to Alan Kreitl, so that he could review the handwriting in one of them alongside the letters.

While waiting to hear from Kreitl, I filled my weeks with work on other cases as well as continuing to review selected portions of the Arias investigation in depth. At times, my attention to the case bordered on the obsessive, to the point that I couldn’t get it out of my mind—I was now fixated on the three-by-five card and wanted to know how Arias was using it. Concerned that perhaps I had missed something, I arranged to return to the jail and review the pack of postcards again.