Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (2 page)

Fueling the graphic details of the murder was the fact that Jodi had already admitted responsibility for it. Jodi’s two court-appointed lawyers promised jurors there was a reasonable explanation for all of this. Her testimony had been littered with implications of self-defense or perhaps battered woman’s syndrome; however, Jodi’s credibility was extremely suspect. In the early days of the investigation, she had denied being anywhere near Travis’s house on the night of the killing. Then she changed her tale, admitting she was there but insisting that two strangers, a man and a woman dressed in ski masks had done it. Finally, she’d come around to admit she was solely responsible, only this time she concocted a new story alleging that abusive behavior by Travis had pushed her to kill him.

For his part, the prosecutor, Juan Martinez, was confident that the evidence would prove Jodi Arias was guilty of premeditated first-degree murder, even though the defense wanted to paint her as a woman left dazed and disoriented by acute stress disorder, dissociative amnesia, and post-traumatic stress disorder after an angry, violent encounter. The stakes were enormously high for both sides. Jodi’s life and the lawyers’ careers rode on the outcome. Though the death penalty was on the table, it could be considered only with a conviction of murder in the first degree.

The fascination with both Jodi and the case had started at the murder, crescendoing steadily for four and a half years. By the time the trial started on January 2, 2013, it was at a fever pitch. After Jodi’s attorneys had rolled the dice, calling Jodi herself to the witness stand on February 4, it had become insane. From that moment forward, the crowd of devoted true crime followers and regular folks at the courthouse mushroomed, with more and more people trying to witness up close the testimony of this femme fatale.

In the fifteen days during which Jodi had been testifying, she had been addressing questions from both sides, fending off attacks from Prosecutor Juan Martinez and spinning her version of events with the help of her own lawyers, Kirk Nurmi and Jennifer Willmott, who fed her carefully phrased questions. What emerged was a graphic, often uncomfortable level of detail about the sex life that Jodi and Travis had shared. She had described in full color every kinky sexual behavior she and Travis had ever engaged in. They had anal sex; they tried bondage; their fantasy sex play made porn writers blush. In a phone sex recording played in open court they talked about zip-tying Jodi to a tree with her dressed as Little Red Riding Hood while they performed wild sex acts outdoors. Jodi had recorded the late night conversation between the two that went on for more than half an hour. On the tape, Travis’s voice, sleepy, baritone and raspy, is in sharp contrast to Jodi’s soft, young, giddy tone. They delightedly recall the time they had experimented sexually with Pop Rocks and Tootsie Pops; the pleasures of oral sex; their sex in a bubble bath; the lubricants and bikini waxes; and the mutual masturbation on both sides. The moans of orgasms could be heard at various points of climax. The entire courtroom, jurors and gallery alike, had sat in awkward self-conscious silence as this extremely private pillow talk was broadcast as evidence. Some in the audience had been visibly embarrassed.

The explicit testimony seemed especially hard on those who knew and loved Travis. His sister, Tanisha Sorenson, a fixture in the gallery pretty much every day since the trial had started on January 2, took in the information as stoically as she could. She was not one to keep her feelings about Jodi to herself. “I know this might sound creepy, but I hope to get to watch her die someday after she’s on death row,” she had told a reporter early on. Tanisha was joined in the gallery every day by her sister Samantha and her brother Steven. The other four siblings were there less often, but all of them had to travel great distances to hear the secrets of their brother’s sex life spilled into open court.

The graphic nature of the sexual content was amplified by the fact that both Travis and Jodi were Mormon, though Jodi had not been a Mormon when she and Travis first met in September 2006. By most accounts the connection between them was immediate and electric, and within two months, Jodi had converted to the Mormon faith, with Travis performing her baptism. But her conversion didn’t change the fact that out-of-wedlock sex acts are absolutely forbidden in the Mormon religion. The church’s Law of Chastity couldn’t be clearer: “Before marriage, do not do anything to arouse the powerful emotions that must be expressed only in marriage. Do not participate in passionate kissing, lie on top of another person, or touch the private, sacred parts of another person’s body, with or without clothing. Do not allow anyone to do that with you. Do not arouse those emotions in your own body.” All this can be found in chapter 39 in
The Book of Mormon.

According to Jodi’s testimony, Travis had told her all about the Law of Chastity and its taboos. His explanation was that “vaginal sex was the ultimate place to not go until marriage,” but any other sex acts, while not being condoned, were in a gray area that might make them okay. The very night of her baptism, Jodi claims, the two went to the gray area, with abandon.

After fifteen extraordinary days of Jodi on the stand, it seemed to many in and out of the courtroom that there could be nothing left to ask of this strangely mesmerizing defendant. Both her attorneys and the fiery prosecutor had finally run out of questions. But, now, on Day 16 of Jodi’s testimony, it was time for a different set of questions—from the members of the jury.

In Arizona, criminal trial court proceedings allow time for interaction between a witness and the jury, giving the jury an opportunity to ask a witness direct questions through the judge. Arizona is only one of a handful of states that routinely allow juries to do this, the thinking being that such exchanges encourage jurors to be engaged and attentive during the trial. Each juror writes his or her questions on a piece of paper while the witness is testifying. They are then placed anonymously in a wire basket in front of the jurors to be vetted and read by the judge at the end of each witness’s testimony. Both the prosecution and the defense attorney are allowed to argue against questions they deem inappropriate or irrelevant, but ultimately the judge makes the final decision on what gets asked. Then the attorneys are allowed another round of follow-up questions of the witness based solely on the scope of the jurors’ questions.

Maricopa County Superior Court judge Sherry Stephens was on the bench, and she would be the reader of the jury’s questions. Over the course of the trial, Judge Stephens had turned neutrality into an art form, her monotone voice and bland expression studiously avoiding any hint of what she might be thinking. Given the barrage of questions that the defense and the prosecution had already asked of Jodi Arias, the number of new questions the jury had for her was astounding. More than two hundred additional inquiries had been picked from the hundreds in the basket of jury questions. The eleven men and seven women on the panel, with no one identified as “alternates” until after closing arguments, had been busy. Without much emotion, the judge turned to Jodi, seated in the witness box, and read the first question.

“Did Travis pay for a majority of your trips?” she asked.

The juror’s question was referring to the many small trips the two had taken together over the almost two years they had known each other. Jodi listened carefully, seeming to want to process the question before making a snap response, which she might later regret. She swiveled her chair to look at the jury face-on. There were no signs of fatigue or stress in her face, despite her often-emotional testimony during the previous three and a half weeks. Many days on the stand, she doubled down with her head in between her hands. Today she was much more composed. Her puffy, short-sleeved blouse was starch white, like the top half of a schoolgirl’s uniform. Only the top of her hair was pulled back in a scrunchie, the rest of it falling down straight to her shoulders.

“Fifty-fifty,” she replied, indicating that, at least for travel, she and Travis were on equal financial footing.

After two more follow-up questions about the trips they took, the line of inquiry from a juror went right to the murder. A juror wanted to know why Jodi had put Travis’s camera in his washing machine right after she killed him. Again, Jodi paused to consider the question carefully. She relied on the answer she had repeated so often during her time in the witness box, namely that she couldn’t remember. She claimed she had no memory of anything that happened after Travis lunged at her and she shot him. Throughout the long period of jurors’ questions, she answered over and over that she couldn’t remember. Finally on the seventy-fourth question, the issue of her memory loss was dealt with head-on.

“Why is it that you have no memory of stabbing Travis?” the judge asked, reading from a juror’s question.

Jodi took a long pause. She looked at the jury, prepared to answer, then hesitated again before any sound came out. She raised her hands from her lap, lifted them into the air, spread her fingers, and began using her hands to help her with her emphatic points.

“I can’t really explain why my mind did what it did,” she said in a tone no more emotional than if she had been asked where she had last seen her car keys. A pause of at least three seconds ensued. “Maybe because it’s too horrible. I don’t know.”

PART I

CHAPTER 1

DEAD AT HOME

O
n June 9, 2008, at just before 10:30
P
.
M
., officers for the Mesa Police Department in Mesa, Arizona, responded to a 911 call at 11428 East Queensborough Avenue. It came from a five-bedroom, well-maintained Spanish-style house in a quiet residential area of town where the homes were variations of each other, based on a handful of tasteful models. The owner of this particular home had been found dead in the shower of the master bathroom. The caller stated she had no idea how long he had been there.

“A friend of ours is dead at his home,” the young female voice told the dispatcher, her words shaking in her throat. “We hadn’t heard from him in a while and came to check on him. We think he is dead. His roommate went to check on him and said, ‘There is blood everywhere.’ ”

Responding officers found the man, later identified as thirty-year-old Travis Alexander, crumpled naked and lifeless on the floor of his shower stall. His body was well into the decomposition process, and although it was unclear how long he had been there, there was no doubt it had been at least a couple of days. Officers observed large amounts of blood beyond the shower as well, splattered around the floor, walls, and sink. Police observed a large laceration to the man’s throat, which appeared to cross from one ear to the other.

A fairly hard-edged town with a violent crime rate above the national average in pretty much every category, the city of Mesa had seen its share of disturbing deaths. Twenty-five years earlier, in one of Maricopa County’s most heinous crimes ever, a transient by the name of Robert “Gypsy” Comer had murdered a man he had never met before at a campground near Apache Lake, then kidnapped a woman one campsite over and sexually assaulted her for twenty-four hours. He had been sentenced to death, and he was executed by lethal injection in May 2007.

Unlike the Apache Lake crime, this new Mesa murder did not have the markings of a random crime, though at this early stage, nothing could be ruled out. Travis owned and occupied the house, but being single, he liked to rent out bedrooms to friends and roommates for the income. He currently had two boarders, Enrique Cortez and Zachary Billings, who told police it had been four or five days since they had last seen and spoken to him. However, they hadn’t suspected anything was wrong, because he had a trip planned to Cancún; they’d just assumed he had already left.

It was the planned trip to Cancún that had prompted the search for Travis in the first place. Unable to reach him, Marie “Mimi” Hall, the friend Travis was supposed to be traveling with, had become increasingly concerned, especially since they were scheduled to leave in the morning. That evening, she’d gone to his house, knocked, and waited in vain. When no one came to the door, she went home and called her friend Michelle Lowery and Michelle’s boyfriend, Dallin Forrest. All three entered the house by using the keypad code at the garage. Mimi immediately detected a foul odor, something she initially blamed on Travis’s dog, Napoleon. Inside, they were surprised to find Zach and his girlfriend, Amanda McBrien, in Zach’s bedroom. They had not heard the doorbell. Now that they knew Travis was missing, Zach tried to turn the doorknob to his room, discovered it was locked, and went to retrieve the spare key to the master bedroom suite. As the door opened, a huge bloodstain could be seen on the carpet at the entryway to the hall leading to Travis’s en suite bathroom. The smell of death was undeniable. That was when all of them knew the search was not going to end well.