Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story (7 page)

Chris Hughes, a Prepaid Legal colleague and one of Travis’ best friends, was scheduled
to be on it, but Travis never called in. In the next few days, Travis’ cell phone
was flooded with text messages and voicemails, from friends, roommates, and even Jodi
as she concocted her alibi.

Mimi decided she had to go to Travis’ home in Mesa. She was so worried that she called
her mother on the drive over to calm her nerves.

She arrived at the home and repeatedly pounded on the door and rang the doorbell.
She saw his pug-mix dog Napoleon excitedly jumping up and down at the entryway, but
no sign of Travis.

She went home and emailed Travis. Her fears grew with each minute. She then contacted
her friend Michelle Lowery and they went to his house again, this time around 10 p.m.
They knocked together. Nothing.

They reached out to more of Travis’ friends and finally tracked down one who had
the code to his garage.

They typed it into the keypad — 0187. As they made their way into the house, a foul
stench quickly overpowered them.

By the time they got to his bedroom, it was clear that something bad had happened.
Blood was on the floors, the smell even more powerful.

In the bathroom, there he was: Travis’ bloated, naked corpse stuffed into his shower.
Mimi frantically dialed 911.

“Oh my god,” she said in a panicked voice.

“What’s going on?” the female dispatcher said.

“A friend of ours is dead in his bedroom,” she said.

The dispatcher scrambled officers to the home and assured Mimi and her friends that
help was on the way.

The dispatcher kept Mimi on the line as officers sped toward the scene, getting as
much information as she could about how Travis could have died such a horrible death.

“Has he been depressed at all? Thinking of committing suicide, anything like that?”
the dispatcher asked.

“He’s been really depressed because he broke up with this girl. And he was all upset
about that, but I don’t think he’d actually kill himself over that,” Mimi said.

“Had he been threatened by anybody recently?”

“Yes, he has. He has an ex-girlfriend that’s been bothering him and following him
and slashing his tires and things like that.”

“And do you know the ex-girlfriend’s name?”

Mimi couldn’t remember the name of the supposed stalker. She just knew that Travis
was having some relationship issues. She asked her friends who had accompanied her
to the house, and someone in the background chimed in. And then came the damning moment.

“Her name is Jodi,” Mimi said.

There it was. Just a few minutes into the call, with police not even at the scene,
and friends armed with just a few basic details about Travis’ recent troubles had
pinpointed a suspect.

“OK, so last weekend, his stalker, he told her never wanted to see her again. Had
a big confrontation. And that’s all we know,” Mimi told the dispatcher.

The call ended shortly after. Police may not have known it yet, but they had their
prime suspect.

Mimi’s next days, and those of the others who discovered the body, were filled with
horror and confusion, grilling by police and questions about what occurred, with the
thoughts of Jodi always on their minds.

A few days later, Mimi attended Travis’ memorial service at his Mormon temple in
Mesa. Among the crowd of mourners, one woman stood out.

“Are you Mimi Hall?” the stranger said in introducing herself.

“I’m Jodi Arias.”

Many killers do things in predictable and secretive ways to cover their tracks. They
go underground. They flee to Mexico or some extradition-free country. They try to
keep their mouths shut and most definitely do nothing to arouse suspicion.

Not Jodi. She had to be part of it, still, even after his death, drawn to Travis
and everything that involved him.

Mesa police Detective Esteban “Steve” Flores got the call just as he had begun analyzing
the horrific scene. It was message from a woman named Jodi Arias who wanted to inquire
about the killing.

Flores went on to pull an all-nighter and got sidetracked with the immediate demands
of the scene. He is a soft-spoken veteran police detective, a stout man known for
his careful, methodical work at every crime scene.

The next day, he got another message from the same woman. Jodi definitely wasn’t
hiding.

In fact, she was overly chatty. It was the first installment in her ever-shifting
alibis.

She inquired about the crime, offered her assistance, asked about the murder weapon
and described her relationship with Travis, all largely unsolicited information.

She provided all sorts of little clues and tidbits about Travis and his home. He
had a king-size bed, maybe it was a California king, she said. He slept on Egyptian
cotton sheets.

Jodi told Flores she looked back at her phone records to see the last time she spoke
to Travis. She described how he’d never lock the doors, and how she gave him grief
about it.

“Maybe you can’t talk about this but was there any kind of weapon used? Was there
a gun?” she asked, fishing for anything to find out if the authorities were onto her.

Yes, Flores said, but he didn’t tip his hand. He asked her if Travis had a gun or
any weapons in his house. “His two fists,” she said.

Despite everyone pointing to Jodi from the minute the body was discovered, police
proceeded at a deliberate pace before actually putting her in handcuffs about a month
later.

All of Travis’ friends saw her as the prime suspect from the minute police affixed
yellow tape to the perimeter of the property and began examining the bathroom and
house for forensic clues.

But Flores and his colleagues still had a lot of work to do to build the case; the
foundation was there with Jodi as a possible culprit, but they had to build a house
on top of the foundation.

Police quickly interviewed Mimi Hall and Travis’ two roommates, Enrique Cortez and
Zachary Billings, to make sure none of them had a particular beef with Travis.

Investigators thought it was odd that his roommates had no idea Travis’ bloated corpse
was stuffed into the shower in the days after Jodi killed him. A stench from the body
was present throughout the house, but Zachary and Enrique didn’t think much of it
and were so busy with their jobs, church and girlfriends that they weren’t home much
anyway.

Enrique remembered smelling it, but it was a bachelor pad. For all he knew, Travis
left some dirty dishes in his room before he went to Mexico. They never imagined that
the smell came from his decomposing body just a few feet away behind Travis’ bedroom
door.

Leads and tips started coming in to police. They had to chase down each one and cross
them off their list, a time-consuming task for the handful of officers working the
case.

One anonymous caller phoned police to say they needed to look at a man named Dustin
Thompson.

Dustin and his wife Ashley, an employee at a Dillard’s distribution center, were
seeing their marriage fall apart, and Ashley was friends with Travis. She had known
him for about three years and had visited his house to watch UFC matches on a Wednesday
night in May.

The caller notified police that Dustin somehow knew about the killing the day the
body was discovered and went to the house to see what was going on with all the officers
at the scene.

As it turns out, the tip was bogus and Dustin had nothing to do with the slaying.
But police had to follow the tip and dozens of others regardless.

As Mesa cops awaited forensic results, Flores, the lead detective, kept in close
contact with Jodi. The circumstantial evidence clearly pointed to her, but they wanted
iron-clad proof.

Almost everyone who knew Travis was convinced who did it. No doubt. It had to be
Jodi.

They had been creeped out by her bizarre behavior at various times and heard the
stories from Travis about Jodi’s stalking.

One friend even told police that Jodi had been “acting very ‘Fatal Attraction’” lately,
referring to the film starring Glenn Close as an obsessed mistress whose heightening
obsession with a married man ends in murder.

“There’s an old saying that, if someone is just not acting right, look into it,”
Flores would later say.

The detective began piecing together clues as Jodi tried to put the pieces of her
own life back together.

She tried to resume her activities in Yreka, but it wasn’t easy because she had to
carry on the outward appearance of a mourner while simultaneously dealing the psychological
trauma of knowing she had just killed the love of her life, the man she thought she’d
marry someday. She cried for days.

She went to work at a Mexican restaurant in Yreka. She updated her MySpace page to
say she “missed Travis. See you soon, my friend, but not soon enough,” while also
posting a photo gallery of her trips and time with him. As she flew back to California
from Arizona after attending Travis’ memorial service, she flirted with the guy sitting
next to her on the plane and got his number, calling him after getting home.

She even wrote letters of condolence to Travis’ family and sent a bouquet of white
irises to Travis’ beloved grandmother, Norma Sarvey, who raised him and inspired him
so much.

“Travis always told me he liked the name Iris for a girl…If I ever have a son I’ll
name him Alexander,” she wrote in her diary.

On the whole, Jodi did quite well handling the situation and moving on, or at least
making it look that way.

Her mother said the death of Travis brought her and Jodi closer, and she was finally
starting to see positive changes in her daughter.

Maybe there was a silver lining to all of this, her mother thought.

“Just this last couple weeks since Travis’ death has been the best relations that
we’ve had in our whole life,” Sandy Arias would later say during questioning by police.
“Maybe this death has made her see that life is short and you can’t be that way. And
it’s changing her.”

At the same time, Jodi was also playing the role of sleuth. She would call Flores
to get updates on the investigation and offer up stories that puzzled him.

She would leave him casual voicemails on his mobile phone.

“Hi Detective Flores, this is Jodi Arias calling in regard to Travis Alexander,”
she said in one message. “It’s Saturday, not exactly sure what time, maybe you’re
off. I hope you’re enjoying your day off. If you could give me a call back, my phone
number is 831-402-1909.”

As she was leaving her message, forensic experts were analyzing the evidence. On
June 26, the reports came back: The bloody palm print on the wall was Jodi’s. One
week later, on July 3, the DNA samples taken from the scene matched up to Jodi.

A few weeks earlier, Jodi and Travis’ other friends voluntarily provided police saliva
samples for DNA comparisons.

Flores shared his findings with the Maricopa County Attorney’s office, and prosecutors
presented the case to a grand jury.

The panel indicted Jodi on July 9, 2008, the same day she celebrated her 28th birthday.
It was now time to take Jodi into custody.

Jodi was at her grandparents’ three-bedroom house when Mesa police Department joined
by deputies with the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department showed up and slapped the
cuffs on her.

Jodi was under arrest.

The date was July 15, 2008. It was the culmination of the most tumultuous period
of Jodi’s life.

In the span of 45 days, she had killed her lover in gruesome fashion, skipped town,
hooked up with a new guy, mourned the loss of Alexander, even sent his family condolence
cards.

Now she was in a nondescript interrogation room in Yreka. Most people are nervous
in this situation, rattled by the mere sight of handcuffs on their wrists, fearful
about their life being shattered once the authorities figure out what they did.

But Jodi seemed to have different coping mechanisms. She tried small talk with a
female officer, asking where she was from Arizona. Then she complained about the temperature
in the room. It’s too cold, she said. She wondered where her purse was.

Here she was, locked up for what could be an eternity, and Jodi begged Flores for
a sweater and inquired about her handbag.

“Any way you can turn the heat up in here or like, do you have a sweater I can borrow
or something?” she asked Flores.

“I don’t have any sweaters,” he shot back.

They had a few back-and-forths that were fairly routine for police interrogations,
and then Flores laid down the gauntlet.

“Everybody is saying, I don’t understand what happened to Travis. I don’t know who
killed him. But you need to look at Jodi. And sometimes the simplest answers are the
correct ones. And that’s one of the reasons I started looking at you a little bit
closer and over the last month or so I’ve gotten into Travis’ lives, talked to all
his friends, his family. I got a really good understanding of who he is now. And I
got a very good understanding of your relationship with him. And I’m just putting
two and two together … and it kind of matches.”

Whatever Jodi had told herself in the month since Alexander’s death, it surely set
in at this time that she was in trouble.

It wasn’t the kind of interrogation you see on a TV drama where a defendant is standoffish,
gives quick, one-word answers and demands for a lawyer to be present.

Jodi rambled on in long answers as detectives tried to sort out the truth. Jodi talked
at length about her relationship with Travis, their beliefs in the Mormon faith, his
desire to meet a nice Mormon girl, and her supposed adherence to the Ten Commandments.
She tried to make sense of her relationship with Travis for Flores.