Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (3 page)

I
t was ten minutes to midnight when homicide detective and lead investigator for the case Esteban Flores arrived at the address. By then the residence had already been secured with yellow police tape, and a police guard was in place to monitor the comings and goings in the house.

The scene in the bathroom was gruesome. By the blood spatter and smears on the walls, there definitely appeared to have been a struggle between the victim and the assailant. It was difficult to assess a cause of death because of the high number of wounds visible across the victim’s upper torso and head. The victim was hunched in a sitting position on the shower floor. The body looked like it had been rinsed off in the shower some time after death. A .25-mm bullet casing was carefully removed from atop caked blood on the floor near the sink, but the handgun it came from was nowhere to be found. Blood swabs, fingerprints, and hair samples were collected from the bathroom baseboards and floor.

Nothing in Travis’s bedroom looked particularly out of place. His well-organized closets and drawers had not been disturbed, and there was no indication that the room had been entered in any forced manner. Of note, however, sheets and blankets had been stripped from the bed and removed from the room, although it couldn’t be determined by whom or why. The hallway between the bedroom and master bathroom had blood smears and one latent bloody palm print, which would be cut from the wall and analyzed later at the crime lab.

With the preliminary assessment of the crime scene complete, Detective Flores turned his attention to the friends or housemates who had been present when the body was discovered—Mimi Hall, Michelle Lowery, Dallin Forrest, Zachary Billings, Amanda McBrien, Enrique Cortez, and Karl Hiatt. After being ruled out as suspects, they might be able to provide information about other people who knew Travis and maybe had a grudge or a score to settle. The fact that the other two boarders were not only unharmed, but had actually been living several days in the same house as their dead landlord, allegedly without knowing it, seemed to suggest that Travis had been a very specific target. Among Travis’s friends, there was a lot of buzz about Jodi Arias, a vindictive ex-girlfriend who lived in California. She would need to be located, but at the moment, the six at hand all agreed to go to the Mesa police station to be interviewed.

Flores chose to speak with Mimi Hall first, as she had been the first on the scene and was Travis’s intended guest for the trip to Cancún. She told the investigator that she had met Travis a year earlier in a singles ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, although the two had only been getting to know each other better in the past few months. She thought Travis may have had a romantic interest in her, but she had told him that she wanted the relationship to be platonic and would understand if he wanted to replace her with someone else on the business trip to Mexico. Travis had declined, promising he would respect her boundaries. She reported she hadn’t seen him in church on Sunday and had been trying to call him for days before she finally went to his residence.

When asked about Travis’s roommates, Mimi didn’t know much. Zach had been there a few months but frequently stayed with his girlfriend, while Enrique had moved in only a couple of weeks earlier. Both were from the church, but she didn’t know them well enough to provide an assessment of their personalities. When asked about Jodi Arias, she had to rely on hearsay, but there had certainly been a lot of chatter about Jodi: she was a “stalker ex-girlfriend”; Jodi would crawl through Napoleon’s doggie door to get inside when she wasn’t invited; after the two broke up, Jodi had stolen some pages from a journal Travis kept, something he had been hoping to turn into a memoir. Mimi was aware that Travis had talked to Jodi as recently as the previous week to confront her about hacking into his Facebook account. In Mimi’s opinion, even though she had never met her, Jodi’s obsession with Travis was concerning.

“I was worried because he had told me about an ex-girlfriend who had done some psychotic obsessive things to him and his friends,” she said. She told Flores she even had her sister on the line when she went to the house in case something was seriously wrong. “I was actually afraid that the girl might be there,” she told the detective.

The next person interviewed was Zachary Billings, one of Travis’s two tenants. Zach had met Travis a couple of years earlier when Zach had been on a Mormon mission in Arizona in 2006 and had come to Travis’s home to talk to one of his roommates. More than a year later Zach was back in Arizona and looking for a place to live. In January 2008, Zach had moved into Travis’s house as a boarder.

Though the likelihood of Zach’s being the killer was slim—who would live in the same house as his victim for that many days without trying to get rid of the body?—he could have easily seen or heard something that might prove critical. It was almost four in the morning when the interview with him began. Despite the hour, Zach was quite forthcoming and relaxed, respectfully answering all questions. He paid Travis $450 a month for his room, and with that rent, he had free range of the house. Though Zach did not know the new roommate, Enrique, very well, he did know that Enrique was also from the church. The house was strictly a living arrangement, not a social one, and each man kept pretty much to himself—in fact during the four and a half months Zach had been there, he and Travis had not had dinner together once. Because Travis traveled on business frequently, it was common for Zach to go days without seeing his landlord.

The last time he thought he had seen Travis was the Thursday before the body was discovered, but he didn’t think anything of Travis’s absence. Zach knew Travis was going on a trip, and not knowing the specifics, Zach assumed he had already left. At this point, Zach accounted for his whereabouts from the time he had last seen Travis alive, which had been in the house, till the time the body was found. For the most part, he had been with his girlfriend, Amanda McBrien, at her house. Other than that, he said he had been going to church, running errands, or working at McGrath’s Fish House, at the intersection of Stapley Drive and U.S. Route 60, about fifteen miles from the house. At one point, he had texted Travis about a mailbox key, but was not concerned when there had been no reply.

Detective Flores asked Zach if he had noticed anything out of place or unusual. Zach said maybe some furniture had been shifted ever so slightly in the living room. This had a reasonable explanation. Travis had purchased a floor cleaning machine somewhat recently, and because the machine was also in the living room, he assumed Travis had a maintenance project in mind.

Turning to more general questions about his landlord, Flores asked questions about Travis’s physical well-being. According to Zach, Travis was in overall good health and exercised regularly, either riding his bike, running, or kickboxing.

When it came to Jodi Arias, Zach had a lot to say. He said she had once been Travis’s girlfriend, but they had broken up before Zach began living with Travis. It was after the two split up that Jodi moved from California to Mesa to be close to him, which seemed rather weird since most people would move farther away following a breakup. Zach wasn’t sure where Jodi lived now—whether she was still in Arizona or back in California with her family. Travis had sometimes paid Jodi to clean the house, maybe because she didn’t know many people and he felt sorry for her. Other times, she came over uninvited or called at inappropriate times to ask for advice, which led to heated arguments between them. Travis had had two girlfriends since Jodi, but one had broken up with him in February, in part because she said Jodi was always hanging around and Travis needed to deal with it. Zach was more than willing to give a buccal swab for a DNA sample and be available in the future for questioning.

Travis’s second roommate, Enrique Cortez, was confused about the exact day he had last seen Travis. He described for Detective Flores unusual observations from the week before. One evening when he had gotten home from work at 6:00
P
.
M
., he had noticed the front door was locked. It was unusual that he had to enter the house through the garage. Like Zach, Enrique had noticed that the living room furniture was pushed aside, and the floor cleaner stood in the middle of the floor. The dog fence was also out of place, set up across the stairs. Though he had been living there only a few weeks, Enrique had never seen Travis restrict his pug Napoleon’s movements around the house. The dog was free to roam everywhere. Enrique also noticed that Travis’s bedroom and office doors remained closed for days. He didn’t detect an odor in the house until about an hour before Travis’s body was found.

As night turned into morning, the interviews with the other people who had been at the house revealed similar themes. As far as Travis’s having any enemies in his social circle, profession, or church, nobody could think of anybody beyond the obsessed jilted girlfriend with a penchant for showing up unannounced. The boarders had not seen any strange, suspicious characters lurking around the bushes or casing the neighborhood in the days before the murder. Of course, Jodi was no stranger.

CHAPTER 2

YOUNG JODI

D
espite the intense media coverage, there is surprisingly little known about Jodi Arias’s upbringing. Many of the supposed “facts” about her early life come from Jodi herself, making them unreliable and subject to an understandable amount of scrutiny. However, if we sift through the concrete and established aspects of Jodi’s past, it becomes clear that much of her youth was marked by her family’s relocations and her parents’ strict, controlling behavior toward her.

Jodi Ann Arias was born on July 9, 1980, in Salinas, California, to parents William “Bill” and Sandra Denise (nee Allen) Arias. A tall, muscular man, with a well-trimmed mustache and beard, Bill Arias was a restaurateur, and took pride in his buff physique. He had dreams of opening a chain of restaurants, while Jodi’s mother worked as a waitress at the family’s restaurants. Her heritage on her father’s side is Mexican, while her mother’s background is German and English.

For Jodi, growing up in Salinas was close to ideal. Known for its flowers, vineyards, and temperate climate, the city is located in Monterey County in the middle of the California coast, about eight miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. Jodi attended Los Padres Elementary School on John Street, and to hear others tell it, she was a happy kid, well liked by a large circle of playmates and friends. She loved art, especially drawing and coloring, and was happiest when she was near a pile of Crayola crayons and some pieces of blank paper. She was also an avid reader, who took flute and karate lessons. Around age ten, she took on photography as a hobby.

The oldest of her parents’ four children, Jodi had two younger brothers, Carl and Joey, and a younger sister, Angela; she also had an older half sister from her father’s first marriage.

Beth Hawkins was a weekend babysitter for the household for almost a year, around the time Jodi was five or six. She claimed she had sometimes observed Jodi behaving aggressively toward her younger brother, Carl. She recounted one incident in particular, when Carl began screaming from another room. She asked him what was wrong, and at first, the child could not explain. Eventually he admitted that his sister had struck him in the back of the head with a baseball bat. When Beth asked Jodi if she had hit her brother, she was struck by Jodi’s response of “I don’t know why he is crying.”

Recalling it more than two decades later, Beth said she was surprised by Jodi’s lack of empathy for her brother, who had clearly been hurt. It could have been an early indicator that Jodi suffered from some sort of detachment disorder.

Years later Jodi would say she was subjected to disciplinary beatings from both her mother and her father, claiming her mother hit her with a wooden spoon that she carried with her in her purse, and that her father used a belt to dole out punishments. But others disputed this, insisting Sandy and Bill never reacted with violence. To that end, these claims of abuse have never been substantiated by any school or health authorities, nor have any of her friends come forward to say they saw evidence of abuse. Aside from Jodi’s own statements, there has never been any evidence to suggest domestic violence in the Arias household. What people have said is that Sandy and Bill were particularly strict with their daughter from a young age, a trend that would continue well into her teenage years, until Jodi moved out.

When Jodi was about eleven, the Ariases moved for the first time in Jodi’s life, going 157 miles south to Santa Maria, California, where Bill had a restaurant called the Branding Iron. Jodi seemed to adjust well to her new surroundings, developing a tight circle of six or seven girlfriends and taking to middle school easily. She attended the eighth grade at Orcutt Junior High School, on Pinal Street not far from Mary Grisham Park. One thing that friends at the time noticed was that Jodi always seemed to be babysitting the youngest two siblings, Angela and Joey. She carried around a diaper bag and was often seen pulling them around in a red cart. It was a lot of responsibility for a girl in junior high, and friends say she was often a no-show at the school dances and sporting events.