Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story

• Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story
  
• Copyright
  
• Acknowledgments
  
• Foreword
  
• Chapter 1 The Killing
  
• Chapter 2 Jodi and Travis
  
• Chapter 3 The Loves of Jodi’s Life
  
• Chapter 4 ‘I’m Travis Alexander’
  
• Chapter 5 The Mormon Courtship
  
• Chapter 6 Lighting the Fuse
  
• Chapter 7 The Breakup: Jodi Unravels
  
• Chapter 8 A New Beginning
  
• Chapter 9 Bubble Baths, Porn and Phone Sex
  
• Chapter 10 The Road Trip
  
• Chapter 11 ‘Her Name Is Jodi’
  
• Chapter 12 The Investigation
  
• Chapter 13 ‘I Don’t Even Hurt Spiders’
  
• Chapter 14 ‘No Jury Is Going To Convict Me’
  
• Chapter 15 Travis Alexander: In Memoriam
  
• Chapter 16 ‘The Person Who Done it … Sits in Court’
  
• Chapter 17 #Jodiarias
  
• Chapter 18 The Bulldog
  
• Chapter 19 The Prosecution
  
• Chapter 20 The Body
  
• Chapter 21 Jodi Takes the Stand
  
• Chapter 22 The Jury Has Reached a Verdict
  
• About the Authors
  

Killer Girlfriend
The Jodi Arias Story

By
Brian Skoloff
and
Josh Hoffner

Copyright© 2013 Brian Skoloff and Josh Hoffner All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-939116-38-3

For additional information contact:
www.killer-girlfriend.com

bskoloff@gmail

[email protected]

Published by Waterfront Digital Press
WatersideProductions.com

2055 Oxford Avenue

Cardiff, CA 92007

Acknowledgements

This book came together in short order, and we believe it provides a gripping and entertaining comprehensive account of the entire Jodi Arias and Travis Alexander saga. We hoped to not only provide readers with a full account of the case, from the killing to the verdict, but to delve deeper into the lives of both Jodi and Travis before they met each other and embarked on a tragic journey.

We’d like to thank our editors, Katie Oyan and Anna Jo Bratton, for their tireless efforts aimed at making sure the book offered a true and factual account of the case, and did so in a way that flowed from start to finish.

We’d also like to thank San Francisco-area criminal defense attorney Michael Cardoza for his never-ending encouragement throughout this project and Los Angeles-area criminal defense lawyer Mark Geragos for providing insightful offerings on the legal system. Phoenix criminal defense lawyer Julio Laboy also contributed a great deal of insight for the book.

Wild About Trial founder Alison Triessl wrote the foreword that put this book into the context of the social media environment that helped make the case such a national sensation, and Wild About Trial reporter and digital artist Michael Williams contributed incredible work on the book’s cover and website.

We offer a big thanks to Waterfront Digital Publishing and Vook, along with our agents, Bill Gladstone and Jack Jennings, for their constant support and encouragement.

And lastly, we’d like to thank our managers at The Associated Press for affording us the opportunity to pursue this project, and the entire company for giving us a platform to tell this story and so many others over the years.

Brian Skoloff and Josh Hoffner

Foreword

This country has watched its share of mesmerizing criminal trials over the past 20 years.

Much of the media attention began with O.J. Simpson and his ensuing case dubbed the “Trial of the Century.”

The immense public interest only continued with the likes of Scott Peterson, Conrad Murray, Robert Blake, Phil Spector, Casey Anthony, Drew Peterson and a handful of others.

But nobody could have foreseen the impact that an unknown Northern California waitress would have on changing the media’s approach to following criminal trials. This book is the story of Jodi Arias and the trial that captivated a nation as it became a cable TV news sensation and lit up the world of social media like no other before.

Over the past year, my company, Wild About Trial, has scoured the country looking for the most interesting criminal trials, often relying on the steady stream of content from The Associated Press in populating our site.

We are a website and mobile app designed to provide live streaming of trials accompanied by a complete interactive experience including live tweeting from inside the courtroom, legal analysis from our staff of attorneys, official court documents, and community forums.

From day one of the Jodi Arias trial and continuing on through the start of deliberations, we saw a dynamic shift in how viewers consumed every facet of the case.

In this modern era of instantaneous news, the public demanded up-to-the-second updates on every element of the trial. They read stories from the AP and other news organizations, but they also wanted to watch it live, in real time, and wanted to peek behind the curtain. So they went to the only logical place today’s public goes to find immediate information: Twitter.

An entire interactive community developed around the Jodi Arias trial.

Wild About Trial placed a reporter in the courtroom live tweeting every update on the case and answering viewer questions, providing the site’s followers with the next best thing to being inside the courtroom itself.

As the online conversation developed, many viewers began to feel left behind if they missed even a single day. The Jodi Arias trial became much more than water cooler talk. It became a must-watch event _ and people were watching it everywhere, on their home or work computers and even on their mobile devices so they never had to miss a moment.

The authors of this book are veteran Associated Press journalists who have each spent more than a decade covering the nation’s most newsworthy stories from the 9-11 terrorist attacks to Hurricane Katrina, the Fort Hood shootings, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Colorado movie theater massacre and the Scott Peterson murder trial, just to name a few.

They are able to bring this wealth of experience into their narrative to provide a complete account of the facts in this sensational trial, as well as provide a greater context to understand why the story of a small-town woman accused of murder captivated so many.

This book provides the first comprehensive account of the case from the day Jodi and Travis Alexander met to the killing, Jodi’s arrest, her ensuing trial and finally, the verdict, written by a journalist who sat in the courtroom throughout every twist and turn of the four-month trial, along with his veteran AP editor. It is a gripping page-turner that covers the entirety of the Jodi Arias saga, perfect for the most avid Jodi Arias trial-watcher or even those just trying to find out what all the fuss is about.

Alison Triessl

Wild About Trial, Founder; co-founder and CEO of the Pasadena Recovery Center; Attorney.

Chapter 1

The Killing

“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” —William Congreve

Travis couldn’t help himself. Jodi was every man’s dream. The sex was fantastic. She was up for anything, you name it. The petite, brown-haired — sometimes blonde — seductive 27-year-old was a pleaser, willing to satisfy Travis’ every kinky desire.

On this day in June 2008, the 30-year-old Travis was ready for more. He was preparing to head off on a trip to Cancun with a devoutly Mormon woman who made it crystal clear she wasn’t interested in anything beyond a platonic relationship.

But Travis had Jodi. And despite wanting to marry a good woman of faith, he had carnal desires that deeply conflicted with the man he presented himself to be publicly and the private lust he harbored behind closed doors.

Jodi served a purpose. She was never Mrs. Right, just Miss Right Now as Travis fulfilled his sexual needs before hopefully meeting The One.

This never sat well with Jodi.

She arrived at about 4 a.m. from California during what was supposed to be a road trip to see another man in Utah. Arizona was hundreds of miles off her course, but she couldn’t resist Travis’ charm and her overwhelming desire to please him. She was blinded by her love for the handsome, confident and outgoing professional who gave rousing motivational speeches to cheering colleagues at conferences across the country. His smile lit up the room and melted her heart. It was never clear whether Travis had invited Jodi to come to see him on that day. Authorities contend he had not, but Jodi insisted he begged her to come.

The two crawled into his king-size bed together. When they awoke in the afternoon at about 1 p.m. in Travis’s tidy four-bedroom home in Mesa outside Phoenix, the day began like so many others with the pair, naked and sexual.

But according to police, that’s not all Jodi had in mind. She came for revenge. She came to teach Travis a lesson. She came to kill.

Less than five hours later, Travis would be dead.

Exactly what happened during those remaining hours of Travis’ life is known only by two people — Travis and Jodi — and Jodi is the only one still alive to fill in the gaps.

***

According to Jodi, the day began with steamy sex and eventually devolved into a harrowing fight for her life.

Her rendition of the final hours of Travis’ life - and what came after - follows:

Travis always wanted to tie her to the bed for a raunchy romp, so she complied. He loosely tied her wrists to his headboard before the sex began.

Travis later had other plans — for the two to take nude photos of each other, yet another deviant fantasy he privately harbored. Jodi naked in pigtails on the bed, splayed out on his mattress. Graphic, pornographic, close-up photos of Jodi’s genitalia. A photo of Travis lying naked on his back.

Just a few hours later, Travis wanted her to take photographs of him in the shower, proud of his newly fit body after months of working out ahead of the trip to Mexico.

One photo of Travis in the shower was taken at about 5:30 that evening. Another was taken a short time later, a chilling tight shot of Travis’ face, water beads dripping from his cheeks, his eyes focused in a serious gaze.

Jodi then accidentally dropped his new camera, sending him into a rage. He lunged in anger, body slamming her to the tile floor. She managed to escape his firm grasp and wriggled free.

Travis chased her from the bathroom in a fury. She ran into his closet to retrieve a .25-caliber pistol he kept on a shelf, then fled out another door at the opposite end in a dash for the hallway — with Travis still in pursuit and clearly enraged.

He lunged at her again. She fired the gun, but didn’t know if the bullet struck him. He just kept coming. And now Jodi’s memory failed her. Her mind grew foggy, the trauma of the attack washing her brain of any recollection of what happened next.

She conceded she must have stabbed him numerous times, but can’t recall where she got the knife, or anything after that until she finds herself about 280 miles north near the Hoover Dam in Nevada, pulled onto the side of the road, her hands drenched in blood. She knew something terrible had happened, but just couldn’t remember the details.

“I must have killed him,” she thought to herself. Stricken with fear and shame, Jodi ditched the gun somewhere in the desert — she has no idea what she did with the knife — and headed north to Salt Lake City to see the other man. But not before starting a chain of events aimed at meticulously creating an alibi to avoid suspicion.

She would later claim she was never at Travis’ house that day. She sent him text messages and emails within hours of killing him, and left him a message on his mobile phone apologizing for not being able to make it for a visit that day, as he had wanted.

Jodi then continued north to Salt Lake City where she met the man and spent the night in his bed kissing and cuddling as if nothing had happened. As if she hadn’t just washed Travis’ blood from her hands. As if Travis was still alive and not crumpled dead in his shower with nearly 30 stab wounds, his throat slit from ear to ear so deeply she nearly cut his head clean off, a bullet hole in his forehead.

She would go on with her life, returning to Northern California for her regular waitressing shifts, and her normal routine for roughly the next month until her arrest.

Then came the lies.

First, she wasn’t there.

Next, masked intruders carried out the attack and she escaped.