Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (37 page)

Dworkin also found thousands of photos from Jodi’s own personal Canon camera, including four that the defense deemed significant to the case. Three photos showed Jodi as a brunette with reddish blond streaks, date-stamped about a month before Travis was killed. The state was arguing that Jodi dyed her hair from blond to brunette between June 2, 2008, when she rented a car at Budget car rental in Redding, California, and June 4 when she killed Travis. This, said the state, was part of her planning and premeditation. But the defense was arguing, through these photos, that Jodi became a brunette at least a month before the killing. The fourth picture, curiously taken on July 12, 2008, just three days before her arrest, was of the gray “Travis Alexander’s” T-shirt and the pink “Travis” panties, a reminder of what the defense claimed was Travis’s possessive, controlling nature. The prosecution would counter that there was no evidence outside Jodi’s questionable word that the items in the photo were given to Jodi by Travis.

Defense expert Bryan Neumeister, a thirty-two-year veteran specialist in video and audio enhancement, was called to present a much-anticipated piece of evidence—a recording of a telephone call between two people. One voice, the clearer of the two, was identified as Jodi’s, and the second, a male voice, was Travis’s. With the requisite foundation requirements met allowing the recording to be played, this particular phone call would soon become the sex tape heard around the world.

CHAPTER 18

EIGHTEEN DAYS

W
ould she or wouldn’t she?

As the defense case progressed that became
the
question that hummed through the courthouse in speculative chatter. As each defense witness stepped down, the pulse of the reporters would rise. Would Jodi be next to take the stand?

The wild card in any criminal trial is whether a defendant will take the stand in his or her defense. A person charged with a crime has a right to remain silent from arrest through trial, and that silence cannot be used against her by the jury. But when self-defense is asserted, it almost always calls for a defendant to get on the stand and explain why the conduct in question was justified and, hence, not criminal. Jodi Arias was no exception.

From the outset of the trial, few people believed an outright acquittal was even remotely possible; however, Jodi could help her case if she could offer some explanation as to why the brutal slaying of Travis was not premeditated first-degree murder, and, perhaps more important, why she lied for two years before admitting she killed him. Beyond the sheer barbarity of it, the fact that she told three stories made her seem even more of a depraved monster than had she not waited two years to admit she killed him. By then, when her final claim, that she had acted in self-defense, bubbled up through the lies of the masked ninja story, it seemed not only desperate, but ludicrous.

Still, if, in spite of the past lies, Jodi could come across as sympathetic and believable on the stand, it could turn the tide in the case. Calling Jodi as a witness was risky, but it held the potential to reshape the trial and possibly avoid a conviction of first-degree murder, or at least the death penalty. Given the circumstances, either of those outcomes would have been a victory for the defense.

But of all the people to take the stand in any criminal case, the defendant has the most to lose and, thus, the greatest motive to lie—and Jodi was already an admitted liar. She had a lot to explain, and she needed to do it in a credible way. Everything about her would be scrutinized, from the content of her testimony to her demeanor and delivery. Jodi needed to make the jury believe it was she who was the victim. She would need to make a convincing argument that she had never planned to kill the love of her life, but rather had been the victim of her oversexed, two-timing boyfriend’s abuse. If only she could connect with a few jurors, or even one, who would actually believe her, then maybe her life would be spared. There was no question that it was a stretch of epic proportions and a gamble, but Nurmi and Willmott rolled the dice.

On Tuesday, February 4, right after the lunch hour, the defense wrapped up testimony from two computer forensic and audio/video witnesses. At about 2:00
P
.
M
., the attorneys approached the bench to have a private discussion with the judge. Judge Stephens gave jurors a break and sent them out of the courtroom for just a few minutes. Sidebar conferences and juror breaks were quite common at the trial, so the spectators in the public gallery had no reason, on that basis alone, to suspect that something extraordinary was about to happen. Once the jurors were gone, Jodi, dressed in a black short-sleeved top and white slacks, briefly left the courtroom through the side door closest to her seat, accompanied by the uniformed bailiff, probably to use the restroom. She came back in through the same door a couple of minutes later and headed straight for the witness box, appearing to be in a state of anxious, yet controlled, composure.

In an instant, the hum in the courtroom ceased, as all eyes were trained on Jodi. The atmosphere was electric. Her decision to testify certainly made her the exception to the mega trial rule. When it came to the biggest trials of the era, from O. J. Simpson’s murder trial to Michael Jackson’s child molestation trial, and the murder trials of Scott Peterson and Casey Anthony, all had chosen not to take the stand in their own defense. Jodi’s moment had finally arrived.

Jodi’s hair was off her face, her frameless glasses not shielding the apprehension in her eyes. Her life was on the line and, by anyone’s admission, things were not looking good. Judge Stephens asked that the jury be returned to the courtroom, and Jodi Arias stood in the witness box to be sworn in.

It took no time for the testimony to stall. No sooner had Judge Stephens told Mr. Nurmi “You may proceed,” and he had delivered his first question, “Hey, Jodi, is this a position you ever expected to find yourself in?” than the word “Objection! Relevance!” stopped the answer cold. It was clear that Jodi was going to be the witness of the day for a long time to come.

Nurmi began again after a brief sidebar conference. He looked directly at Jodi.

“Did you kill Travis Alexander on June 4, 2008?”

“Yes, I did,” Jodi answered.

“Why?”

“The simple answer is that he attacked me and I defended myself.”

That it was “the simple answer” was an understatement. The formidable task in front of Nurmi was to make it a
believable
answer. With that in mind, the defense attorney’s line of questioning went straight to Jodi’s childhood, the good and the bad parts of it. Jodi answered each question by rotating slightly toward the jury, looking from person to person on the panel as directly as she could. She recalled everything at home being close to ideal until about the age of seven, when her mother started spanking her with a wooden spoon. Jodi appeared to tear up at this memory, although no actual tears started to flow.

With that, and perhaps taking a page from Casey Anthony’s highly publicized bombshell acquittal, Jodi threw both of her parents completely under the bus. She talked about escalating violence in the home, and beatings that would leave welts on her. She said her father was as much a party to the behavior as her mother, often using a belt to inflict punishment. Once, after he shoved her during an argument, she fell into a doorpost and was briefly knocked unconscious. When she came to, her mother, also involved in the argument, told her father to be more careful. Jodi said she became so tired of the excessive discipline and physical abuse that she finally dropped out of high school after her junior year and moved out. Also similar to Casey Anthony’s case, the defendant’s mother, seated supportively but helplessly in the gallery, had to endure every moment of her daughter’s accusations. However, whereas Casey had let her lawyers do the character assassination for her, in this trial, Jodi was accusing her parents of abuse with her own words from her own lips, all while sitting mere feet from the mother she was lambasting. On occasion, Sandy Arias’s twin sister would help Jodi’s mother maintain her stoicism by holding her hand.

For eighteen consecutive court days, from February 4 to March 13, Jodi would return to the witness stand. After her first day on the stand, the judge ordered that the cameras in the courtroom could not shoot her walking to the stand. She wore a security device on one leg that was obscured by the loose-fitting slacks she always wore. Locked onto a knee, it would prevent her from running should she decide to make a fast move, and caused a slight limp, which could no longer be captured on camera.

Jodi spent the first few days of her testimony recounting her relationships with three previous boyfriends. She began with Bobby, her first boyfriend and the person she moved in with after she left home. For the most part, she talked about him fondly, remembering how he liked dressing in eighteenth-century Goth. And even as she went on to claim that he was occasionally abusive toward her, her demeanor remained flat. They ended the relationship “mostly because of housekeeping issues,” adding there was no lingering anger or obsessive feelings once they were no longer an item. While Bobby had managed to stay out of the trial vortex, never taking the witness stand, sources who had investigated Jodi’s time with Bobby described the end of their relationship very differently, hinting that, as she would later do with Travis, Jodi had remained obsessed with Bobby for a long time after their breakup and stalked him.

Matt was another ex Jodi had once lived with. She was as cheerful walking through that relationship with Nurmi as she had been with Bobby. In fact, she was so soft-spoken that, at one point, Judge Stephens asked the jurors if they were all able to hear her. Concerning Matt, Jodi said he was kind, spiritual, and treated her well. Their relationship did include sex, but she loved him, so sex was only part of it. After about a year and eight months, when Jodi learned he was being unfaithful, she confronted him in person, and the relationship was over. The ending was not heated or violent. Rather, it was tearful and emotional, but it was over. Again, the other side was never told.

Nurmi proceeded to ask Jodi about what happened next. She said she moved to Big Sur, where she met Darryl Brewer. The four years of their relationship had no evidence of violence or disrespect. Darryl, when he was on the stand just a few days earlier, had already corroborated everything Jodi revealed. On the stand now, Jodi confirmed that their main sticking point had come when she had found a new spiritual calling in the Mormon faith and had decided to be celibate until she found a marriage partner, a decision that by her own account did not last long. She also agreed that their breakup was remarkably simple and mature, despite their long history together. If one were looking for anger or resentment in Jodi’s body language about any of these men, it just wasn’t there. She openly and confidently answered Nurmi’s every question, no matter how titillating or embarrassing it might have been.

Then came Travis. Because he was unable to speak for himself, Jodi was the only one in the relationship left to talk about what had gone on between them. Lots of prior witnesses had attested to certain things they had seen, or overheard, or discussed with one party or the other. However, they weren’t in the bedroom with them. Even if Travis were alive, he and Jodi may have defined the relationship completely differently, as in every classic he said, she said scenario. Here, however, there was only she said. Jodi’s version had little to no chance of being taken seriously because the prosecution had already established her as a profligate liar.

On the other hand, the portrait of Travis seemed hard to believe as well. Until this point, he’d morphed from man into saint, which wasn’t realistic either, and the defense had the added obstacle of taking on Mormonism, morality, and hypocrisy as it tried to find a saleable story line in the torrid sexual landscape of Travis and Jodi. While the defense attorneys themselves may not have relished attacking the victim of such a brutal, angry murder, they had an obligation to defend their client. They knew Travis had been admonished by his church for losing his virginity outside marriage long before he had ever met Jodi. If there was to be any kind of meaningful defense, it had to build on the reasonable assumption that Travis was
not
absolutely chaste and pure of mind, while Jodi mercilessly cajoled him into the bedroom to fulfill her one-sided, insatiable sex drive. That scenario just wasn’t realistic, and the defense would emphasize this point in its attempt to represent Jodi as best it could.

Of course, to those around Travis, the experience felt very different. To them, Jodi was slaughtering Travis twice, first by physically killing him, then by attacking his character in an equally vicious fashion, knowing full well that he was no longer there to defend himself.

Nurmi took no time in getting Jodi to talk about when she met Travis for the first time at the Las Vegas convention, moving her swiftly along to when they first had oral sex, which she testified was exactly one date and about ten days later. Nurmi paused so Jodi could delve into every minor detail, not wanting her to broad brush it for the sake of the jurors, who had sworn they had no opinion on the case during its exposure in the press. Yes, Travis had come into a guest bedroom where she was sleeping; yes, they started to French kiss when she had been expecting conversation or at most, minor kissing; yes, he started taking off her clothes; yes, he was in his temple clothes, but they undressed him together; yes, the oral sex went both ways. Nurmi wanted Jodi to let the jury know why she had been so willing to jump into sex this quickly. As one of Travis’s friends pointed out, any born and bred Mormon girl who was asked for oral sex on a first date would have slapped the man in the face.