Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (5 page)

As Flores turned the last page in the binder, we pieced together the day’s chronology based on the time stamps. The police now had evidence that she had spent the early afternoon of June 4, enjoying a sexual dalliance with Travis, followed by a photographic session in the shower later in the afternoon after which she killed him.

It was Detective Flores’ and my belief that Arias lured Travis into the shower to entice him into a vulnerable position, naked and defenseless. His shower ended with her stabbing him in the chest, slicing his throat, and shooting him.

Although Arias had denied being in Mesa within the last couple of months, the photographs proved otherwise. Not only could police place her at the crime scene on the day of the murder, they had a virtual flipbook of the crime itself, a series of images that showed how the events actually played out, in the form of time-stamped photographs. Though there
was no photo of Arias’ face, it was obvious that she was the one dragging him back toward the bathroom when the second inadvertent photograph showing her stocking foot and pant leg was snapped.

Based solely on the pictures, I was leaning toward charging Arias with first-degree murder, but I hesitated. While the photos supported our belief that Arias had been with Travis on the afternoon of his killing and provided the story of how his life ended, they still didn’t prove that she hadn’t walked out before Travis was killed.

“How can we be absolutely certain that Arias didn’t leave the house in between the photos time-stamped earlier in the afternoon and when Travis was killed?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Flores answered. “We’ll have to wait for the fingerprint results to come back,” referring to a latent palm print found in blood on the wall in the hallway leading to the bathroom. “I put a rush on the request.”

That meant I’d still have to wait a little longer to make a determination whether to charge her.

As Flores packed up the binder, I found myself thinking over the disturbing implications of what the photos had shown. It now seemed clear that Arias’ apparent cooperation with police was nothing more than a ruse to divert suspicion away from her. Detective Flores smiled wryly as he reminded me of their telephone conversation on June 10, where she had offered to “help” him with the investigation.

She had played the part of the grieving ex-girlfriend well.

T
he police might have had a collection of incriminating photos and an actual timeline of the crime itself, but they were only beginning to build the case against Jodi Arias. While the photographs from the camera were significant—certainly the most significant piece of evidence against her—police still had to proceed cautiously when speaking to Arias, whether it be in person or by telephone. They had to be strategic about what information to share with her.

Arias continued to maintain that the last time she visited Travis Alexander was in April 2008, two months before his murder. Backing up this assertion was a complex yet well-thought-out alibi in which she claimed that on the day of the killing she was traveling to visit a prospective beau in Utah.

In a phone conversation with Detective Flores on June 25, she laid out the details of her supposed alibi, saying that she left Yreka on June 2 and had expected to arrive in the Salt Lake City area on the morning of June 4 for a Pre-Paid Legal conference and to spend some time with a potential love interest. She then detailed a nightlong escapade of driving in the wrong direction on various highways after getting lost. According to her, the errant path taken explained why she arrived a day late, on June 5.

When contacted by police, the boyfriend-in-waiting, a man named Ryan Burns, confirmed that Arias had not shown up in Utah until the fifth day of June, a day later than she had told
him to expect her. He could not account for her whereabouts in the days leading up to June 5.

Arias’ alibi continued to unravel from there.

A fingerprint examiner with the Mesa Police Department confirmed on June 26 that the bloody latent palm print found on the west wall of the bathroom hallway belonged to Arias. The palm print put Arias in the hallway near the area where one of the inadvertent photographs captured the body being dragged. But it only proved that Arias was there at some point. It didn’t tell us when.

The latent print results moved me one step closer to filing criminal charges, but I still wanted to wait for the results of any DNA testing from the scene. Helpful as they are, latent prints are limited in their use because they cannot be dated and examiners are unable to pinpoint the day a print may have been left. They make a strong case as supporting evidence, but taken alone, the palm print couldn’t place Arias at the crime scene while the killing was taking place. Only the DNA results could do that by confirming whether or not Arias had left any blood behind.

A week later, on July 3, the DNA results from the bloody left palm print showed there was a mixture of blood from two individuals—Travis Alexander and Jodi Arias. There were also DNA results from a strand of hair that was found attached to the wall with blood. It, too, was from Jodi Arias. Like latent prints, the hair’s presence was not enough to tell us when it was left at the house or how it ended up becoming stuck in his hallway. Arias had been to the house many times, so the hair could conceivably have been left there and only disturbed and attached to the wall later, during the attack.

The combination of the latent prints, the DNA, and, most importantly, the photos made me feel it was finally appropriate to charge her. The pictures chronicled the couple’s activities during the entire afternoon, starting in the bedroom, followed by Travis taking a shower, and ending with the in
advertent photographs of the body being dragged. This timeline from the camera made it clear that both the palm print and hair were left during the attack as Arias stabbed and shot Travis.

Although I had palm print and DNA results, the importance of the photographs retrieved from the camera was hard to overstate. If Arias had simply taken the camera from the crime scene and disposed of it on the drive to Utah instead of leaving it behind after deleting the incriminating photographs, I might never have charged her with the murder because the remaining evidence may not have been enough to prove her guilty at a trial.

It was hard to understand what caused Arias to put the camera in the washing machine rather than take it with her. The effort she put into cleaning the scene was difficult to reconcile with the apparent carelessness of leaving the camera behind. Perhaps she mistakenly believed that once the photographs were deleted, they could never be recovered. Or maybe she was confident that the deletion of the photos combined with putting the camera through the wash cycle would erase the images on the camera’s memory card. Her reasons for leaving it behind were of little consequence. What was important was that her mistake allowed police to place her at the scene, even though she vehemently denied it.

During the June 25 phone call, Detective Flores had let Arias know that police had found Travis’ camera in the washing machine, but led her to believe that they had been unable to recover any of the photographs on the memory card, telling her the camera was “completely destroyed.”

In response, Arias boasted of being a photographer and claimed that Travis had sought out her advice before purchasing this Sanyo camera. She then offered the detective solace by advising him that he might consider sending the camera to outside data recovery services that had been successful in retrieving data in situations like this where it seemed impossible.

Whatever her motivation in providing the detective this advice, it seemed she had been undermined by her own arrogance and the mistaken belief that because she had put the camera through the wash cycle, the water and bleach would destroy the images, leaving her safe from scrutiny.

Police discovered the remaining part of Arias’ cover up plan in the penumbras of her electronic communications. Within days of the murder she made a cell phone call, sent a text message, and delivered an e-mail to Travis in an attempt to show that she had nothing to do with his death.

Arias left a voice mail on his cell phone around midnight on June 4, 2008, detailing the same story about getting lost on her way to Utah that she would tell Flores after her arrest in Yreka:

Hey, what’s going on? It’s almost midnight, anyway, right about the time you’re starting to gear up. I know Leslie called you, so I already talked to her, so you could call her back if you want. But, it’s not really necessary, um. My phone died, so I wasn’t getting back to anybody, um, and what else? Oh, and I drove one hundred miles in the wrong direction—over a hundred miles, thank you very much. So, yeah, remember New Mexico? It was a lot like that, only you weren’t here to prevent me from going into the three digits, so fun, fun. I’ll tell you about that later. Also we were talking about when, we were talking about your upcoming travels my way. I was looking at the May calendar, duh, so I’m all confused. Um, Heather and I are going to see Othello July 1, and we would love for you to accompany us. Uh, I don’t know when Teen Freedom’s event is though. It’s on “the list.” We could do, we could do Shakespeare, Crater Lake and the Coast, if you can make it. If not, we’ll just do the Coast and Crater Lake. Anyway, let me know and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

Less than two days after she left Travis the voice message on his cell phone, Arias sent him a text message on June 6, 2008, at 9:58
A.M.
, asking about a check in the amount of $200 dated May 25, 2008, she had mailed him as partial payment for the BMW that he had agreed to sell to her:
Hey, I need to know when you’re going to deposit that check,
she wrote.

The following day, June 7, at 10:21:03, Arias sent an e-mail to Travis in which she related her concern at not hearing back from him in response to her phone call and text message:

SUBJECT:

FROM:
“Jodi Arias” [email protected]

DATE:
Sat, 7 Jun 2008 10:21:03

TO:
“Travis Alexander” [email protected]

Hey You . . .

I haven’t heard back from you. I hope you’re not still upset that I didn’t come to see you. I just didn’t have enough time off. It’s okay, sweetie, you’re going to be here in less than two weeks—we’re going to see the sites, check things off, “The List” and all kinds of fun things. Oregon is BEAUTIFUL this time of year. Yaaay!. . . . be happy!

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that I’m thinking about pushing my visit up to next week, but it depends on my budget, so I’m not for sure yet. I know you’ll be in Cancun, but I’ll probably crash at your house in your cozy bed anyway . . . eat some of your oatmeal and frozen dinners, you know, the usual—jk. = ) I know you said the door is always open, but I wanted to give you a head’s up. If for any reason that won’t work, let me know and I’ll make other arrangements. Your home has always been my second home, although it’s a bit more lonely without NAPS around. =/

You’re probably in CA right now, but wherever you are get ahold of me at least before you head to Mexico.

Thanks, hon—Jodi

With the discovery of these communications, the Mesa Police Department had now completed their investigation. The end result showed that Arias had been at Travis’ house on June 4, 2008, and that they shared a sexual interlude hours before she killed him by stabbing him repeatedly, slashing his throat, and shooting him in the face. She had then attempted to cover up the crime by deleting the photos and staging her communications with him posthumously. With these pieces in hand, I decided to seek a charge of first-degree murder.

On July 9, 2008, I presented the case to a Maricopa County Grand Jury, and that same day the grand jury returned a true bill charging Jodi Ann Arias with the first-degree murder of Travis V. Alexander. The proceedings had been conducted in secret, as required by law, so Arias had no idea that she had been charged—she wouldn’t learn of the charge until she was actually arrested. Ironically, the day the grand jury returned the true bill charging her with murder was her birthday. She was turning twenty-eight.

Within days of the indictment, police in Mesa called the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office, one of the law enforcement agencies in Northern California that held jurisdiction over Yreka, where Arias now lived, and asked them to assist in her arrest. Detective Flores called me on July 14 to let me know that he, his sergeant, and another detective were flying to Yreka to arrest Arias and execute a search warrant on her home. He mentioned that they knew she was living in Yreka, but weren’t sure of her exact address.

The Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office attempted to find Arias’ car, a 2004 Infiniti Coupe with a California license plate reading
2ASCEND
. It was registered to her parents’ address on South Oregon Street in Yreka, but it was nowhere to be found. The deputies ran a computer search and learned that the car had been repossessed by Oregon Adjusters at the
request of the lien holder on July 9, 2008, and was in a lot in Medford, Oregon, just across the state border.

With the car a dead end, investigators with the Siskiyou Sheriff’s Office turned to searching the Yreka area. They found Arias was employed at a Mexican restaurant called Casa Ramos in Yreka, but they didn’t find her there. They explored other leads where she could be, eventually locating her around 9
P.M
. on July 14 at the Pine Street home of her maternal grandparents Caroline and Carlton “Sonny” Allen. A surveillance unit was sent to that address to monitor her movements, and as it started getting dark, Arias and her mother were seen talking in an animated fashion while they sat in her mother’s car parked in front of the home. It appeared they were engaged in an emotional conversation, because Arias seemed to be crying. After about an hour, Arias got out of the car and went back inside as her mother drove off.

The surveillance team continued their watch rather than attempt a nighttime arrest of Arias. All arrests carry an inherent danger of injury to police, which may include being killed, a risk that increases once it is dark. The better course is to proceed with caution, preferably in the daylight hours when the suspect’s movements can be best observed.

From their vantage point in the street, the surveillance team was able to see inside the house through the windows, where they observed Arias moving around in a northwest bedroom and it appeared to them she was packing for a trip. They ended the surveillance for the night after the lights in the house went off around midnight.

When the officers returned the next morning, July 15, they noticed that a white Chevy Cobalt rental car was now parked in front of the house. Several packing boxes were in the backseat, some with “Jodi” written on them in black marker. Fearing that Arias might leave town, police decided they needed to move quickly, and came up with a plan to arrest her. An officer from the Yreka Police Department, who was also assisting in
the investigation, went up to the door under the guise that he was following up on an open burglary report that had been filed by Arias’ maternal grandfather almost two months earlier on Wednesday, May 28, 2008.

In response to a call from Arias’ grandfather phoning to report a burglary, Yreka police had responded to the residence around 3:30
P.M
. that May afternoon. When officers arrived, they learned the elderly couple had been out for much of the day and had returned home some time around 3:00
P.M.
to find that someone had broken into their house by forcing open a side door. That exterior door led to an enclosed patio or porch area, which, in turn, led to the kitchen. They mentioned that their granddaughter Jodi was still at home when they left at approximately 10:00 that morning.

Arias’ grandmother Caroline told police she had already called Jodi to inform her of the “break-in,” and Arias showed up at the house shortly thereafter, within fifteen minutes. Arias told police that she left home earlier that day at approximately 1:00
P.M
. She also said that the doors and windows were locked before she stepped out.

The investigation by police cast doubt on the legitimacy of the burglary. Investigators found it unusual that only one item was taken from each of the house’s four rooms. A CD player with cassette and radio was missing from the grandparents’ bedroom. Also taken was a DVD player that had been sitting on top of the entertainment center in the living room. Arias indicated that $30 had been stolen from her room, a $20 bill and a $10 bill, both of which had been lying on top of the dresser.