Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (34 page)

“And I was headed toward the dresser, but then I stopped and I was trying to think of something funny or witty to say, like, do you still need my help or something. And he started grabbing at something on the bed. And I realized they were papers and as he was grabbing the papers, one kind of went sailing off the bed and it fell in that chaotic pattern that paper falls and it landed faceup near my feet. And it was a photograph.”

“What was in the photograph? What was the photograph of?” asked Nurmi.

“It was a picture of a little boy.”

“Could you guess how old the little boy was?”

“Five-ish—five, six,” Arias alleged. “I’m not a good judge of age.”

Arias’ testimony about this incident actually occuring was contradicted by what she had previously written in her journal, seized by police from her grandparents’ Yreka home on the day she was arrested.

In the entry for January 20, 2008, Arias acknowledges her failure to attend a friend’s baptism because she and Travis were exploring their “naughty fantasies” that day. She does not write again in her journal until January 24, 2008: “I haven’t written because there has been nothing noteworthy to report (for January 21, 22, 23).” The three-day gap where she found “nothing noteworthy to report” happens to include the day she claims to have seen Travis masturbating to the picture of the little boy.

“Was the little boy dressed?” Nurmi inquired without addressing the journal entries during the direct examination.

“He was dressed in underwear, like briefs,” Arias said.

She recalled being frozen for a moment, not sure how to react. “It kind of seemed like one of those dreams where some
thing is really off, but you just can’t figure it out. . . . And I turned to go and he called my name, and I just ran. . . .”

Instead of calling the police or speaking with a Mormon bishop after leaving the house, she decided to return that same day, whereupon she said the two engaged in anal sex.

Nurmi asked, “Why, Jodi, were you willing to submit yourself to sexual interaction with Mr. Alexander having seen and having heard everything you saw and heard that day?”

“It’s hard to describe because it’s very embarrassing. But he seemed very ashamed with himself. And he, like—he didn’t want to be that way. It was something he struggled with. And that’s not who he wanted to be. It’s not who he wanted to be in the future. And he was trying to deal with it.

“And when he had sex with women, he felt like a normal heterosexual man. And that’s what he wanted to be. And that’s what he said he was. And that’s what I believed him to be. And so when he had sex with women, he felt more normal and it was preferable to his other deviant urges.”

“So were you doing this, having sex, to help him?”

“Yes, you could say that,” Arias answered. According to her testimony, she also helped by giving him some pamphlets that she found at the mall that she believed could be useful.

Arias claimed that the following day, January 22, Travis was physically abusive toward her, although according to her journal “nothing noteworthy” occurred that day. She testified that on that day she was preparing to leave on a trip to California to see friends. “We were talking in his bedroom and he told me he needed to borrow, I think it was two hundred dollars. But I didn’t have it. I’d just lent him six hundred and ninety-nine dollars and—like a few days prior. And I had just enough money to get—to pay for the gas on my trip, maybe some food, and get back.

“. . . I didn’t really snap at him because he had reacted very badly in the past when I snapped at him. But I did say—I said, I lent you seven hundred dollars . . . and when I said that, he
got angry and he crossed the room and he started shaking me. He said, ‘I’m fucking sick of you.’ And he’s screaming real loud and some spit got in my face . . . and he body-slammed me on the floor at the foot of the bed.

“. . . It didn’t hurt, but it startled me . . . and I kind of let out an unexpected sound, I guess it could be best described as a yelp . . . and I think he misinterpreted because he said, ‘Don’t act like it hurts.’ He called me a bitch. He kicked me in the ribs. And that hurt for real. But he kicked me and I put my hand out to block his foot and it clipped my hand and hit my finger.” Arias described the ring finger on her left hand as being swollen and likely broken, as she held it up for the jury to see that it was bent at an angle. However, she admitted that she didn’t seek medical attention or call the police in response to this supposed injury.

Arias also claimed later in her testimony that in April, just days before she was set to move to Yreka, Travis “just flipped his lid and blew up. And he threw me on the ground and got on top of me and started choking me.”

Arias went on, “He squeezed my neck and I couldn’t breathe—everything turned gray really fast and then went black. . . . I didn’t have time to think, oh, my God, he’s going to kill me. I just—the only thought I could think is, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, like I didn’t have any air.”

When court resumed on February 12, Arias’ fifth day of testimony, Nurmi introduced into evidence the sexually explicit conversation Arias had recorded on May 10, 2008. Arias explained that she made the recording while she was at her grandparents’ house in Yreka, where she was living at the time. She also claimed that she made the recording at Travis’ request, although this request is not on the recording.

To properly prepare those in the gallery, Judge Stephens asked that they have “no reaction whatsoever to anything that is played for this jury,” and if they believed they could not do so, they were asked to leave the courtroom. I had already
played the audio recording for Travis Alexander’s family and they had determined that they wanted to be in court while it was played.

Arias was on the witness stand when Nurmi began to play the approximately forty-five-minute recording over the courtroom loudspeakers, and an awkward placidity fell over the courtroom. The first voice we heard was Arias’, sounding a lot more animated and playful than she had throughout her testimony.

“Okay, what did you say, I’m sorry,” Arias says, opening the conversation, to which Travis responds in a groggy voice, indicative of just being awakened from sleep, “I said, why don’t we just talk for a little bit about happy things and get normalized for a moment and then we’ll see where that takes us.”

Arias breaks into a giggle. “We’ll see where it takes us. I like that . . .”

The conversation started off slowly, with the two discussing their individual travel plans for the coming month, postings on the Internet made by mutual acquaintances that they believe were inappropriate, and Travis’ intention of coming to see her before he takes his trip to Cancún with Mimi.

Arias steers the conversation to the sexual adventures they’ve enjoyed in the past: “There have been a few times where I’ve been bold enough to just pull you onto the bed and start . . . and . . . oh my gosh, remember that time when I came to visit you when I was still living in California and I fell asleep on your chair next to your bed and you woke me up by pulling my pants off and totally licking my pussy.”

“. . . Yeah, ah, you’ve got to admit, though, there’s not many guys like that would do that just for fun . . . wake you up with a . . .” Travis replies, now clearly more engaged. “. . . I’m going to tie you to a tree and put it in your ass all the way.”

Arias responds with a beguiling laugh and says, “Oh my gosh. That is so debasing. I like it.”

Spectators in the gallery exchanged awkward glances, and
it seemed like some were biting back laughter as the recording progressed, with the conversation becoming more graphic and the two growing even more uninhibited.

“. . . Before I met you, I never jacked off. Once I started . . . once, ah . . . once we started meeting, I don’t know, it was once a month, once every two weeks, like since you’ve left I jack off every day, sometimes two, three times a day,” we hear Travis tell Arias, who responds with an invitation.

“. . . I wish you were here. If you were here, my grandparents are asleep. I’d let you right in my bedroom. We would shut and lock the door and we’d just have a big fuck fest. We’d go at it all night.” Arias continued in a whisper, “You make me feel horny. I seriously think about having sex with you every day, several times a day. I think of how it feels to have your cock deep inside me. I remember it . . . and I want it again.”

“Is it wrong that I am glad we started fucking?” Travis asked.

“Well, if it’s wrong, then I don’t want to be right,” Arias replies.

At this point it is clear that Arias is masturbating and approaching an orgasm, becoming breathless as she instructs Travis, “Don’t come yet, okay, cause then I’ll come two times and you can come the second time.”

As the impending orgasm approaches, her whispering rises into what seems like an interminable shriek as Travis quietly listens. Once she is done, he compliments her. “Now that was hot. Naturally the way you . . . the way you moaned there, it sounds like . . . you’re a twelve-year-old girl having her first orgasm. It is so hot.”

“. . . Sounds like what?”

“A twelve-year-old girl having her first orgasm,” Travis repeats, at which Arias laughs gleefully. Even she sounds as if she understands that this is a comment made in the heat of the moment, not to be taken seriously.

Clearly unaffected by the comment, Arias continues the
sexual tenor of the conversation, coaxing him on by saying, “Yeah, I want you. I like the way your dick feels against me. It’s one thing that you’re smooth everywhere, and of course your dick is way smooth. When I have your dick in my mouth, I like putting my lips all over it. I really, really, really want to suck your dick right now, so bad,” she says in a sultry voice, and the two gradually reach their orgasm at the same time, with Arias screeching so loudly that she drowns out Travis’ moans.

As much as it seems like the recording should end, the sexual dialogue continues. Travis discloses that Arias is the one who introduced him to using K-Y personal lubricant. “Oh . . . you introduced me to K-Y, you know that?”

“. . . Yeah,” Arias responds. “And K-Y is made for that, so it’s good for you.”

Even though in her earlier testimony Arias had painted their time in Ehrenberg as less romantic than she had hoped, on the recording, she romanticizes the moments they had shared there.

“Remember the first time you and I grinded, ah, um, at Ehrenberg and we both . . . like I ended up just coming and you’re like ‘wow.’ . . . I came, you came at the same time, I looked around, there’s jizz all over. It was so hot,” she said with a giggle. “We came together. That was so cool.”

At the end of the recording, Judge Stephens called a recess, instructing all parties to be back in the courtroom by 2:50
P.M
. When proceedings resumed, Nurmi questioned Arias in detail about what jurors had just heard in the recording. His examination paid particular attention to Travis’ comment that Arias’ orgasm sounded like that of a twelve-year-old girl reaching climax for the first time.

“Let me ask you this,” Nurmi posed. “When you recorded this tape and you’re living in Yreka in May of 2008, were you twelve?”

“No,” Arias replied.

“Was this your first orgasm?”

“No,” she again answered, in what seemed an admission that she had indeed climaxed during their phone conversation.

But later in the redirect examination, when Nurmi asked her if the orgasms heard on the tape were real, she said no, claiming she was only pretending to climax. “I was faking it because I can’t—well, when I’m on the phone—when I do something like that, like, masturbating requires both hands.”

Arias continued her attack on Travis’ character from the witness stand by alleging that he had once told her he wanted her to dress up in a schoolgirl’s outfit and wear her hair in braids to act out one of his fantasies, reminiscent of how she willingly posed during their last sexual encounter memorialized in the photographs taken on June 4, 2008.

T
he lurid details of Arias’ and Travis’ sex life had all but dominated Arias’ testimony during her six days on the witness stand, with Travis’ murder feeling more like an afterthought than the reason we were here in the courtroom. Questions about her trip to Mesa finally surfaced on February 19, toward the end of her direct examination, when Nurmi began asking about Arias’ movements in the days leading up to the murder.

Arias denied staging the burglary at her grandparents’ home to obtain the .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun she had used to shoot Travis. She also claimed that her decision to rent a car in Redding, instead of Yreka, was based on a good deal she found on the Web.

She recounted her drive south to Santa Cruz, where she met her ex-boyfriend Matt McCartney for an evening of karaoke. After spending the night at Matt’s apartment in Monterey, she made an early-morning visit to Darryl Brewer in Pacific Grove.

“And did you borrow anything from Mr. Brewer while you were there?” Nurmi asked.

“Yes, I borrowed his gas cans.”

“And how many did you borrow from him?”

“Two.”

“Why did you borrow two gas cans from Darryl Brewer?”

“So that I could—well, gas in Yreka at that time was $4.78 a gallon for regular unleaded. This was 2008. It was very expensive. All gas in California is a little more expensive because
they have stricter regulations. So going to Nevada and Utah would have been cheaper, so I wanted to fill up.”

With one question and a single answer, the issue of the gas cans had seemingly been laid to rest. Arias’ explanation for borrowing the gas containers appeared plausible, especially since she even knew the price per gallon being charged in California for unleaded gas back in 2008. Her carefully crafted response failed to mention the third gas can she had purchased in Salinas, which cost $12.96, plus tax, negating any possible savings from the purchase of gasoline at the cheaper price in Nevada and Utah.

“You didn’t tell him ‘keep this a secret’?” Nurmi asked of Arias’ conversation with Brewer that day.

“No.”

“Okay. And when you were having breakfast with Darryl and his son, do you remember telling Darryl that you were going to Mesa?”

Nurmi’s question failed to address that the conversation Arias had with Brewer about going to Mesa had not occurred that morning at breakfast, but during a telephone conversation the two had in late May, when she first asked about borrowing the gas cans.

“I had no plans to go to Mesa at that point, so, no I wouldn’t have told him that,” she responded.

Arias claimed she next went to Salinas to get a manicure, so that her nails “looked good” for Ryan Burns. In Pasadena, she stopped at Starbucks, and then at ARCO, “because they had cheaper gas,” where Arias claimed she “filled up the tank and I filled up the gas cans, too.”

Apparently Arias was not mindful of her previous answer about needing to fill the gas cans in Utah and Nevada, as she was now admitting that she filled them in California, where the gas was more expensive.

“Okay. So at this point in time, you have your car full of
gas, you have your gas cans full of gas, right? . . . And the plan is to go to Utah, right?”

“Yes,” Arias said, recounting that she then called Ryan Burns to tell him she was on her way.

“. . . Did you go to Utah directly after you spoke to Ryan Burns?” Nurmi asked.

“No . . . I had been talking to Travis intermittently throughout that time, and the weeks prior when he discovered that I was going to Utah, he started saying, ‘Why are you going to Utah?’ . . .

“On the very last time I called Travis, it was kind of like—I don’t know how to describe it. He had been—he had been very sweet. He had been guilting me, kind of making me feel that I was taking this big trip and that I wasn’t going to see him. . . . And since I was driving south, he wanted me to come to Mesa.

“I told him no the first few times. During one conversation, he became angry. During the others, [he] stayed calm; he has this way of, like, talking in this really sweet voice . . . and making me feel guilty, and he sounded so very sweet, and so it was like, when I called him one more time, it was just like, All right, I’m going, so I went.”

“. . . Okay. When you arrived at Mr. Alexander’s house, did you have a gun with you?” Nurmi asked.

“No,” she answered, although she had told Detective Flores on June 10, 2008, that Travis did not have a gun at his house and had only his two fists for protection.

“Did you have a knife with you?”

“No.”

Arias claimed she entered the house through a side gate, because she knew that Travis locked the front door at night.

“Why wouldn’t you just knock on the front door?” Nurmi inquired.

“I had always just come and gone without knocking. . . . It was just easier to walk in.”

Arias said once inside the house, she found Travis in his office on the first floor, with his dog Napoleon sitting on the floor next to him. “He had his back to me and he was on his laptop, watching music videos or something on YouTube.” He didn’t see her initially, she said, so she stood in the doorway looking at him until Napoleon’s bark alerted him to her presence. “That’s when Travis turned around and got up out of his chair and came over and greeted me. . . . He had a big smile on his face and he kissed me on the lips.”

Arias said the two continued watching the videos for a bit before going into the kitchen, where he implied he wanted to have sex, but she was too tired from the drive, so they went up to his bedroom where they slept, with Arias waking at noon and Travis sleeping until 1:00
P.M
.

Nurmi next asked Arias to describe their sexual interactions that afternoon, which Arias claimed involved Travis binding her wrists as part of their foreplay, indicating that Travis then used a knife to cut the ropes in order to free her hands. This was an obvious attempt to account for the knife she would later use to stab him.

Her recollection also included their picture-taking session and “regular vanilla” sex. Jurors again viewed the photographs of Arias posing naked on Travis’ bed, her hair in braids, with Nurmi directing their attention to Arias’ shaved pubic region in the photograph.

“Travis didn’t like hair,” she said. She also talked about a sex video that she claimed the two recorded on his Sanyo camera that they deleted after viewing it together.

Arias claimed that after the sex, she took a shower and got ready to “hit the road,” adding that she put the sheets from Travis’ bed in the washing machine, as they typically did each time the two had sex.

Even though her car was packed and she was ready to depart Mesa at 2:00
P.M
., Arias said she stayed around for a bit to view the CDs containing photographs taken during their trips
that she made for Travis that had been “hanging around” in her briefcase “for months.”

She described Travis growing angry when the CDs wouldn’t play on his computer, saying that when they finally did, he noticed that they were scratched and blamed her for holding on to them for too long. To blow off steam, she said Travis threw one of the CDs at the wall, causing it to ricochet and land on the desk, and then roll off onto her head before ending up on the carpet.

According to Arias, she was now worried, “because I feel like the trip had gone pretty well at that point, now he’s going to get angry or I’ve done something stupid again, and . . . the trip is going to get ruined. . . .”

Arias alleged that in his anger, Travis grabbed her by the arm, spun her around, bent her over the desk, pulled down her pants, and pressed his groin against her buttock.

“Based on that movement, did you believe that he wanted to have sex with you again?”

“Yes, I could feel that he had an erection.”

“Okay. And at that point in time, did you want to have sex with Mr. Alexander?”

“Well, yeah, actually I did because it was better than him getting mad. . . . I didn’t want his anger to escalate to the levels that it had in the past. . . .”

Nurmi inquired, “So, your mind-set on June 4, 2008, was ‘anything to avoid a fight,’ is that what you are telling us?”

“Yes, in that moment, yes,” Arias said, claiming Travis was now a lot calmer.

“Did you leave then?” Nurmi asked.

“No . . . We decided to go upstairs and take pictures, more pictures.”

According to Arias, this impromptu picture-taking session was at her insistence after she convinced Travis that the photographs would show off his recent weight loss. “. . . The Cancún trip was announced in 2007, I think right before I broke up
with him. And so he assumed he was going to win the trip and so he was getting into shape. . . . The prior summer he was almost 240, and so he had lost a lot of weight and he was down to, like, a little over two hundred. . . . His goal was to have a six-pack. . . . He wasn’t quite there yet, but he was close . . . and when he got to that point, he wanted photos taken of what he had accomplished.”

Court ended that afternoon with Arias testifying that she had wanted their visit to end on a positive note, and since the pictures on the CDs were ruined, she wanted to do something else to make him happy.

Arias’ testimony was in its eighth day when she returned to court on February 20, to finally testify to Travis’ killing.

Nurmi opened his examination by asking Arias about the photo shoot she and Travis had decided to conduct in the late afternoon of June 4.

“And this was to take place in the bathroom?”

“Yes.”

“And why was the shower area selected?”

“It was selected for the water. We were going to go for a certain effect with the pictures and the water,” Arias said.

“. . . Tell us what happens once he gets in the shower.”

“I was taking pictures of him. We were trying out different poses . . . and at one point he was sitting and I was taking pictures. I was probably a few feet from the shower so that the water didn’t get on the camera. And . . . I was showing him the photos, and we were deleting some. And at one point, when I went to delete the photo, as I moved the camera it slipped out of my hand . . . like, it bounced, and I almost caught it. But I didn’t catch it, and it landed on the mat and then it rolled onto the tile.”

“Where were you when this took place, relative to the shower?”

“I was crouched by the shower. I might have been on the mat, or the edge of the mat. . . . At that point, Travis flipped
out again. And he stood up and he stepped out of the shower and he picked me up. I was crouching, but he lifted me up. As he was screaming that I was a stupid idiot. And he body-slammed me again on the tile.

“He told me that a five-year-old can hold a camera better than I can—and when I hit the tile, he was—I rolled over on the side and started running down the hallway. And I don’t know why I didn’t run out of the room. I ran to the closet because the door was open, was my thought.

“. . . I could hear his footsteps chasing me . . . so I ran into the closet and I slammed the door. And I intended to run through the opposite end of the door because it had an exit. And as soon as I got in there and began to run, I remembered where he kept the gun. So I grabbed it.

“I jumped up on the shelf. He kept it on the very top. I grabbed it and I ran out the other door as he was opening the door. And he ran chasing me and I turned around and pointed it at him so that he would stop chasing me.

“. . . We were in the middle of the bathroom. I pointed it at him with both of my hands. I thought that would stop him. . . . He got like a linebacker. He got kind of low and grabbed my waist. But, before he did that, as he was lunging at me, the gun went off.”

Arias claimed she didn’t mean to shoot Travis. “I didn’t even think I was holding the trigger. I just was pointing it at him and I didn’t even know that I shot him. It just went off. And he was—he lunged at me and we fell really hard against the tile toward the other wall . . . so at this point, I didn’t even know if he had been shot. . . . We were struggling and wrestling . . . and he was getting on top of me . . . he’s grabbing at my clothes and I got up. And he’s just screaming angry. And after I broke away from him, he said, ‘Fucking kill you, bitch.’”

Although to this point, she had been able to recall even the minutest details of her relationship with Travis, her memory of the events in the bathroom as she fought for her life became
fuzzy. “There’s a lot of that day that I don’t remember,” she said. “There are a lot of gaps.”

“Okay,” Nurmi said, seemingly working to jar her memory. “. . . Once you broke away from him, what do you remember?”

“Almost nothing for a long time. . . . There’s like a huge gap. . . . And the most clear memory I have at that point is driving in the desert. . . .”

“Let me ask you this, do you remember stabbing Mr. Alexander?”

“I have no memory of stabbing him.”

“Do you remember . . . dragging him across the floor?”

“No, I just remember trying to get away from him.”

“Do you remember placing him in the shower?”

“I’m sorry. That’s no. . . . I have a vague memory of putting the knife in the dishwasher. . . .”

“What else do you remember?” Nurmi asked.

“Not much,” Arias stated flatly, claiming that the next thing she remembered was driving west. “Because I remember the sun was in my eyes for a while. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t have GPS anymore. . . . I hit a lot of stoplights. And then eventually, I was in the desert.”

Arias testified that she did recall taking the gun with her when she left Travis’ house that day. “I remember throwing it . . . in the desert.”

“. . . Explain to us if you believed that Mr. Alexander was alive or dead? . . .” Nurmi asked.

“I didn’t know. . . . But I didn’t think he was . . . I thought he was not alive at that point.”

As part of her direct examination, Arias detailed her movements in the hours, days, weeks, and months after the killing, including the many lies she’d told along the way, something Nurmi sought to address in his final questions to her on the stand.

“. . . Since Mr. Alexander’s death was discovered, you told
one version of events in which you weren’t there and another version of events where intruders came into the home, killed Mr. Alexander, and you escaped. Why did you then now decide to tell us what really happened?