Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (6 page)

Now that Flores had Jodi admitting she and Travis had been lovers, he was in a better position to get her to reveal other crucial details. “I appreciate it,” he said, using the classic technique of seeming to befriend the person being investigated. The detective moved the conversation along, looking to map out a timeline. “So you moved back to California a couple of months ago.”

Jodi guessed that she had moved back on April 10.

“Did you stop by his house to say goodbye to him?”

“Oh, yes,” Jodi replied. “I was completely moved out of my house, and I stayed at his house for about a week. I practically lived there. I spent the night there several times a week when I lived there. I came over and I cleaned his house a lot. He paid me a little bit to keep his house nice and clean. Sort of like a housekeeper.”

The detective asked if Jodi had ever met any of Travis’s roommates, to which she replied that he’d had several. One guy who had been there moved to Utah, she thought, and one had moved to Phoenix. She said that she and his current roommate Zach, a returned Mormon missionary, had “sort of connected” because they communicated by instant messaging. She claimed not to know if he still lived at the house, and Flores confirmed that he did.

Flores used the opening to expand on the profile of the renter. “What do you think about Zach . . . what was his relationship with your ex-boyfriend?”

“He seemed like a nice guy when I first met him,” Jodi stated. She explained that she had met both Zach and his girlfriend at the house.

With the Mormon religion on the table, Jodi talked about Travis’s position on substances. Mormons don’t drink alcohol and don’t use tobacco, drugs, coffee, or tea, she stated. “He was just super strict on that,” she told Flores, referring to Travis. “He wouldn’t even take Excedrin for headaches because it had caffeine. I’m a little less strict on that . . .”

“There are a lot of Diet Cokes in the fridge,” Flores commented.

“Yeah, they’re not Travis’s,” Jodi responded. “I can guarantee you that. He wouldn’t even touch Coke.”

The conversation returned to contact between Jodi and the victim. “And that was around April that you last saw him, right? You haven’t been back in town since?”

“No, I haven’t at all,” answered Jodi.

“Somebody had mentioned your name, that you had been back in town for like a week, a couple of days.”

Jodi said that she had been planning on going, but hadn’t acted on it, but Flores was on to something. “You haven’t been physically down here since you left?”

“Since I moved, no, I haven’t. I was gonna go this week actually and stay at his house while he was in Cancún, but it’s just not in the budget.”

“Is that something you guys had scheduled?” Flores questioned.

Jodi went on to explain that Travis frequently let his friends stay at his house, and that according to Jodi’s calendar, she was going to stay at Travis’s place the following week. She had emailed him about it, being so last minute. Now that Jodi’s timeline was getting closer to the murder, Flores’s interest increased. “And when was that email sent out?”

“Just a few days ago,” Jodi replied. “I’m in front of the computer, so I can check right now. Let me log in to my account.” In a few moments, she had her answer. “I sent one on June 7. He got a little upset when I told him I wasn’t driving out. He gets upset really easily . . . I don’t know, we kind of . . . guilt each other.”

“So you guys have a decent relationship as friends?”

“We did. We had . . .”

For the first time, Flores let Jodi know her name had come up in the investigation. “Because the people we talked to, they said your relationship was kind of rocky, got a little crazy at times . . .”

“It did. What happened was when I broke up with Travis last year, it was kind of dumb. It was a bunch of drama . . . I had the suspicion that he was cheating on me, so I looked in his phone . . . it all blew up and we realized we couldn’t trust each other. We broke up at that point, but we were still attracted to each other . . . still loved each other. So, it wasn’t the best thing, but we still hung out all the time together. And it didn’t really help either of us to move on.

“I haven’t really dated anyone since. And he told me he hadn’t dated anyone since, but then after that, he had. So, it’s all been kind of weird because we kept our dating life sort of from each other. Like a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. And I figured, ‘Okay, if he didn’t have a girlfriend, then it was okay me coming over.’ And if he didn’t think that I was with anybody, then that’s fine, too. So the less we knew about each other, the better off we were.”

Flores moved the interview from the relationship to the crime scene. “You stayed in the house, knew the surroundings,” he continued. “Can you describe his bedroom bedding and stuff for me?”

“Um, I spent a lot of time in there,” Jodi answered confidently. “I don’t know if it’s Egyptian cotton or what, but it’s really nice.” She went on to describe what should have been a five-thousand-dollar bed, a California-king-sized Intelli-Gel sleigh bed, but Travis had picked it up for really cheap. She was quite familiar with the bedding as well, knowing that his down comforter was encased in a brown-striped duvet cover with a button closure and that the sheets were more of a cotton/linen material in a brown-checked pattern. She described the many times the two had to reposition the comforter inside the duvet cover, grabbing corners and shaking it out to distribute it.

Once those details were established, Flores moved the conversation to people and contacts other than Zach Billings, asking Jodi how she’d heard of Travis’s death and what people around Travis were saying about the death. When Jodi said that she’d heard it was being treated as a “suspicious death,” Flores cut in.

“I can tell you that we’re investigating it as a homicide,” Flores stated. “It’s not a suspicious death anymore. And it’s important to find out why someone would want to do harm to him. What kind of stuff he was involved in . . . or maybe it was as simple as a burglary or an intruder.”

Jodi picked up on how hard it would be to overpower him. “One thing,” she added, “. . . when they said suspicious death, I thought, well he’s trying to shed pounds so he looks good for Cancún, so he looks good in boxers and in a bathing suit, swim trunks or whatever, so I know he takes supplements and he works out really, really hard. It’s a very intense routine . . . he had these heavy dumbbells that he uses . . . he’s so strong, there are a couple of kinds that he uses, we tried to wrestle for fun and he showed me some moves . . . unless there were two people, I don’t see how anyone could have overpowered him.” It wouldn’t be the last time Jodi spoke about it requiring two people to take him down.

“Yeah, he was a pretty good-sized guy,” Flores said, having only seen him dead and crumpled over with little blood left in his veins.

“Close to two hundred pounds,” Jodi stated.

“Why would somebody want to hurt him?” Flores continued. “Money worries? Concerns?”

“He did owe people money, but they were good friends,” she said, before proceeding to launch into a prolonged discussion of Travis’s finances and the fact that Jodi had recently written him a small check toward the BMW he had sold her. Flores let her talk, but sooner or later the conversation would have to shift back to their relationship. Finally he saw an opening.

“We’ve been talking to people . . . don’t want to make you feel bad, but they didn’t have the best things to say about you,” Flores said, putting the rumors about their relationship on the table for the first time.

“Okay.”

“They said that you were either taking advantage of him, or hanging around when you weren’t wanted. They mentioned that sometimes you would end up going into his house. You were in his house when he didn’t want you there, and you were asked to leave, but you would continue to return. There was also some talk about you spying on his email, Facebook accounts, those types of things.”

Jodi had a reasonable defense. “He gave me his Facebook password and his Myspace password. And I gave him my Facebook password and Gmail account password. And we did that a few months ago to reestablish trust between us . . . It just didn’t work, and he got upset and we changed our passwords after that . . .”

“How long ago?”

“Not long ago . . . two weeks ago, maybe? I don’t know about his because I wasn’t going to try to get back into his accounts anymore . . . And as far as ever getting into his emails, that never happened. He would just have his computer on, and he’d leave his Gmail window up, and there were times where I went on his computer to look up other things, and if his Gmail window was open, I would just close it.”

“We are getting a search warrant for his email, but we can tell where those things were accessed from. I just wanna make it clear that if you did access it from somewhere else at a certain time, we’re gonna know.”

Jodi was not intimidated. “I’ll tell you right now that I did,” she said assuredly. “He gave me his passwords . . . but I only accessed Gmail and Myspace because those were the only passwords.”

Jodi had just contradicted herself, because seconds earlier, she had mentioned she also had his Facebook password. Flores pretended to ignore her slipup.

“How long ago?” Flores wanted to know. “When was the last time?”

“Weeks ago. We had a conversation where like, he made it clear he wasn’t comfortable with that anymore. And I changed my Gmail password again, and he saw another guy’s email there and gave me a hard time about it . . . We’re both trying to move on . . .”

“There seems to be a lot of jealousy issues.”

Jodi seemed to know where this was leading, so she went on the offensive. “I think it was jealousy on both parts,” she responded. “For me, it wasn’t so much jealousy as it was, I just wanted him to be honest. And one of the reasons I moved was because we were spending too much time together, we weren’t moving on. I guess I could have dated other people, but our social circles were so small that any time he heard about something . . .”

“Okay. Did you move down here . . . because of him?”

“Yeah, because of him primarily . . . because of Travis.”

“People were saying to call you because you probably know what happened and possibly had something to do with it.” The question came out of the blue.

“Oh gosh, no, I . . . ,” Jodi stammered.

“Yeah, that’s how bad it was getting at the scene. I needed to talk to you to see why they would say something like that, why they would start pointing fingers in your direction.”

“I don’t know, maybe because I’m the ex-girlfriend?” The conversation had clearly taken a turn for the worse, but Jodi tried to face it head-on. “We had a lot of fights.”

“Were there a lot of issues? Obviously, it wasn’t a great relationship.”

“It was a great relationship until we started fighting . . . I had a suspicion . . . that he wasn’t being faithful, and I found a bunch of text messages that were no good. And rather than being an adult about it and confronting him, I kept it in and let it fester, and I was miserable . . . I realized this is no kind of relationship, so it finally all just came out. He was really apologetic, but we both just realized that neither of us could be in an adult relationship. And that was the end of a black year. So at that point we continued to see each other, a long time after that.”

“I’m glad I did get a hold of you,” Flores commented. “It clears up a lot of the concerns that I had. I don’t think it’s what these people thought was going on.”

“I should probably tell you that when Travis got upset, he would send me text messages and things. You’ll probably find Gmail, Facebook, you’re welcome to access all of my accounts.”

“We’re probably going to subpoena all of his Facebook and Gmail and everything to see who he was communicating with. I’m not sure how far back we go, usually six months to a year . . . I hate telling people over the phone, but it is a homicide, it was an angry situation. When we see something like this, we think, these people hated each other. Somebody went in there to hurt him, and they did, and they hurt him really bad.”

CHAPTER 4

JODI’S MEN

J
odi never returned to high school after her junior year. Instead, she took a series of waitressing jobs, and Bobby eventually got a job busing tables. Between them they made enough to make ends meet.

Bobby did not have his own place; he lived with an elderly couple whom he considered his grandparents. The property was in bad shape—cigarette smoke hazing the interior light, linoleum buckling in the kitchen, and an unkempt lawn begging to be mowed. Inside, the house was a complete mess, with stuff hoarded in every corner. Amid that chaos, Bobby had carved out a bedroom of his own, and when Jodi moved in, she shared that space with him.

At first things seemed to go well, until Jodi claimed she discovered that Bobby was being unfaithful. According to Jodi, Bobby was exchanging affectionate emails with another girl, which Jodi admitted she discovered with a little sleuthing on Hotmail. Jodi said the two would go to the library so they could each check their respective personal email accounts. While there, Jodi happened to see an email from another woman in Bobby’s inbox. In an early sign of Jodi’s penchant for espionage, or perhaps fabrication, she said she left the library with Bobby under the guise that she was heading to work, but secretly returned to the library, where she was able to access his account. She then printed the letters at the library and formulated a plan to confront him.