Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story (7 page)

They typed it into the keypad — 0187. As they made their way into the house, a foul stench quickly overpowered them.

By the time they got to his bedroom, it was clear that something bad had happened. Blood was on the floors, the smell even more powerful.

In the bathroom, there he was: Travis’ bloated, naked corpse stuffed into his shower. Mimi frantically dialed 911.

“Oh my god,” she said in a panicked voice.

“What’s going on?” the female dispatcher said.

“A friend of ours is dead in his bedroom,” she said.

The dispatcher scrambled officers to the home and assured Mimi and her friends that help was on the way.

The dispatcher kept Mimi on the line as officers sped toward the scene, getting as much information as she could about how Travis could have died such a horrible death.

“Has he been depressed at all? Thinking of committing suicide, anything like that?” the dispatcher asked.

“He’s been really depressed because he broke up with this girl. And he was all upset about that, but I don’t think he’d actually kill himself over that,” Mimi said.

“Had he been threatened by anybody recently?”

“Yes, he has. He has an ex-girlfriend that’s been bothering him and following him and slashing his tires and things like that.”

“And do you know the ex-girlfriend’s name?”

Mimi couldn’t remember the name of the supposed stalker. She just knew that Travis was having some relationship issues. She asked her friends who had accompanied her to the house, and someone in the background chimed in. And then came the damning moment.

“Her name is Jodi,” Mimi said.

There it was. Just a few minutes into the call, with police not even at the scene, and friends armed with just a few basic details about Travis’ recent troubles had pinpointed a suspect.

“OK, so last weekend, his stalker, he told her never wanted to see her again. Had a big confrontation. And that’s all we know,” Mimi told the dispatcher.

The call ended shortly after. Police may not have known it yet, but they had their prime suspect.

Mimi’s next days, and those of the others who discovered the body, were filled with horror and confusion, grilling by police and questions about what occurred, with the thoughts of Jodi always on their minds.

A few days later, Mimi attended Travis’ memorial service at his Mormon temple in Mesa. Among the crowd of mourners, one woman stood out.

“Are you Mimi Hall?” the stranger said in introducing herself.

“I’m Jodi Arias.”

Chapter 12

The Investigation

“You won’t answer my calls, you change your number. I mean, I’m not gonna be ignored, Dan!” -‘Fatal Attraction’

Many killers do things in predictable and secretive ways to cover their tracks. They go underground. They flee to Mexico or some extradition-free country. They try to keep their mouths shut and most definitely do nothing to arouse suspicion.

Not Jodi. She had to be part of it, still, even after his death, drawn to Travis and everything that involved him.

Mesa police Detective Esteban “Steve” Flores got the call just as he had begun analyzing the horrific scene. It was message from a woman named Jodi Arias who wanted to inquire about the killing.

Flores went on to pull an all-nighter and got sidetracked with the immediate demands of the scene. He is a soft-spoken veteran police detective, a stout man known for his careful, methodical work at every crime scene.

The next day, he got another message from the same woman. Jodi definitely wasn’t hiding.

In fact, she was overly chatty. It was the first installment in her ever-shifting alibis.

She inquired about the crime, offered her assistance, asked about the murder weapon and described her relationship with Travis, all largely unsolicited information.

She provided all sorts of little clues and tidbits about Travis and his home. He had a king-size bed, maybe it was a California king, she said. He slept on Egyptian cotton sheets.

Jodi told Flores she looked back at her phone records to see the last time she spoke to Travis. She described how he’d never lock the doors, and how she gave him grief about it.

“Maybe you can’t talk about this but was there any kind of weapon used? Was there a gun?” she asked, fishing for anything to find out if the authorities were onto her.

Yes, Flores said, but he didn’t tip his hand. He asked her if Travis had a gun or any weapons in his house. “His two fists,” she said.

Despite everyone pointing to Jodi from the minute the body was discovered, police proceeded at a deliberate pace before actually putting her in handcuffs about a month later.

All of Travis’ friends saw her as the prime suspect from the minute police affixed yellow tape to the perimeter of the property and began examining the bathroom and house for forensic clues.

But Flores and his colleagues still had a lot of work to do to build the case; the foundation was there with Jodi as a possible culprit, but they had to build a house on top of the foundation.

Police quickly interviewed Mimi Hall and Travis’ two roommates, Enrique Cortez and Zachary Billings, to make sure none of them had a particular beef with Travis.

Investigators thought it was odd that his roommates had no idea Travis’ bloated corpse was stuffed into the shower in the days after Jodi killed him. A stench from the body was present throughout the house, but Zachary and Enrique didn’t think much of it and were so busy with their jobs, church and girlfriends that they weren’t home much anyway.

Enrique remembered smelling it, but it was a bachelor pad. For all he knew, Travis left some dirty dishes in his room before he went to Mexico. They never imagined that the smell came from his decomposing body just a few feet away behind Travis’ bedroom door.

Leads and tips started coming in to police. They had to chase down each one and cross them off their list, a time-consuming task for the handful of officers working the case.

One anonymous caller phoned police to say they needed to look at a man named Dustin Thompson.

Dustin and his wife Ashley, an employee at a Dillard’s distribution center, were seeing their marriage fall apart, and Ashley was friends with Travis. She had known him for about three years and had visited his house to watch UFC matches on a Wednesday night in May.

The caller notified police that Dustin somehow knew about the killing the day the body was discovered and went to the house to see what was going on with all the officers at the scene.

As it turns out, the tip was bogus and Dustin had nothing to do with the slaying. But police had to follow the tip and dozens of others regardless.

As Mesa cops awaited forensic results, Flores, the lead detective, kept in close contact with Jodi. The circumstantial evidence clearly pointed to her, but they wanted iron-clad proof.

Almost everyone who knew Travis was convinced who did it. No doubt. It had to be Jodi.

They had been creeped out by her bizarre behavior at various times and heard the stories from Travis about Jodi’s stalking.

One friend even told police that Jodi had been “acting very ‘Fatal Attraction’” lately, referring to the film starring Glenn Close as an obsessed mistress whose heightening obsession with a married man ends in murder.

“There’s an old saying that, if someone is just not acting right, look into it,” Flores would later say.

The detective began piecing together clues as Jodi tried to put the pieces of her own life back together.

She tried to resume her activities in Yreka, but it wasn’t easy because she had to carry on the outward appearance of a mourner while simultaneously dealing the psychological trauma of knowing she had just killed the love of her life, the man she thought she’d marry someday. She cried for days.

She went to work at a Mexican restaurant in Yreka. She updated her MySpace page to say she “missed Travis. See you soon, my friend, but not soon enough,” while also posting a photo gallery of her trips and time with him. As she flew back to California from Arizona after attending Travis’ memorial service, she flirted with the guy sitting next to her on the plane and got his number, calling him after getting home.

She even wrote letters of condolence to Travis’ family and sent a bouquet of white irises to Travis’ beloved grandmother, Norma Sarvey, who raised him and inspired him so much.

“Travis always told me he liked the name Iris for a girl…If I ever have a son I’ll name him Alexander,” she wrote in her diary.

On the whole, Jodi did quite well handling the situation and moving on, or at least making it look that way.

Her mother said the death of Travis brought her and Jodi closer, and she was finally starting to see positive changes in her daughter.

Maybe there was a silver lining to all of this, her mother thought.

“Just this last couple weeks since Travis’ death has been the best relations that we’ve had in our whole life,” Sandy Arias would later say during questioning by police. “Maybe this death has made her see that life is short and you can’t be that way. And it’s changing her.”

At the same time, Jodi was also playing the role of sleuth. She would call Flores to get updates on the investigation and offer up stories that puzzled him.

She would leave him casual voicemails on his mobile phone.

“Hi Detective Flores, this is Jodi Arias calling in regard to Travis Alexander,” she said in one message. “It’s Saturday, not exactly sure what time, maybe you’re off. I hope you’re enjoying your day off. If you could give me a call back, my phone number is 831-402-1909.”

As she was leaving her message, forensic experts were analyzing the evidence. On June 26, the reports came back: The bloody palm print on the wall was Jodi’s. One week later, on July 3, the DNA samples taken from the scene matched up to Jodi.

A few weeks earlier, Jodi and Travis’ other friends voluntarily provided police saliva samples for DNA comparisons.

Flores shared his findings with the Maricopa County Attorney’s office, and prosecutors presented the case to a grand jury.

The panel indicted Jodi on July 9, 2008, the same day she celebrated her 28th birthday. It was now time to take Jodi into custody.

Jodi was at her grandparents’ three-bedroom house when Mesa police Department joined by deputies with the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department showed up and slapped the cuffs on her.

Jodi was under arrest.

Chapter 13

“I Don’t Even Hurt Spiders”

“I think you’re not grasping the reality of the situation.” —Detective Rachel Blaney of the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department

The date was July 15, 2008. It was the culmination of the most tumultuous period of Jodi’s life.

In the span of 45 days, she had killed her lover in gruesome fashion, skipped town, hooked up with a new guy, mourned the loss of Alexander, even sent his family condolence cards.

Now she was in a nondescript interrogation room in Yreka. Most people are nervous in this situation, rattled by the mere sight of handcuffs on their wrists, fearful about their life being shattered once the authorities figure out what they did.

But Jodi seemed to have different coping mechanisms. She tried small talk with a female officer, asking where she was from Arizona. Then she complained about the temperature in the room. It’s too cold, she said. She wondered where her purse was.

Here she was, locked up for what could be an eternity, and Jodi begged Flores for a sweater and inquired about her handbag.

“Any way you can turn the heat up in here or like, do you have a sweater I can borrow or something?” she asked Flores.

“I don’t have any sweaters,” he shot back.

They had a few back-and-forths that were fairly routine for police interrogations, and then Flores laid down the gauntlet.

“Everybody is saying, I don’t understand what happened to Travis. I don’t know who killed him. But you need to look at Jodi. And sometimes the simplest answers are the correct ones. And that’s one of the reasons I started looking at you a little bit closer and over the last month or so I’ve gotten into Travis’ lives, talked to all his friends, his family. I got a really good understanding of who he is now. And I got a very good understanding of your relationship with him. And I’m just putting two and two together … and it kind of matches.”

Whatever Jodi had told herself in the month since Alexander’s death, it surely set in at this time that she was in trouble.

It wasn’t the kind of interrogation you see on a TV drama where a defendant is standoffish, gives quick, one-word answers and demands for a lawyer to be present.

Jodi rambled on in long answers as detectives tried to sort out the truth. Jodi talked at length about her relationship with Travis, their beliefs in the Mormon faith, his desire to meet a nice Mormon girl, and her supposed adherence to the Ten Commandments. She tried to make sense of her relationship with Travis for Flores.

But what Flores really needed and wanted was a confession. It is one of the building blocks of a strong case, as important as finding the murder weapon, a strong motive, and physical evidence connecting the suspect to the crime. Police had all the physical evidence they needed by this point, and seemed to have motive figured out: jealousy. The murder weapon was a mystery, although the breakin at her grandparents’ house provided ample circumstantial evidence.

So for two days, Flores and other officers threw everything they could at Jodi, alternating between good cop, bad cop and father confessor. On the first day, Flores started off by questioning her gently, but slowly lost his patience as Jodi’s responses meandered.

“He liked you, he loved you. He wanted to be with you but he was reluctant to make a commitment first off. And he truly didn’t think that you were marriage material,” Flores said. “And I don’t know why not. I mean, I see you, you’re a wonderful girl. You’re struggling, you’re trying to make your way through life and I don’t see why you guys couldn’t have made it, you know?”