Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (40 page)

Jodi had provided conflicting details when recounting this story to expert witnesses who interviewed her at the jail in preparation for trial. These details would wreak havoc on her credibility. At trial, she explained that Travis draped the rope around the sleigh bed’s headboard and wrapped loose nooses around her wrists, but she had previously told an expert that her ankles were also bound.

She was naked; he was wearing his temple garments, which he discarded right before giving her oral sex. She wanted him to shave his pubic area before she reciprocated, so the bondage role-playing stopped, and they had more traditional sex. In breaks from sex, the photos were taken. Because Travis liked Jodi in braids, she wore her hair that way for the naked photo shoot. The sex went on for hours.

As Jodi told it on the stand, they were in his downstairs office at around 4:00
P
.
M
. Jodi had brought a CD of photos from trips they took together and wanted to show them to Travis, but the CD didn’t operate. It was scratched or had a virus. Whatever the cause, it frustrated and annoyed Travis. She was hanging with Napoleon on the floor, but Travis was getting angry. Everything about his body language changed. Jodi testified that he threw the CD against the wall.

Napoleon left, which was typical Napoleon behavior; he didn’t like it when Travis got mad. Jodi tried to calm Travis down by rubbing his back. The next thing she knew, he rotated her around, leaned her over his desk, and applied his whole body weight to her. Trapped underneath him, she went along with him, hoping to calm him down. They were both wearing clothes, but Jodi claimed Travis pulled down her pants and, after a few thrusts, ejaculated on her back. Jodi said that she wasn’t angry about it, as it had seemed to do the trick.

The two hung out for a while more, then Travis went upstairs to shower. Travis had just lost forty pounds, so even though he wasn’t one who loved having his picture taken, he was up for some photographs of himself that day. For a few months, Jodi had been aware of his pending trip to Cancún. She knew that she wasn’t his guest and, according to her, she was fine with that. She thought taking a few pictures of his new body would make him happy.

The day’s evidence ended on that cliffhanger, but it had been another extremely long day. It was six thirty in the evening, and Judge Stephens dismissed the jurors until ten thirty the next morning. The next morning did not find anyone looking particularly refreshed. By now, even Jodi’s outfits were being recycled through the jury box. She was still mixing up hairstyles, whether or not she was wearing glasses, but everything else seemed the same, same likely staged remorse, same head hanging in the same manner as the day before, and arguably the same fake tears.

Nurmi picked up his questioning where the previous day ended, reminding Jodi that she and Travis were about to engage in a photo shoot. Jodi said they selected the shower because of the water effect. They were also going to use Travis’s new camera, as hers was already packed. He was the model, but she picked the poses. What she testified to from this point forward is the following story that prosecutors would later argue was a complete fabrication. She told jurors she was squatting on the floor a few feet from Travis. He was seated in the shower. She leaned toward him and reached into the shower to show him some photos, but the camera slipped out of her hands and hit the tile floor of the shower.

Travis flipped out, screaming that a five-year-old could handle a camera better than she. He then stepped out of the shower and body slammed her on the tile. Her story was already suspicious. Back in April, Jodi had blown the engine on Travis’s BMW, and it didn’t upset him nearly as much as the camera dropping apparently did. It seemed incongruous that a dropped camera would make him as maniacal as Jodi described. In her telling, though, this explosive reaction was just the beginning.

When he started spitting at her, she ran down the bathroom hall into the master bedroom, and pivoted right, straight into his closet. She slammed the door, knowing she could run out the other end of the closet. Jodi could never really explain why she didn’t pivot left and out the door of his bedroom. Going that way, she could have fled down the stairs and diffused the situation or run out of the house. Instead, she stayed within the confines of the closet and master bathroom. She knew that he had a gun in there, and she stepped on a shelf to grab it from the top shelf. Nurmi got her to the most anticipated testimony of the trial. “What happened next?”

“I grabbed the gun, and I ran out of the closet. He was chasing me to the middle of the bathroom; he kept running like a linebacker until he grabbed my waist. The gun went off; I didn’t mean to shoot him. It was just pointed at him, and went off. He lunged at me and we fell, really hard towards the wall. If he had been shot, nothing was different. I didn’t want him to get on top of me. I can’t get out of those holds. He’s grabbing at my clothes, screaming angry. He said, ‘I’ll fucking kill you, bitch.’ ” He was calling her names like “fucking idiot” and she was crying, but he was still trying to lunge at her even after he was shot in the head.

How did he end up with multiple stab wounds and a slashed throat? The explanation everyone—jurors, the courtroom gallery, the television audience—had been hanging on for turned out to be no explanation at all. After she broke away again, she remembered “almost nothing.” As Jodi calmly explained to the jury, after shooting Travis there was a “huge gap” in her memory that lasted at least five hours.

“Most of my next memory is driving in the desert,” she asserted to Nurmi. Between the gunshot and driving in the desert, she claimed her memory was essentially blank. She had no recollection of stabbing Travis over two dozen times or slashing his throat. She didn’t remember dragging him back to the shower. She had a vague recollection of putting a knife in the dishwasher but she couldn’t be sure it was a memory from that day. She couldn’t recall deleting incriminating images from the camera and putting it, along with Travis’s clothing, in the washing machine. She didn’t recall collecting the gun and the rope, and maybe the knife, to dispose of far from the house. Somehow, Jodi did all that without leaving a trace of the vicious killing anywhere in the house but the master bathroom suite and the washing machine, which she hoped had destroyed any incriminating evidence.

Elaborating on this elusive answer, she explained that she was able to remember the “feeling,” but not the details. She said the feeling was “mortal terror.” She recalled recognizing that she wouldn’t be able to rewind the clock as she drove west in the desert, the sun in her eyes, the many stop lights, the sky getting darker. Somewhere, she threw the gun, but she didn’t remember precisely where.

The anticlimax of her words was striking. After years of lies and alternating versions of events—not to mention weeks of testimony during which she had repeatedly vilified Travis’s character—this answer about the “huge gap” in her memory was impossible for many to swallow. It had the same air of convenience as her story of walking in on Travis masturbating and the photo of the small boy just happening to float to her feet. For a woman whose credibility had been stretched thin for years, this excuse that she simply didn’t remember what had happened felt more suspect than almost anything else she’d said. In many ways, this gap in her memory—what prosecutor Martinez would eventually call Jodi’s “fog”—became a metaphor for her entire persona and a lens through which all of her testimony could be scrutinized. The same woman who could remember the kind of latte she purchased at Starbucks years earlier somehow couldn’t recall sticking a knife into her lover’s chest or nearly decapitating him.

Jodi said at some point before the Hoover Dam she realized that she had blood on her hands and clothes. She stopped driving and tried to clean herself up with some bottled water she had in the trunk. She knew that Travis was probably dead, but she had no clear memory of him being dead when she left. On fleeting occasions, she thought maybe it was all a nightmare. Driving in a daze, she finally got her bearings when she saw a sign: “Las Vegas, 100 miles.”

Jodi said she knew her life was pretty much over. She couldn’t call 911 because she couldn’t imagine telling them what she had just done. She was scared of what would happen to her and her family. She was angry with herself and just wanted to die. Determined to carry on, she continued on to Utah, and her fifteen-hour visit with Ryan Burns and other friends before heading back to Yreka.

When asked why she attended Travis’s memorial service in Mesa on June 16, Jodi explained: “I thought if I didn’t show up it would look suspicious. People knew we were close.” Through tears, Jodi explained that she had made a promise to Travis and it was important to her to keep it.

“Why?” asked Nurmi.

“He would have come to mine even if it was in Antarctica.”

The night after the memorial service, Jodi said she lay in bed alone: “I felt like he was there. It helped me to know he was okay; that he was in a better place, that maybe he wasn’t mad at me anymore.”

Kirk Nurmi brought his direct testimony home by asking Jodi to explain why she had created the alternate stories to Travis’s murder.

First, Jodi was asked to explain why she told
Inside Edition
that no jury would ever convict her.

“Those were the bitterest words I ever had to eat,” Jodi replied.

“Why?”

“You can’t convict a dead person. I planned to be dead long before a trial.”

“Since his death was discovered, you told one version of events in which you weren’t there. In another version, intruders came into the home, killed Travis, and you escaped. Why did you then decide to
tell us what really happened
?”

“Objection!’ rumbled Juan Martinez, offended by Nurmi’s reference to what “really happened” as though Jodi was being truthful on the stand.

“Rephrase,” said Judge Stephens.

Nurmi tried again. “Why did you then come forward with all these things you were hiding, Alexander’s sexual interest, the violence?”

“It felt fraudulent from day one, especially when there were people who believed me. It wasn’t an overnight decision by any means,” Jodi answered. “I would rather have gone to the grave with it . . . By the time spring of 2010 rolled around, I confessed.”

With that, Nurmi finished his direct questioning of this witness, and Judge Stephens summoned the attorneys yet again into her chambers.

CHAPTER 20

JUAN’S TURN

I
t was on February 21, 2013, the twenty-first day of the trial, that Juan Martinez had his chance to go after Jodi. Everybody knew that his cross-examination was going to be confrontational and dramatic, offering none of the softball questions from defense attorney Kirk Nurmi’s direct. The bulldog was ready, and he had a lot to work with.

Still, it wouldn’t be a slam dunk for Martinez. One area in which the defense had been successful was in humanizing Jodi. She had come off as intelligent and well-spoken. Then there was the issue of the sex tape, which seemed to be something of a split decision: It had certainly gotten headlines and supported Jodi’s claim that sex happened. However, it also proved that kinky sex had been mutually embraced. If Jodi was being debased by Travis, she seemed to be enjoying every second of it, which is not unusual. Entire industries are built around the concept of erotic humiliation, also known as dominance and submission or D&S, with the so-called subs enjoying the sexual roller coaster as much or more than their doms. Even if she was faking her enjoyment, that certainly didn’t justify Travis Alexander’s brutal death. In her testimony, Jodi tried to turn their sexual play into emotional and physical abuse. The sub wanted to be recast as a battered woman so she could claim self-defense.

As a result, in the previous eight days, Jodi had also introduced four stories of physical abuse at the hands of Travis, along with the stories of their salacious sexual escapades. It was prosecutor Martinez’s job to tear those down and expose them as lies. Like many parts of her testimony, there was no corroboration for her allegations. At least two friends testified they had seen Travis losing his temper, and he had snapped at Jodi on occasion, but that was a far cry from physical abuse. There were no witnesses to substantiate any physical abuse, no medical records to support the claims, no photographs, no calls to the police, and no disclosures to friends.

As part of her campaign to cast Travis as the abuser during her direct testimony, Jodi had held up a crooked left ring finger for the jury to see, telling them that the day after she found Travis masturbating to the photo of the small boy in underwear, Travis broke her finger in a violent outburst. Jodi claimed that Travis, threatened by her discovery of his shameful secret, became increasingly hostile and violent toward her, to the point at which she had to kill him to defend herself. However, her story line was all over the map, with her tangle of lies repeatedly contradicting each other. While her defense attorney left those contradictions unaddressed, prosecutor Martinez couldn’t wait to get at them and rip apart the cocky self-assurance she exhibited while lying. The question was whether Jodi would be able to stay human in the eyes of the jury, and keep all her stories straight under Juan Martinez’s onslaught of tough questions.