Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story (8 page)

But what Flores really needed and wanted was a confession. It is one of the building
blocks of a strong case, as important as finding the murder weapon, a strong motive,
and physical evidence connecting the suspect to the crime. Police had all the physical
evidence they needed by this point, and seemed to have motive figured out: jealousy.
The murder weapon was a mystery, although the break-in at her grandparents’ house
provided ample circumstantial evidence.

So for two days, Flores and other officers threw everything they could at Jodi, alternating
between good cop, bad cop and father confessor. On the first day, Flores started off
by questioning her gently, but slowly lost his patience as Jodi’s responses meandered.

“He liked you, he loved you. He wanted to be with you but he was reluctant to make
a commitment first off. And he truly didn’t think that you were marriage material,”
Flores said. “And I don’t know why not. I mean, I see you, you’re a wonderful girl.
You’re struggling, you’re trying to make your way through life and I don’t see why
you guys couldn’t have made it, you know?”

“I think we just, we have very different philosophies,” Jodi said.

Finally, Flores had enough. It was time to throw his trump card down on the table.

“What if I could show you proof you were there?” Flores asked.

“How?” Jodi said.

“Would that change your mind?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“You need to be honest with me Jodi.”

“I was not at Travis’ house.”

“You were at Travis’ house and you guys had a sexual encounter which there’s pictures.
And I know you know there’s pictures because I have them. I will show them to you,
OK? So, what I’m asking you is for you to be honest with me. I know you were there.”

“Are you sure those pictures aren’t from another time?” Jodi asked.

“Positive.”

She continued to insist that she was not there, despite Flores saying he had reams
of evidence proving otherwise.

“Jodi, this is over. This is absolutely over. You need to tell me the truth,” Flores
said.

“Listen, the truth is I did not hurt Travis.”

She kept lying, even going so far to offer up this bold statement: “Listen, if I’m
found guilty, I don’t have a life. I’m not guilty. I didn’t hurt Travis. If I hurt
Travis, I would beg for the death penalty.”

“I don’t even hurt spiders,” she added.

Flores decided to increase the pressure on Jodi by telling her that he was going
to bring pictures showing what happened. Before he left, he offered a parting shot:
“Tell me exactly what happened because, you know what, I think your mom and your dad
really deserve the truth. They’re gonna be asking. … What was going through your mind
and what caused you do to this. It happened. And I can prove it happened and there’s
no doubt in my mind, and there is absolutely no doubt in anybody’s mind who is investigating
this that you were there and that you did this. But I’ll let you think about that
OK? And I’m gonna go look for some pictures … and I’ll be right back.”

“Detective, I’m not a murderer,” Jodi insisted.

Flores wrapped up the conversation by explaining the process for defendants in her
situation, including bail hearings, extradition to Arizona, and limited contact with
family.

He pushed a few more times to get her to confess, but she didn’t bite. Jodi asked
about whether Travis’ family or the public knew she had been arrested. Then came an
odd request.

“This is a really trivial question and it’s gonna reveal how shallow I am. But before
they book me, can I clean myself up a little bit?” Jodi asked.

She asked to go the bathroom, and Flores said yes — but handcuffs are staying on.

“Do you know I’m not, like, violent, or am gonna run. It’s Yreka.”

Flores left the room, but kept the video surveillance camera on as Jodi stayed there
by herself with nothing but a water bottle and her thoughts.

Usually in these situations, criminal suspects will shrug, sigh, mope and express
other outward expressions of anger over their predicament.

Jodi was still worried about her appearance. Still handcuffed, Jodi got on the floor,
dropped her head and pulled it back swiftly to bring her hair back.

“You could have at least done your makeup,” she said aloud to herself. “Gosh.”

Later, she broke into song. She belted out a verse from a Dido ballad called “Here
With Me.”

“I didn’t hear you breathe/I wonder how I am still here. And I don’t want to move
a thing/it might change my memory.”

She shuffled her water bottle to the left and right on the table in front of her,
then picked at the label.

“And I won’t go. And I can’t hide. And I can’t breathe until you’re resting here
with me.”

Later, a completely different song choice: “O Holy Night, the stars are brightly
shining.”

She chuckled to herself and continued with the song. “He knows our needs, hear the
angel voices. … O night when Christ was born.”

She then cried.

At another point, she raised her arms and placed her hands behind her head and stretched
her torso. She inspected a trash can. Then she went to the wall, placed her head on
the floor, and did a headstand.

Jodi was later booked into the system and spent her first night in jail, but detectives
took another crack at her crumbling story the next day. Now wearing an orange prison
jumpsuit and handcuffs and still alone in the room, Jodi added to the soundtrack of
her incarceration, this time the Bette Midler favorite, “The Rose.”

“Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snow, lies the seed.”

Flores sent in another investigator to work on Jodi, and the good cop, bad cop game
elevated. Detective Rachel Blaney of the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department entered
the room and unlocked the handcuffs to make Jodi more comfortable, noting that “these
types of cuffs aren’t the most comfortable.”

“Do you think they’re really designed for comfort?” Jodi asked.

“They’re not. OK, you’re not going to give us any problems being out of the cuffs.
You really don’t look like the type that would.”

Blaney then took a soothing, almost mother-like tone in her voice as she calmly pressed
Jodi.

“I don’t think you’re the type of person that can sit there during your trial and
see Travis’ family sitting over there and continue to make that lie in yourself without
it tearing you up,” she said.

“I don’t think I could either,” she said.

Blaney continued to pry, but gently, with the focus on Jodi’s character, not the
heinous killing.

“You’re not our typical suspect. You come from a good home, you’re a bright girl.
There’s no question in my mind or any of the other investigators’ minds that you were
the person that took Travis’ life. But what I need to know or what I’d like to know
is … whether you’re a cold-blooded, cold-hearted murderer who slaughtered this guy
or are you somebody that got caught up in circumstances and things got out of control.
Because I think that’s what happened honestly.”

It was stellar detective work on the part of Blaney. She was warming up the suspect,
trying to get Jodi to open up. But really, Blaney just wanted her to confess and make
it easier to lock her up for the rest of her life.

“Anybody could be capable of harming another person. It’s in our nature. … Most people
suppress that,” Blaney said. “What I generally see are the cold-hearted ruthless types.
What I don’t see very often, Jodi, are people like yourself that are intelligent and
spiritual and caring and so I tend to believe that it was an … incidental circumstance,
if you will.”

Jodi was more closed down than the previous day, barely saying anything in response
to Blaney’s kinder, gentler approach. She cried when Blaney mentioned Travis’ family,
and Jodi noted how fond her slain lover was of his brothers and sisters.

“I can only imagine that keeping all of this in is tearing you apart inside. It’s
not hard to tell that, you know. You have portrayed yourself as being very strong,
but you can see it in your eyes, Jodi,” Blaney said.

“I fall apart when people aren’t looking,” Jodi said.

“Just because I’m a cop doesn’t mean that I don’t care, you know, about humanity
and people. I’m not sitting here judging you. I’m trying to help you out. Trying to
give you a chance to make things right,” she said.

She then offered a preview of the harsh reality that was to come with her headline-grabbing
murder trial.

“When this goes to trial, the media’s there. It’s not kept a secret. Do you want
to be out there like O.J. Simpson …? You know, nobody respected him aftewards, even
though he maintained his innocence?”

Blaney told Jodi that this would certainly be big news soon.

“Do you want to be portrayed as that cold blooded, cold-hearted murderer because
the media loves that?” Blaney told her.

Jodi responded in a soft voice: “You know of course I don’t want to be portrayed
as a cold-blooded murderer.”

Blaney went on: “This is kind of a pause, you know, before things start getting heavy.
This is an opportunity to help yourself out. When the jury looks at it, those are
the things they are going to be mulling around in their mind when they decide what
type of sentence to hand out or when they make a recommendation to the judge. Those
are the sorts of things that turn a jury, and juries can sometimes be fickle, but
I’ve never seen a case with so much concrete hard evidence.”

Jodi still wouldn’t admit to the killing, and in fact, most of her answers took a
different tack as she talked about how she would be portrayed in the media. Jodi asked
about what would happen to her possessions, including a camera and a couple hundred
bucks in cash that she was carrying when arrested.

She asked about her journals and told Blaney where authorities could find them —
in her fireproof safe. She broke down in tears as she told Blaney that she shot a
wedding for a couple named Brian and Katie the weekend before and that their wedding
photos were still on her camera. She said she was happy with how the photos turned
out as she worked her magic with photo-editing software.

“That’s the only thing they have to remember the day,” Jodi said.

“I think you’re not grasping the reality of the situation,” Blaney said, “and hearing
what your concerns are, you should be concerned for yourself right now.”

They went back and forth for the next 20 minutes or so as Blaney’s patience grew
thinner with each lie and Jodi’s behavior became more bizarre. Blaney left the room
for a few minutes, and Jodi responded by sitting down on the floor, cowering under
the table.

Blaney returned and tried to put more pressure on Jodi, seeing Jodi’s apparent fear
as a chance to get her when she was at her weakest.

“I’m at the end of my rope,” Blaney said, now changing her tactics. “And what I’m
hearing is somebody who doesn’t give a crap about what happened. I’m hearing somebody
who is worried about money, your appearance, everything about you. I don’t hear anything
about Travis, unless you’re specifically asked.”

Blaney gave Jodi countless opportunities to unleash her self-defense claim, practically
putting the words in her mouth as she attempted to get a confession. “Was he roughing
you up and you just couldn’t take it?” she suggested. “Was he being violent on his
part?”

She made some references to their relationship being rocky and how Travis was violent
with her and left her bruised. But she didn’t go into the kind of painstaking detail
that she did during her trial as she brought out the claim that she killed Travis
because he was abusive.

Jodi never cracked. They went after her for two days and threw everything they had
at her in hopes of securing a confession, but she never admitted to the killing.

If Jodi’s behavior in the interrogation room was notable for her flippant demeanor
and evasiveness, her mother’s interview with Flores in July 2008 after her daughter’s
arrest was torturous for its heartbreaking nature.

Every mother and father dreads the day that they have to take a call from a police
officer or school official telling them that their child has done something wrong.

Whether it’s shoplifting a candy bar from a convenience store, getting detention
for mouthing off at school or getting caught drinking, the calls are always painful.

Being told your daughter is a murderer is pure torture.

Sandy Arias’ pain was so palpable during her interview by Flores that it’s difficult
to watch. The tears, the sobs, the questions of “how this possibly could have happened”
are heartbreaking.

Sandy described Jodi’s problems, her relationship with Travis, her behavior in the
month or so since he died. She admitted Jodi’s friends would call her over the years
and say that Jodi needed help, that she had mental issues. One day Jodi would be fine,
the next day she would call her mother in tears. Her mother said Jodi had trust issues
and was always paranoid.

“Why would she do something like that? Did she snap? How could she come back here
and be normal?” Sandy Arias pondered.

Through tears, she told Flores that Jodi was a “very intelligent person,” and cited
the many books she read in her life. She admitted their relationship had never been
great and that Jodi clearly had mental issues, along with some “fantasy in her head”
that she had a rotten childhood.

But a murderer? No way. Sandy said she felt like she was “going to puke.”

Flores tried to console the sobbing mother, but also explained to her how real the
situation was.

“The evidence is pretty damning,” he said. “I’ve never had this much evidence in
a case before.”