Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (36 page)

“I could have, yes.”

“Isn’t it true that during that telephone call, she was asking you for a favor . . . for gas cans, so she could make a trip to Mesa, Arizona, you remember that?”

This time, Darryl took a little longer to think. Finally, in a subdued, almost embarrassed manner, he faintly answered, “Yes.’’ It was eventually established that Jodi had picked up two five-gallon gas cans from his house near Monterey on June 3, 2008, and she had never returned them. But, more important, she had told Darryl that she was going to Mesa—key evidence of her planning.

Mr. Martinez proceeded to show Darryl some sales receipts for gas purchases made at two gas stations close to each other, and then put the pieces together. The state’s theory was that Jodi had borrowed the cans, bought the gas, and traveled to Mesa so that she could make the trip without stopping for gas and leaving a trail. With the gas cans in her car, there would be no record of any transaction at a gas station. Perhaps more important, there would be no attendant to testify that he saw her in the middle of the night on the road to Mesa and there would be no footage of her on any gas station cameras. As long as she had those cans, she probably figured there would be no way to prove that she went to Arizona that night. This, according to the state, was evidence of planning, forethought, and premeditation in the calculated murder of Travis Alexander.

When Martinez exhausted his questions about the gas cans, he moved into the sex life of Jodi and Darryl. He wanted to know when it began, how often they did it, in what fashion, was it photographed, who was more aggressive, and a slew of other personal details. Darryl said he and Jodi were both equally enthusiastic, and that Jodi may have taken pictures of him when he was in the shower.

It was a chilling parallel, and taken with the rest of Martinez’s well-constructed cross-examination, it was not a good ending for the defense’s first day. Jodi, the self-described photographer, had taken naked pictures of at least one man prior to Travis—in the shower no less—and she had also borrowed two gas cans for a trip that would have taken her past countless gas stations no matter in what direction she was traveling.

T
he following day, January 30, the defense called Lisa Andrews, now using her married name, Lisa Daidone. Perhaps the state had opted not to call her as its own witness, in part because her testimony was expected to be so inflammatory against Jodi that Martinez may have feared it might be grounds for a successful appeal. This way, he got to cross-examine her and lead her to the answers he wanted. Mostly, it was her knowledge of Jodi’s stalking, in particular, the tire-slashing incidents, that was so damaging. If she were to testify about them, the jury might conclude that Jodi had been the perpetrator of those uncharged crimes, even though there was no police report or hard evidence tying her to the incidents. Lisa became a defense witness instead, based primarily on an angry email she had once sent to Travis.

Lisa was a beautiful young lady, very composed, with casually combed blond hair and nice eyes. In the four years since Travis’s murder, she had married and given birth to her first child. Lisa inhaled deeply as Jennifer Willmott began her questioning. Lisa was called as a defense witness because, during her eight-month on again, off again relationship with Travis, she had witnessed a side of him the defense wanted to feature. In hindsight, Lisa said he had not been abusive or that sexually aggressive with her and, in fact, it was she who had initiated their first kiss. She also thought they were going too far, too fast when Travis got an erection during a make-out session. However, when she discovered that he was cheating on her with his old girlfriend, Jodi Arias, she broke up with him. The very next day, she sent him an angry three-page email about her feelings on a proper Mormon relationship, which Willmott was introducing now. She went through the entire email with painstaking care, it being one of their most important pieces of evidence in their quest to prove that Travis wasn’t a saint, but was a sex-obsessed cheater.

“Do you remember this email, where you were talking to Travis about breaking up and that it was the right thing to do?” Willmott asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you hope he came to the same conclusion?”

“Yes.”

“Did you talk to him about starting off the relationship . . . wrong?”

“Yes,” said Lisa quietly.

“Did you feel that way because you thought
you
might have tempted him to kiss
you
?”

Lisa agreed, saying she thought it was too soon to be behaving that like.

“Did you talk to him about the fact that you were making out too long?”

“Yes.”

“By making out, what do you mean?”

“Kissing,” Lisa said with a small smile.

“Did you talk about how each time you made out, it progressively got worse?”

“Yes.”

“Did you talk to him about when you used to make out with him in the beginning, you didn’t think about sex?”

“Yes.”

“But, eventually, it would creep into your mind?”

“Yes.”

“Was that something you were not comfortable with?”

“Yes,” Lisa acknowledged.

Willmott asked if she thought sex was on Travis’s mind, too. Lisa replied affirmatively.

“Did you tell him that sometimes you thought he wanted you just for your body?”

“I did say that in the email,” Lisa said.

“And that your kisses didn’t mean anything to him?”

“I did say that in that email.”

“That you felt it was a way for him to let out sexual tension . . .”

“I did say that in the email,” she said with a deep swallow.

“. . . that he had so much of?”

Lisa was becoming a little embarrassed. “Again, I said that,” she said, subduing a crooked smile.

“Did that make you feel used and dirty?”

Lisa acknowledged that she had mentioned that in the email, and that if Travis truly cared for her, it wouldn’t have been about passion and lust.

“Do you remember that you told him that you had previously told him not to grab your butt?”

“Yes.”

“And especially not in public?”

“Yes.”

“But that he persisted in doing it?”

“Yes.” Lisa admitted that at the time, she felt Travis was not listening to her, acknowledging that she had asked Travis not to talk about sex so much, but he did anyway. She thought it made a man vulgar and unattractive to talk about sex as much as he did. She believed Travis was a virgin, and she told him that he’d get sex some day, but he just had to be patient.

Willmott pointed out in the email that Lisa had used the words “immature,” “insensitive,” and “selfish” when she was discussing Travis’s behavior. The same email still in evidence recalled a day trip the two took together to Sedona, where Lisa had complained that Travis was on the phone too much. He implied that she should be grateful. She also mentioned that he was being selfish when he wanted to have conversations with her late at night, and she was too tired to talk. Late night calls were the norm between Travis and Jodi but clearly Lisa, young and unaware of those calls, was unwilling to engage in a similar practice.

Nonetheless, Lisa said they got back together, mostly due to Travis’s persuasiveness and persistence. However, she called it off again, this time because she thought Travis was getting too serious about marriage. The third time they got back together was even more short-lived. “Strange things” had been happening and, by mid-February 2008, she didn’t want to continue the relationship, at least until Jodi was out of Travis’s life. Though the jury wasn’t allowed to hear the details, these bizarre occurrences included the tire slashings on two consecutive nights the previous December. Lisa suspected Jodi was behind the criminal mischief and was fed up. She also found out Travis was in touch with another past girlfriend, Deanna Reid.

To end her questioning, Willmott wanted to know how Lisa had felt after Travis’s death, when she learned he was not a virgin. She said she had been “shocked.”

At this point, Willmott turned the witness over to the prosecutor, and all hell broke loose. It began well enough. Martinez walked Lisa through her complaints about Travis that the defense had made into character issues, and Lisa agreed that many of them had been reversed after she had made Travis aware of her feelings. In her words, Travis had become more respectful, more attentive, and more gentlemanly after that. She even agreed with Martinez that many of those early complaints of hers about Travis being too sexual had been the product of complete naïveté on her part, as she knew very little about the biological process of arousal. In hindsight now, she seemed to feel silly that she had thought Travis’s erection had been from sick thinking, not human biology.

Martinez also pointed out that Travis sincerely wanted to marry Lisa, and at that point he was doing everything he could to be the man she would want to be with. It was Travis who was trying to conform to what Lisa wanted, not the other way around. After they got back together, Travis was the one who stopped anything even remotely sexual, from hugging to kissing, from going too far so that Lisa wouldn’t feel adversely affected. Even the third time they got back together, Lisa admitted that Travis never “foisted” himself on her.

“If he was kissing you, that was something that was welcome by you, right?” Mr. Martinez inquired.

“Correct,” Lisa agreed.

“If you were kissing him, that was something you wanted, right?”

“Correct,” Lisa said again.

“When you were in public, was it a situation where you would be glomming onto him, grabbing onto him, and hugging him?” Martinez asked, alluding to testimony where Jodi had been described as being overly sexual and inappropriate when out with Travis.

“No,” said Lisa, more comfortable now that she wasn’t undermining Travis. Martinez described the relationship with the analogy that they were like a couple of high schoolers, and Lisa embarrassedly agreed, also concurring that the email she had sent was along the lines of a “high-school maturity.”

“In retrospect, do you think some of the comments you made were a little unfair to him?”

“Yes,” Lisa nodded enthusiastically.

Martinez strode over to the prosecution table while rambling about what a proper relationship
shouldn’t
look like, selected a particular photo from underneath another upturned one, and started to carry it up to the projector. “Do you think, in regards to everything he did to you, and how you feel, and in the circumstances, do you think in your mind, it is appropriate to take a knife and slash somebody’s throat?” Martinez bellowed, slapping the photo down onto the machine. There were audible gasps and yelps in the courtroom at the unexpected grisly display.

“Objection!” barked Willmott, jumping to her feet as an autopsy photo of Travis’s face tilted slightly back, bloated, gray, exposing a gaping wound across the neck, came onto a humongous screen and multiple smaller ones visible throughout the courtroom, but meant for the jury. “Completely irrelevant!” she exclaimed. Nurmi joined Willmott in a standing objection as they stormed to the bench.

The damage had been done. As Judge Stephens called for an immediate sidebar, the courtroom went into meltdown. Lisa sat stunned, her hand across her mouth. Tanisha ran from the gallery, sobbing, followed at the heels by a male relative. Her sister, Samantha, threw her head down and folded her hands on top of her head in a desperate attempt to hide from the image. The man beside her leaned over her to shield and protect her. Jodi hid behind her hair, which she pulled entirely over her face as she, too, appeared to sob openly, pinching her nose on occasion. Her mother and aunt, while not crying, looked stunned. Other people in the gallery also fled for the hallway.

When order was restored, Judge Stephens admonished everybody in the courtroom that it was imperative to keep their emotions under control. Martinez continued with Lisa along a different line of question, acting as if no disturbance had been created by his ambush. Nurmi would later use Martinez’s stunt as the basis for one of myriad unsuccessful motions for a mistrial throughout the trial. He asked that the judge remove Travis’s family from the courtroom to the witness room, where they could watch the trial on a monitor, if there were further emotional outbursts.

The next two witnesses were Desiree and Dan Freeman, the sister and brother friends who had taken two trips with Jodi and Travis, one day trip to Sedona and the Grand Canyon, the other a three-day trip to Havasupai Falls in the Grand Canyon region. Desiree testified first. She said Travis became quite enraged at Jodi on one occasion when they were all together, and seemed “over the top.” She even used the word “shocked” when Jennifer Willmott asked her how she felt witnessing the confrontation.

Desiree’s brother was next. In 2010, Dan Freeman had actually been considered as a witness for the prosecution as well as the defense, and he had even stopped watching the news about this case in the event he was called. At the time, he was caught in the middle, as he regarded both Travis and Jodi as friends. On the stand, he tried to stay completely objective. He testified that he had seen Jodi and Travis fight on more than one occasion, but nothing extraordinary. He and his sister accompanied Travis and Jodi on the September 13–15, 2007, trip to Havasupai Falls that started out with a fight between Jodi and Travis at Travis’s house. Sometimes, he got the distinct feeling that Travis didn’t want to be alone with Jodi, lest he lose his willpower and do something sexual he’d regret later. Dan reinforced that Travis was cozier with Jodi when fewer people were around.

The prosecutor objected to some of the evidence from the defense’s next witness. Lonnie Dworkin, a computer forensics examiner who had examined various devices, including Travis’s and Jodi’s laptops, Jodi’s cell phone, and Jodi’s Canon camera. He recovered video and images from all the devices. Most important to Jennifer Willmott was a photo of an erect penis that Dworkin claimed he had recovered from Jodi’s hard drive. Because Dworkin had no idea whose genitalia it was, Martinez objected. Dworkin was allowed to testify about the photo but it wouldn’t be displayed in open court until later in the trial.