Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story (12 page)

Why would she need to shoot him after he was no longer a threat, after he was bleeding
all over and near death, if not already dead?

It was a crucial fact in the case that prosecutors needed to prove in order to help
secure a first-degree murder conviction and the death penalty.

Dr. Kevin Horn, who performed the autopsy, testified the gunshot wound would have
likely rendered Travis unconscious and unable to defend himself.

“Again because of the injury to the brain, the information processing part of the
brain would have rendered him unable to raise his hands to offer any sort of purposeful
action or to verbalize anything,” Horn said.

Horn’s testimony would be a tough obstacle for the defense to overcome, as he said
there was no way Travis could have continued to fight after being shot in the head,
as Jodi claims.

“If the bullet wound was the first wound that was received by Mr. Alexander, would
it have been immediately incapacitating?” Martinez asked him.

“Yes,” Horn replied.

“And why would it have been incapacitating?” Martinez continued.

“Because of brain injury,” Horn said.

A juror query for Horn would sum up his testimony, and obviously later send the panel
into deliberations with some serious questions.

“Can you explain why you think Travis was still alive when his throat was cut?”

“Because of the large amount of hemorrhage into the soft tissue around the throat
wound,” Horn replied. “That requires a beating heart.”

Jodi’s defense attorneys began presenting their case Jan. 29, 2013. It went on for
nearly 2 1/2 months, delving deep into Jodi’s life, with witness after witness describing
her as a gentle soul, an unassuming woman who was in search of herself.

Their task was daunting. Here is a defendant who had admitted to lying, to creating
an alibi to avoid suspicion and arrest, who lied repeatedly about her involvement,
who fled the scene of the killing without calling police, without ever checking to
see if Travis could be saved.

The self-defense claim, too, would be an enormous challenge. At the heart of it all
was convincing jurors that Travis was a violent man, an abusive womanizer who had
attacked Jodi at least four times in the past, kicking her in the ribs, breaking her
finger and once even choking her into unconsciousness.

The problem was that no evidence or testimony supported her claims. She never called
police to report the abuse. She never took photographs to document her injuries —
something one would think an aspiring photographer would do without even thinking
about it. And she never even wrote about any of the abuse in her detailed diaries.

She would later explain it was because of her belief in the law of attraction, a
notion made popular by the movie, “The Secret.” The idea was simple — only put out
to the world the sort of energy you want in return. Talking, writing or even thinking
negatively only begets more negativity. Jodi insisted she lived by this rule.

But the lack of documentation of Travis’ abuse would haunt the defense. Their only
hope was to portray Jodi as the victim, Travis as the perpetrator.

Their case would rest largely on demonizing Travis and portraying him as a liar and
a cheat who used Jodi to fulfill his raunchy fantasies, berated her publicly and privately,
beat her when things didn’t go his way, and ultimately, tried to attack her one last
time on the day of his death.

The defense tactic throughout the case was clear — introduce the jury to Jodi, give
them the opportunity to get to know her, through multiple witnesses and eventually,
through her own words during 18 days on the witness stand.

It was not an unsurprising approach. The case against Jodi was damning. At the very
least, defense attorneys hoped that if the jury did convict her of first-degree murder,
they would spare her life after coming to know the gentle person she was deep inside.

And with that, the case went in slow motion, and continued that way for weeks, one
day dragging into another as reporters and spectators grew bored with the seemingly
never-ending tale of Jodi’s life.

The first defense witness talked mostly about his business mentoring relationship
with Jodi through PrePaid Legal, and described her as feminine but conservative.

Next up was ex-boyfriend Daryl Brewer, who told jurors how Jodi had become more involved
with the Mormon church after meeting Travis. Brewer also explained that he never saw
Jodi become violent or jealous toward other women in his life. But he described her
as sexually aggressive — something that did not work in the defense favor — and said
she once took a nude picture of him in the shower.

An ex-girlfriend of Travis later testified that he cheated on her with Jodi and lied
to her about being a virgin, which played right into the defense case that Travis
was just out for sex. However, the same woman said Travis had never been physically
or emotionally abusive to her.

Another friend of Travis told jurors about their involvement in the Mormon faith,
and again repeated claims that Travis had portrayed himself to be a virgin.

Another dilemma for the defense was the gun — the very weapon she acknowledged disposing
of somewhere in the desert as she fled the scene of the killing, and the very same
caliber used to shoot Travis.

How could it could such a coincidence that Travis was shot with a .25 caliber pistol,
and the same caliber was stolen from the Northern California home of Jodi’s grandparents
— where she had been staying — just a week before the killing?

The defense never even tried to explain away the gun. Jodi simply denied that she
took it, and insisted that she shot Travis with his own gun that he kept in his closet
— coincidentally, a .25 caliber pistol. But again, there was a problem. There was
no evidence, no spare bullets, no holster, no gun box, nothing at Travis’ home to
prove he ever even owned the weapon.

And no one testified throughout the trial that Travis owned a gun. No one. Not a
shred of evidence. But the defense stuck with this story.

At the time, pundits, trial watchers and lawyers following the case everywhere thought
surely the defense would have a better explanation. Nancy Grace railed about the case
every night, condemning Jodi as a murderer.

Jodi had admitted to lying so many times in the past, blaming it on fear and shame,
that one more lie couldn’t have made a difference. She could have easily acknowledged
she took the gun, if only for self-defense against a man she claimed had been abusing
her. But she didn’t.

The story of Jodi’s entire defense would largely rest on her words, her accounts,
her assertions. Sure, the text messages, the phone recordings, the emails, all showed
that Travis was clearly not the man he presented himself to be publicly. He was a
Mormon. He was looking for a good wife of faith, but he also liked the sex with Jodi.
There was just no question about it. Travis’ own words proved it.

But just who was the sexual aggressor in the relationship always remained unclear.

And for the jury to make the leap to self-defense, they would have to believe that
not only was Travis very much into sex with as many women as he could get into bed
— and some pretty kinky sex at that —but that he was a physically violent man toward
women. None of his past girlfriends or acquaintances described him as such a person.

A defense expert testified that Jodi suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder
and amnesia, explaining why Jodi couldn’t recall much from the day she killed Travis.

Another expert told jurors Jodi was indeed abused by Travis and suffered from battered
woman’s syndrome. Enter the prosecution expert who later countered it all, saying
Jodi suffered from none of the diagnoses and instead had borderline personality disorder,
a severe mental illness marked by unstable moods in behavior and relationships that
can lead to brief psychotic episodes.

These dueling expert witnesses would become crucial to the defense case aimed at
saving Jodi’s life.

But the key to it all was for jurors to hear directly from Jodi herself. In many
death penalty trials, the defendant never takes the stand. It creates too many chances
for an aggressive prosecutor to poke holes in their stories, and catch the person
off guard, creating a “Perry Mason”-style gotcha moment that could clinch the case
for a conviction.

In the U.S. justice system, defendant’s are innocent until proven guilty, meaning
it’s not the job of defense attorneys to prove their client didn’t commit the crime.
Prosecutors must prove that they did.

Defense lawyers merely have to create enough confusion in the prosecution case to
raise reasonable doubt.

And that’s exactly what Jodi had hoped to do for herself.

***

“Ms. Arias, you may come forward and take a seat please,” the judge said to stunned
whispers in the gallery.

Jodi got up from the defense table and walked gingerly across the courtroom to the
witness stand. She was dressed in a black shirt and khaki pants. Her stringy bangs
were combed straight down over her forehead, almost touching her glasses. She looked
homely. Bland. Childish. Innocent.

In their haste to get her to the stand before the jury entered the room, court officials
forgot to swear her in. Defense attorneys had requested she be seated before the panel
was present so jurors couldn’t see her electronic ankle bracelet placed on her by
authorities each time she leaves jail for trial.

Now the formality.

“The defense calls Jodi Arias,” said her attorney, Kirk Nurmi.

Jodi stood and raised her right hand to be sworn in, then sat again. The jury was
now in the room.

“Hi Jodi,” Nurmi said in a gentle voice, as if speaking to someone at a funeral.

“Hi,” she replied, a smirk appearing for just a split second before her lips shrank
back into an emotionless line across her face.

“How are you feeling right now?” Nurmi asked.

“Um, nervous,” Jodi said, shifting around in her chair.

“Is this a position you ever thought you would find yourself in, testifying here
today?”

Martinez objected. Relevance. Attorneys approached the bench to argue with the judge
privately. Jodi’s mother sat in the gallery stone-faced. Travis’ family watched from
the front row just across the room.

Nurmi moved on to another line of questioning.

“Let me ask you a couple of important questions before we get back and start talking
about who you are and why you’re here, OK?” he said.

Jodi nodded. “OK.”

“Did you kill Travis Alexander on June 4, 2008?” Nurmi asked slowly, practically
stopping after each word.

Jodi swiveled in her chair and looked to the jury.

“Yes, I did,” she said

“Why?” Nurmi prodded.

“Um,” Jodi started, again turning her chair to face the jury. “The simple answer
is that he attacked me.”

She paused.

“And I defended myself,” Jodi continued.

Nurmi wanted to get some of the most problematic things out first before he spent
the ensuing days questioning Jodi about the minutia of her entire life, from childhood
to now.

He asked her about an interview she did for “Inside Edition” after being arrested
and charged in Travis’ death. At the time, she was sticking to the story of the intruders,
though it wouldn’t be long before she changed the tale once more.

“I understand all the evidence is really compelling,” Jodi said in the TV interview.
“In a nutshell, two people came in and killed Travis. I’ve never even shot a gun.
That’s heinous. I can’t imagine slitting anyone’s throat.”

Then came the kicker.

“No jury will convict me and you can mark my words on that,” Jodi told “Inside Edition.”
“I’m innocent.”

Nurmi asked her if she remembered saying that.

“Yeah, I did say that,” Jodi replied.

“Why?”

“At the time, I had plans to commit suicide,” Jodi said.

She paused to sigh, rubbing her hands on her legs nervously as her gaze dropped down.
She lifted her head and looked to the jury again.

“I was extremely confident that no jury would convict me because I didn’t expect
any of you to be here,” she told the panel.

“I didn’t expect to be here, so I could have very easily have said no jury would
acquit me either,” she continued, explaining that she couldn’t tell the interviewer
for the TV show that she was going to commit suicide because a jail guard was nearby.

“I would have been thrown into a padded cell, stripped down and that would have been
my life for a while until I stabilized,” she said. “So I was very confident that no
jury would convict me because I planned to be dead.”

Jodi went on for more than a week recounting in precise detail one life event after
another — from a troubled childhood marred by abuse at the hands of her parents, a
string of bad relationships, and how Travis belittled her, cheated on her, call her
derogatory names like whore, skank and “three-hole wonder” and used her to fulfill
his sexual fantasies.

She explained that she continued to see Travis for sex even after they broke up and
she learned he had been cheating on her because she had low “self-esteem.”

“I was kind of a doormat, “Jodi said, staring sheepishly at jurors, a pure look of
innocence in her eyes.

She explained how Travis once beat her, pushed her to the ground, kicked her in the
ribs and broke her finger, then in a theatrical moment for the jury, raised her hand
to display her crooked digit. She later detailed three more accounts of abuse at the
hands of Travis, including once when he choked her into unconsciousness.