Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (32 page)

Nurmi proceeded to introduce a second line of inquiry that centered on the many moves Arias’ family made after they left Salinas when she was twelve.

Arias testified that after living in Santa Maria for a couple of years, the family moved to Yreka, where she attended high school, beginning in the ninth grade.

“. . . Okay. And just to give us a sense of things, how far was Yreka from Santa Maria, where you moved from?” Nurmi asked. “So you were several hours away?”

“Yeah, ten hours,” Arias replied in a voice barely above a whisper, adding that she didn’t know anybody when she moved there.

“. . . Now, you mentioned that when you moved to—based on what you told us before, are we correct in understanding that the beatings, the pushing of the furniture, that sort of thing with your dad, continued throughout your high school years?” Nurmi asked.

“Yes,” Arias confirmed.

“Okay. Were those the incidents that you were talking about before about being pushed into the post and the furniture, or were there other incidents?”

“That happened when I was in high school. There were a few things that happened right before we moved,” Arias recounted. “A bunch of my friends and I one night decided—like the last night we were there we decided to sneak out
of the house and hang out and my parents woke up and found out.

“So, when I came back, my dad asked where I had been. And I had fallen asleep. He woke me up around 6:00. So, when I sat up I was disoriented because I had been sleeping. I didn’t give him a satisfactory answer, so he hit me across the face, and I fell back down.

“Then he sat me back up and asked me again, and I didn’t give him a satisfactory answer, so he hit me across the face again, and I fell back down.”

“When you say he hit you across the face, did he punch you?” Nurmi asked.

“No. It was an openhanded, hard slap.”

“Do you recall, did you bleed?”

“No, I didn’t. Not that I recall.”

“Did you bruise?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes.”

“. . . Your dad is a pretty big guy, right?” Nurmi said, presenting a menacing impression of Arias’ father.

“He was pretty big at that time,” Arias affirmed. “His health is—he’s frail now, but he was very big at that time. . . . I don’t know his weight, but he’s about five eleven. He used to bench-press 520 pounds. . . .”

“. . . To your knowledge, was your mom aware—I know you mentioned the one incident where your mom was present; was your mom aware of your dad beating you?”

“Well, she was present, yes, of course. Sometimes we were on road trips together, and they would take turns if they, you know, had to pull the car over, or something. . . .”

“. . . Did your mom’s beatings with the wooden spoon, did they continue in high school as well?”

“They continued for a short time, but I think as I turned sixteen, seventeen, she—I don’t recall her carrying the wooden
spoon around, but she just started grabbing whatever was available, like a hairbrush.

“She had acrylic nails, so sometimes she would grab me and dig her nails into my skin, and things like that.”

After determining that Arias did not graduate high school, Nurmi asked, “Why didn’t you graduate high school?”

“Well, it’s kind of complicated,” Arias replied, initially hesitating to acknowledge her failure before discussing her excuses for not having earned her diploma.

She explained that she was no longer living at home when she dropped out of high school, and had moved in with her then boyfriend in a town about six miles from Yreka.

“Okay, why did you leave your parents’ home to go live with your boyfriend?”

“I was kind of tired of the discipline, and it was three months until I was eighteen. And one day, they decided to ground me until I was eighteen. I was—I skipped one period in high school because there was a final for my—I was taking a college history class, U.S. history, and I wasn’t—I didn’t feel like I had adequately studied, so I skipped that period to study for the exam and decided I would make it up the next day.

“So, I parked my car in the parking lot at Rite Aid and just cracked open the window and I was studying it for that hour, and my dad—somehow found me. It’s a small town.

“So, I guess the school notified him I wasn’t present for that class, so he found me. And at that point, they didn’t use physical discipline that day, but I was grounded until I was eighteen. I couldn’t fathom being grounded for three months.

“When you were grounded in my house, it meant no phone, no TV, no friends, no social functions of any kind, and you’re in your room, period.

“. . . And I thought, I wasn’t going to wait until I was eighteen to move in with him. It was three months away, and it just made sense to me at that time, as I was seventeen years old, so I just moved out.”

Arias sounded like a rebellious teenager who would do things her way irrespective of the consequences and then complain that it really wasn’t her fault because, as in this case, she needed to cut class to study for a test.

The trial had now become the Jodi Ann Arias life story. As she and Nurmi told it, her mother had been quick to beat her, usually with a spoon, while her father would push her down and slap her in the face. She portrayed her parents harsh in grounding her for cutting class.

The success of the approach being employed by the defense hinged on the jury believing Arias’ words and developing sympathy and positive feelings for her—and forgetting that she had problems telling the truth.

O
nce the defense finished discussing in detail how Jodi Arias was allegedly mistreated by her parents when growing up, they turned their attention to Arias’ relationships with men, starting with her high school boyfriend, Bobby Juarez. It appeared their goal was to expose for the jury what they believed to be a pattern in her relationships, which would begin with a honeymoon period during which Arias supposedly committed herself fully only to be hurt after she discovered that the other person was either unfaithful or did not want to commit to her.

Rather than be grounded for missing school, Arias moved out of her parents’ house and in with Bobby, whom she had met at a carnival when she was fifteen and he was eighteen. She testified that the relationship started off as a friendship, with the two dating on and off over the next three years. Arias said she and Bobby had been back together for about seven months when she moved in with him. At the time, Bobby was living in Montague with an elderly couple he addressed as “Mom” and “Dad,” but Arias believed they were his grandparents.

“I got a job at another restaurant and began working full-time,” she recounted. “. . . To me it made more sense to work so I could support myself and my boyfriend. He didn’t have a job.” This response typified Arias’ style of emphasizing a point by being critical of others.

Arias testified that she believed things were going well in their relationship until she discovered that Bobby was suppos
edly cheating. She described his frequent telephone conversations with a woman he claimed was just a friend. “They had been interested in each other in the past,” she said. “He would talk to her a lot, actually, in my presence. So I figured if he’s doing it right in front of me, there’s nothing going on there.

“So then, one day, he went to the library. That’s where we went for Internet access, and he would e-mail her a lot. And I took—I had to go to work at the Purple Plum. And I dropped him off at his friend’s house. . . . And before going to the Purple Plum, I went back to the library. And I clicked—this is—he had a Hotmail account. This is in 1998. So I clicked the—I don’t know if they had different security things for Hotmail at that point. But I clicked the ‘back’ button to see what was really going on with her, because I had suspicions. And I found a whole bunch of love letters that he was writing her that were all contemporaneous with the time that we were together.

“So I printed them out and I called in sick for work, because I was not well emotionally. And I drove back out to his friend’s house, and I didn’t want to create a scene or drama. So I said, ‘Can I talk to you?’ So we went into the bathroom, and I pulled them out of my pocket and handed them to him, and he opened them up and read them and—he felt kind of shocked.”

This story showed what appeared to be the jealous side of Arias, who would go to any lengths in an effort to confirm her suspicions, including snooping into a library computer to access her boyfriend’s e-mail account.

Arias said she broke up with Bobby after that, but then agreed to get back with him after he promised to break off contact with the other woman, someone we would later learn he had never met in person.

In response to Nurmi’s question as to whether Bobby ever physically abused her, Arias recounted an argument the two had in the fall of 1999, when Bobby came to see her at the home of a friend where she was staying.

“Our argument escalated and he approached me and spun
me around, and he was very much into martial arts. So he had some kind of hold. I guess it’s called a stranglehold. So he started strangling me just for a few seconds and then he let go. I almost passed out. I fell on my knees.”

“. . . I was trying to get to the phone to call 911 and he got my arm in some kind of lock and was putting pressure on my forearm and I thought he might break it because that seemed to be what the goal was. So I managed to grab the phone and I called 911, and he grabbed it out of my hand and hung up.

“And I was crying. He kept telling me to shut up because they were going to call back. So he was right. The phone rang and he answered and he gave the operator an excuse like, he said, ‘My girlfriend was trying to program 911 into the speed dial and accidentally called it.’” Any vestige of truthfulness in Arias’ answer was now shrouded in doubt because 911 operators are trained to ask to speak with the person who called, and not simply accept the word of the boyfriend offering an excuse as to why the emergency number was dialed.

“But did you stay together after that?” Nurmi asked.

“This was really toward the end of our relationship. . . . We didn’t stay together much longer after that.”

Arias’ answer was apparently not the response that Nurmi was hoping to elicit, because he followed up with similar questions.

“Why did you stay together with him after this incident?”

“Well, I don’t know if we were still together,” Arias replied. “But he would still come over to the house where I lived. . . .”

“Why would you hang out with him in that regard?”

“. . . During all the years I’ve known him, that had never happened before. So I just didn’t think it was something that was a pattern of his or that would continue.”

“Did you ever engage in sexual behavior with him after this incident?” Nurmi asked.

“I don’t remember, maybe,” she said tentatively, “. . . maybe once or twice. I don’t remember, honestly.”

“And why was that okay with you after this incident?”

“I still loved him,” Arias answered.

Perhaps this was the answer that Nurmi wanted, because he now left this topic and turned to asking questions about her next boyfriend, Bobby Juarez’s roommate, Matthew McCartney. Bobby and Matt were sharing a studio apartment in Medford, Oregon, about fifty miles north of Yreka, where Arias was a frequent visitor. She said she was still trying to make things work with Bobby when she discovered something about Matt during a visit to Medford that made her take notice. That weekend, Matt had a female visitor.

“And it was a real eye-opener because I saw how Matt was treating her, and he was very chivalrous and very polite, and he was a gentleman, and he just treated her with a lot of respect,” Arias recounted. “And that’s not something I had received, but I had seen it on TV and that kind of thing. So, it was just jarring to see that and then consider my relationship.”

“. . . But you lived with your parents for the first seventeen years or your life, right? Did you not see your father treat your mother in this way?” Nurmi asked, creating an opening for Arias to once again disparage her father, this time claiming that he treated her mother in a degrading manner.

“One I recall specifically is my mother used to be very thin, and I think she is a size 10 now. . . . He used to put up photos of her on the refrigerator when she was thinner. And he would make comments about her weight . . . he would put things like that around the house to remind her that he would prefer her with less weight. . . .”

Although Arias believed that her relationship with Bobby Juarez was no longer going as she hoped and he was indicating a desire to break up, Arias testified she decided to move to Medford, where he was living, ostensibly because there were more job opportunities. Further complicating her move, Bobby would no longer speak to her after an incident where he “came
around the corner and saw us [Arias and Matt] all, like, just hanging out and having fun.”

Jumping from one lover to the next, especially when Matt was Bobby’s roommate, made her seem an opportunist, rather than the victim she was attempting to portray.

When court resumed on Tuesday morning, Arias continued her testimony by describing the initial period of her relationship with Matt McCartney in glowing terms. About five weeks after the two started dating, the couple moved into a small apartment together, with Arias finding a job at Applebee’s and Matt working as a manager at Subway.

“I see that period of my life as probably one of the best times in my life,” Arias recalled. “He treated me very well. He was very kind. He was very respectful. He was very spiritual,” she recalled.

“. . . At the time you met Matt, where were you spiritually?” Nurmi asked. “Was there a particular religion you were a member of? . . .”

“I was not a member of any denomination. I considered myself Christian. I didn’t attend church. And I didn’t obey all the commandments that Christianity espouses.”

“Okay, so when you talk about Matt and the spirituality, did you become more affiliated with his beliefs . . . ?”

“We sort of explored together and opened up to other beliefs. We began taking meditation seminars, kind of New Age–type seminars, but they had their roots in Hinduism and Buddhism, maybe some kind of, like, a more modern version of transcendentalism, things like that. We took these little courses and classes and we would drive to Portland or the Bay Area.”

“Okay. Was that a big part of your relationship?” Nurmi inquired.

“Yes, it was,” she answered, perhaps not realizing that she was describing the identical path she would later take with
Travis, where she fully immersed herself in Mormonism to align herself with him.

“This may go without saying because you had lived together: Was this also a sexual relationship?”

“Yes.”

“Did you love Matt?”

“Very much. Yeah, I was in love with him.”

Arias explained that she and Matt lived together for about five months in Medford before moving to Crater Lake, Oregon, where they found seasonal work and dorm accommodations at the Crater Lake Resort.

“How long in total in terms of relationship were you together with Matt?”

“I think approximately a year and eight months.”

“And in that year and eight months, did he ever hit you?”

“No.”

“Did he ever call you a whore?”

“No.”

“Slut?”

“No.”

“Three-hole wonder?”

“No.”

By this point, Nurmi had asked this same set of questions so often that the words had begun to lose their intrinsic power to shock the listener.

“What brought the end of your relationship with Matt McCartney?” Nurmi continued.

Arias recounted that after their summer at Crater Lake, they rented the same small apartment in Medford, but after a couple of months, they began to argue over little things.

“It wasn’t anything serious, but it wore on our relationship because it made things not enjoyable,” she said, explaining that at one point, the two decided to take a break, with Matt returning to Crater Lake for one season and Arias moving to
Ashland, Oregon, about fifteen miles south of Medford. “We saw each other on weekends. He would come into town in Ashland and stay with me.

“And I remember I was with his dad’s girlfriend . . . and we were trying to download pictures onto his dad’s hard drive, and on the desktop there were some other pictures of this girl. And I didn’t recognize her. But I recognized the setting. And it was inside the lodge at Crater Lake.

“And the date was also current with the season, which would have been 2001 . . . and a few weeks later, I was working at Applebee’s. . . . I was walking past this table and two people said, ‘Hi, Jodi,’ and I stopped, and I didn’t recognize them. And they explained that they worked with Matt at Crater Lake, and they were just in town for their days off. . . . And they said, ‘We took a vote. We think you should know something.’ And they told me he was seeing another girl named Bianca at Crater Lake. . . .” The chance meeting with two of Matt’s Crater Lake coworkers, who were so in tune with democratic principles that they even took a vote before telling her of his relationship with another woman, strained credibility. Arias’ story was especially troublesome because she failed to explain how these strangers would even have recognized her.

“What did you do when you had this information?”

“I was reeling, because, I mean, of all the boyfriends I had, I would have expected him to not be the one that cheated on me. He was very loyal. I trusted him completely, like implicitly. He could have said the sky was falling and I would have believed him. I think I would have just looked out the window to see what it looks like.”

Arias testified that she asked her boss to leave early that night, went home, changed her clothes, and set off for Crater Lake. “I decided I wanted to find out if it was true. So . . . I drove up to Crater Lake to see if I could find out. . . . I didn’t want to continue the relationship if that was the case.”

Arias described her quest to find Bianca’s room, and what she did when Bianca answered the knock at her door. “I said, ‘Hi, are you Bianca?’ and she said, ‘Yeah.’ So she invited me in because she knew who I was. And so we sat down.”

Arias claimed that they had a ninety-minute conversation, during which she confirmed that Bianca and Matt were together.

“Now, in this hour-and-a-half conversation, were you yelling at her?” Nurmi asked.

“No. It was just chitchat, actually. I mean, I was not trying to freak out or get upset, you know, because she had no idea. She was under the impression that he and I were no longer together. I didn’t look at this as her fault.”

“How did it feel when you had this information confirmed?”

“I didn’t really allow myself to have much emotion until I left her presence. And at that point, I allowed myself to cry.”

Arias explained that a confrontation with Matt came soon after, in September 2001. “I went over to his dad’s house. I knew the day he was getting back. And he was on the phone with Bianca when I came over. And he hung up, and he said, ‘I know what you want to talk about.’

“. . . And basically our relationship was over and it was kind of sad,” she said, describing the outcome of their conversation.

Arias testified that she left the Medford area soon after, because there were “too many memories,” but said that she and McCartney remained friends.

Her next stop was the Big Sur–Carmel area to seek employment at the Ventana Inn & Spa, where she met the man who would become her next love interest, Darryl Brewer.

In response to Nurmi’s questions, Arias described her growing feelings for Brewer, whom she said she began dating about a year into her employment at the Ventana Inn.