Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (27 page)

“In terms of unconsciousness, how much time are we talking about?”

“A few seconds, probably.”

We had talked about the two of the three mortal injuries, the stab wound to the chest and the slitting of the throat. Now,
I introduced a photo that depicted the gunshot wound visible just above Travis’ right eyebrow.

“And what’s the trajectory of this gunshot wound?” I asked Dr. Horn.

“It passes down through the skull, passes through the face and downward, and to the left, and terminates in the left cheek.”

Dr. Horn told jurors he didn’t know the distance from the muzzle of the gun to the temple where the bullet entered the head, but he was able to determine the trajectory. “The problem in this case is that the brain was decomposed,” he explained. “And the brain is a very soft structure to begin with, so it falls apart very rapidly after death. So, I was not able to see a track through the brain. But just because the bullet passes through the front of the skull where the brain normally would be, I have to conclude that the brain was perforated.”

“And, if the brain is perforated, what would happen to this individual once he was shot?”

“He would be incapacitated,” Dr. Horn replied.

“Went down?”

“Yes.”

“Immediately?”

“Rapidly, yes.”

The path of the gunshot and whether or not it had perforated Travis’ brain would be a sticking point for the defense, as their client was contending that after dropping Travis’ camera during their picture-taking session in the shower, Travis had become enraged and chased her to the bedroom and around the closet. It was here that she claimed she found a gun and shot him, a scenario that would be impossible based on Dr. Horn’s testimony that the gunshot would have rendered Travis incapacitated and unable to move, much less chase after her. Arias’ story would also be impossible because as she told Detective Flores during her June 10, 2008, phone call, Travis didn’t have a gun in the house.

“So if that’s the scenario in this case, we have the defensive wounds to the hands. What does that tell you about the sequencing of these three injuries?”

“I believe the wounds to the hands must have occurred before the fatal injuries either of the head or of the throat,” Dr. Horn explained.

“So what you’re saying is that at some point during the stabbing, but before the slashing of the throat, and before the gunshot to the head, this individual grabbed the knife?”

“Attempted to.”

It was a powerful image, Travis in the shower trying to grab at the knife as it slashed toward him.

“. . . Tell me about the sequencing of events as applied to the two injuries, the one to the head and the slitting of the throat, and when this individual may have grabbed the knife or the knife was applied to his hands.”

“With the throat wound and the head wound, I don’t think this person could have had a purposeful activity, meaning I don’t think they could have raised their arms and attempted to defend themselves. With a chest wound, that’s possible, because he would not have been immediately unconscious.”

“Which wound would have been first, in your opinion?”

“Well, the stab wound could have occurred and then the defensive injuries could have happened after the wound to the chest occurred.”

“And then in terms of the sequence of the injuries involving the throat injury we talked about, what is your opinion?”

“Well, the throat injuries and/or the head wound are going to be immediately incapacitating and he’s not going to attempt to defend himself after that. . . .”

“In terms of the shot to the head, do you have an opinion as to whether or not he was alive at the time that that shot was struck?”

“I can’t say.”

“Do you have an opinion as to the wound to the neck,
whether or not he was alive at the time that that was rendered, if you will?”

“I believe he was. There’s a great deal of hemorrhage associated with that.”

“And was he alive with regard to the one to the chest that we have been talking about?”

“Yes, I believe he was.”

Beyond indicating that the strike to the chest was the first mortal blow, Dr. Horn’s testimony was important in highlighting for the jury another aspect of Arias’ plan to kill Travis. The mortal blows were inflicted by two separate weapons—a gun and a knife. Arias’ preparedness in bringing a backup weapon should the other fail went a long way in proving that she planned the attack. The three mortal wounds, along with the more than twenty nonfatal injuries, speak to overkill and demonstrate Arias’ single-minded intent to end Travis’ life even if it took repeated knife strikes and switching to a gun to deliver a parting shot.

With the end of my direct examination of Dr. Horn, Jennifer Willmott rose to begin her cross-examination. As I suspected, Willmott spent a good deal of time working to infuse doubt into Horn’s testimony by questioning his opinion that the bullet had perforated the brain. If she could have him admit that he was uncertain whether it had gone through the front part of the brain, she could argue in favor of Arias’ claim that the bullet was the first injury she inflicted, not the last. Horn did not waver, maintaining that he could determine both the path of the bullet and when it was fired in relation to the other injuries.

“. . . You didn’t find any evidence of trauma or, like, a bullet track through the brain?” she asked. “Nothing so clearly defined, no hemorrhage, no foreign bodies, no metal fragments, right?”

Dr. Horn repeated his findings: “. . . For the most part, if you have a bullet pass through the brain you’re not going to
be standing, you’re not going to be functional, you’re going to fall. . . .”

“Well, just so we’re clear, you don’t actually have any medical evidence of it passing through the brain, right?” Willmott prodded, attempting to use earlier testimony that he had not been able to determine the bullet’s track through the brain because the brain was already decomposed when he conducted his examination. Her apparent goal was to cast doubt on the entirety of Dr. Horn’s findings by claiming that he was going beyond what the medical examination had revealed by maintaining that the bullet had passed through the brain.

“It had to have passed through the brain,” Dr. Horn replied emphatically.

“You don’t have medical evidence of that, do you?”

“I do,” Dr. Horn insisted. “The skull is perforated where the brain is, so it had to have passed through the brain. . . .”

“But you have no idea—you have no medical evidence of how far or what part of the brain it exactly would have hit, right?”

“It would have passed through the right frontal lobe,” Dr. Horn replied. “I don’t have any evidence of hemorrhage now because of the decomposition, but it had to have passed through the brain because of the part of the skull that was injured.

“The brain in a young person especially is flush against that structure. The brain occupies the entire skull, so to have a hole in the skull here”—he indicated the area of Travis’ right temple on the autopsy photo—“and then exit in here”—he pointed to Travis’ left cheek—“it has to pass through the brain.”

Having failed to shake Dr. Horn’s testimony about the bullet track through the brain, Wilmott moved on to other topics, including testimony that had been given by Detective Flores at an earlier hearing that appeared to differ from Dr. Horn’s. “Isn’t it true that at some point you told Detective Flores that you believe the first wound was a shot to the head?”

“I don’t remember ever saying that.”

“Do you think that you never told Detective Flores that?” Willmott asked.

“I don’t think that’s consistent with the evidence that I have, and I don’t remember ever saying anything like that,” Dr. Horn repeated.

“So what your testimony is, I just want to be clear, is that you never told Detective Flores that the gunshot wound was the first wound?”

“I don’t believe I ever said that, no.”

“And do you remember telling Detective Flores that you knew this because the gunshot wound wouldn’t have completely incapacitated somebody?”

“I don’t recall saying that, either,” Dr. Horn stated.

She continued to press this point, attempting to sow doubt in Dr. Horn’s words or at the very least make it appear that he was contradicting himself. Horn was confident in his opinion, and eventually, having failed to shake his testimony, Willmott gave up and ended her cross-examination.

Dr. Horn’s testimony that he recovered a bullet from Travis’ left cheek that forensic firearms examiner Elizabeth Northcutt found to be consistent with a .25-caliber round made it important for me to bring in Officer Kevin Friedman of the Yreka Police Department. Officer Friedman testified that he responded to a “cold burglary” on May 28, 2008, at around 3:40
P.M
. at the Pine Street home that Arias shared with her grandparents Caroline and Carlton Allen. He conducted the investigation, which included looking at the point of entry on the south side of the house, taking fingerprints, and determining what had been taken.

Officer Friedman portrayed the burglary as “unusual,” explaining that four items had been taken—a DVD player, a stereo, thirty dollars in bills, and a black-handled .25-caliber gun—just one item from each of the home’s four rooms, while “small items worth money” and a large amount of change had been left behind. Officer Friedman also testified that he
thought it was strange that only one of the firearms, the black-handled .25-caliber handgun, was stolen from the dresser that had been converted into a gun cabinet, where other handguns of various calibers were also kept. The .25 caliber handgun taken from Arias’ grandparents’ house was the same caliber as the casing found in Travis’ bathroom.

The jury already knew by Arias’ own admission to Detective Flores that Travis did not have any guns in his house, leaving no doubt that she had staged the burglary in order to obtain her grandfather’s gun to help carry out her plan to end Travis’ life.

I continued my case by calling Detective Nathan Mendes, formerly the lead detective of the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office’s major crime unit, and had him testify to Arias’ efforts to hide her identity for her trip to Mesa. Detective Mendes and his team had assisted detectives from the Mesa Police Department in locating and arresting Arias at her grandparents’ home in Yreka. Detective Mendes, who was now a special agent for the United States Department of the Interior, had also helped execute the search warrant on Arias’ grandparents’ Pine Street home that same day, so I intended to introduce the receipts from the Airwalk shoebox through his testimony.

I showed the detective a photograph of the small bedroom in which the shoebox had been found during the execution of the search warrant. “Did police have occasion to search this box here?” I asked, pointing to the white box with the red logo that sat atop the twin bed with the patriotic red, white, and blue quilt.

“Yes, sir.”

Holding up the bundle of receipts that had been found inside the box, I asked if he recognized them.

“Yes, sir. These are items taken during the service of the search warrant,” he replied.

“I move for admission of Exhibits 237.001 through 237.022,” I said, knowing there would be no objection be
cause defense counsel would think those receipts actually helped corroborate Arias’ story that the detour to Mesa was the result of an impromptu decision after speaking with Travis while she was already on the road.

“No objection, Your Honor,” Nurmi said.

One by one, in a serial fashion, almost bordering on the mechanical, I showed each receipt to the jury through the testimony of Detective Mendes, only pausing long enough to identify the various merchants and the dates of each purchase, and sometimes mentioning Jodi Arias as the person who had made the transaction.

The first receipt I showed Detective Mendes was the one from Budget Rent-a-Car System for the Ford Focus that Arias had rented at the Redding airport. I turned my attention to establishing Arias’ aim of not being recognized on the day she rented the vehicle.

“Back in June 2008, were there car rental companies in Yreka?” I asked.

“Yes, sir, there are at least two others,” the detective said. “. . . There was Hertz and Enterprise.”

“But there was Budget there, right?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you familiar with Redding, California?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“In fact, you live near Redding now, or not?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And with regard to Redding as it relates to Yreka, how far apart are they?”

“Just under ninety miles.”

“And approximately, what is the driving time between Yreka and Redding, California?” I asked.

“In the summertime, about an hour and a half,” Detective Mendes said, explaining that it could be a longer drive in the winter because there’s a lot of snow in Siskiyou County.

I next asked Detective Mendes about his visit to the Budget counter at the Redding airport to show the photographic lineup of five pictures, including a mug shot of Jodi Arias labeled as number 5, to rental car agent Ralphael Colombo.

“What did he say when you showed him that in terms of the identification?”

“He said that the person that came in and rented the vehicle was number 5, except that she had blond hair when she came in and got the car,” Mendes told the jury.

Moving the questioning back to the items that had been found in the Airwalk shoebox, I showed Detective Mendes the remainder of the receipts for his identification, going through the different stops that Arias had made, including the gas stations, bank, and Walmart. I didn’t want to call undue attention to the transactions at the ARCO gas station in Pasadena where Arias made three separate gas purchases, so I purposely did not focus on the amount of gasoline purchased, but instead concentrated on the times those purchases were made.

I wanted the jury to see that there were three receipts associated with the three different sales, so that there would be no confusion later when I questioned Arias about the three separate purchases at ARCO, if she took the stand as I predicted. I wanted to make sure they were not thinking there had only been two sales—a credit and a cash sale—so I asked the question in a way that emphasized that the receipts were not repeats of each other, careful not to go any further. I then ended the direct examination.