Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story (11 page)

Jurors heard Jodi tell Flores she moved back to California in April, and that was the last time she saw Travis after their relationship ended.

“You haven’t come back in town since then?” Flores asked.

“No, I haven’t,” Jodi replied on the call.

She then explained how she knew of no enemies Travis had, and no weapons he kept in the home.

Flores knew something wasn’t right. After all, Travis’ friends immediately fingered Jodi as the possible culprit. The odds were clearly stacked against her.

As in so many criminal cases, the lies always come back to haunt the suspect. Jodi’s challenges would be formidable as the prosecution made quick work of its case in less than two weeks. The case seemed clear, the evidence irrefutable.

Martinez pointed out how Jodi’s palm print was found in blood at the scene, along with the nude photos of her and Travis time-stamped on the day he died.

Then there was the gun. Jodi’s grandparents had reported a .25 caliber pistol stolen from their home just about a week before the killing — the same caliber used to shoot Travis in the forehead.

Her insistence at the start — and for two years after her arrest — that she had nothing to do with his death and wasn’t even there. Then later came the outlandish story of the masked intruders. She finally settled on self-defense, and her changing version of events would be played out again and again throughout the trial.

All of this, combined with the sheer brutality of the attack, the rage with which it was carried out, not just a single gunshot or a few stab wounds, but a virtual butchering of his body, would prove formidable obstacles for Jodi’s defense.

“Her changing stories, the confession, the forensic evidence, it’s just a very difficult case to defend, “ California criminal defense lawyer Mark Geragos told The Associated Press at the time.

The defense’s only hope was to spare Jodi the death penalty using expert witness after expert witness to show what a perverted letch Travis was, how he abused her, how her entire life was a series of wrong turns and dead ends, trying to gain sympathy from the jury. Her biggest problem would be the lies.

Martinez proceeded to call witness after witness, portraying Jodi as a cold-hearted killer who took Travis’ life with so little emotion and afterthought that she went to see another man a day later for an intimate encounter.

Ryan Burns was called to the witness stand. He explained how he met Jodi at a PrePaid Legal convention in Oklahoma in April 2008. They exchanged numbers and within a few weeks began chatting on the phone often.

Toward the end of May 2008, just weeks before Jodi would kill Travis, Burns told jurors Jodi made plans to come visit him in Utah.

She arrived on June 4, 2008, explaining that she was late because she had gotten lost and needed to stop to rest. But something immediately struck Burns, he would testify.

Jodi had cuts on her hands.

“She had two small bandages on a couple of her fingers,” Burns told jurors. Jodi explained she had cut herself on broken glass while working in a restaurant.

Little did Burns know, the woman he would later spend the night with had just savagely attacked and killed her last boyfriend. Burns said the two watched a movie at his home in West Jordan, Utah, just outside Salt Lake City.

He said things soon got heated as they grew intimate.

“We were talking and we kissed … Every time we started kissing it got a little more escalated,” Burns testified.

“Eventually, we stopped,” said Burns, also a devout Mormon. “I didn’t want to go any further.”

Later that night the couple attended a PrePaid legal event then joined others at a nearby restaurant.

“She was fine, she was laughing about simple little things like any other person. I never once felt like anything was wrong during the day,” Burns told jurors.

After dinner, the two went back to Burns’ home and napped. When they awoke, things again heated up.

“She got on top of me pretty aggressively and we were kissing. She was right on top of me,” Burns said, explaining how the encounter soon cooled down just like earlier in the day.

He told jurors Jodi left his home at about 1 a.m. to head back to California.

After his testimony, Burns appeared on cable network HLN for an interview with Nancy Grace, explaining how “very awkward” the entire saga has been.

“It’s hard to believe you’re this close to something so dramatic,” Burns said. “I really didn’t think she could have possibly done it.”

Burns went on to describe how he spoke with Jodi on the phone just hours after she had killed Travis while she headed to Utah to see him.

“For that whole hour,” he told Grace, “we talked about simple things, giggling about just little jokes, just like normal conversation you would think, obviously very abnormal in retrospect.

“She seemed just like the Jodi that I’d been talking to for five or six weeks the entire 14 hours that she was with me the day after Travis died.”

Jodi’s lies, and the stories she weaved in the days and months after killing Travis, were becoming the crux of the prosecution case against her. These weren’t the actions of a woman who had just killed a man in self-defense, the prosecutor would explain.

This woman was a murderer, clear and simple.

Jurors would later hear from Maricopa County Medical Examiner Dr. Kevin Horn, who explained the severity of Travis’ wounds and the ferociousness of the attack.

Horn described gashes on Travis’ hands and feet, clearly defensive wounds as he tried to fight off his attacker, and how it was extremely unlikely that Travis would have been able to do much at all after the gunshot wound to the head. This testimony clearly contradicted Jodi’s story that she shot him first but he kept coming after her, knocking the gun from her hand and forcing her to resort to the stabbing to save her own life.

Jurors heard a phone message Jodi left Travis just hours after the killing as she began to meticulously plan her alibi to avoid suspicion and cover her tracks.

“My phone died so I wasn’t able to get back to anybody,” Jodi explained on the call, adding that she wouldn’t be able to make it to Travis’ home for a visit on her road trip.

Jurors also were repeatedly reminded of her lies to Flores and others upon her arrest in California just about a month after the killing.

She sobbed as police questioned her, but stuck to her story that she wasn’t involved — even after being shown the pictures that put her at the scene on the day he died.

The July 15 videotaped interrogation was played for jurors as Detective Flores grilled the defendant, explaining that all the evidence pointed to her involvement. She insisted she didn’t kill him.

“You shot him in the head, then you got a knife and you stabbed him,” Flores told her. “Jodi, tell me the truth, please.”

“I did not kill Travis,” Jodi replied.

Then she said something odd, something that puzzled even the veteran police detective.

She explained that if she were to have killed him, she couldn’t have stabbed him. It would have been too cruel.

“I don’t think I could stab him. I think I would have to shoot him until he was dead if that were my intentions,” Jodi told the detective. “If I had it in me to kill him, the least I could have done was make it as humane as possible.”

Flores confronted Jodi with the photographs, specifically an unintentional shot of Jodi’s leg and a portion of Travis’ bloodied body.

“It’s your foot, Jodi. These are your pants,” Flores told her.

“This is his bathroom. That is not my foot,” Jodi replied.

And she continued with the lies even though at this point, police had everything they needed to prove Jodi was there when Travis died, even that Jodi must have been the one who killed him.

Martinez showed jurors the gruesome photos of Travis’ bloated body, and pictures taken by police at his home of her handprint and footprints in blood.

Jodi sat at the defense table, visibly shaken by the reality of what was occurring. She couldn’t bear to look at the pictures. She covered her face. She looked away. It was just too much for her to relive.

She had a similar reaction when the infamous phone sex recording from May 2008 was played for the jury.

Jodi’s defense attorneys were preparing to portray her as a love-struck emotional basket case who only begrudgingly agreed to participate in so many raunchy sex acts to please Travis, to make him happy, and to calm his constant rage toward her.

Martinez was clearly working to paint a picture of a woman who was as much into the sex as Travis was, even instigating it often, introducing lubricant into their relationship as Jodi complained the anal sex grew painful.

He displayed text messages between Jodi and Travis exchanged about three months before his death.

“Maybe u could give my ass a much-needed pounding,” Jodi wrote. “I want to fuck you like a dirty, horny little school girl.”

The case against her grew even stronger with every day of testimony, every raunchy photograph, every recording and text message, and every lie Jodi told police, friends and family before eventually settling on self-defense.

The prosecution’s final witness before resting its case on Jan. 17, 2013, was a female friend of Jodi who had dinner with her 24 hours after Travis was killed.

“She was acting like Jodi, the same Jodi I always talk to,” Leslie Udy testified, adding she had been friends with Jodi for about two years at that time.

Udy told jurors she had a long talk that night with Jodi, who called Travis her best friend.

“She said that they weren’t together anymore, which I kind of already knew,” Udy said.

But Jodi told her she and Travis would “always be friends.”

Days later, Udy said Jodi called her in tears to tell her the news of Travis’ death. Jodi acted shocked. Distraught. Confused. Again, she pondered, who could have done this?

“She couldn’t imagine why someone could do something like that to Travis, that he was such a wonderful person and why would anybody do that to him,” Udy told jurors.

Martinez was done — for now. His point was made. Jodi is a liar. She lied from the start, and was still lying now.

Chapter 20

The Body

“CAUSE OF DEATH: Sharp force trauma of neck and torso. MANNER: Homicide.” —Autopsy report for Travis Alexander.

Travis’ body was a mess. His brain had turned to mush after about five days decomposing in his shower.

The Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s report would describe the wounds in precise detail. During the trial, Martinez showed the photos of Travis’ mutilated corpse over and over to jurors, emphasizing the sheer brutality of the attack Jodi delivered upon him. He needed the jury to see the wounds, to imagine what it would have been like to suffer such trauma, such pain, such anguish as the life left his body.

Travis’ family would sob and look away. Jodi, too, couldn’t bear to see the pictures. Each time they were displayed on a large screen in the courtroom, she looked down, sobbing, tears dripping down her cheeks.

Stab wounds to the head, to the neck, chest, stomach, shoulders, back, and feet, nearly 30 in all, including five on his hands, presumably as he fought furiously to defend himself. He also had a single gunshot wound above his right eyebrow.

His throat had been slit from ear to ear.

Jodi claimed she shot Travis first, but he didn’t die, and kept coming after her, forcing her to fend him off with the knife. While she couldn’t recall actually stabbing him, blaming her memory loss on the trauma of the attack, she conceded she must have done it.

Part of the prosecution case would come down to the order in which the attack occurred. Prosecutors said it was clear she stabbed him first repeatedly in a blitz assault, and after he was likely already dead, she then shot him in the head. They needed to convince the jury that this happened since it would clearly counter her self-defense claim.

Why would she need to shoot him after he was no longer a threat, after he was bleeding all over and near death, if not already dead?

It was a crucial fact in the case that prosecutors needed to prove in order to help secure a first-degree murder conviction and the death penalty.

Dr. Kevin Horn, who performed the autopsy, testified the gunshot wound would have likely rendered Travis unconscious and unable to defend himself.

“Again because of the injury to the brain, the information processing part of the brain would have rendered him unable to raise his hands to offer any sort of purposeful action or to verbalize anything,” Horn said.

Horn’s testimony would be a tough obstacle for the defense to overcome, as he said there was no way Travis could have continued to fight after being shot in the head, as Jodi claims.

“If the bullet wound was the first wound that was received by Mr. Alexander, would it have been immediately incapacitating?” Martinez asked him.

“Yes,” Horn replied.

“And why would it have been incapacitating?” Martinez continued.

“Because of brain injury,” Horn said.

A juror query for Horn would sum up his testimony, and obviously later send the panel into deliberations with some serious questions.

“Can you explain why you think Travis was still alive when his throat was cut?”

“Because of the large amount of hemorrhage into the soft tissue around the throat wound,” Horn replied. “That requires a beating heart.”

Chapter 21

Jodi Takes the Stand

“They’re probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I’m not even going to swat that fly. … They’ll see and they’ll know, and they’ll say, “Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly.” —‘Psycho’

Jodi’s defense attorneys began presenting their case Jan. 29, 2013. It went on for nearly 2 1/2 months, delving deep into Jodi’s life, with witness after witness describing her as a gentle soul, an unassuming woman who was in search of herself.