Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (41 page)

Taking the stand, Jodi looked extremely apprehensive, with her hair straight down and the glasses she wore on occasion perched on her nose. That day her clothes were particularly conservative: a black tailored jacket piped with white, worn over a white lace-trimmed shirt. Before everyone stood for the jury, she sat with her head down and her eyes closed, possibly praying, until finally sucking in an enormous amount of air and letting it out with a sigh. With the reminder Jodi was still under oath, Mr. Martinez went right for the jugular, straight out of the box, on a very personal level.

He showed her a photo of her sister and her, dated May 2008.

“[It’s] a picture of your dumb sister, Angela, isn’t it?”

“She’s my sister, but she’s not dumb.”

“
You
tape-recorded a conversation on May 10, 2008, where you said, ‘I honestly think she’s a little bit dumb.’ ”

“I called her dumb and stupid.”

“Did I ask you that, ma’am? I’m not asking you if you love her. I’m asking if you indicated it.”

The conversation Martinez was referring to came straight from the casual, nonsexual part of the sex tape recording. Martinez was throwing her off her game. Surely, Jodi didn’t anticipate this question. If she denied saying it, she’d be lying since it was on the recording. But, with her family sitting right there in the courtroom, it was tough to have to admit she’d called her sister dumb. Perhaps Martinez was establishing that Jodi said things that she didn’t mean. He was setting the stage to prove that this witness either lied about absolutely everything or betrayed everyone who loved her—or both.

Martinez operated at high speed almost all the time. He was hot tempered, which was quite a contrast to Jodi’s cool and calm delivery. Sometimes, his aggression seemed unnecessary, so well-established were the points he was trying to make, but his tactics were actually brilliant. He started big,
Jodi was not truthful.
He would take no time to get to
Jodi was a person with a very selective memory.
She couldn’t remember at what point she thought Travis must be dead, she couldn’t even remember the murder; yet, minutiae about other arguably irrelevant events were exaggeratedly accurate. Martinez also skillfully managed to bring up Jodi’s licentiousness by emphasizing that she was lying on top of Ryan Burns kissing him within hours of slaughtering Travis.

Jodi didn’t seem to mind fighting back. The two went at it over her convenient memory lapses.

“Problems with your memory, is it a recent vintage?” Martinez asked.

Jodi sidestepped. “Define recent.”

Martinez replied with sarcasm, “I don‘t know, since you started testifying . . . If it benefits you, you have a memory issue?” Then he added a question, his voice rising. “What factors influence your having a memory problem?”

“Usually when men like you are screaming at me or grilling me or someone like Travis doing the same,” Jodi shot back.

Getting sassy with the prosecutor was most likely not a great idea. One TV producer in the gallery expressed what many felt when she said, “Speaking as a human being, not a journalist, I wanted to slap her. Why was she talking to him like that?” But Jodi’s mission was to make at least one person on the jury take her side, and exploiting the prosecution’s consistently aggressive style and barking tone was one way to achieve that. Their sparring became absurd. If Martinez asked: “Did you like it?” Jodi responded, “What do you mean by ‘like it’?” Spending time challenging the prosecutor on word nuances came off as arrogant, but most likely, she was hoping that it would make him look like a bully.

Just as the defense had the sex tape in its arsenal, the prosecution had a weapon of its own: Jodi Arias’s journals. Jodi had been faithfully journaling for years. Her private feelings for Travis were written in her own hand, so there was no reason to believe these entries were anything but truthful. After all, they were supposedly written from the heart, for no one else’s eyes . . . until now. Martinez took only a few minutes into his cross-examination to raise one of those journal entries. He used it not only to demonstrate Jodi’s boundless affection for Travis, but also to undermine her various accusations against her lover, among them that he was a pedophile and had assaulted her, injuring her finger.

She had written in her journal on January 20, 2008, but the next entry wasn’t until January 24. In between those dates, on January 21, she had supposedly caught Travis masturbating to the photo of the boy, and then the next day, January 22, she said Travis had broken her finger. Yet her January 24 entry began with “I haven’t written because there has been nothing noteworthy to report.”

“Did you write about significant things?” Martinez asked Jodi, coming from a point of reference as to when she had hurt her finger.

“Some things . . .”

“You knew you could write anything because it would stay private?”

“No.”

“Take a look at the first five or six lines,” Martinez growled, opening up the journal, which had been entered into evidence as Exhibit 242. “You wrote that?”

After a sidebar, he continued. “ ‘
I guess it’s a good thing nobody reads this because I love Travis Alexander more than can be.
’ You confronted him because you loved him and you didn’t want to let him go?”

By pointing out the date, Martinez managed to completely undermine Jodi’s story of the angry, raging, finger-breaking Travis that very day. Jodi would go on to testify that she never wrote anything negative in her journals about Travis because of her belief in the Law of Attraction, which urged that one think positive thoughts.

With the deftness of a furtive welterweight, Martinez rapidly fired questions, taking aim at Jodi’s sex life with Travis and using the sex tape to show Jodi was more than a willing participant. For days on end, Jodi had been insisting she was degraded and humiliated by the amount and types of sex acts, and made to feel “like a used piece of toilet paper.” The inordinate amount of time Martinez used to get to Jodi’s diary entry about “the Pop Rocks and the Tootsie Pops” was painful, but eventually the point was made that Jodi had written that she enjoyed the experience.

The interchange between Martinez and Jodi was fascinating to watch. It was hard to know exactly how well the prosecutor was scoring with every juror. Sometimes his point was so belabored that it was easy to forget the original focus. Jodi didn’t mind toying with Martinez, either. She sometimes seemed to enjoy trying to help him with an excruciatingly precise question by being even more exact, such as deciding if journal entries in the same color ink meant it was the same entry carried forward to the next page. She’d flip back and forth, back and forth, deciding if she agreed. Several times, a few one line zingers added levity to a moment, allowing Martinez a moment to pause from his ceaseless pacing.

When the day had begun, Jodi had been ready for the fight, feeling empowered; after all, she had been observing Martinez in action since January 2 and knew how he operated. However, as the afternoon wore on, she sometimes lost the flat affect that had been her façade throughout her eight days with Nurmi. She was definitely showing signs of losing control, as instances of smirking, contempt, and smug, feigned delight filtered through her composure.

B
oth sides had time to regroup over the weekend. Court resumed right after noon on Monday, February 25. Jodi continued to wear black, this time a completely black, scoop-neck, long-sleeved top. The day began by dissecting Jodi’s statements to Detective Flores on the day of her arrest on July 15, 2008. Prosecutor Martinez’s questions bounced around from past to present to past again, rarely going in a linear fashion. It’s a technique used by law enforcement to trip up habitual liars. Within a few questions, the now familiar sparring between the two resumed. Martinez began rolling the interrogation footage, and everyone present could see and hear the detective say: “A lot of details in this case have not been released to the public. Details known only by us and people who did it. One of the reasons I’m here, I think you can help us.” Jodi’s response to that was, “I’d like to help you in any way I can.” Martinez pushed the pause button before addressing Jodi.

“Not true, is it?” he snapped.

“Depends on what ‘help’ means,” Jodi replied, indicating she was no more willing to surrender a single answer this day than she had on Friday. It was certainly going to be another long afternoon in court. With truth, lies, and consequences on the line, Martinez asked Jodi which lies were true.

“You told us, the reason you lied was you were thinking about your family.”

“Yes.”

“If there’s a good reason for it, it’s okay to lie?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You were concerned about your family?”

“Yes.”

“Your reputation?”

“Yes.”

“Thinking more of yourself when you were making this statement to the detective, right?”

“I can’t say that.”

Even the smallest points became the focus of semantic debate. Martinez was focused at all times. He tried one more time to get Jodi to admit that her use of the word “help” with detective Flores was totally self-serving and misleading. If she had really wanted to help him she would have admitted to knowing the things that only the killer would know for sure.

“Other than you, who would be sure?” he asked her in subdued frustration.

“God,” Jodi answered after a quick pause to think it through.

“Well, we can’t subpoena God, can we?” Martinez shot back.

Jodi even answered the rhetorical. “I don’t think so,” she said, turning to address the jury, as was her habit. Martinez’s response to that was quickly objected to, and sustained, by Judge Stephens. Even spectators would know it was argumentative, and irrelevant.

The rest of the afternoon was spent highlighting Jodi’s lies to Detective Flores about the crime itself. “The whole interview was a lie,” was the way Martinez summarized it best.

The prosecutor was clearly getting annoyed at Jodi’s evasiveness and attitude. Jodi slipped into one of her self-serving answers that she had contemplated suicide, and Mr. Martinez started to smoke through the ears. He told Jodi she really needed to stop talking about her suicide attempts, saying she had played that card many times. That, of course, brought up the definition of the word
many.
Juan Martinez then made an insightful point he would resurrect months later in his summation. Jodi conceded that her weak attempt to slit her wrists shortly after her arrest was too painful to carry out. The tiny razor cut to her wrist had “stung” too much. Martinez dove in: “Can you
imagine
how much you must have hurt Mr. Alexander when you stuck that knife in his chest? That must have really hurt, right?” Martinez was seething. Again, Nurmi’s “Objection!” was sustained.

For the people watching the case from the outside, many loved that Martinez was scolding Jodi the way they wanted to, leading the prosecutor’s star to rise fast in social media. Systematically, he was dismantling each and every claim of physical abuse Jodi made against Travis, claims that many felt made a mockery of battered women’s syndrome and made it that much harder for real victims of domestic violence to be believed. Outside the courthouse “Juan Martinez for Governor” buttons and signs had begun to pop up.

Another area Martinez probed was Jodi’s diabolical and cruel behavior towards Travis’s loved ones after she killed him. Jodi had gone out of her way to offer condolences to Travis’s family. She had the gall to send a bouquet of irises to his grieving grandmother coupled with a note reading “you are in my prayers.” Not surprising, his grandmother threw the flowers away as soon as they arrived. Jodi sent an eighteen-page letter to the same grandmother on what would have been Travis’s thirty-first birthday, July 28, in which Jodi explained in detail how two masked intruders butchered and shot Travis and how she had escaped. It was hard to fully comprehend the mentality of somebody who would butcher a man, then cozy up to his devastated family and feed them intricate lies on the premise that she wanted to console them.

The evidence against Jodi was overwhelming but, even by the third day of cross she refused to be rattled; if anything, she seemed to rattle the prosecutor, or at least annoy him. He would ask a long question, pause for her answer, only to have her respond with an “I guess,” and get him ranting again. After one showdown, Jodi said she couldn’t even remember the question. “I think I’m more focused on your posture, your tone, and your anger,” she told her infuriated opponent.

It was yet to be seen if the seasoned prosecutor’s theatrics were playing well with the jury. Some court observers complained that much of the testimony was going adrift from the brutal, cold-blooded killing of Travis Alexander and had a lot to do with showboating. Others said Jodi’s disrespect of the prosecutor played right into his hands, showing jurors she was far from the pliant wallflower she claimed to be with Travis. She was revealing herself as a passive aggressive manipulator who not only liked playing mind games, but was good at them.

One area of cross that landed squarely was Martinez’s examination of Jodi’s infamous gap in her memory that began right after she shot Travis. Martinez pounced on the idea that her blackout when it came to murdering Travis was way too convenient, too unbelievable. Prosecutor Martinez showed just how absurd it was by explaining how Jodi deleted numerous photos from Travis’s camera after killing him and how each deletion involved a complicated process, not the kind of intricate maneuver one accomplishes in a blackout.

The fourth day of cross began with sex, sexual aggression, sexual fantasies, and more lies. Martinez was not afraid to elicit details, so those attracted to the case for prurient reasons were certainly satisfied. Jodi was delightfully happy through much of the sex testimony. She seemed to take amusement in watching someone as clever, sophisticated, and old as Martinez use terms generally spoken in the bedroom. Not as amusing were the questions about the murder. Parts of the CBS
48 Hours
hour-long program featuring Jodi’s early interview were aired. There she was on the courtroom screens, larger than life, spewing what everyone now knew were outright lies and doing it believably in the same calm tone she was using during her testimony. Someone might as well have been screaming,
Liar, liar, pants on fire.