Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias
Read Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias Online
Authors: Jane Velez-Mitchell
CONTENTS
To Travis Alexander and his siblings
T
he writing of this book posed an extraordinary challenge because the person at the very center of the horrific events is a habitual liar. Adding to the dilemma, Jodi Arias made her upbringing, her interactions with previous boyfriends, and her relationship with murder victim Travis Alexander a huge part of her defense strategy. Tragically, Travis is not alive to give his side of the story. Additionally, many of the individuals Jodi maligned in her testimony and/or her journals, including ex-boyfriends and members of her own family, never took the stand to offer their version of events. Given these remarkable circumstances, the reader is strongly advised to regard everything that Jodi Arias claims, as recounted in the following pages, with skepticism and suspicion. She has earned her reputation as a pathological liar. While many of her claims have been exposed as outright lies, like all accomplished fabulists, Jodi Arias seamlessly wove actual events into her fabrications, often making it impossible to determine where truth ends and fiction begins. Hopefully these mysteries will add to the adventure of the reader’s journey through these pages. Because of the passions and social media frenzy surrounding this case, and the unreliability of her testimony and writings, the friends and ex-boyfriends Jodi Arias references are identified only by their first names unless they testified in court or spoke out publicly.
by Nancy Grace
T
here are some messes in life you can clean up. Murder is not one of them. The decision to kill is irrevocable. There is no turning back the clock. Not ever. Not even if you lie about it.
This universal truth seemed to escape the enigmatic Jodi Arias, but then again, Arias always has a difficult relationship with the truth. Her decision to commit the premeditated murder of Travis Alexander was not just one bad decision—it was the culmination of a series of bad decisions. Those choices reflect a lifetime of warped logic and twisted beliefs. In the following pages of this book, you will learn the secrets of Arias’s long journey to murder. Her life story features self-delusion, self-pity, grandiosity, and above all, a sense that nothing in this world could take her down.
The Jodi Arias story does not begin with the murder of Travis Alexander. She was never your typical “woman scorned,” victim-turned-killer, victim of circumstance, or whatever lie she may tell next; instead, she was something far more insidious. She was the manipulator, the deceiver, and the deviant hidden behind the guise of placid beauty, who spent years building up her own reality until it all came crashing down.
Jodi Arias is a liar and a murderer, but what is perhaps most terrifying about her is that she still believes she will get away with it. This is a woman who thought she could lie her way to freedom. From the first time that she spoke to police until her final day on the witness stand, she treated the truth with disdain. In the process, she shamelessly and repeatedly denied the proof that was so apparent to everyone else, while dragging her innocent victim through the mud. Through all the photographs, the DNA, and the testimonies, Arias never once thought she could be convicted. She matched each mounting piece of evidence with another outlandish lie, holding on stubbornly to her fabrication. Arias then turned to her next lie with a faint smile and a dry tissue for her “tears.”
Arias’s claims will be repeated in the following pages in all of their lurid detail, just as they came out in her police interrogations and at trial. But the question the reader must always ask is: How much of it is true? When it comes to what Travis and Jodi did behind closed doors, the full story may never be known. Everything that she has said—both about her own life and about her relationship with Travis Alexander—must be questioned. We can never forget that, with Travis dead, Jodi has become the sole author of their affair. When the only source of information is a proven liar, it is our duty to find the truth for ourselves.
Pathological liars like Arias are inherently dangerous because they perfect a psychological strategy that allows them to lie convincingly on a moment’s notice. Arias’s lies were so brazen, so patently ridiculous, that her ability to deliver them with a straight face and a convincing look—under oath, no less—became a subject of fascination for HLN viewers across the country. Arias seems to have mastered a mental technique that allows her to believe her own lies. Put another way, in her mind, factual truth is irrelevant. Truth is redefined as survival. Arias would say anything in her desperation to survive.
While Arias’s endless, rambling tales never added up to the truth, one certainty was clear: there was something unquestionably wrong with her. Something about this woman made the world’s skin crawl, from her own family and friends to trial watchers in their living rooms. This book dissects Arias’s behavior to discover the connection between her past and her mysterious relationship with Travis Alexander. She did not come out of the womb evil. So what happened during her life to make her the person she became? Paranoia, obsession, and manipulation are what catapulted her from man to man and eventually into the arms of Travis. When the time came, as it inevitably did, Arias was always prepared with a new variation on the same story: suspicion, betrayal, and abuse. She starred as the victim in each scenario.
Arias’s calculated manipulation was never more obvious than during her affair with Travis Alexander. Alexander was successful, loved, and happy, everything Arias wanted for herself. Their relationship was undeniably fueled by intense sexuality and endless deception. Arias’s sexual prowess was overwhelming, and Travis fell for each devious move she made. Taking advantage of Travis’s Mormon beliefs, which prevented him from exposing their sex affair, Arias built a wall between him and the truth.
But Arias’s manipulation could bring her only so close to Travis, and, when faced with rejection, she got angry. Instead of facing reality, Arias created a convenient new truth: Travis was no longer her lover but rather her tormentor and source of humiliation. A jealous rage overcame Arias, and, suddenly, she wanted revenge, taking days, maybe even weeks, to plot out Travis’s murder. She thought through and planned all of the logistics of how she would kill the supposed love of her life.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the crime, beyond its grisly nature, was that, in the weeks following Travis’s death, Arias carried on with her life, living as though his blood was never on her hands. There was no sign of remorse, no sign of grief or self-loathing for the heinous crime she committed. Not even when police confronted her with the overwhelming evidence of her culpability was she willing to accept the burden of the truth and own up to her role in his death.
With this book, Jane Velez-Mitchell goes behind the scenes of what has become one of the nation’s premiere case studies on killers who lie and liars who kill. She sets out to uncover the real Jodi Arias, decoding the mind of a killer. In the coming pages, she unpacks this case in full, from Arias’s childhood to the stunning guilty verdict.
By diving deeper into the facts of this case, we can all learn a life lesson. While most of us are honest, straightforward, and trusting, predators exist who are the exact opposite—deceitful, cunning, and dangerous; three words that perfectly describe Jodi Arias.
A
s she sat on the witness stand, only one thing about Jodi Arias was clear: the woman was a chameleon.
Once upon a time, before the trial had begun, before she’d been taken into custody, before she’d killed her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander, Jodi Arias had been a bombshell. During her relationship with Travis, her hair had been dyed blond; her makeup had been tasteful, with just the right amounts of lipstick, blush, and mascara; and her alluring face had been radiant.
The woman on the witness stand bore little resemblance to that Jodi. She wore no makeup, though her skin had grown pale from lack of sunlight. Her mousy brown hair had returned to its natural state, with thin, wispy bangs cut right at the eyebrows. When she dated Travis, she hadn’t worn glasses, but during her trial a large, unavoidable pair of glasses was often fixed on the bridge of her nose. It was unclear whether she actually needed the glasses, but their presence had the unmistakable and deliberate effect of making her look like a librarian—a librarian who happened to be on trial for murder.
There was nothing subtle in this transformation or in the public’s fascination with it. From the first words of the defense’s opening statements, people had been clamoring for more, and most days the gallery was packed to the gills with spectators eager to witness this chameleon firsthand and hear the inner workings of a case that was more sexually charged than any in memory—possibly ever. Indeed, though this was a murder trial, the sexual exploits of Jodi and Travis were the bedrock of the case, with both the prosecution and defense alike putting the most intimate details of the pair’s sex life on full display for the jury. The fact that cameras were permitted in the courtroom to broadcast the stories of their steamy sex to the world made things even more lurid. Voyeurs everywhere came out of the woodwork, and outside the court, gallery tickets were briefly scalped for hundreds of dollars until court officials cracked down.
But this wasn’t just about sex. A brutal crime had been committed—the cruel, bloody slaughter of Travis Alexander, who at thirty years old had been an active member of the Mormon church. Not only did he possess athletic all-American good looks, he was adored by his community—and people were hungry for justice. According to the prosecutor, Jodi had killed him three times over on June 4, 2008, leaving him with twenty-nine knife wounds and shooting him in the right temple. Even though the gunshot was probably a gratuitous postmortem act, two of the twenty-nine knife wounds were definitely lethal: the fatal stab to the heart, and the six-inch slice across Travis’s throat, a gash that went three and a half inches deep from ear to ear and severed his airway and carotid artery. Five knife injuries on Travis’s hands were defensive wounds, sustained in his desperate effort to fight off his attacker.