Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (13 page)

When the same thing happened the following night, the two could no longer ignore it. There was the same unexpected knock on the door, with no one there when they answered. This time Travis immediately raced to his car, only to find his tires slashed again. Lisa said they called the Mesa police, but after waiting several hours for an officer to arrive, he had to leave before they could file a report. Frightened, Lisa asked Travis to spend the night, which he did. She said they did not have sex; she just didn’t want to be home alone.

Lisa said the next day she received an angry email from a “John Doe,” which she had saved. Filled with hostility, it mentioned her relationship with Travis.
“You shameful whore. Your Heavenly Father must be ashamed of the whoredoms you have committed with that insidious man. If you let him stay in your bed one more time or even sleep under the same roof as him, you will be giving the appearance of evil.”
There were a number of religious references, with the email signing off:
“Be thou clean, sin no more. Heavenly Father loves you and wants you to make the right choices. I know you are strong enough to choose the right. Your Father in Heaven is pulling for you. Don’t ignore the promptings you receive, because they are vital to your spiritual well-being.”

Lisa said that she and Travis suspected that Jodi had sent the email and slashed the tires, but they had never been able to prove it. Detective Flores asked Lisa if she could think of anyone other than Jodi who might want to harm Travis. No one came to mind, although Lisa did provide Flores with the name of one of Travis’s former roommates. She recalled that he and Travis did not see eye to eye, and that he had moved out suddenly in the middle of the night the previous December. Still, she didn’t believe he had a reason to hurt Travis. In her opinion, Jodi was a much more likely candidate.

Detective Flores wanted to conduct follow-up interviews with some of the people who had been at the house when Travis’s body had been discovered, including Mimi Hall, Dallin Forrest, and Michelle Lowery. They all agreed to come to the station to be interviewed and to give DNA and fingerprint samples, a necessary step to exclude them from any evidence found at the scene.

The detective also called Jodi Arias. When he learned that she was in the area, having traveled from Northern California to Mesa, Arizona, for Travis’s memorial service to be held that day, he asked her if she could come to headquarters the following day so he could speak with her in person. He explained that he already had three others coming to provide DNA samples for exclusionary purposes.

“I am leaving tomorrow, but I will try and come by,” Jodi told him.

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. on June 17, Mimi, Dallin, Michelle, and Jodi arrived at the Mesa police headquarters building on North Robson. They were there to be fingerprinted and to provide saliva for DNA testing. Jodi was the only one who declined to sit down with the detective for a follow-up interview. She said she had been speaking with a close friend who had convinced her that there were a number of people talking about her involvement in Travis’s death, and as a result, she was now uncomfortable speaking to him without first consulting with an attorney.

Travis’s friends were equally uncomfortable being at the headquarters with Jodi. Almost all of them were already convinced that she had killed him, and they viewed all of her actions since his death as suspect. They had been offended when four days earlier, on June 13, she had posted a photo gallery on her Myspace page dedicated to Travis. It included twenty-five pictures, most of them with Jodi and Travis posing together in various locations they had visited. She titled the collection “In Loving Memory of Travis.” As if that weren’t enough, Jodi had been calling some of the friends, trying to find out the latest in the murder investigation, which they found disingenuous. In fact, Travis’s friends became outraged when Detective Flores, at one point, told Chris and Sky Hughes that Jodi was no longer a suspect, that she had been cleared. It was a ruse. The police wanted Jodi to think she was not under suspicion, though the group at the station house could not have known that she was still law enforcement’s number-one suspect.

Among the evidence the police were amassing on her was the activity on Travis’s telephone. The significance of a voice mail from Jodi wasn’t immediately appreciated but soon it would be. At 11:48
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. on June 4, Jodi left an upbeat message for Travis in which she apologized for not making it to Mesa and told him that she and her friend Heather were planning to see
Othello
in early July and invited him to join them. Of course what police quickly learned was that the voice mail was a cover, a poorly designed smokescreen that Jodi used to strengthen her alibi. And it might have actually worked, if it hadn’t been for the crucial piece of evidence at the scene of the crime.

The first significant break in the case came ten days after Travis’s body was discovered, in the form of the memory card found in the digital camera police had discovered in Travis’s washing machine. Although the camera had clearly been put through the wash, Michael Melendez, a computer forensics detective with the Mesa Police Department, had been able to recover numerous pictures from it, including some that had been deleted.

The deleted photos included images of Travis, who was naked, standing in various poses in the shower, his muscles toned and well defined. He was reaching his arms up as he soaped his body. The photos were eerily reminiscent of the famous shower scene in the classic Hitchcock movie
Psycho,
except instead of Janet Leigh, it was Travis dripping in water and danger. Astoundingly, it appeared the recovered photos had been taken before, during, and after his murder. One of the last photos of Travis alive showed him staring intently into the camera, his handsome face betraying a subtle anxiety as droplets of water rolled down his cheeks. It was time-stamped June 4, 2008, at 5:29
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Less than a minute later, at 5:30
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., another photo showed Travis sitting on the slippery floor of the small shower stall, an extremely vulnerable position. Forty-four seconds later there’s a blurry photo of the bathroom ceiling. It’s believed to have been inadvertently snapped as Travis was attacked. About a minute later another photo, taken upside down and apparently by accident, shows Travis lying on his back, with large amounts of blood around his neck and shoulders, the bathroom in the background. Remarkably, the photo also revealed the right pant leg and foot of the killer, who was possibly reaching down to move the body. The murderer was wearing a dark-colored sock or shoe and striped sweatpants, probably blue, with a zipper on the back of the cuff.

The last photo, also upside down, appeared to have been taken by accident as well, and was snapped one minute, sixteen seconds after the previous one. After it was enhanced, that photo revealed the bathroom hallway and baseboard drenched in a dark, bloodlike liquid substance.

Detective Melendez retrieved another six photos that had been taken prior to the shower pictures, time-stamped June 4, 2008, starting at 1:40
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. The first showed Jodi Arias posing naked on Travis’s bed. There were, in fact, four photos of Jodi posing in the nude, some in extremely provocative and graphic sexual positions, leaving nothing to the imagination. The other two were of Travis, who was also naked in both images, a tube or bottle of KY lubricant next to him. The photos were the smoking gun, irrefutable proof that Jodi was lying when she told Detective Flores she had not seen Travis since early April 2008. Police now had the evidence to prove that she had been the last person to be in contact with Travis Alexander before his death.

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etective Flores sat on this stunning information for nearly three days before he finally spoke to Jodi Arias again. On Saturday, June 21, she had left a message with her telephone number on his cell phone, asking that he call her back when he had the chance. That Tuesday, June 24, the detective returned the call.

“What can I do for you?” he asked when Jodi answered the phone. She told him that, when she had reached out to him four days earlier, she had been having a really bad day. She explained that her car had gotten a flat tire on the way to the airport, so she had missed Travis’s funeral in Riverside on June 21. That day, there had been a 9
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. family service at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Fourth Street, followed by a 10
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. funeral service, and a burial at Olivewood Memorial Park, and she had missed them all.

Despite missing the funeral, Jodi had been present on June 16 for a memorial service in Arizona in honor of Travis. Jodi had flown there on the morning of Sunday, June 15, to attend the memorial the following day at Travis’s church. Jodi was invited to stay with Dan and Desiree Freeman, who lived with their parents in Gilbert. Dan picked up Jodi at the Phoenix airport after which Jodi, the Freemans, and Aaron Dewey, a Mormon friend in their social circle, attended the regular Sunday service at Travis’s church. The next day, Jodi planned to go to the memorial with Aaron. He picked her up at the Freemans and, as they headed to the church with some extra time, Jodi had a special request. She asked Aaron to drive by Travis’s house because she wanted to see it. Though the house was still locked and sealed, the crime scene tape had been taken down. Aaron and Jodi sat outside and talked, before walking around the front yard. Aaron detected nothing unusual in their conversation.

At the memorial, the crowd numbered at least five hundred friends, co-workers, and church members. The distraught and grieving group gathered to share memories of Travis. The memorial program included a verse Travis wrote in a blog less than two weeks before he died: “The Gold from Within.” Aaron sat with Jodi during the service. He said that she sat with her head down, displaying no emotion and no tears. “People commented after about that, saying things like, ‘She loved him, he was brutally killed, and she has no tears. What’s up with that?’ ”

After the service, Jodi was “kind of bubbly, going around talking to people and catching up.” She had also arranged to have three to four binders of photos of Travis, including some with her in them, displayed on a table at the service. She invited those in attendance to find photos with special meaning, remove them from the plastic sleeve, and write a message on the back. Her intent, according to Aaron, was to give the photos to Travis’s family. Needless to say, many people were dumbstruck to see Jodi there. To them she was the first suspect on a list of one. How dare she show her face among them and pretend to grieve his death? She worked the crowd, hugging Travis’s friends, acting as though she was making her first trip to Arizona since early April. Travis’s friend Taylor Searle was completely unnerved when Jodi approached him for a hug and a chat, recalling how his mind began to race. “My mind tells me that I should not be talking to you right now because you’re the one that did this. But I’m also confused because you’re here so I don’t want to be a complete jackass if it turns out it wasn’t you. So, I’m gonna be pleasant with you, but I don’t wanna talk to you. Those are the kind of things going through my mind, just throwing me off, like, Hey! ’cause I didn’t know what was going on: why was she there?” In what Travis’s friends regarded as a positively diabolical move, Jodi also sent a large bouquet of irises to Travis’s grandmother Mum Mum expressing sympathy. Horrified, Mum Mum immediately threw them in the trash.

Perhaps because of the awkward reception she had received at the memorial service, Jodi had deliberately missed Travis’s actual funeral in Riverside. Yet here she was again talking to Flores on the phone, appearing to be helpful and asking if there had been any new leads in the case. She even apologized to the detective for having declined to speak to him during her visit to the station the day after the memorial.

Jodi explained that she might be traveling to Tucson, Arizona, in the coming weeks and could stop by headquarters to meet with him then, on the way through. She also offered to give a statement over the phone, if the detective preferred, but she couldn’t give it that instant. They agreed on a call at 10
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. the following day. Just as they were about to hang up, Detective Flores blurted out a question. “Did you send Travis an email about coming down to visit him?”

Jodi admitted she had written him an email a week or so before his murder, but as he had not responded, she assumed he was probably in California. She also knew that he was traveling to Cancún, Mexico, and said she had been planning to stay at his house and visit with friends while he was away. Travis had an “open-door” policy, and according to Jodi, he let her stay there in exchange for taking care of his pug when he was out of town. Ultimately, Jodi said finances had prevented her from going to Mesa, so she had traveled to Southern California and Utah instead.

Before the call ended, Jodi had a practical question for the detective: “How will I get the belongings that I left at Travis’s house?” she wanted to know. She had left a few items of clothing there and was wondering how she could get them back. Given the grisly nature of Travis’s murder, Detective Flores thought this concern was odd. The detective would learn soon enough just how unusual a woman Jodi Arias really was.

The following morning, Detective Flores dialed Jodi’s cell phone at the appointed time. He started his questioning with the basics of how she and Travis had met and when they had first started dating.

“We met in September,” Jodi began; “the following weekend he invited me to church, and the following Wednesday he gave me
The Book of Mormon
and I started reading it. I got baptized on November 26 . . .”

She didn’t dwell much on nine of the first ten months they had been together, but moved forward to describe the end of the relationship. “Travis has kind of a commitment phobia, I guess you could say,” she offered. She said that the ironic part was breaking up “around the same time” she had moved to Mesa in June 2007. Besides commitment issues, the problem had been trust.