Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (18 page)

At Jodi’s request, Travis, who was an elder in the Church, agreed to perform the ceremony. Jodi even invited her ex Darryl Brewer, but he didn’t attend, nor did her family. Jodi said that even if her family could have teleported, they wouldn’t have come. The baptism took place at the LDS church in Palm Desert. Travis was already in the baptismal font when Jodi arrived in her white baggy jumpsuit, the traditional baptismal outfit. He said a blessing, she dipped into the water, and she came back up. She described the emotion afterward as a very peaceful feeling. After the ceremony, the two went back to her house, began to kiss, and got intimate again.

The way Jodi remembered it, she and Travis were in her bedroom kissing when Travis spun her around, bent her over, unzipped his pants, and began having anal sex with her. Jodi said she endured it as long as she could but that, eventually, it was so painful she had to stop him, after which he ejaculated on her back. At the end of her spiritual day, Jodi said she ended up feeling like “used toilet paper.”

Sky Hughes was at the baptism that day and said it was an awkward ceremony, with not many people in attendance. But, more than that, she doubted Jodi’s recollection was accurate. She seemed to recall Travis going back to her house after the ritual, contradicting Jodi’s version. Sky noted that Jodi’s vivid juxtaposition of religious and sexual rites seemed designed to inspire anger against Travis and sympathy for her. Jodi’s absurd anecdote wasn’t just about anal sex; it was anal sex after a baptism, a sacred ceremony. Indeed, Jodi was no stranger to anal sex. She and Darryl had done it once or twice, something Darryl later acknowledged.

The next month, Darryl moved out of the house in Palm Desert and back to Monterey, where his ex-wife, with whom he shared custody of their son, had relocated. He was done and ready to leave. The final piece of Jodi and Darryl’s breakup seemed to go without incident, and they remained on friendly terms.

Jodi would continue to live in the Palm Desert house as long as she was financially able. Already, she had missed her half of several mortgage payments, and Darryl had been carrying the full financial load. This was the first time since they had taken ownership of the property that Jodi had failed to meet her financial obligations. Her goal of turning her job with PPL into a full-time career was not happening as quickly as she had hoped. While she was realizing some income from the company, sometimes between $1,000 and $1,300 a month, it was hardly enough to cover all her household bills. When Darryl tried talking to her about it, she would tell him not to discuss anything negative. Since reading
The Secret,
Jodi had been trying to employ the power of positive thinking to change reality by making only positive statements.

Yet she continued to connect with Travis. That Christmas season, Jodi went to Arizona for a corporate event that was taking place in Phoenix. Travis was putting up about thirty people at his place so he told her that because of the guest load, he had no room for her. One of the friends invited to stay there, a curvy blonde named Clancy Talbot, said she overheard Travis on the phone with Jodi explaining to her that there was no room for her to stay. He ended the call by saying he would see her at the event the next day. Several hours later, Jodi appeared at the house uninvited. Her unexpected arrival was particularly awkward, because Travis’s ex-girlfriend Deanna was one of the invited guests, and there were still tender feelings between them. Clancy said Jodi announced herself to the room as Travis’s girlfriend right in the middle of a motivational presentation Travis was giving, and that he tried to make light of it. “He says ‘wait . . . no. We’ve gone on a couple of dates, but we’re not like hitched or anything.’ He tried to be nice to her, but at the same time make sure everyone knew . . . that she was not his girlfriend,” Clancy recalled.

Jodi spent the night anyway. Her recollection of the evening had Travis joking quietly to her that he wanted oral sex, but he didn’t want to be affectionate with her in front of Deanna. She claimed he had even told her that Deanna was “emotionally unstable,” so she tried to steer clear of her. Jodi said Travis was hypervigilant about any public display of affection. Even after Deanna left, they slept on separate couches. After lights were out and the house was quiet, she reached for his hand, and he sat up abruptly to see if anyone was awake.

Clancy’s account was a complete contradiction to that. She said that she had come downstairs during the night to find Jodi asleep under the Christmas tree. Travis had a portable wrought-iron gate so that Napoleon, his dog, could not get to the tree, and Jodi was sound asleep in the secured area behind the gate, curled up under the tree. Clancy said she and some of the others were really put off by Jodi’s odd behavior. “It just gave me a stomachache. It just gave me the creeps . . . a yucky feeling, like something’s not right.”

CHAPTER 11

JODI SPINS

P
icking out the strangest moments in Jodi Arias’s July 15 police interview is difficult, but everyone seems to have his or her personal favorite—the headstand against the wall, the slow, seductive backbend, the low lilting rendition of Dido’s song “Here with Me,” the stuffing of sheets of paper down into her pants, or the trifling self-criticism as she ponders her appearance while in the interrogation room. It had been just a few hours since she’d been formally arrested for the savage murder of the love of her life, yet in the windowless room, Jodi didn’t appear concerned with her accused crime. “You should have at least done your makeup, Jodi, gosh,” she says during a moment alone, as if she is waiting in the wings in the final moments before taking the stage and is not pleased with what she sees.

Dressed in white pants, a formfitting gray V-neck shirt, and a pair of flip-flops, Jodi appeared lifeless as the cameras in the tiny interrogation room began to roll. She sat completely motionless, her head lying on the round table in the small room, her hair neatly combed but falling wherever it may in her pose. There was no option of pushing it back out of the way—her hands were handcuffed behind her back, and therefore unavailable for primping. She alternated between sitting at the table and sitting on the floor, back pressed against the wall and legs extended straight out. At one point, Jodi whispered to herself, “It’s cold in here,” but little other action took place until five minutes in, when Detective Flores entered the room.

The detective, in dark blue pants and a lighter blue dress shirt without a tie, hid his fatigue well. As he extended his hands toward her handcuffs to unlock them, he offered her anything she needed to help with her comfort, from a bottle of water to more heat in the small, chilly room. He warmly reintroduced himself as the detective on Travis’s case, and Jodi politely told him she remembered him well.

After the niceties were complete, he got right to work. “I know exactly when it happened, when he was killed,” he told Jodi in a matter-of-fact, nonaggressive manner. Jodi was completely without hysteria or confusion, listening with an affect so flat that the only way to know she was hearing anything was by her occasional “okay” or “uh hunh” to a statement. “I know a lot of details, and just recently we found quite a bit of evidence that I’ll discuss with you. The main thing I’m looking for, though, is answers on why certain things happened and why they went so far.” He explained that many of the details were known only to the killer, not even to Travis’s family, and Jodi offered her total cooperation. He then read her her Miranda rights. After she acknowledged that she understood them and agreed to talk, the questioning began.

“Let’s start with this: what have you been up to since Travis’s death?” the detective asked; hopefully, fewer confrontational questions like this would produce fewer defensive responses and make the interview that much more productive than going straight into the crime scene. Jodi talked about both her jobs, PPL and the Mexican restaurant in Yreka, but added that she had been in a daze for the last few weeks. She deviated almost immediately to Travis’s Facebook page and the flood of memorial entries that had been posted since his death. She called her own entry and its “my dear Travis” sentimental tone “immature,” so she had taken it down. In reality, Travis’s friends had been aghast by its over-the-top nature, with dozens of pictures of the couple in happier times. Even after Travis’s brutal murder, she had the nerve to enshrine him like her saint, although she had most likely butchered him. It was a postmortem stalking in the most tasteless manner, with Travis, even in death, unable to shake her or defend himself.

At that point, the detective brought up the murder. “You know . . . everybody is saying, I don’t understand what happened to Travis, but you need to look at Jodi. 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’s lives, talked to 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 kind of just putting the two together . . . obviously, you weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend anymore.”

Jodi was slightly tongue-tied. When it became clear that she was conflicted about spilling information on the sex life of a man who had committed to chastity, the detective helped her out. “Well, I’m sure if Travis could speak right now, he wouldn’t care what people thought about him. ’Cause they knew who he was.” Flores went on to describe his view of their relationship, based only on what he learned by probing Travis’s side, and his analysis was spot-on. “Well, the way Travis thought by, you know, getting into his head, and everything he’s written, his journals, and everything I found out about him, he truly had feelings for you. And for some reason he felt that the relationship between you and him was somewhat unhealthy. But he couldn’t stop it. And I assume it’s probably maybe the same way you felt about him . . .”

Jodi agreed that their relationship was unhealthy. Even though Arizona was the “Mormon land of opportunity,” following Travis there after their breakup led to more sex, but less spirituality. She described signals that she would get from Travis to leave her residence and come to his home for a rendezvous. “My nightlife was about him . . . He would text me,
I’m getting sleepy dot dot dot . . . zzz,
and that was his code to, like ‘come on over’ kind of thing . . . the coast is clear. I lived five minutes away, maybe ten depending, and it was just too convenient and too easy, and it was fun, and we had fun. We were together. So, it wasn’t healthy, and I totally agree with that.”

Jodi said she moved back to Yreka for three reasons: she needed to regroup financially, with her money situation described as being “in dire straits”; she wanted to be with her family in Yreka, especially urgent because of her father’s poor health; and she wanted to put physical distance between Travis and her. The nine months she had lived in Mesa had done nothing to promote a meaningful relationship between them. She made it clear that she had also been in intimate relationships with other men in her life, that her interpretation of Christianity and the Bible had always been true to the Ten Commandments, which did not say, “Thou shalt not fornicate.” When she converted to Mormonism, she had grown to understand the importance of chastity.

While it may be laughably unreasonable to buy into her lifestyle as chaste, Travis had been a Mormon a lot longer than she had, so following his lead to the outer limits of chastity was not wholeheartedly absurd. She admitted to feeling guilty when she and Travis were doing things that would make a streetwalker blush. But, somehow, instant sexual gratification seemed to prevail.

Jodi provided a lot of fodder for psychologists. She moved to Travis’s town only after they decided not to keep dating. The sex was hotter after the split. Big emotional moments came mostly on the phone. When Detective Flores asked Jodi if she and Travis ever seriously talked about getting married, Jodi said he had proposed to her in a telephone conversation. “Once we broke up, he brought it up, he actually proposed to me. That was really hard because we were on the phone and it was just like, none of that stuff should be done on the phone anyway, but I was hundreds of miles away, and I told him that I loved him. We didn’t say ‘I love you’ during our relationship, but we said it afterward. It was weird.” Skeptics would later say this conversation between Travis and Jodi never took place, but aside from Jodi Arias being a pathological liar, she would not be the first to look back and romanticize a toxic relationship that was driven by lust.

Jodi provided the detective with a timeline. She did not dispute the fact that she and Travis were only official for five months, all of it long-distance, and that she had moved to Mesa within weeks of breaking up. She dismissed the hint from Detective Flores that this was kind of stalker behavior, saying she had found a roommate in Mesa back when she and Travis were still an item. Because she had to leave Palm Desert anyway, she was following through with a plan that was already in place. She said there were plenty of advantages for Travis, too, when she settled in his town, and in her telling, he’d even hired her to clean his house, knowing she could use the money so he wasn’t at all upset. Flores listened and let her go on. He’d likely already talked to people close to Travis who’d told the detective they’d heard him arguing on the phone with Jodi about her move to Mesa.