Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (22 page)

“I didn’t,” answered Jodi, just as deliberately.

“Where was that gun from then? Where did you get it? If you didn’t take it, did he have one in the house? Did you get it there in Arizona?”

Jodi maintained that the weapon wasn’t hers. “I didn’t ever have it actually in my possession,” she said barely audibly.

“Then who had it?” asked Flores. The detective was probably hoping that Jodi would see that her story didn’t make sense. After the question was asked, Jodi sat there silently. It was a long, pregnant pause. Finally, with almost timidity, she said she was going to come clean.

“I didn’t tell you . . . I can tell you everything I know or I remember . . .”

“What happened after that last picture was taken?” the detective pressed. “If you want me to believe that somebody else was there, you have to show me.”

The fabrication started slowly, with a cryptic “I didn’t actually see it. I heard it first.” But it picked up energy as it went along. Jodi said she hadn’t been able to talk about the “real” perps initially because they had threatened to hurt her family. She had to improvise the story as she went. She showed either remarkably quick thinking, or painfully amateur floundering, depending on your perspective, as she spilled her on-the-spot story to the detective. She said she was present when the murder occurred, but didn’t actually see it with her own eyes, so she didn’t know what the intruders had done at first. She asked to look at the pictures from the crime scene, presumably to help her memory, but more probably to help her craft her story. Her request was denied.

As she elaborated, her story grew stranger, with her trying to justify her reluctance to talk. “They know where I live. Or they know where my parents are. I don’t know if they know where my grandparents are, but they got my address, they know where my family is.” It was remarkable how quickly she covered every possible address in Yreka, in case the invaders had put out a carte blanche “take no prisoners” when it came to their threat to do harm to her family.

“You’re saying someone followed you all the way to Arizona from here?” Detective Flores asked incredulously.

“No, I don’t think . . . I think I was an element of surprise for them.”

“So they
didn’t
expect you?”

Jodi was definitely faltering, but she carried forth. She said they argued about if they wanted to kill her or not. “For what reason?” Detective Flores asked in apparent shock over the outrageousness of her story. Jodi answered with a theatrical flair, “Because I’m a witness.”

“A witness of what?” Flores pressed.

“Him, of Travis . . . but I didn’t really witness it. I didn’t see much,” Jodi sighed.

She didn’t know why they had wanted to get rid of Travis. She didn’t recognize them, so she didn’t know if they were local.

Detective Flores couldn’t hold back. “You need to make this believable, because to me it’s not believable right now,” he interjected. “I am listening, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. People don’t just go in somewhere and kill someone for no reason and let a witness go. That just doesn’t happen.” He needed the details.

Jodi played with her hair a bit, pulling it behind her head and combing it with her fingers. Eventually she pulled her feet back up onto the seat of the chair, with her knees bent. “They were white Americans from what I could tell. They had . . . ummm . . . wummm . . . what do you call those things? Beanies, but they cover your whole face. They have holes for your nose, mouth, and eyes . . . Ski masks! They were black, or dark blue or something.”

At this point, she took the story back to the few hours before the murder. Jodi said she and Travis had sex a couple of times in the afternoon, once in his bed and once in his office; they fussed with his computer, trying to figure out a virus that was creating problems on his hard drive; they fed Napoleon; and then Travis went upstairs to shower and shave. Jodi said she had begun taking pictures of him shaving for his Myspace page, even though he was a rather reluctant model at first. Jodi says, that fateful afternoon, she convinced a hesitant Travis to pose in the shower so she could take some photos based on a Calvin Klein ad that she admired. That was when all hell broke loose.

Jodi tried to describe the events of the murder. Travis was inside the shower stall, and she was crouched down outside the door snapping the pictures of him. Suddenly she heard a loud ring and Travis began screaming, and then she thought she got knocked out, but only briefly. She next saw two people near Travis, while he was holding his head. Because “he was on all fours” Jodi rested her head on his back and was begging him to tell her if he was okay. He told her to go get help, but the two masked intruders were still there.

“One was a guy, and one was a girl. I couldn’t tell that at first. But I could just see one was a girl, and I assumed the other was a guy because of their build and their voices. I don’t remember what they were wearing . . . like maybe jeans . . . One was in all black, and one was in jeans.”

“Did they say anything?” Flores asked. “What words did you hear?”

Jodi said the girl wanted to kill her, but the guy just wanted to finish off Travis. She said Travis was screaming the whole time, but not like a girl, more like he was in pain because he had been shot. Mortally wounded, he was lying on the floor of the shower, not writhing, just screaming in agony.

The male came after her next. She used the crime scene photos Detective Flores displayed for her to indicate with her finger where the action took place, and her pointer finger went to Travis’s bedroom closet, where the male confronted her. “He stopped me and he didn’t touch me. He just held the gun to my head and was like ‘You don’t go anywhere.’ He told me to stay there and not to move.” She was helpless to contact 911—Travis’s phone was downstairs, and hers was dead.

Jodi still wanted to save Travis. In the face of extreme danger, she sprang from the closet and jumped the female assailant, who was slightly taller than Jodi. She had been hovering over Travis, and Jodi pushed her aside. “Travis was bleeding everywhere because he had been shot at this time . . . He wasn’t talking, but I could tell he was breathing.”

Flores wanted to know who was armed. Jodi wasn’t sure. “I thought she was the one with the gun. Maybe she had the gun. He had the gun. Maybe there were two guns. I don’t know.” She maintained that the female was Travis’s shooter, but everything was fast and muddled, as she had been knocked out herself that brief amount of time. When the assailants left the room, she tried to stand Travis up, but he was weakening. They came back to find her supporting him and trying to help him walk, and there was a brief discussion between them about killing her as well. “They had an argument back and forth, and she wanted to kill me and he didn’t. He said, ‘That’s not what we’re here for . . .’ It was obvious they were there for [Travis].”

A small struggle ensued, but Jodi was not a fighter by nature. “I’m not a person who knows about self-defense. I took some classes eight years ago, but I’ve never been consistent with it . . . I just knew I had to hold on to her hand because she had a knife.” After the struggle, the pair decided to spare Jodi her life. They told her not to move as the man rifled through her purse. His last act before making her flee the house was removing the small amount of cash she had in her wallet. That was when he found her car registration, and the story came full circle. “You must be that bitch from California!” The threat to do her family bodily harm if she ever told what happened to Travis was real now that the killers had her registration and her home address. They told her to leave, which she was reluctant to do with Travis still alive. But they were in control, and she left.

Detective Flores wondered if Jodi had seen any cars outside, or thought of going to a neighbor’s. “I was really scared; I was freaked out of my mind,” she told him without emotion. He asked her if she had been injured, and she showed him some healed slice wounds on her left fingers. He questioned her again about who might have wanted to hurt Travis.

In the end, he told her he didn’t believe her. “I came in here hoping you would tell me the truth, and this is not the truth, Jodi,” he sighed. “This does not make any sense, to have two people come in, first two white males and later you change it—”

“No, I don’t think I ever said white males,” Jodi interrupted.

“Yes, you did.”

“When?”

“At the beginning of this story, and then you change it to ‘Oh, one was female.’ That doesn’t make any sense to me.” He also suggested that the scenario of letting Jodi go was absurd. “The fact that they left you alive and let you go? That never happens. Why would anyone do that? Why would somebody risk the chance of getting caught and just let you run out the front door while they’re upstairs in his house, knowing you could just run across the street and tell somebody? It just doesn’t make sense.” He didn’t show particular exasperation as he discounted the masked intruder story. “There is a reason that you did this, and you just refuse to tell me why. Maybe because you
are
just cold and calculated . . .”

In creating an alternative killer/killers, Jodi was not particularly unique in the phenomenon of blaming someone else. Her masked intruder story, morphed into the “ninja story” in the press, would become particularly infamous, more for her steadfast devotion to it in the face of it being totally ludicrous than anything else. Nonetheless, she showed that she was willing to take a lie as far as she could, eventually holding on to this story—one that she’d made up on the spot with Detective Flores—for the next two years.

O
n September 5, 2008, Jodi was extradited to Mesa, Arizona, to face charges of first-degree murder in the death of Travis Alexander. Her new home would be Maricopa County’s Estrella Women’s Jail in Phoenix. The dormitory-style jail on Durango Street was relatively new, having been built in 1991, and housed about one thousand inmates. As part of the booking process, Jodi was required to pose for a mug shot, which she did with great camera comfort, tilting her head and coyly smiling. The resulting picture could easily be mistaken for a yearbook photo, save for the orange jumpsuit. She was given a seven-by-eleven-foot room with a locked door in the maximum-security wing of the facility. The cell was fitted with a stainless steel toilet, a vanity/shelf bolted securely to the wall, a rusty stool, and bunk beds, two slabs jutting out from the rear wall. Though it was a far cry from Travis’s sleigh bed with the expensive mattress, Jodi accustomed herself to her little bunk, with its thin, ill-fitting mattress and ugly pink linens, to sleep in. She managed to use her small space to maximum efficiency, storing court documents, art supplies, and miscellaneous other things, including her spare white and gray striped uniform, as all the inmates wore.

She received two daily meals, with a nutritionally adequate standard of 2,600 total calories. The first meal was a “sack,” served between 6 and 8
A
.
M
. It typically contained a protein like peanut butter, two pieces of fruit, two rolls, and a dessert, cookies being the usual offering. The second meal was served between 6 and 8
P
.
M
. This was typically a hot meal, a stew or a casserole, accompanied by mashed potatoes and fruit.

Six days after her arrival in Arizona, Jodi entered a plea of “not guilty” at her arraignment at Maricopa Superior Court in downtown Phoenix. A two million dollar bond was set. Just days before her arraignment, Jodi sat down for an exclusive interview with Jim Walsh, a reporter with the
Arizona Republic.
This would be her first jailhouse interview in Arizona. In response to questions, she maintained her innocence, but declined to address the DNA evidence that tied her to the crime.

“God knows I’m innocent. I know I’m innocent. One day, when I am before God, I will not be held accountable by God for Travis’s death,” she proclaimed. “I would never hurt him. He was my friend.” Jodi used the opportunity to perpetuate the theory/lie she had started during her interrogation, that two intruders had killed him. She claimed that Travis’s physical strength alone dictated that more than one person had been responsible for his death.

On the day of her arraignment, Jodi scheduled a press conference from jail with several local news stations, including KTVK and at least one national network. Even captive, she had the ability to make herself look like a prison-stripes women’s wear model, appearing totally put together and composed. Jodi called the murder story far more complex than what was being portrayed, using the word
multifaceted
to describe it. “I need to be honest, it is very compelling, but none of it proves that I committed murder.” A question from the background asked how she was managing to stay so calm. “Through my faith and through the knowledge of my own innocence” was her quick answer, without so much as a pause to think about it.

The public was intrigued with the murder, and the coverage in the media began to balloon. It had all the makings of a media sensation. According to the “National Data on Intimate Partner Violence” for the complete year 2007, there were more than two thousand “intimate homicides,” or homicides involving people who were either in or had been in an intimate relationship. In 25 percent of intimate murders in 2007—more than five hundred in all—the victim was the male partner or ex-partner. What propelled the Jodi and Travis doomed relationship into such a disproportionate headline grabber, beyond the “ex-girlfriend murders ex-boyfriend” scenario? Travis and Jodi were a couple that appeared to be ideal—good-looking, smart, savvy, personable, sensible, religious—appealing in every way. Added to that was a relationship undercurrent that most of us can relate to on some level—insecurity, jealousy, flirting, and desire. Then add the forbidden love, the raunchy sex, the stalking, and the web of lies, with a twist of Mormonism, and the press could not resist. The fact that the murder was so brutal, bloody, and partially documented in accidental photos added to the fascination of the red-hot story, and crime junkies could not get enough.