Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (17 page)

My follow-up visit to the jail, which took place on August 4, 2011, did not turn up anything that I hadn’t already seen, but as I lingered in the waiting area talking with the intelligence officer, I saw a woman with short-cropped hair and rimmed glasses entering the facility. I recognized her as a friend of Jodi Arias’ named Anne Campbell, who had attended a number of Arias’ court hearings. I watched as she went to the window to fill out the paperwork requesting an inmate visit with Arias. I was surprised when she turned and fixed her gaze on me before breaking into a grin.

“They’re up to something, and I know it, and there is nothing we can do about it,” I said to the intelligence officer. She didn’t say anything, just nodded. All we could do was stand
there and watch as Campbell was allowed inside to visit Arias. Not long after, I headed for the parking lot to return to the office.

Perhaps my comment struck a chord, because I’d only been on the road for about five minutes when I got a call on my cell phone from the intelligence officer, directing me to come back to the jail. She had something to show me, and the urgency in her voice suggested that it couldn’t wait.

Upon my return, I was led to the same office adjacent to the security desk, where I was shown two magazines. One was an issue of
Star,
dated July 25, 2011, the other an August 2011 edition of
Digital Photo Pro
.

“Arias requested that these magazines be turned over to Anne Campbell,” the officer told me, directing me to have a look at them.

Nothing of note jumped out at me as I leafed through the pages of
Digital Photo Pro
. “I don’t see anything,” I said.

“Are you sure? Turn to page 20,” the officer instructed.

I slowly scanned the page and noticed the words “you testify so” written in pencil along the right edge, next to the magazine’s spine.

“Okay, now go to page 37.”

Flipping ahead seventeen pages, the words “we can fix this” jumped out at me.

“Well, I’ll be . . .” I remarked. “Give me another.”

“Page 43.” The officer smiled.

“You fucked up. What you told my attorney the next day,” I said, reciting aloud the words scrawled across the top of this page.

“How did you find these?” I asked, awestruck at Arias’ attempt to clandestinely communicate with someone outside the jail.

The officer explained that she hadn’t noticed the concealed messages when she first skimmed the magazines, and neither had her sergeant, who had also perused them in the dim light
of their office. But a gnawing feeling prompted the officer to further scrutinize the magazines, first by raising the lights in the room, which yielded no results, and then by taking them to another room, with brighter lighting, to comb through them one last time. It was then that she noticed some writing on one of the pages in
Digital Photo Pro
. Grabbing both publications, she returned to the office adjacent to the security desk, where she enlisted the help of another officer to make sure they found all the messages hidden on the pages.

Grabbing a sheet of paper, the two officers pored over the pages of
Digital Photo Pro,
writing down the page numbers and the cryptic message associated with each page:

         
20:
 
you testify so

         
37:
 
we can fix this

         
40:
 
directly contradicts what I have been saying for over a year

         
43:
 
You fucked up. What you told my attorney the next day

         
54:
 
Interview was excellent! Must talk asap!

         
56:
 
get down here asap and see me before you talk to them again and before

When they were done, they knew they had a message intended for somebody outside the jail, but they couldn’t understand its meaning. They then turned their attention to
Star
magazine, featuring a smiling Casey Anthony on the upper left-hand corner of its cover. They looked slowly through every page, finding nothing until they reached page 82, the last page of the magazine. There, along the bottom border of the page, also written in pencil, they found the following numbers, in this order: 43, 40, 56, 20, 37, 54. When they rearranged the messages on those particular pages of
Digital Photo Pro
in that order, they realized they had decoded what
were obviously instructions to someone outside of jail to do Arias’ bidding:

         
43:
 
You fucked up. What you told my attorney next day

         
40:
 
contradicts what I’ve been saying for over a year

         
56:
 
get down here asap and see me before you talk to them again and before

         
20:
 
you testify so

         
37:
 
we can fix this

         
54:
 
Interview was excellent! Must talk asap!

If I had any doubts that Arias would stop at nothing, including changing a witness’s story, they evaporated as I read this attempted communication, in which she even cursed, in violation of her Mormon faith, which prohibited profanity. After preparing and serving another subpoena duces tecum, I immediately called Detective Flores, who agreed to drive to the Estrella Jail to pick up the publications and take them to the Mesa Police Department so they could be held securely should they be needed in any future court proceedings.

When Flores arrived, we discussed the implications and consequences of what the Maricopa County Jail officers had just found, and I was tempted to tell him about Darryl Brewer’s interview summary where he had revealed to the defense investigator that Arias had told him she intended to travel to Mesa before she took her trip in early June. This was the closest I came to disclosing the existence of the gas cans to him, although as the trial neared there would be other times where I thought about it.

But while the intelligence officer had managed to foil the delivery of Arias’ outgoing message, I still didn’t know who the magazines were intended for or how they were going to be used. Driving back to the office from the jail, I started to think more about the timing of the attempted secret communication.
As I focused on both the date and the message itself it became clear there was nothing coincidental about the timing.

The court had scheduled a hearing in four days, on August 8, where I would challenge the credibility of the Bob White letters and attempt to preclude them from being introduced as evidence at trial. It appeared that the cryptic messages in the magazines were somehow linked to the upcoming hearing. Arias was clearly trying to communicate with someone regarding his or her potential testimony. Whoever the intended recipient of the magazines was, he or she was most likely planning to give testimony that would support Arias’ claim about the authenticity of the White letters.

The problem that Arias was attempting to remedy, according to the note in the magazines, was that the story this person had told to Arias’ lawyers didn’t line up with what Arias herself had been saying for over a year. Because all phone calls are recorded, she couldn’t risk conveying that message via the telephone, so she had to resort to the magazine route instead. With the coded message, it appeared that Arias was trying to influence the person to testify to her version of the truth, tampering with someone who would likely be a witness on her behalf.

In the days before the August 8 hearing, I disclosed the existence of the magazines to the defense. I also disclosed the results of Kreitl’s analysis of the writing on the index card found in Arias’ cell. He had concluded that the writings on that card were an attempt by the writer to “simulate” Travis’ handwriting. He reached this conclusion after comparing the writing on the index card to the handwriting samples that were known to have been written by Travis, including his two journals and the letters to Deanna Reid.

This final detail about the three-by-five card brought everything about the White letters into sharp focus. It was obvious that the ten letters disclosed by defense counsel to the State
were forged, and it seemed that Jodi Arias had forged them, as it appeared she had practiced simulating Travis’ handwriting on the three-by five card while she was at the Maricopa County Jail.

When August 8 arrived, I presented my case, calling four witnesses, beginning with Deanna Reid and Alan Kreitl to prove that the White letters should be precluded from any part of the trial. The witnesses’ testimony combined to paint a clear picture that the letters were forged, with Kreitl’s handwriting analysis making the most compelling argument.

Under direct examination, Kreitl cited several differences he had found when comparing the content of the ten White letters with those provided by Deanna Reid. For one, the spacing in the White letters was much tighter than in Travis’ letters. The letters known to have been written by Travis also didn’t contain dates, while the questioned ones all had dates in the upper right-hand corner of the page.

In comparing the signatures on the two sets of letters, Kreitl found that the size of the signatures on the known letters was much larger than the signatures on the questioned ones. He also observed that the height relationship between the letter
r
and the letter
a
in the name
Travis
on the questioned documents was different than on the authentic ones.

But my presentation did not end with Kreitl and the other witnesses I had called to testify that day. I also planned to call additional witnesses, including the deputy from the jail who had discovered the coded messages in the magazines. By bringing the magazines into the discussion, my plan was to show that the coded messages were connected to the Bob White letters, indicating that Arias was trying to tamper with a witness who she was asking to testify as to the letters authenticity.

Only it didn’t work out quite that way.

The following day, August 9, the court allowed the defense to call a witness preemptively to challenge the prosecution’s
account of the magazines before I’d had a chance to show their connection to this hearing. The witness was Heather Nitterauer, a fellow inmate of Arias’, who testified that she had been the one who had written the messages in the magazines as a way to communicate with her codefendant in an impending case.

As implausible as her testimony was, what was even more strange was that the person interrogating Nitterauer was not Nurmi or Washington, but Jodi Arias herself, who had elected to proceed “propria persona,” or “pro per”—acting as her own lawyer for the purposes of these proceedings. The result was that for the first time, Arias and I were on opposite sides of the debate, addressing each other directly, without an intermediary. The seating arrangements in the courtroom also changed, with Arias now sitting in the lead counsel’s chair, just two feet away from me. This shift in roles moved Arias from quiet spectator to active participant, meaning that she could now make objections, question witnesses, and introduce or object to any evidence.

Even though she had taken over the first counsel’s chair, both figuratively and literally, she was still in her jail garb, a two-piece pantsuit of black and white stripes from top to bottom. And instead of the ballpoint pen commonly used by lawyers to take notes, she was allowed only a three-inch yellow golf pencil, which required her to continuously sharpen its point throughout the proceedings.

If her lack of legal experience intimidated Arias, she didn’t show it. But in her eagerness to begin the questioning of her witness, she started her examination before Nitterauer had even been sworn in, a fact that was not lost on the courtroom clerk, who interrupted Arias by indicating to the judge, “She hasn’t been sworn,” referring to the witness.

Judge Sherry Stephens said to Nitterauer, “Yes, you need to stand and be sworn.”

Arias waited as Nitterauer stated her name and recited her
legal oath, before jumping back in with her questions. “You have already stated your name,” she began. “Can you just tell us why you’re here?”

“I’m here to testify that I wrote something in a book,” Nitterauer replied, seeming to misstate her answer.

“Okay. Do you remember what—you said a book?” Arias said, in an attempt to coach Nitterauer to correct her blunder.

Apparently the witness picked up Arias’ cue to modify her answer, because she gave the desired response, “Magazine.”

As Arias continued with the direct examination, it appeared her focus was no longer on the witness as she turned her eyes to the back of the courtroom. “Okay. So did you—you wrote something in a magazine? Okay . . . I’m sorry, Your Honor, I’d like to remind the Court the rule has been invoked. We have a witness in the room,” she told Judge Stephens, referring to Deanna Reid, who was sitting in the gallery listening to the testimony.

Arias’ comment to the judge was referencing Rule 615 of the Arizona Rules of Evidence, which requires the Court to “exclude” witnesses from the courtroom who will be called to testify, so they cannot hear the testimony of others.

When I pointed out that Deanna Reid had already testified at this hearing and was no longer a witness in these proceedings, Arias responded, “She’s still a trial witness.”

“Is she going to be a trial witness?” Judge Stephens asked, directing her question at me.

“Not for the State at this point,” I replied.

The judge next asked Arias, “Are you planning on calling her?”

Arias avowed that she would be calling Reid as a witness at trial, and therefore the judge had no choice but to exclude Deanna from the proceedings.

Three years had passed since her arrest, and it appeared Arias still harbored resentment toward Deanna for the place that she held in Travis’ life, and her request that Deanna be
excused appeared to be merely a ploy to prove that
she
was in control.