Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (10 page)

Travis, being protective of his kid sisters, took on a lot of responsibility, beginning a pattern of caring for people that would continue throughout his life. Travis described terrible beatings at the hands of his mother, who would go after any child who dared to wake her as she slept off her latest high. To endure the wrath, Travis mastered a way of twisting in such a way as to deflect the blows to less sensitive areas of his body, such as his back and arms, where not only did it hurt less, but the bruises could be hidden from the school’s teachers and other concerned adults.

With his mother sleeping off the drugs, he and his siblings were left to fend for themselves in a filthy house on Allwood Drive. There was very little food and no prepared meals, and the children would hunt through the kitchen for anything that was edible. They often had to eat things that were spoiled. Travis recalled once scarfing down a piece of moldy bread he had scavenged from the refrigerator. He spoke of feeling teased by the canned foods in the cupboard, which he longed to eat, if only he had known how to use a can opener.

The filthy conditions in the house encouraged cockroaches. “My sisters and I found some amusement in the fact that an entire colony of albino roaches had broken out so that the house looked like a bunch of moving salt and pepper crawling on everything,” he wrote. “To this day I only have one phobia, roaches. There was nothing more disgusting to me than to wake up to feel roaches crawling on my body.”

With neither parent working, the family eventually lost the house. They moved to an old, beat-up camper shell in an aunt’s backyard. The shell was four feet tall by five feet wide by six feet long, and was situated next to the garage, where the washer and dryer were kept. The washing machine was not hooked up to the plumbing, so every time somebody did wash, dirty wash water pooled in the backyard, creating a swampy, germ-infested mess that the children had to muddle through whenever they left their “shell.”

Travis recalled that his sisters, his mother, and he had lived in that camper shell for more than a year. There was no shower, so they would have to go for days without washing. Travis said he didn’t mind being dirty. He said he was actually afraid of bathing because one time he had spilled some water in a bathroom and his mother accused him of urinating on the floor. Furious, she had shoved him into a wall.

The unpredictable family violence, fueled by drug abuse, left the children perpetually frightened and apprehensive. Travis recalled countless fights between his mother and father that required police intervention. He remembered a time when his mother emptied a revolver into his father’s car, and according to Travis, he was standing on the other side of the front door when his father kicked it down and stormed into the house. His father then retaliated by chopping up his mother’s belongings with an axe. Gary and Pam Alexander separated when Travis and his sisters were young, but as the years went by, Travis would welcome two more sisters, Hillary and Allie, and another brother, Steven.

School did not provide a respite for Travis. He was a shy kid, with few friends. “When your clothes are as dirty as the rest of you, and you stink and have lice, you don’t make a ton of friends,” he wrote of his school days. “Sadly, as you could imagine, I was mocked for my appearance. Nothing too harsh; nowhere close to what was said at home. I will not give much detail on that, as I feel it is inappropriate to state. I will say, though, I have never heard in any movie, on any street corner, or amongst the vilest of men any string of words so offensive and hateful, said with such disgust as was the words that my mother said to my sisters and me.”

In spite of the hardship, Travis had fond memories of watching
Sesame Street
with his siblings, and of visiting his great-grandfather Vic, whom he credited with teaching him the alphabet. Vic was his mother’s grandfather, and while she didn’t have very much family, and fewer that she actually liked, she adored her grandfather. He lived only an hour south of them, but because Travis’s mother did not want Vic to know about her addiction, they only visited twice a year. She’d get herself together enough to take the kids for a visit, which Travis always looked forward to. Vic would take everyone out for pizza or on walks with the dogs, then he’d challenge Travis to a game of checkers and pull out some of the other toys he kept at his house for the kids.

The goodbye hug was the moment Travis cherished the most. When it was time to go, Travis would run to hug Vic goodbye. Vic’s mood would suddenly turn serious. He would grab Travis by the shoulders, shake him, and utter the following words: “Travis, you need to know that you are special, that there is not anything that you can’t do. There is something great inside you. You’re special, Travis, don’t you ever forget it.” His words were always followed by a hug so tight and stiff, it would squeeze the breath from Travis’s body.

Travis would channel these words from Vic whenever his mother’s cruelty became too much. When she was coming down from drugs, she would be exceptionally nasty, telling her children how miserable and worthless they were and complaining how they had ruined her life. As hurtful as her words were, Travis found solace and inspiration in Vic’s words of encouragement. “Every time I would feel her fist sink into my back, I could feel Grandfather’s hands on my shoulders, and I knew she couldn’t reach what was great inside of me,” he wrote.

In Travis’s account, he was six years old when he decided there was a God. He had spent the entire day screaming for his paternal grandmother to come and take him for the weekend. “I screamed so long and loud that I actually woke up my comatose mother long enough to beat me for waking her up,” he recalled. “When she went back to bed I went back to screaming to God. Sure enough that evening [my grandmother] came and picked me up, while my mother slept.” The problem was, he always had to return home when the weekend was over.

The filth, the beatings, the hunger, and the humiliation became almost too much for Travis. By the age of ten, no longer able to stand the conditions, he ran away. Even though he didn’t go far, just a few blocks away to the residence of his father’s parents, his grandparents Jim and Norma Jean Sarvey, he never planned on going back. He strode into the house, positioned himself in the middle of the living room, and announced, “I am going to live with you now!” to which his grandmother agreed. Though Travis’s determination to escape his mother was clear, what was less clear was why there was no earlier intervention to take the children away from their abusive mother.

In many ways, Travis’s decision to seek out his grandparents was not a surprise. He was particularly fond of his grandmother, whom everybody called Mum Mum. Born in the middle of the Great Depression near Oklahoma City, Norma Jean Sarvey was feisty and self-sufficient. She loved the outdoors and spent a good deal of her leisure time camping, fishing, hunting, and shooting. She liked to cook and attended church regularly. She was also a huge dog lover, with a particular affinity for pugs.

Norma was known for her broad smile and gave Travis the love, structure, and security he craved. She described him as an easy boy to raise. Travis had equal admiration for Mum Mum. According to friends, he liked to quote Abraham Lincoln when expressing his fondness for her. “All I am, or can be, I owe to my angel (grand) mother,” he’d say, altering the quote just slightly to make it applicable to his grandmother.

Norma was also an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), and she introduced all of her grandchildren to its teachings. She belonged to the Jurupa Stake Center, the Mormon church on Serendipity Road in Riverside. At first the other kids in the ward viewed Travis as the kid who never came to church, but over time he became a welcome and regular member.

As he got older, Travis settled into a normal and wholesome life with his grandparents. He attended Rubidoux High School, one of four high schools in the district. The contemporary, one-story building on Opal Street had a brick façade and great views of Mount Rubidoux from its classrooms and playing fields. Travis kept mostly to himself there. He was introverted and shy and often chose to eat his lunch alone in the school library, away from the social scene in the cafeteria. Not the scrawny kid of his youth, he no longer smelled and was not dirty, but the memory of the pain of previous rejections still lingered.

At sixteen, Travis became more confident and self-assured, according to friends. They attributed the change to his involvement in the Mormon church, and as Travis became an active member of Jurupa Stake, he started to gain praise for his insightful ideas and his desire to help others.

Travis graduated from high school in 1995 and worked a string of jobs to save money for a church mission. The following year, he was called to serve in the Colorado Denver South Mission. Part of his two-year undertaking was volunteering to help the homeless in and around Denver. As someone who had spent a good deal of his life without essentials, Travis knew firsthand the plight of the people his mission was serving. He spent countless days handing out care packages to the less fortunate that contained food items and essential hygiene products. On each bag, Travis wrote a personalized note.

It was during his time in Colorado that Travis learned of the death of his father, who had perished in a motorcycle crash at the age of forty-nine on Travis’s twentieth birthday. Travis’s friends have said that Gary Alexander had been clean for more than a year when he died in 1997. By then Travis’s mother had also stopped doing drugs and had been trying to get her life together. But her long history of drug abuse had taken its toll, physically and emotionally, leaving her morbidly obese with a number of health problems. Travis’s friends complained that she was manipulative when it came to Travis, trying to make him feel guilty for not visiting more often or taking on the role of her caregiver. However, people around Travis were amazed that, despite everything his mother had done to him, he had found it in his heart to forgive her.

In 1998, around the age of twenty-one, Travis returned from his Denver mission and settled back in California, sharing a home with some other single Mormon guys. He joined the Riverside Singles Ward of the LDS, where everyone called him by his self-proclaimed nickname, T-Dogg. In the Mormon church, a ward is a local congregation presided over by a bishop, much like a pastor in other Christian denominations. Depending on the neighborhood, a ward can have anywhere between twenty-five to five hundred active members who live within a specified distance of a meetinghouse. Singles wards such as the one that Travis joined are found in areas where there is a high population of single adults. Also known as YSAs, or Young Single Adult Wards, they are created to serve unmarried members between the ages of eighteen and thirty. SAs, or Single Adult Wards, are for single members over the age of thirty. Family Wards are for married members
or
single members who are thirty plus. Either way, once a member is over thirty, the Young Singles Adult Ward is no longer an option. Members of the wards are taught the principles of the gospel, but a primary purpose of a singles ward is to give members the chance to mix with other Mormon singles with the goal of marriage. Travis was already keenly aware that in the Mormon religion, dating was for the sole purpose of finding a marriage partner.

At the Young Singles Ward, Travis made lots of friends, among them a young Mormon woman named Deanna Reid. They met in 1998 when Travis was on a date with her roommate. The girls in Deanna’s house would hang out with the guys in Travis’s house, and they all became friends. Travis and Deanna had already known each other for more than a year when they began dating in the spring of 2000. There was definitely a strong chemistry between them. In fact, friends said Travis wanted to marry her. Deanna wasn’t ready, though, and at twenty-one she really wanted to pursue a religious mission in Costa Rica. After only a few months of dating, she left California for Central America. The two stayed in contact via mail, as phone calls and email were not permitted. The church had strict communication policies for members on a mission. They could only call family twice a year, on Christmas and Mother’s Day, and they were forbidden to have telephone contact with boyfriends or girlfriends. There was no limit, however, to how many letters Deanna could write, but she was very busy and didn’t have a lot of free time.

Deanna had been away for more than one year when she received a letter from Travis in the summer of 2001, telling her that he was seeing someone else. “I was sad at first, really sad,” she recalled. “But I kind of expected it. I actually thought it would come a lot sooner. I kind of expected him to say that all along that he wanted to date other people. I even told him before I left that I didn’t expect him to wait around for a year and a half. I’ve seen that happen. All of my friends went on missions. I know what it’s like when the person you were dating starts dating someone else. It just happens all the time.”

In June 2001, Travis had fallen in love with a young woman he had met at the Young Singles Ward in Riverside. Linda Ballard was nineteen and a student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Travis and Linda had met once before while Linda was still in high school. He had even flirted with her, but her sister scolded him that she was still in high school and too young for him. When Linda came home for the summer after her freshman year, Travis reconnected with her, and the pair quickly became a couple. Their first date and first kiss were on June 4, 2001, exactly seven years to the day before he was murdered. Travis picked her up at her sister’s house, where she was staying. On his car’s dashboard was a picture of a young woman. “Who’s that?” Linda asked.

“Oh, that’s Deanna,” Travis replied. “She’s my missionary. She’s in Costa Rica on her mission.” Later, Linda learned that Travis had broken up with Deanna while she was in Costa Rica around the time they had begun dating.

From the start, Travis adored Linda. She was pretty, smart, and there was definitely an intense spark. She was quite beautiful, with full lips, and a radiant toothy smile. He was particularly attracted to her slender, petite frame. Linda, in turn, was taken in by Travis’s charisma and his easy way with people. Travis was just a few years older than she. At that point, he was selling day planners at Franklin Covey, a retail store in Riverside that sells organizers and offers time management training for companies and individuals. According to Linda, he was very into organization. He didn’t want to stay there long, as he had bigger plans for himself. Linda learned that he had been raised in poverty and she admired his determination to make something of himself. However, she was against his decision to forgo college in favor of finding a quick way to earn big money.