Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story (2 page)

Then something set her off. Something he said. Something he did. The way he looked
at her with disgust. She was reminded of the times he called her a whore and a skank,
when he said she was nothing more to him than a “three-hole wonder.” And of the trip
he planned to take to Mexico with another woman. He never invited Jodi. This enraged
her.

At some point, Travis’ guard was down, he was comfortable, not expecting the murderous
rage that was about to be unleashed on him. Jodi was about to carry out her plan.

She pulled out a knife and suddenly began stabbing him in the chest. Travis was stunned.
He struggled to grab the blade. It sliced through the tender skin of his palms. He
stumbled in a daze around the bathroom, at one point hunching over the sink, where
blood spilled out everywhere.

Jodi stabbed him again and again, in the chest, in the back, in the head. He struggled
to speak, gasping and gurgling, in shock by the blitz attack and the sheer pain of
the deep gashes all over his body.

He began to lose strength as he bled profusely. Jodi then went in for the kill, and
with a powerful slashing motion cut his throat wide open. Blood was now spewing from
his neck.

The medical examiner would later conclude this knife wound was likely fatal as Travis
would have quickly bled to death, both his carotid arteries that deliver blood from
the heart to the brain severed.

But Jodi wasn’t done. At some point, she pulled out the gun and polished Travis off
with a single shot to the forehead. Authorities would later claim he was already dead
at that point, and the gunshot was just one final salvo of rage. Jodi dragged his
mutilated body back into his shower, where washed off much of the blood.

She then began to clean the scene, but left blood everywhere along with her hair
and bloody palm print. She deleted the nude photos, and put the camera in Travis’
washing machine then turned it on, for whatever reason leaving behind evidence of
her involvement.

Later, she simply grabbed her things, walked out the front door to her car and drove
off as if nothing had happened.

By now, the world is familiar with Jodi Arias. She went on trial for Travis’ death
in January, and her story has provided an endless fascination to people around the
world.

The image of a bespectacled Arias sitting in a Phoenix courtroom — often crying and
wearing drab outfits — has become a daily fixture in the news for the last four months.

The story of Travis and Jodi is one of troubled upbringings, passion, love, betrayal,
the Mormon church, and most notably, sex, something that would remain a constant theme
throughout her trial.

Jodi Ann Arias was born on July 9, 1980, in Salinas, Calif., a city best known as
the hometown of John Steinbeck and often referred to as the “salad bowl of the world”
because it is such a prolific agricultural region.

Her parents are Bill and Sandy Arias.

Bill owned restaurants all through Jodi’s childhood — and still does to this day.
Sandy also worked in the family restaurant until she became a dental assistant in
the early 1990s. Jodi joined the business herself as a teenager, waiting tables after
school and on weekends.

Jodi was the oldest of four siblings, including brothers Carl and Joseph and sister
Angela. She was closest to Carl in age, and she fondly recalls an idyllic early childhood
with him that involved bike-riding, tree-climbing, camping, roller-skating and playing
with friends in their cul-de-sac in Salinas. She played the flute, enjoyed art and
took karate lessons.

The family left Salinas when she was about 11 and moved to Santa Maria, about an
hour north of Santa Barbara, where Jodi spent her junior high years. The family eventually
settled in the former gold rush town of Yreka, located in far Northern California
near the Oregon border.

She attended Yreka Union High School for three years, with Spanish and art being
her favorite classes. She liked Spanish so much that she took a study abroad trip
to Costa Rica.

The relationship between Jodi and her parents was strained. She’d act up and get
scolded like many adolescents. In 8th grade, her parents caught her growing marijuana
at the house. They called the cops, and Jodi always resented them for it.

Jodi claimed during her trial that her parents were abusive, giving her spankings
with various objects, including a wooden spoon and belt, and shoving her into furniture,
a door post and a piano in punishments that allegedly grew worse as she got older.

She says her dad was a physically imposing man, claiming that he could once bench
press an astounding 520 pounds. However, her abuse claims were not corroborated by
anyone else, and it doesn’t appear any of it was ever reported to authorities. Jodi’s
parents were never called to testify during the guilt phase of the trial and largely
declined to comment throughout the proceedings.

The relationship with her parents grew more tumultuous as time went on.

The tipping point came when Jodi got caught skipping school at the end of her junior
year, and her parents grounded her until her 18th birthday. It was to be a rigid grounding
— no phone, no contact with friends, essentially confinement to her room until July.

In the weeks prior, Jodi had already been plotting her escape as she fought more
with her parents, quietly packing up and moving boxes to the home of an older guy
she had fallen in love with. When the grounding came, Jodi moved out and later dropped
out of high school.

Jodi loved art from a young age. She was always drawing and painting pictures. Although
she is often referred to in the media as an aspiring photographer, Jodi never really
took those aspirations very far, other than a few wedding gigs. She loved shooting
photos, yes, she shot thousands and thousands of them, but Jodi’s real profession
was as a waitress.

She worked at least 10 different restaurant jobs in the decade or so from her teenage
years until she was arrested at the age of 28. The locations ran the gamut from a
high-end luxury hotel to a Denny’s to a California Pizza Kitchen located in a mall.
She tended bar, waited tables and became quite good at it, in fact.

***

Jodi’s big foray into the professional world was at a company called Prepaid Legal
Services.

Prepaid Legal was founded in the 1970s by an Oklahoma businessman named Harland Stonecipher,
who had trouble paying his legal bills after a bad car accident.

He founded a company that allowed members to pay a monthly fee to get access to legal
and other services. The company is now called Legal Shield, and it offers identity
theft protection as one of its main services.

The company made Stonecipher a multimillionaire - and enticed thousands of other
Americans with the same tantalizing prospect.

Prepaid Legal is similar to Amway in that it relies on an aggressive sales force
to spread the message and recruit new salespeople to get rewarded financially.

Jodi met Travis at a Prepaid Legal conference. Her life pretty much spiraled from
that point forward.

Jodi’s childhood seemed downright idyllic when compared to Travis’ upbringing. His
mother was an addict, hooked on methamphetamine just as the drug was becoming the
scourge of communities all across America.

As a result, Travis and his siblings were subjected to all sorts of ills that no
child should ever have to encounter. His father was addicted to drugs, too, but got
clean before he died. Travis was always proud of his dad for turning his life around.

Travis described in his blog how awful it was in their neighborhood in Riverside,
Calif. Mom would be strung out for days, then she would come home and need to crash
for several more days. Travis would attempt to wake her up, and he’d get beaten. “It
hurt, but we got used to it,” he wrote.

They also got used to not having much food around the house. Meth took priority over
groceries, so Travis and his siblings would have to literally scrounge for crumbs.

He remembers one day from his childhood when all he could find in the house to eat
was a moldy piece of bread. The house was disgustingly filthy, too — so much that
roaches infested the family’s surroundings.

The cops showed up on a regular basis amid a series of domestic disturbances between
his mother and father, including a time when mom emptied a handgun into dad’s car
and another occasion where dad took an ax to mom’s belongings.

“I have never heard in any movie, on any street corner, or amongst the vilest of
men any string of words so offensive and hateful, said with such disgust as was the
words that my mother said to my sisters and I,” Travis wrote in his blog.

The family eventually got kicked out of the house, requiring them to move into a
camper in his aunt’s backyard — leaving them crammed into the tiny space for about
a year. He didn’t bathe much, and naturally got mocked at school for his filthy appearance.

The camper was right next to a washing machine. The discharge wasn’t connected to
any sewer system, so it dumped piles of wastewater right next to their ramshackle
temporary home.

Finally, Travis and his siblings got the hell out of there. They moved in with his
grandmother when he was about 10 and never looked back. He had seven siblings in all;
both his parents are now deceased.

Grandmother Norma Sarvey took Travis under her wing, taught him how to be a man and
introduced him to the Mormon faith. During the screaming matches with his mother,
Travis would pray and come to believe that God was somehow looking out for him — if
he could just get out of this mess.

***

He was naturally drawn to religion after all he went through.

Travis was baptized into the Mormon church, did a two-year missionary in Denver and
eventually became a fun-loving, successful salesman and motivational speaker at Prepaid
Legal.

In the early 2000s he moved to Mesa - a perfect spot for a young Mormon man. The
city is home to one of the largest Mormon populations in the country outside Utah.

He became a fitness nut, obsessively counting calories and working out. He loved
the sport of Mixed Martial Arts and was a big believer in environmentally friendly
causes in the months before he died, buying a hybrid electric Toyota Prius.

Colleagues at Prepaid Legal would cheer loudly when he walked to the stage at seminars,
conferences and team meetings, encouraging them to sell, sell, sell. Only 5-foot-9
in height, he became a larger-than-life figure to some colleagues. His message was
refreshing, his approach authentic. He once showed up with a 1980s heavy metal-style
wig and a muscle shirt at a Prepaid Legal conference, leading a skit as a character
named Eddie Snell from Alabama. As a Def Leppard tune blared, he danced around the
front of the room and had the crowd on their feet, absolutely loving every bit of
it. He was completely comfortable cutting it up on stage.

The adversity of his youth shaped his adulthood and helped make him an optimist in
every sense of the word. When life throws something bad your way, it’s not a stumbling
block, he would say, it’s a stepping-stone!

In a poignant blog post at the beginning of 2008, just months before his life would
be cut tragically short, Travis outlined his big dreams and visions for the year ahead.
It was vintage Travis: enthusiasm, confidence, ready to take on the world and make
it a better place.

“This Year will be the Best year of my life. This is the year that will eclipse all
others. I will earn more, learn more, travel more, serve more, love more, give more
and be more than all the other years of my life combined. True other years now past
have been at times magnificent but none like this. This is a year of metamorphosis,
of growth and accomplishment that at previous was unimaginable.”

He circled back to the “best year of his life” mantra in the final sentence of the
blog post, right after offering this prediction: “I will find an eternal companion
that enhances me exponentially and countless other goals that at one point I dare
not even dream.”

Less than two months later, he was dead.

Jodi had three loves in her life before she met Travis: Bobby Juarez, Matt McCartney
and Darryl Brewer. Only Darryl would be called to testify at her trial.

The relationships were all unusual and tormented in their own ways.

She met Bobby Juarez at a carnival as a teenager. She was standing next to a ride
called the Zipper when she noticed him, seduced by his long black hair and gothic
attire that stood out on a sweltering summer day.

It’s a fast ride in which occupants get strapped into a cage that spins around in
circles as it hurtles through the air. That stomach-churning, terrifying, unpredictable
ride was the beginning of Jodi’s turbulent romantic life.

At the time, she was an impressionable 15-year-old, Bobby a skinny 18-year-old with
no job who had all sorts of wild ideas and beliefs. He believed in vampires and wanted
to travel to San Francisco to hunt them, an idea that intrigued Jodi, who was a big
fan of Anne Rice books at the time. But the relationship was not without problems.
At one point Bobby tried to strangle her, according to Jodi, and told her “how he
would kill each member of my family.”

Jodi says she tried calling 911 during one fight, but Bobby snatched the phone from
her hand and hung up. The 911 operator called back, but Bobby made up an excuse that
his girlfriend was trying to program 911 into the speed dial and it was an accident.