Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (17 page)

According to Jodi, the things Travis said to her got her thinking. He was a motivational speaker, so he had a talent for making people look at their lives and begin to implement positive changes. He advised Jodi not to settle for mediocrity, and was most likely referring to her dead-end relationship with Darryl. He was a firm believer in going after what you wanted and making things happen, and he wholeheartedly encouraged Jodi to do the same. He also jokingly teased that dating a man of Darryl’s age was akin to dating her grandfather. She deserved better. Travis also talked about how important marriage and family were, and he expressed an interest in her. Jodi may have even thought,
Travis is it, he will ask me to marry him,
although he never expressed himself like that.

The phone calls quickly became more, and within days Travis invited Jodi to join him at Chris and Sky Hughes’s home in Murrieta, California, the very first weekend after they had met. Jodi didn’t hesitate in accepting and was so delighted with the budding relationship that she took the bold step of ending her relationship with Darryl. Just four days after returning home from the convention, she told Darryl, the man she’d been dating for four years, that it was over. It appeared Jodi had her sights set on marrying Travis with no more encouragement than his weekend invitation.

Jodi sat Darryl down at the kitchen table and told him their relationship was going nowhere. She knew he didn’t want to get married, and she no longer wanted to have sex, as she was saving herself for her future husband. What she didn’t say was that she also wanted to be free to pursue her interest in Travis. Despite the abrupt nature of things, the breakup was amicable. They owned the house together, and they agreed they could continue sharing it for the time being, but they would sleep in separate bedrooms.

Her obligation to Darryl removed, Jodi happily accepted the invitation from Travis to join him for the weekend party at the Hugheses’ house in Murrieta, only an hour and a half from Palm Desert. Chris and Sky Hughes were the “it” couple, the Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt of the local Mormon world. They were tall and attractive, imposing yet charming, and everyone wanted to be in their circle. Jodi arrived in Murrieta hours before Travis showed up, easily fitting in with the crowd. She’d met some of them briefly at the convention and knew Sky from when she borrowed her dress for the PPL banquet dinner.

According to Sky, Jodi behaved quite normally throughout the afternoon. She was dressed conservatively and appeared comfortable socially—shaking hands with everybody she met, carrying on interesting, intelligent conversations, making eye contact with confidence, and impressing everyone present with her friendliness, grace, and charm. Nobody said anything about her being improper or out of place; she was totally normal, another guest at a beautiful weekend get-together.

Travis arrived by 9
P
.
M
. He brought a few G-rated movies with him. Adhering to the Mormon faith, he never dabbled in anything rated R. He even had a filter on his home DVD player that would block any content above a PG rating. He never cursed, but used substitute words that were acceptable replacements, with
Mother-freaker
being a perfect example. Travis’s movies provided the focus for the rest of the evening. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed them, joking, laughing, having good clean fun. When they were over, all the guests went home, except for Jodi and Travis.

That night, Jodi was given her own bedroom by her hosts; however, the details of the night grew fuzzy after that. In Jodi’s version of events, Travis came to see her in her bedroom after everyone else had gone to sleep. It was a rendezvous they had planned earlier in the night, and Jodi was expecting his arrival. In her telling, Travis came on hot and heavy right away, although she admittedly didn’t resist. They were French-kissing and lying side by side on the bed. Travis began to remove her clothes, which Jodi said made her feel apprehensive, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings or spoil the mood, so she didn’t say no. She felt the two had chemistry, and she didn’t want to snuff it out. Jodi recalled that Travis was wearing his temple garments, the Mormon church’s symbolic protection from the evils of the world, under his sweatpants. Before long, the temple garments were discarded in a joint effort, and according to Jodi, Travis then performed oral sex on her. She then reciprocated, with him ejaculating in her mouth. When the two awoke early the next morning, Jodi claimed they were both naked, and that eventually Travis got dressed and left the bedroom.

While no one doubted that Travis went to Jodi’s room that night, the story seemed bizarre to a lot of Travis’s friends. Sky Hughes said it was a lie, and based her opinion on a conversation she had with Travis in the kitchen the following morning. She was in the kitchen when Travis came downstairs with a huge smile on his face and what Sky described as an “I’m cool” walk.

“Oh gosh, what did you do?” Sky asked.

“I left her wanting,” was Travis’s sly response.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sky asked.

“Well,” Travis responded, “I went in there, we were talking and we started kissing and it got a little more heated. And I said, ‘I want you to know that I respect you, and I don’t want you to regret anything and let’s move slowly.’ ”

And then, Travis told Sky, he left the room, which was what he thought was so funny. Sky took that to mean no sexual activity beyond kissing had occurred. Still, while it’s hard to know whether or not Travis’s words to Sky were the whole story, it seemed pretty clear that an intense make-out session had occurred. Others noted that Jodi’s story seemed odd in another respect: the idea that a man would aggressively insist on performing cunnilingus on a woman he’d just met didn’t ring true to many people. Ultimately it was anybody’s guess how far things went, but something had happened, as Travis boasted that Jodi “wanted the T-Dogg.”

As Sky and Travis chatted that Sunday morning, Jodi and Chris eventually joined them in the kitchen. The four were going to go to the LDS church for the Sunday morning service, even though Jodi wasn’t a Mormon. On the way to the service, Travis rode with Jodi in her car, and on the way back Sky rode with them. During the return trip, Sky found a binder of Jodi’s drawings in the backseat. There were drawings of butterflies, and of lots of people. One was of her sister, and another was of Darryl. Travis asked to see the picture, and complimented her talent. The party ended soon after church. Travis walked Jodi to her car, kissed her goodbye, and she drove off for Palm Desert.

T
he following Wednesday, Jodi and Travis met at a Starbucks near her home. Travis was driving back to Mesa from California and wanted to meet Jodi to give her
The Book of Mormon.
He was interested in having her learn about the religion that meant so much to him. Jodi couldn’t invite him to come to her house, because Darryl still lived there, so they agreed to meet at a Starbucks. Over a caffeine-free chai tea, Travis gave her the sacred book, and the two spoke about the Word of Wisdom, Mormon doctrine that bans the consumption of caffeine and alcohol.

According to Jodi, Travis also told her he was horny, and they decided to act on it, driving separately to a local park. There, Travis got into her car and she said she performed oral sex on him. When it was over, Jodi recalled that Travis readjusted the car visor he had pulled down and then put his pants back on. Jodi recalled that he refused to kiss her afterward, saying it was gross. He kissed her on the cheek and left.

Jodi later said she felt “maybe just a little deflated.” She was also a little disappointed in herself, having never been intimate that quickly before. She later said she got a voice mail from Travis, in which he expressed misgivings about the experience.

Travis’s friends believed Jodi twisted her tale to make Travis the sexual aggressor when in reality, they believed, it was actually the other way around. While by all accounts Travis had been a virgin well into his twenties, Jodi had lost her virginity as a teenager and had been sexually active ever since. Josh Denne, a good-looking friend of Travis’s, said he met Jodi around the very time Travis did and couldn’t help but notice she gave off a very sexual vibe. Josh said, “She would just put out that
Look, I’m available . . . how ya doin’? I’m interested
type of energy about her.”

Josh, who was single at the time, said he realized he didn’t ask for Jodi’s number because, while he thought she was attractive, her nonverbal cues made him uncomfortable. “The energy that I got from her, it’s almost like a stripper-type of energy,” Josh recalled. “She had that look like,
Hey . . . you know, I’m willin’ to do whatever.”
Josh said Travis was “a babe in the woods” sexually. He had never been exposed to women who used sex as a tool, so he was likely blind to what Josh was picking up on. On the other hand, Travis was the one who first approached Jodi in the casino, so whatever vibe he was getting from her, he had liked it enough to spend the rest of the weekend with her, and then invite her to the exclusive banquet to show her off to his friends.

Not long after the weekend at the Hugheses’ house, Jodi began getting visits from Mormon missionaries. They came for “discussions,” the Mormon way of introducing potential newcomers to the church, on average twice a week. Jodi and Travis had only met a few weeks earlier, but already Travis wanted her to become a member of the Mormon church, and Jodi was willing. This way they could carry forward with their relationship. Jodi had no objection to the visits from the missionaries; in fact, she enjoyed them.

Meanwhile, Travis and Jodi spoke on the phone for hours every night. The calls now typically occurred after 11
P
.
M
. and sometimes as late as 3
A
.
M
. Jodi described them as long heart-to-heart conversations, during which the two talked about everything from Travis’s dog, Napoleon, to religion to spirituality to her interest in the arts and photography. Jodi felt the two were really connecting.

After a month of telephone talk, the two met again in person. It was October, and the plan was for a romantic interlude in Ehrenberg, Arizona, a spot chosen because it was approximately equidistant between their two houses. Travis had even rented a motel room in town for the rendezvous.

Jodi said they were physical from the moment she walked through the door, that they started passionately kissing, and soon they were both naked on the bed, doing the “Provo push”—the equivalent of grinding, something Mormons aren’t supposed to do. According to Jodi, the rest of the weekend was spent in mutual oral sex, watching television, eating at Sizzler, and going to a movie, far more casual than the romantic kind of tryst she had in mind.

Travis also shared scripture from
The Book of Mormon
with Jodi. She said he taught her about the church’s Law of Chastity: vaginal sex was off-limits, but everything else—oral and anal sex—was okay. Jodi later spelled out what she saw as Travis’s interpretation of the Mormon code, saying, “It seemed like Travis kind of had a Bill Clinton version of sex, where oral and anal sex were also sex to me, but not for him.” Travis’s friends wondered how anyone would be so gullible as to believe that their deeply conservative religion would condone oral and anal sex, especially someone getting regular visits from Mormon missionaries, who were eager to answer every question. In
The Book of Mormon,
it said plain as day, do not “touch the private, sacred parts of another person’s body, with or without clothing” unless you’re married. Travis’s buddies scoffed at the suggestion that their friend, who never so much as cursed, would try to pull that whopper over on a girl he’d just started dating.

According to one of Jodi’s accounts, despite the sex that weekend, she didn’t feel they were very connected with each other. To her, they had seemed to be much more in tune with each other on the phone calls. Other accounts of hers had her having a really glorious time, so a lot of the highlights and low points of the story depended on her frame of mind. However, that being said, their lack of romance left her disappointed. It could have been an eye-opener for her that Travis might not be the prince of her dreams. It could also have been an indication of what was going on in Travis’s head. If Jodi’s description of the weekend is even true, being intimate in a hotel room, whether they were doing nothing or everything, was likely creating a lot of guilt and angst for Travis. Perhaps there was a part of him that was trying to discern if Jodi was the girl for him. The next morning, the two had breakfast at a neighboring truck stop, but there wasn’t a lot of conversation. After the meal, they went their separate ways, she back to Palm Desert, and he to Phoenix for a PPL meeting.

Jodi started to replay the weekend in her mind when she didn’t hear from Travis for two days. She had called and texted him, but he hadn’t responded. She started to feel a little used, so she was happy to get the voice mail from him later that week. His message was kind and reassuring, and everything seemed to get back on track. The two started talking again on the phone every night, usually about both spiritual and sexual things.

According to Jodi, on November 11, 2006, Travis sent her a photo of his erect penis via cell phone. Jodi was in a restaurant when her phone beeped, announcing that a picture had arrived. She had never received a photo on her new phone, and thought Travis must be sending her a file. After seeing the photo, she slammed her phone closed immediately, being in a public place with the waitress approaching. Some people doubt this photo is of Travis’s penis, although the prosecutor did not dispute it later at Jodi’s murder trial. Based on the two fingers in the photo, which don’t resemble Travis’s, some suspect Jodi used a penis photo she already had and claimed it was Travis’s. Jodi explained that the two had been text-flirting for hours before the photos arrived, with each trying to top the last one’s comments.

Two weeks later, on November 26, 2006, Jodi was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She hadn’t been approved for baptism right away, because she was still cohabitating with Darryl Brewer. During her pre-baptism interview, the branch president asked if she was obeying the Law of Chastity. “Based on a technical sense, yes,” she replied. She had been invited to become a member by the missionaries. She found the Mormon acceptance of all faiths in the world extremely appealing and in line with the faith she already had. She loved their strong emphasis on family and marriage. Her only objection was their rule against caffeine, as she typically enjoyed a cup of coffee every morning, but she could live with that.