Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (28 page)

From the line of questioning that Nurmi pursued during his short cross-examination, it was apparent the defense was not concerned with any of the purchases Arias made on her trip. Instead, Nurmi focused his questions on the three deposits Arias made at the Washington Mutual Bank in Pasadena. From his questions, it appeared that the source of the money
was somehow significant to the defense, although for me it was just a time marker that Arias had stopped at the bank in Pasadena at 10:15
A.M
. on her way to Mesa to kill Travis.

To support Detective Mendes’ testimony, I called Ralphael Colombo, who told jurors about renting the car to a blond-haired Jodi Arias.

West Jordan Police detective Michael Galieti then testified about the traffic stop in which he observed that Arias’ back license plate was upside down and the front one was missing.

Ryan Burns was in court to testify to Arias’ late arrival in Utah, the excuses she provided for her tardiness, the traffic stop by police, and the sexual contact the two engaged in during her brief time in West Jordan.

On cross-examination, defense counsel continued along down the same path they had taken with Detective Flores of attacking Travis’ character rather than focusing on the evidence that undermined Arias’ self-defense claim. Nurmi asked Burns if he had heard from others that Travis was a big flirt, and whether Arias had told him that Travis had cheated on her. The line of questioning seemed out of place, because it didn’t address the conflicting stories Arias had told him about her delayed arrival, her phone charger, and the upside-down back license plate. Using this witness to try to establish what they wanted the jury to perceive as Travis’ inappropriate interactions with women was misplaced, as Burns had no personal knowledge and could only speak to what Arias and a few others had told him.

On the ninth and final day of my case in chief, I called the last witnesses, among them Detective Flores again. As part of my direct examination of Flores, I played the telephone message Arias had left for the detective on June 21, in which she provided her mobile phone number, setting the stage for the introduction of the phone records through the testimony of the custodian of records for the mobile phone carrier, Sprint.

What I hadn’t expected was the line of questioning Nurmi
would pursue during his cross-examination of Flores that inadvertently emphasized Jodi Arias’ momentous error in leaving the camera behind in the washing machine on the day she killed Travis.

“Detective, you were present when the photos of Ms. Arias and Mr. Alexander were shown in court?” Nurmi asked Flores.

“Yes.”

“And that was a few weeks after the investigation that those photographs were actually recovered, right?”

“Yes.”

“Before they obtained those, had you had any other evidence that Ms. Arias was at Mr. Alexander’s home on June 4?” Nurmi continued, to which Flores answered, “No . . .”

After nine days of testimony and twenty different witnesses, it was now clear that Arias had implemented a plan to kill Travis that she carried out on June 4, 2008, and it had gone the way she hoped, except for that one fatal slip-up that Flores was able to highlight in his final testimony.

I concluded with Arias’ PPL friend Leslie Udy, who testified to several conversations she’d had with Arias, including the two telephone calls Arias made to her after supposedly learning of Travis’ death. Udy described Arias’ apparent sadness and claims of disbelief. Udy’s testimony was meant to remind the jurors that Arias’ feigned disbelief at the news of Travis’ death was just another part of her cover-up.

Most emblematic of Arias’ deception was the hour-long conversation Udy had with Arias on the evening of June 5, 2008, as the two sat in Arias’ rental car in the parking lot of Chili’s, days before Travis’ body would be discovered stuffed in the shower. “We talked about Travis,” Udy recalled. “. . . She said they weren’t together anymore, which I already knew . . . but that they would always be friends, and that they had joked and laughed about the fact that at some point further on, they would see each other at the Pre-Paid Legal events and their children would play together and be friends. . . . She indicated . . .
that although they were broken up and weren’t together anymore, they would always be best friends.”

Udy also recounted for the jury the two telephone calls she received from Arias, the first on the morning of June 10, 2008, telling her Travis was dead, and the second around two o’clock the following morning.

“And what was she saying?” I asked, with regard to the second call.

“She was saying that this was about the time of day that she would normally talk to Travis . . . they were both night people and that they talk about that time . . . and that she had lost her best friend and that she didn’t know what to do.”

It was then that I asked Udy the final question of my case in chief. “In any of those three conversations, did she ever tell you that she killed Travis?”

“No,” she replied.

Udy’s testimony helped unveil the deceitfulness that was Jodi Arias, someone who would even manipulate her own friend in her friend’s time of grief.

O
n Thursday, January 17, I rested my case, and the court indicated that trial would resume with the beginning of the defense’s presentation of evidence on Tuesday, January 29, giving us a twelve-day recess. But while those twelve days offered a break from the trial, there would be no shortage of drama.

The court set an evidentiary hearing for Monday, January 28, to hear evidence of supposed prosecutorial misconduct, one of the many occasions when such an allegation would be made by defense counsel as the trial progressed. Defense counsel refused to inform me what acts they believed constituted the misconduct and which witnesses would testify in support of their latest accusation, giving them an obvious tactical advantage at the upcoming hearing.

Fortunately, their key witness, someone named Gus Searcy, talked to others about the hearing and his upcoming testimony, claiming it would change the course of the trial. Searcy, an executive director at Pre-Paid Legal Services, now called LegalShield, held himself out as the paradigm of success at the network marketing company. He had met Arias at a PPL business briefing in Arizona when she approached him to help her attain the kind of success that he professed to have achieved, because as he was quick to say, he had become an executive director in ninety days, a rate of progress that normally takes more than a year for others to achieve.

Searcy’s lack of discretion gave me the necessary forewarn
ing about the allegation he would make at the hearing, where he intended to accuse Travis’ friend and mentor, Chris Hughes, of trying to sway his testimony. This allowed me to contact Hughes, who denied the allegations and agreed to travel to Phoenix to give testimony at this hearing. After taking testimony from Searcy and Hughes out of the presence of the jury, Judge Stephens found that there was no merit to the defense’s claim of prosecutorial misconduct.

With the conclusion of Monday’s hearing, defense counsel informed me that Searcy would be one of two witnesses to take the stand on the following day, the first day of their case, although I had only been informed six days earlier that Searcy would be a witness at all. This was extremely late notice and left me with very little time to prepare. But at least this time they let me know he would take the stand the next day rather than refusing to identify him, as they had done for the prosecutorial misconduct hearing. I knew Searcy did not have any information that spoke to either the events leading up to or immediately following the murder, so it was hard for me to speculate what substance, if any, his testimony would contain.

Defense counsel also informed me that Darryl Brewer was the other witness they intended to call the next day.

As I sat at the prosecution table next to Detective Flores that Tuesday morning, I was on edge, hoping to hear Brewer’s name called first. I was a bit disappointed when I heard that the first witness would be Searcy. The thought that ran through my mind was that something might happen between now and the afternoon when Brewer was expected to testify, because there is always the remote possibility the defense might alter their trial strategy, leading to Brewer not being called at all. But I let that thought slip by and concentrated on Searcy as the short man with thinning hair, dressed in a dark suit, yellow tie, and matching handkerchief peeking out of his jacket pocket, made his way up the aisle of the gallery to the witness box.

Nurmi rose to begin his direct examination by asking Searcy
about his affiliation with Pre-Paid Legal Services/LegalShield. “If you could, what is your position within the company? Is there a label for it?” Nurmi asked.

“I am what’s called a one-hundred-thousand-dollar ring earner,” Searcy replied with a smile, showing the jury the ornate gold band on his left ring finger. “I have this little ring which means I make over a hundred thousand dollars a year, whether I get out of bed or not. And I am an executive director,” he proclaimed.

“Could you . . . educate us all on the hierarchy of Pre-Paid Legal or LegalShield,” Nurmi followed up, “how that works in terms of where an executive director fits in . . . ?”

“LegalShield is a multilevel network marketing company that provides a legal insurance product and an identity theft product. And it has about a little over four hundred thousand associates. Out of those four hundred thousand associates, the goal is to attain a level such as myself, or some of the other people in the company, the main level that people want to get to is something called an executive director,” he boasted with a bit of a grin on his face.

After talking a bit more about PPL, Searcy went on to tell jurors about Arias approaching him after a business briefing in Arizona, requesting that he provide her with some guidance on how to raise her income by increasing the number of people she could sign up as associates. He said that after their initial meeting, he saw Arias about four to six times at national and regional conferences, as well as meeting with her privately on two separate occasions. He was quick to point out that their relationship was “platonic.”

His story became disjointed when he recalled one of the times that he met Arias alone, explaining she spent the night at his motor home in Las Vegas. It was during this visit, as they sat close to each other on separate couches in the motor home, that Searcy claimed to have overheard a “heated” phone call between Arias and Travis Alexander, whom he knew to be
her boyfriend. Searcy recounted that when Arias answered the call, she immediately became upset, and before he could blurt out what he supposedly heard Travis say to her, I objected on the grounds of hearsay.

The court sustained my objection, restricting him from telling the jurors anything he might have heard Travis say during the call. He was left to describe how Arias took the phone outside to continue the discussion in private, which lasted about thirty minutes.

“When she came back in, she was shaking and crying,” Searcy recalled.

It appeared that Nurmi had been trying to introduce aspects of that phone conversation to make it seem that Travis had said something abusive to Arias, causing her to become upset. But his effort came up short, because the judge sustained my objection that whatever Searcy claimed to have overheard could not be introduced for the jury’s consideration.

With the conclusion of Searcy’s direct testimony, I couldn’t help but think about how strange it was that the defense had opted to call him as their first witness. As lead witnesses go, he was not impactful because he had little to talk about other than giving an overview of the PPL/LegalShield structure and talking about a phone call from Travis. Since Searcy knew nothing about the killing, I restricted myself to discussing only the areas touched on by defense counsel, as I did not want to prolong his stay on the witness stand for fear there would not be any time left for them to call Darryl Brewer that day.

My questions focused on having Searcy admit that PPL/LegalShield had many of the earmarks of a pyramid scheme, knowing that this type of affiliation would affect his credibility as a witness. I further inquired about what seemed a tawdry aspect of his relationship with Arias by asking him about the one occasion when she spent the night.

“You said that you did see her on a personal level on two occasions, right?”

“Yes.”

“And one of them involved your mobile home, right?”

“Motor home,” Searcy corrected me.

“Motor home, right?”

“Yup,” Searcy replied in a glib fashion, as if irritated by the question.

“And she came by and she stayed two days and one night, right?”

“Correct.”

“Where was this mobile home, sir?”

“Las Vegas.”

Searcy was confirming that Arias spent the night in a small motor home with a man who was a relative stranger to her. By all appearances, this spoke to his bias as well as to Arias’ poor judgment.

Searcy completed his testimony at around 11:30, at which time Judge Stephens called for a lunch break and indicated that proceedings would resume at 1:30 that afternoon. Even though I had time, I opted not to eat. I wasn’t feeling hungry, and instead went back to my office to wait the two hours before court was set to resume. After so many months of waiting, I was finally going to have the opportunity to begin exposing Arias’ self-defense claim as a sham, and I was going to use one of the defense’s witnesses to do it.

Since I had already done my preparation, all I could do was count down the one-hundred and twenty minutes until I was back at the prosecution table, where I would meet Darryl Brewer for the first time.

“The defense may call its next witness,” the court said.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Nurmi replied. “The defense calls Darryl Brewer.”

I could feel my anticipation rising as I watched the fiftyish-looking Brewer, who was dressed in a black suit, red tie, and dark-framed glasses, raise his right hand to be sworn in. He had requested that the media not show his face, so an agree
ment had been struck that allowed the cameras in the courtroom to record his testimony but capture his image only from the shoulders down.

“Sir, could you introduce yourself to the jury, please?” Nurmi began.

“My name is Darryl Brewer,” he responded in a shaky voice.

“And Darryl, where do you live?”

“I live in Carmel, California.”

Brewer testified that he was divorced and had one son, who was now fourteen.

“. . . And Mr. Brewer, how old are you?”

“I’m fifty-two.”

“Okay, do you know this lady here in the blue shirt?” Nurmi asked, pointing to the defense table, where Arias sat staring blankly at Brewer.

“Yes.”

“How do you know her?”

“I know Jodi because we were in love,” he answered in a somewhat rehearsed fashion.

Brewer told the court he met Arias in the fall of 2001, when he was employed as a food and beverage director at Ventana Inn in Big Sur and Arias came in to apply for a job as a server. His recollection of the date he first met Arias differed from the date he previously provided to the investigator for the defense, at which time he indicated first meeting Arias in 2002.

“And how did she present herself during her interview with you?”

“Outstanding. She was on time. She interviewed well. She was dressed appropriately.”

“. . . Now, at that point in time you hired Ms. Arias, I would take it to understand that you would be a supervisor to her. Am I correct in understanding that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, and to further clarify for everyone, were you her direct supervisor? Was there a restaurant manager? How did that work?

“Jodi wasn’t under my direct supervision. There were other managers involved,” he said, being quick to point out that there were managerial layers between them, which would have made a romantic relationship appropriate, but he hastened to add that their dating relationship didn’t start until a year later, when he was demoted to server after a change in management.

When asked about her job performance, Brewer gave a glowing report and said that “she was excelling.”

“Okay. And in that time was there any disciplinary problems, any behavioral problems, anything of that nature, where she was inappropriate with customers or anything like that?”

“No,” Brewer replied. His answer made me wonder whether she had acquired her bad waitressing habits, documented at Mimi’s Café, P.F. Chang’s and the Purple Plum, more recently.

“Okay, you mentioned there was a shift in management structure at Ventana. You were no longer Jodi’s boss after that shift, is that correct?”

“That is correct.”

“Okay. Did you have a new job title? Could you just kind of describe it for us?”

“Yes. I was working as a server in banquets and helping with weddings,” Brewer said, affirming that once he and Arias were coworkers, they “became infatuated and fell in love.”

“Tell us about who Jodi was at that point in time,” Nurmi said.

“Jodi was a very responsible, caring, loving person,” Brewer recounted, as if recommending her for the job of au pair. Nurmi’s inquiry appeared designed to portray a softer image of Arias, and Brewer accommodated the questions, describing her relationship with his young son as “outstanding,” mentioning she played a “friendly role” in the boy’s life.

Brewer testified that even though the two weren’t married, they bought a home together in Palm Desert in June of 2005. “The plan was somewhat uncertain, revolving around my son. We hoped to stay in the house for a minimum of at least two years. We weren’t in the process of flipping houses. We wanted to establish the home and possibly resell it.”

“Okay. So was this part business venture, part home, shall we say, I mean home to live in but also a business venture?” Nurmi asked.

“Not a formal business venture, a personal business venture; I mean, it was a home. But we also looked at it as an investment. Hoped to gain from it at some point.”

But the venture appeared to fall apart in the fall of 2006 when “the mother of my son decided to move back to Monterey and took my son as well and he started school in Pacific Grove in fall of 2006. . . . I was going to follow [my son], and I began a strategy how to get back to Monterey. . . . I was trying to find work and as soon I found work, I was going to move back to Monterey. . . . My hope was that she [Arias] would remain in the home until we could come to a resolution so we could sell the house.”

“Okay. In terms of the relationship at this point in time was it—were you breaking up? Was it going to be a long-distance relationship? What were the discussions about your relationship with Ms. Arias?”

“Let’s see, the relationship was slowly deteriorating over the summer of 2006. By the fall, Jodi had—we were still together in the home, but it was becoming clear that I was moving back to Monterey and that we were not going to be together.”

Brewer had decided to leave Arias behind, so that it appeared she was free to explore her options and venture into the dating market looking for another man. She also needed to make enough money to pay the mortgage and the bills as
sociated with the ownership of the house. It looked like she was already working two jobs, and the way Brewer described it, she saw a way to get rich quickly by selling memberships to Pre-Paid Legal.