Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (14 page)

“I have been in relationships before where the other guy wasn’t faithful and there is just this like distinctive gut feeling that you just have,” Jodi explained. “I had this feeling with Travis, and I gently asked him about it. He got really upset and he was like, ‘no there is nothing there, don’t worry about it.’ ” She told the detective that she was aware Travis had been texting a lot of girls, but Travis had written it off as being flirtatious but innocent. Jodi described an incident the previous June, when Travis had been napping and she had taken his phone to snoop. “There were tons of girls that I had never heard of. I knew he knew a lot of people from the business, which didn’t bother me, but . . . There were plenty of plans, like where do you want to meet, what is the best place to make out in?”

She said she confronted him, and they broke up, because she did not feel he could be monogamous. She said they each associated with a different ward in Mesa, hers being the University Sixth Ward, and Travis’s being the Desert Ridge Ward, but she spent some time at his. Still, they both knew they weren’t on a path to marriage, despite the romantic and intimate sides of their relationship.

Detective Flores told Jodi that some of the people he talked to had some very unpleasant stuff to say about her. “You seem like a pleasant person, and they were saying that you were kind of obsessive after the breakup, and things like that. What was going on to make them think that?”

“The only thing I can think of, and I realize that because I was at his house a lot, um, but I didn’t go to his house unless I was invited over, or if he knew that I was coming over.” She went on to describe a system she and Travis had to alert each other of a pending visit. “He would send me text messages late at night like ‘Hey, I’m getting sleepy . . .’ And that was like, that became my cue or code word for coming over. ‘I’m going to sleep now, sneak into my room and wake me up’ kind of thing. That would happen a lot.” When Detective Flores asked if that meant there was still a sexual relationship going on, Jodi said that there was.

The detective knew that Jodi had no idea that photos of Travis and her naked in his bedroom had been recovered from Travis’s camera with the time stamp that proved that she was with him right before he was murdered. He played dumb when he started a line of questioning about the camera. He asked her if she remembered anything about it, like when it had been purchased or what brand it was. Jodi said she remembered Travis had asked her for some advice, knowing she was a photographer. She thought he had purchased it in April or May, and she had advised against anything Kodak, but did not know his ultimate choice. The detective wondered if she knew any reason why anyone would want to destroy it, without revealing where it had been found, and Jodi said “no.”

Detective Flores wanted to know where Jodi had been the day Travis was killed. Jodi told him on Monday, June 2, 2008, she left Northern California for Salt Lake City, Utah, where a Pre-Paid Legal conference was taking place that Wednesday and Thursday. She first drove to the airport in Redding, California, where she rented a car rather than drive her mechanically unreliable vehicle. Once her car was rented, she went to Monterey, California, five hours off course to Salt Lake City, to hang out with friends for the night.

The next day, Tuesday, June 3, she drove farther south to Los Angeles, five more hours out of her way. She was going to visit Darryl’s sister, who had a new baby. “I’m a photographer, and she just recently had a baby, and I’m trying to build up my portfolio,” she claimed. The new mother wasn’t around when she got there, and at that point, she said, she headed northeast to Salt Lake City, eleven hours away.

The detective asked her if she had spoken to Travis along the way. “I did talk to him Tuesday night . . . It was brief though, um . . . like that was a matter of two minutes. It wasn’t really an in-depth conversation.” Jodi told the detective she was just leaving a Starbucks in Pasadena, just outside Los Angeles, and called Travis to see if he was in the area.

“Do you know what time that was?”

“Ten o’clock? . . . It was late, kind of a late evening. I mean for us that’s not late.”

Detective Flores wondered about the purpose of the call.

“Um,” Jodi said. “I was just calling to check in, say hey. I was calling people, because I was on the road, just bored.”

“Oh, so you were on the road at that time?”

“It was real brief, um. He was nice and cordial, but he was acting like he had hurt feelings.”

“The reason I ask is we’re trying to figure out when [the murder] actually occurred,” Detective Flores explained. “And people are saying they lost contact with him maybe, you know, Tuesday or Wednesday, people aren’t sure.”

“I talked to him last Tuesday, and I’m sure I called Wednesday. I know I called him again from the road twice,” Jodi recalled. “I did send him text messages. I know I sent him a picture.”

Jodi claimed her long drive to Salt Lake City took her through Boulder City and Las Vegas, Nevada. When she said she had pulled over to sleep in her car, Detective Flores asked her how she kept safe, wanting to raise the issue of a weapon. He baited her by sympathetically telling her that she might be safer if she traveled with some protection, even saying Arizona was a place where you didn’t have to register a weapon like you did in California.

“I’ve actually looked into handguns, because I have lists of things I’m really scared of . . . I’m trying to overcome, and that’s one of them,” Jodi said. “I’m looking into that, because handguns are expensive. You know, it’s not really in my price range right now.”

Jodi wanted the detective to know she had a new man, Ryan Burns, who met her when she got to Salt Lake City. He also worked for PPL, and she had gone to the conference to meet him. She was implying that her interest in pursuing Travis, described by those who had talked to Flores as her “obsession,” was now done.

When the call was over, Detective Flores started doing the timeline math, and Jodi’s story wasn’t adding up. She claimed that driving from Yreka to Salt Lake City via Los Angeles and Las Vegas had taken her forty-eight hours. Mapping her route, including a ten-hour rest stop, he concluded her trip would have taken a maximum of twenty-nine hours. Adding Mesa to the route would add a few hours, but there were still ten to eleven hours of additional time to spare.

He called Ryan Burns that afternoon to see what he could corroborate. Ryan confirmed that he knew Jodi Arias. He had met her in Oklahoma at a PPL seminar a couple of months earlier. The trip to Utah had been in the works for about two weeks. Ryan said Jodi called him on Tuesday, June 3, and told him that she had left the Monterey area at around 11
P
.
M
., and she would meet him on Wednesday, June 4. She never told him she was going via Los Angeles. She said she had forgotten her cell phone charger, so the phone was turned off to save battery power for most of the drive. It was 11
P
.
M
. on Wednesday, the day they were supposed to meet, when she finally called him. She had driven in the wrong direction, gotten lost, and then had run out of gas. She said she was currently one hundred miles from Las Vegas, according to the sign she had just passed. When she finally showed up, it was 11
A
.
M
. on Thursday, June 5.

Ryan didn’t notice anything particularly unusual about her behavior. She hung out with him at the seminar, and then a group of more than a dozen PPL folks went to dinner at Chili’s. Jodi dined with Ryan and his friends, laughing and chatting. Afterward, they went to his place and watched a movie. She fell asleep for a while, and then left Salt Lake City between 2
A
.
M
. or 3
A
.
M
. Ryan couldn’t describe the car, but thought it was a white Ford Focus rental. The next time he heard from Jodi, it was by text, early in the next week. She told him that Travis had died. He knew about Travis, but only because Jodi had mentioned him several times.

Ryan said a lot of mutual friends of his and Jodi’s in Utah were pointing fingers at her, saying she was responsible for his death. He said he had heard that Travis had been shot with a .25-caliber handgun and that he had also been stabbed. Detective Flores thanked him for his time, saying he would be in touch again soon.

In the coming days, forensic results would give Detective Flores and his team the proof they were looking for. A senior print analyst at the Mesa police identification unit had been able to identify the latent print that had been left in the blood on the bathroom wall. She had individualized the latent print to Jodi Arias’s left palm print. It was further evidence that Jodi had been present at the time of Travis’s murder. Jodi had left the print when she touched the wall with her left hand.

Members of the Mesa Crime Lab had also turned up something significant. The blood in the palm print indicated it was a mixture of DNA from two individuals, Travis Alexander and Jodi Arias. A long hair found in the same hallway, stuck to the wall in blood, was also identified as Jodi’s. Detective Flores had his killer.

CHAPTER 8

AT FIRST SIGHT

J
odi was obsessed with Travis Alexander almost from the day they’d met: September 13, 2006. That initial meeting took place at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, the third-largest hotel in the world, with more than five thousand rooms, five outdoor pools, artificial rivers and waterfalls, and nineteen restaurants. It was at one of these restaurants, the Rainforest Cafe, that Jodi encountered Travis for the first time.

The two were in Las Vegas to attend the Pre-Paid Legal Services convention. Travis and Jodi were on opposite ends of the PPL organization. Travis had joined Pre-Paid Legal Services in 2001, when he was about twenty-four, and since then he had parlayed his role in the firm into something well beyond that of a mere salesman, becoming one of PPL’s most sought-after motivational speakers. He was such a successful salesman that by early 2006, he had already become an executive director by achieving at least seventy-five sales in one month, including sales made by those under him. He was now earning close to the hundred-thousand-dollar mark, which was the level at which salespeople were awarded a special ring for executives known as “Ring Earners.” As an executive director at the Vegas convention, Travis had access to all the executive perks, things such as special banquets, front-row seats to popular presentations, and other VIP treatments. The conventions were ways for him to network and to troll the crowd of newcomers for fresh recruits.

By comparison, Jodi was a relative newcomer, who’d only just begun working with PPL a few months earlier, in March 2006. Jodi first heard about the opportunities at Pre-Paid Legal from a stranger who had come into the restaurant where she worked as a waitress. Her job at California Pizza Kitchen in Palm Desert was one of several she was juggling in an attempt to make her monthly bills. She and the stranger got into a casual conversation, so it kind of surprised her when he asked her where she saw herself in five years. He let her know that he was going to retire soon, having made enough money at a company called Pre-Paid Legal Services to do so at a young age. Jodi did not object when he handed her some printed material and a promotional DVD. The DVD sat in her house gathering dust for six months, when one day she came across it while cleaning. She was going to throw it away but decided to watch it first. She popped it into her machine. The message seemed like providence. Here, possibly, was the answer to her mounting problems.

Jodi got so excited about the potential financial windfall that she signed up online and was soon contacted by one of the company’s salespeople, who signed Jodi up as an independent associate. At the time, Jodi had been struggling, working several jobs just to make ends meet, but because PPL’s associates work from home, Jodi didn’t have to give up her other jobs in order to make money. After she signed up with PPL, she heard about the company’s semi-annual convention in September. Apparently it was a great way to pick up tips on how to profit with the multilevel marketing firm, so when September came, Jodi traveled to Las Vegas with her sponsor/mentor and another Pre-Paid Legal associate to attend her first convention. She had been searching for something financially stable to lock on to and maybe this convention would provide the key. Jodi had just finished lunch and was standing with a group of people near the gorilla bench at the entrance to the Rainforest Café when Travis walked right up to her and introduced himself with an extended hand.

“Hi, I’m Travis,” he greeted her. He was dressed in a dapper business suit and well-polished shoes. His short brown hair was combed back off his face, his features were chiseled, his green eyes were light and cheerful, and his smile was bold.

“Hi, I’m Jodi,” was the response from the beautiful, demure blonde. Her dimples enhanced a smile befitting a model and her voice was soft, but confident.

Though Jodi later claimed there wasn’t really any initial magnetic attraction between the two, what followed led many to believe there must have been a potent spark, a palpable heat, from the get-go. Jodi insisted that, at first, his was just another of the many names she had to remember given the hundreds of people she was meeting that weekend. Still, there was clearly something that drew the two into conversation.