Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (5 page)

Jodi desperately needed an escape route and, just in time, along came Bobby back into the picture, and they reconnected. They took a drive out to a little white chapel with a tall white steeple, where they decided to give their relationship another try. When Jodi’s parents got wind of it, they were totally disapproving. They had heard rumors that Bobby was into the occult. Jodi disagreed. She told her parents he was beautiful inside and out. He was just a sensitive soul who was searching. He was still eccentric and friends say he loved to play the Dungeons and Dragons board game. But at least he wasn’t chasing vampires anymore.

Though Jodi’s parents didn’t like him, Jodi seemed long past caring what they thought. She was tired of their control. At every turn, she felt that they were on her case. She claimed that she once skipped class in order to study for an exam she thought was more important, and her father found out. After an administrator told him about the unexcused absence, he tracked his daughter down and grounded her until her eighteenth birthday, still three months away.

Jodi made up her mind that she was going to drop out of school when the academic year was over in May. She was already getting a lot of D’s and F’s, and the fun of school was long gone. She may have just gotten tired of trying to fit in, being neither a stoner nor a preppy. She claimed her parents didn’t support her interest in art, the subject she loved the most, and she was sick of fighting with them. She interpreted their strictness as a rejection of her artistic abilities and this became a reason to blame them for her academic failures.

While most teens act out, Jodi’s behavior already seemed to have diverged into something more serious. Friends say she wasn’t into drugs or alcohol, but rather appeared to have some escalating personality dysfunction. It had started about a year earlier, when she had gone around warning her friends about the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Jodi had been raised as a nondenominational Christian and wasn’t particularly religious, but an older man who frequented her father’s restaurant, where she sometimes waitressed, had done the math and determined that the catastrophic event would occur in September 1997. The idea that Jodi would get invested in this story and take it seriously enough to warn others raised doubts about how grounded in reality she was. To Jodi, the man in the restaurant seemed to be a reliable, valid source of prophecy, as he always carried a dog-eared pocket version of the New Testament and quoted Bible stories with authority. To others he might seem like a nut.

Perhaps the story gave Jodi the opportunity to drum up some fear and excitement, creating unnecessary drama. At this point, signs were beginning to emerge that Jodi thrived on drama and knew how to create it. Was her willingness to believe fantastical stories a hint of why she would soon develop an uncanny ability to lie with abandon? Whatever Jodi’s relationship with the truth was at that point, the tension with her parents built to a head around age seventeen, just before she decided to move out of the house altogether. One of the unsubstantiated claims of physical abuse that precipitated the move was her father pushing her, causing her to hit her face on a doorpost and lose consciousness, only to wake up to her mother telling her father to be more careful. Jodi would maintain that this final abuse was what pushed her to move out of the house at seventeen and in with Bobby.

In the aftermath of Jodi’s decision, Sandy and Bill Arias were beside themselves. Even when Jodi had been struggling, they had always had high hopes for their eldest daughter. Jodi was smart, pretty, and poised, and they believed she was going to accomplish something of importance in her life. They did not understand her rebellion. Simple statements or requests would become twisted, resulting in frivolous battles. Jodi seemed to misconstrue everything they said. They were at a loss as to how to turn things around and recover the daughter they loved. Possibly the intensity of her emotions frightened them, and rather than intervene by finding her professional help, they continued to employ futile, simplistic fixes. Her father had even resorted to disconnecting the car battery to keep her home, which was successful short term, as Jodi did not understand the workings of a car engine. But as it turned out, the Ariases were unable to stop their daughter from taking the drastic step of leaving home for good that summer.

Jodi recalled the night of her escape from her parents’ home. She had packed up what little she had. She knew she had to check her car to see if her father had unhooked the battery again. She was as far as the living room when she heard one of her parents upstairs, so she jumped onto the couch and pretended she was asleep. She ended up dozing off and woke up to find her mother in the kitchen making breakfast. Not to be foiled, she then said that she was going to school, so luckily her mother didn’t see her grabbing her cat as she headed out the door. In a flash, Sandy and Bill’s beautiful but willful child was gone.

CHAPTER 3

FIRST WORDS

T
his is Jodi.”

The voice on the other end of the phone was girlish, almost pleasant. It had been a late night of questioning for Travis’s roommates and friends, but by the following morning Detective Flores had begun to expand his interviews. It was clear that investigators would have to speak with Jodi Arias soon; what was unexpected was that Jodi would be trying to get a hold of them. Word of Travis’s death had spread quickly among his friends and colleagues, and Jodi had received a late-night call, informing her of what had happened. A friend of Travis and Jodi’s, Dan Freeman, called her at 11:00
P
.
M
., just thirty minutes after Travis’s body was found. Jodi became silent, then broke down sobbing when he told her Travis was dead. After a few moments, Dan cut the call off because Jodi wanted to “be with herself.”

Less than two months earlier Jodi had abandoned Arizona after living in Mesa for ten months and had moved back to California. Being hundreds of miles away from this tragic news, she spent the rest of the night calling long-distance to Arizona, reaching out to Travis’s friends there to find out what was going on. At one point as Travis’s friends gathered outside his house, Jodi called one of them, who happened to be standing next to Detective Flores at the time. He asked the detective if he should answer the call. It seemed almost all of Travis’s friends already had their fingers pointed squarely at Jodi. The question was whether the police would come to the same conclusion.

In addition to calling Travis’s friends, Jodi had been busy calling police headquarters twice, leaving a number where she could be reached. With Jodi probably aware that it would only be a matter of time before the police came knocking on her door in Yreka, California, perhaps she thought she could deflect attention away from herself by offering to assist them. At a minimum, she needed to know what the police knew.

Finally at 10
A
.
M
. on June 10, less than twelve hours after Travis’s body had been discovered, Detective Flores called her back.

The detective introduced himself. “I have a message from one of my patrol officers that you needed to talk to me about something?”

“Well, I just wanted to offer assistance . . . I don’t know a lot of anything, but . . .”

“What have you heard so far?” the detective asked.

“I heard that he was, that he passed away, and it was, I don’t know . . . I heard all kinds of rumors,” Jodi said. She stuttered over the few things she claimed she had heard. “There was a lot of blood, his roommate found him, his friend found him, people were . . . I’m sorry, I’m upset, but um . . . I heard that nobody’s been able to get a hold of him for almost a week, and that was about the last I spoke to him, too, and that’s why I thought . . .”

Flores listened attentively, trying to glean from her conversation either inconsistencies or things only the killer could know. This early in the investigation, she was no more a suspect than anyone else. Nobody had seen her near Travis’s home in a while, and as far as Flores knew, she might have an airtight alibi.

Jodi continued her assistance. “I . . . my friend said I should call you anyway and let you know of the last time I talked to him.”

“Yeah, absolutely,” Flores replied with encouragement. “I mean, any help we can get from anybody who contacted him . . .”

Jodi didn’t wait for him to finish his thought. “I used to talk to him quite regularly,” she offered. “I used to live there [in Mesa], but I live in Northern California now. I moved a few months ago. After I moved, we kept in touch regularly . . . a couple of times a week. I hadn’t heard from him. I talked to him on Tuesday night. I looked at my phone records on the Internet to check, and I definitely talked to him Tuesday night.”

Flores was increasingly interested. “That Tuesday night, do you remember the time?” he asked.

“I wanna say like a quarter after nine, but probably between eight thirty and nine thirty.”

“What did you guys talk about?”

“Um, it was brief. He was, I was driving out to Utah, and you know, he was like ‘are you gonna come out and see me?’ And I was like ‘no.’ He was supposed to make a trip up here at the end of the month. We’re doing this thing called ‘one thousand places to see before you die,’ and it’s been featured on the Travel Channel. We sort of got into it last year, where we’re starting to see all these different places on the list ‘one thousand places.’ It is a lot to see, but we each had that goal, and one of those was the Oregon coast. And so he was gonna come up here for that, and we were gonna go see that . . . crater lakes [
sic
].”

“Was that trip already scheduled or was it just something you guys talked about?”

“It wasn’t officially, like dated, but I was planning to make the trip down there. But it was supposed to happen in May, and then it was supposed to happen last week, but that didn’t work out. And he was going to Cancún today and um, and then he said as soon as he gets back from Cancún, he was going to drive up the coast and when he reaches me, we’ll do some things, and then he’ll continue up the coast to Washington and see some friends up there. And then I guess that was to happen in July, that he was supposed to go to Washington, D.C.”

Flores could sense that Jodi was projecting a portrait of a relationship where all was rosy between Travis and her—very different from what he’d been hearing from Mimi Hall and Zach Billings. In Jodi’s version, it appeared she and Travis talked regularly, they were going to see a thousand places together before they died, presumably of old age, and they couldn’t have been more compatible. Undeterred by this discrepancy, Flores turned his attention to any potential suspects she might know of.

“Okay,” Flores said, “did he have any issues with anybody here in town? Any enemies?”

“You know, he got his tires slashed,” she declared. “It was last year, he said he was worried about that. And I was worried, too. He never locked his doors, and I would tell him ‘lock your doors,’ and he said ‘you’re not my mom.’ And he comes from a bad city, Riverside, California, violent. And I come from a similar neighborhood, and my parents always said to lock doors. He doesn’t have that habit, because he lives in a great neighborhood, and it’s never been an issue. Nothing’s ever been stolen.”

The truth of the matter was that the murder did not look like it was motivated by burglary. Valuables had not been reported missing, and things that could have been taken weren’t. Not only did the intruder have enough time to drag Travis’s body from the bedroom into the shower and rinse it off, but there had been time to run a load or two of laundry. This was not a botched or panicked burglary. Because Travis’s body had sustained so many brutal knife wounds, many in the back, it seemed very passionate and personal.

Flores was curious about Jodi’s view of her rapport with Travis. “How would you describe your relationship with him?” he asked.

Jodi seemed to be forthcoming. “We dated for like five months. And we broke up, and we continued to see each other for quite a bit. You know? Right up until I moved,” Jodi said, referring to her recent return to California.

“When did you guys break up?”

“We officially broke up June 29 of last year. But we . . . even though we broke up and decided to remain friends . . . I feel embarrassed talking about this but it was . . . but it wasn’t boyfriend and girlfriend . . . it was more like kind of buddies . . . you know what I mean?”

“You guys were not like romantically together at any time?”

“We were intimate, but I wouldn’t say romantic as far as relationship goes. We were in no way headed toward marriage.” Jodi answered the questions with a frankness that bordered on detachment.

“When you say intimate, does that include like a sexual relationship with him?”

“Yeah, it does.”

“Kind of embarrassing to talk about . . . ?”

“Yeah. And if you could keep it kind of confidential? It’s really looked down upon in that church, I mean, I’m telling you this to help you in any way I can.”

Raised in both the Catholic and Mormon churches, Flores had knowledge about how the Mormon church would have viewed this relationship. In many ways, Detective Flores was the exact opposite of the hard-drinking, smoking, raunchy detective that Hollywood scriptwriters love to create. He’d been married to the same woman for more than two decades and had five children with her. A homebody who loved to cook for his kids, Flores chose to identify with the Mormon church when he married his wife, who was also Mormon. He knew plenty about the religion, including the rules that Jodi and Travis were breaking by being intimate.