Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (19 page)

That same morning, Nurmi also interviewed four other potential witnesses who either were acquaintances of Arias’ or had interacted with her on June 5, 2008, when she traveled to Utah. Among those interviewed was a woman named Leslie Udy.

Udy lived in the Salt Lake City area and had met Arias through Pre-Paid Legal. On the evening of June 5, 2008, Udy, Arias, Burns, and a few others had dined at Chili’s. Arias had driven her to the restaurant that night and told Udy that she and Travis weren’t together anymore, but said she could imagine them both married to other people someday and socializing at PPL events, where their kids would play together.

Our next interview was at the Cottonwood Heights Police
Department, about ten miles away, where Officer Michael Galieti now worked. Nurmi and I drove in separate cars, and he apparently got lost on the way, because he was approximately thirty minutes late. When he finally arrived, Nurmi apologized to Officer Galieti, who ushered us into a room just inside the lobby. Nurmi and I sat down, turned on our tape recorders, and the interview began. This interview was also short, just about thirty minutes, with Nurmi asking Galieti about the circumstances of the traffic stop.

Officer Galieti was in uniform and appeared to be in his late fifties. He was poised in his responses and confident of his information. He came across as someone who was observant and paid close attention to details, and could still remember what happened when he made a traffic stop of the car driven by Jodi Arias.

I’d initially called Ryan Burns to talk about his sexual interaction with Arias and ended up learning something about the traffic stop. But that’s how cases are—there is always a dash of luck in every one of them, and this one was proving no different. I’d found something compelling—another part of the plan in Arias’ scheme to kill Travis. Taken with everything else I’d learned, it was clear that this was not a crime of passion where Arias just reacted or the situation got out of control. This was a killing that had been well thought out to include such fine details as removing license plates to avoid being detected. This was premeditation, down to the last gallon of gas.

I
had almost missed the signposts on Jodi Arias’ road to Mesa. But I was now beginning to understand what fueled her motivation for the road trip to Arizona.

Her overnight journey across the desert that June 4 wasn’t to enjoy the weather. The high in Pasadena was around 70 degrees while in Mesa it was slightly over 100. Arias wasn’t coming to visit friends either. She hid her itinerary from others. It most certainly wasn’t a religious pilgrimage. She didn’t even stop at the Mormon temple. It went beyond hiding a visit to enjoy a sexual tryst, no matter how much premarital sex was forbidden by her religion.

The trip was a journey that would bring permanent closure to her relationship with Travis. She was going to end it by ending his life. Bringing three gas cans was just one part of her elaborate plan.

To avoid missing any of her steps, I took a synergistic approach and detailed on my legal pad all the key elements leading to the killing. I had familiarized myself with this case to the point where I was intimate with the details of the investigation and could rely on that memory to formulate a timeline of Arias’ preparations to carry out the murder.

The trial was still a few months away, but preparation on this scale doesn’t happen overnight. I started working on evenings and weekends when everyone was out of the office and I didn’t have to worry about being interrupted. The office was hushed in a way that only happens after hours, and as I sat
down at my desk, I turned around and looked out the window at the Fourth Avenue Jail, with its visitors streaming in to see the inmates. Looking outside was only a momentary distraction before turning my attention to the blank legal pad in front of me to begin summarizing the steps Arias had taken in premeditating Travis’ murder.

Arias’ planning for the trip to Arizona had started in mid-to-late May, with the call to her ex-boyfriend Darryl Brewer requesting to borrow gas cans. This was the call that ended with her becoming frustrated with him for asking why she needed the cans. Even though she’d hung up without giving him a definitive schedule to pick up the containers, this call marked the first outward sign that Arias’ plan had been put into motion.

From there, she moved on to obtaining the gun. On Wednesday, May 28, 2008, she found that she had the house to herself for approximately five hours, and she used this opportunity to stage the break-in at her grandparents’ house on Pine Street in Yreka, where she was living. Her objective was to take the .25 caliber handgun that belonged to her grandfather. This handgun would never be recovered, but the bullet casing found in Travis’ bathroom matched the caliber of her grandfather’s gun. During the investigation, Arias would confirm to Detective Flores that Travis did not own a gun, .25 caliber or otherwise, which showed that Arias had brought the gun “stolen” from her grandparents’ house to kill Travis, disposing of it after the crime.

Around the same time as the “break-in,” Arias followed up with Darryl Brewer and called him again asking to borrow the two gas cans for her trip to Mesa. In a few days’ time, she would show up at Brewer’s house and take the containers with her.

Her desire to travel in early June 2008 was not borne out of a need to take time off from a job following months of hard work. She had only been employed for one week before
her road trip. As she wrote in her journal, “speaking of Casa Ramos, last night [Monday, May 26, 2008] was my first night. It was cool. Everybody seems nice. I think I’ll like it there.”

Arias came up with a cover story for taking the trip. She was going to visit Ryan Burns, a man she barely knew in West Jordan, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. She mentioned Burns in a journal entry of May 27, 2008. “He’s fun to flirt w/through text messaging. . . . But hey, I like this guy, well so far, what I know about him, I like.”

Three days later on May 30, Arias’ journal entry spoke of her decision to travel to Utah to see Burns in the coming days. But according to her, “He doesn’t seem overly interested in me, although he seems happy that I am coming out to see him.”

It was perplexing that Arias had told her younger sister Angela that she saw Burns as her soul mate and future husband, yet apparently she wasn’t even sure if he was interested in her in a romantic way.

Burns told police that the two agreed that he would wait for her to arrive at his place sometime in the morning on Wednesday, June 4.

Arias rented a car for her supposed trip to Utah on June 2, 2008, at the airport in Redding, a city approximately ninety miles south of Yreka. The person renting her the car remembered the transaction and after identifying Arias in a photographic line-up mentioned that her hair was blonde when he first met her. The picture in the line-up was Arias’ mug shot taken after her arrest when her hair was brown.

During her interaction with the rental car agent, she made up a story and told him that she was just going to be using the car for driving around locally. The first car offered to her had been red, but she had refused it because it might be “more noticeable” to law enforcement, deciding instead on a white Ford Focus. Obviously any encounter with Arizona police would prove fatal to her plan of driving into and out of the state undetected.

According to the only undated entry in any of her journals, Arias spent that evening, the first night of the trip, going out to dinner with one of her ex-boyfriends, Matthew McCartney, singing karaoke after meeting him at the Red Room in Santa Cruz. She wrote that McCartney bullied her into singing a duet to the song “Cruisin’.” She complained in the journal, “Not that I’m any better, but I totally carried him through that song.”

Even though Arias had told Detective Flores during her interview in Yreka that she was ambidextrous, I had come to understand that she only issued left-handed compliments, such as her pointing out that although saying McCartney could sing, it was
her
performance that carried the day.

The next morning, June 3, Arias showed up at Darryl Brewer’s house in Pacific Grove, near Monterey, at approximately 7:30 in the morning. She had breakfast with Brewer and his young son. Once they were done eating, Arias used Brewer’s computer to check her e-mail. She then took the two five-gallon gas cans and left.

Arias stopped at the Washington Mutual branch office in Monterey and engaged in three bank transactions, the last one at 10:15
A.M
. There was an approximately four-hour gap between that transaction and the next time police were able to pick up her movements, based on a few time-stamped selfies she took en route to Salinas. Those photographs were found by police on her cell phone after her arrest.

Because of the changing scenery outside her car window, it appears she was sitting behind the wheel of her rental car and driving while she took these selfies, the first of which was snapped at 2:12
P.M
. What made them so significant was that they showed Arias as a brunette, which meant that at some time after she rented the car at the airport in Redding she had dyed her hair from blonde to brown. A half smile is evident in two of the three pictures, while the last displays Arias’ more
serious side, but all three show her brown hair spilling past her neck and shoulders.

Arias’ next documented stop on June 3 was Salinas, where she visited the Walmart at around 3:25
P.M
. She purchased five items that afternoon, including another five-gallon gas can to add to the two she had borrowed from Darryl Brewer.

Her trip then took her to Pasadena, where she stopped at the ARCO station shortly after 8:30
P.M
. and filled both her gas tank and the three gas cans.

Arias had ensured that the three containers would hold enough gasoline to guarantee she would not have to stop for gas in Arizona, so the police would not be able to place her in the state. She had also saved those gasoline receipts which, according to her, would support her claim that she had traveled directly from California to Utah.

Making sure that her alibi was still in place, Arias called Ryan Burns some time around 9:00
P.M
. She assured him that she was on her way to Utah to see him and would be there in the late morning of the following day, June 4, as previously discussed. What she didn’t tell him was that she was going to drive through the night to visit Travis. She placed the call to this boyfriend-in-waiting shortly before she headed east on Interstate 10 toward Mesa.

Not long after, on the night of June 3, Arias powered off her cell phone. She did not turn it back on until approximately twenty-four hours later, in northern Arizona near the Nevada border, which ensured that police would not be able to electronically trace her detour.

Arias’ plan of driving through Arizona undetected was successful. No one remembered seeing either a brown-haired woman entering the house in Mesa in the early-morning hours of June 4 or a white Ford Focus parked in Travis’ driveway. Tired from a long night of driving, Arias went to bed with Travis, waking up at around 1:00
P.M
.

I knew from the time stamps on the nude photographs that they began taking sexually explicit pictures at around 1:30
P.M
. After this initial bedroom session in the midafternoon, Arias and Travis went downstairs, where they tried to look through the CDs of photos that she had brought with her of their travels, CDs whose very presence demonstrated that she had planned to visit Travis. Sometime shortly before 5:30
P.M
., Travis decided to take a shower, with Arias documenting his final moments on his Sanyo camera.

The first stab wound ushering him to his death came while Travis was seated on the shower floor, followed by more stab wounds, which caused Travis to raise his hands to defend himself. He stood up and struggled to the sink, where Arias continued to stab him repeatedly on his shoulders. In an attempt to get away from the onslaught, Travis made his way down the hall, where Arias caught up with him and slit his throat as he was about to go into the bedroom. She continued the attack by dragging his body down the hallway to the bloodstained sink, where she shot him once in the head. She then continued to drag his body, finally stuffing Travis into the shower.

It was at this point that Arias began the cleanup at the scene. She turned the shower on to wash away any biological evidence from Travis’ body that could be tested later by DNA analysis. She took a plastic tumbler out from under the sink and used it to pour water on the floor in an attempt to clean some of the blood in the hallway. She then used one of the gold-brown bath towels in the bathroom to soak up some of the watered-down mixture.

Retreating from the bathroom, she took the bloody towel and went downstairs to put it into the washing machine. She also placed the camera into the washer, after having deleted the pictures of their sexual activity, those of Travis in the shower, and the inadvertent photos showing her dragging him down the hallway. After dumping in some bleach, she began the wash cycle.

Before she left Travis’ house, she removed her bloodstained socks, which she is seen wearing in one of the inadvertent photographs retrieved from the camera’s memory card, and left with the knife and the gun. Neither of those weapons has been found.

She walked out of the house and resumed her trip to Utah, using the gasoline stored in the three gas cans to fill her car along the way. It wasn’t until she was near the Nevada border that she powered her phone back on and called Ryan Burns to tell him that she’d gotten lost and would be arriving one day later.

Her explanation for not arriving in Utah until June 5, was not questioned by Burns or her other acquaintances. She told them that she had taken the wrong freeway and driven for many hours. She also claimed to have stopped and slept for a long time. Arias was self-deprecating, blaming herself for getting lost, and even called herself an airhead. That same day, almost immediately after arriving at Ryan Burns’ home in West Jordan, she was stopped for a traffic violation because her back license plate was upside down.

Arias’ meticulous approach extended to the cleanup of the rental car before returning it to the rental car agency in Redding. She removed the front and back floor mats before turning the car in, presumably because they might have had blood or other evidence on them that could have linked her to the crime. She also disposed of the three gas cans. Neither the mats nor the gas cans have ever been found.

I also intended to call the jury’s attention to the three communications Arias made to Travis—the June 4 voice message she left on his cell phone, the June 6 text message, and the June 7 e-mail—showing that she’d tried to cover up her involvement in the murder by making it seem as though she and Travis hadn’t seen each other in a while.

For almost four years, I had endured Arias changing her story as she shifted her version of events. I had always known
that I would need something concrete to confront her with at trial that she could not explain away. In this high-stakes game of poker that she was playing, I had found my ace in the hole with the gas cans. And the best part was that she would not hear about them until she was on the witness stand when it would be too late for her to again change her story in an attempt to explain them away.