CONTENTS
Dedication
Author’s Note
Foreword by Nancy Grace
Prologue
PART I
1. Dead at Home
2. Young Jodi
3. First Words
4. Jodi’s Men
5. The Crime Scene
6. T-Dogg
7. Deductive Reasoning
8. At First Sight
9. Reality Check
10. Flirting with Danger
11. Jodi Spins
12. The Chameleon
13. The Ninjas
14. Between Love and Madness
Photograph Section
PART II
15. Jodi’s Trial
16. The Prosecution
17. The Defense
18. Eighteen Days
19. The Sex Tape
20. Juan’s Turn
21. Wading through the Fog
22. Closing Arguments
23. Moment of Truth
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Also by Jane Velez-Mitchell
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
DEDICATION
To Travis Alexander and his siblings
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The writing of this book posed an extraordinary challenge because the person at the very center of the horrific events is a habitual liar. Adding to the dilemma, Jodi Arias made her upbringing, her interactions with previous boyfriends, and her relationship with murder victim Travis Alexander a huge part of her defense strategy. Tragically, Travis is not alive to give his side of the story. Additionally, many of the individuals Jodi maligned in her testimony and/or her journals, including ex-boyfriends and members of her own family, never took the stand to offer their version of events. Given these remarkable circumstances, the reader is strongly advised to regard everything that Jodi Arias claims, as recounted in the following pages, with skepticism and suspicion. She has earned her reputation as a pathological liar. While many of her claims have been exposed as outright lies, like all accomplished fabulists, Jodi Arias seamlessly wove actual events into her fabrications, often making it impossible to determine where truth ends and fiction begins. Hopefully these mysteries will add to the adventure of the reader’s journey through these pages. Because of the passions and social media frenzy surrounding this case, and the unreliability of her testimony and writings, the friends and ex-boyfriends Jodi Arias references are identified only by their first names unless they testified in court or spoke out publicly.
FOREWORD
by Nancy Grace
There are some messes in life you can clean up. Murder is not one of them. The decision to kill is irrevocable. There is no turning back the clock. Not ever. Not even if you lie about it.
This universal truth seemed to escape the enigmatic Jodi Arias, but then again, Arias always has a difficult relationship with the truth. Her decision to commit the premeditated murder of Travis Alexander was not just one bad decision—it was the culmination of a series of bad decisions. Those choices reflect a lifetime of warped logic and twisted beliefs. In the following pages of this book, you will learn the secrets of Arias’s long journey to murder. Her life story features self-delusion, self-pity, grandiosity, and above all, a sense that nothing in this world could take her down.
The Jodi Arias story does not begin with the murder of Travis Alexander. She was never your typical “woman scorned,” victim-turned-killer, victim of circumstance, or whatever lie she may tell next; instead, she was something far more insidious. She was the manipulator, the deceiver, and the deviant hidden behind the guise of placid beauty, who spent years building up her own reality until it all came crashing down.
Jodi Arias is a liar and a murderer, but what is perhaps most terrifying about her is that she still believes she will get away with it. This is a woman who thought she could lie her way to freedom. From the first time that she spoke to police until her final day on the witness stand, she treated the truth with disdain. In the process, she shamelessly and repeatedly denied the proof that was so apparent to everyone else, while dragging her innocent victim through the mud. Through all the photographs, the DNA, and the testimonies, Arias never once thought she could be convicted. She matched each mounting piece of evidence with another outlandish lie, holding on stubbornly to her fabrication. Arias then turned to her next lie with a faint smile and a dry tissue for her “tears.”
Arias’s claims will be repeated in the following pages in all of their lurid detail, just as they came out in her police interrogations and at trial. But the question the reader must always ask is: How much of it is true? When it comes to what Travis and Jodi did behind closed doors, the full story may never be known. Everything that she has said—both about her own life and about her relationship with Travis Alexander—must be questioned. We can never forget that, with Travis dead, Jodi has become the sole author of their affair. When the only source of information is a proven liar, it is our duty to find the truth for ourselves.
Pathological liars like Arias are inherently dangerous because they perfect a psychological strategy that allows them to lie convincingly on a moment’s notice. Arias’s lies were so brazen, so patently ridiculous, that her ability to deliver them with a straight face and a convincing look—under oath, no less—became a subject of fascination for HLN viewers across the country. Arias seems to have mastered a mental technique that allows her to believe her own lies. Put another way, in her mind, factual truth is irrelevant. Truth is redefined as survival. Arias would say anything in her desperation to survive.
While Arias’s endless, rambling tales never added up to the truth, one certainty was clear: there was something unquestionably wrong with her. Something about this woman made the world’s skin crawl, from her own family and friends to trial watchers in their living rooms. This book dissects Arias’s behavior to discover the connection between her past and her mysterious relationship with Travis Alexander. She did not come out of the womb evil. So what happened during her life to make her the person she became? Paranoia, obsession, and manipulation are what catapulted her from man to man and eventually into the arms of Travis. When the time came, as it inevitably did, Arias was always prepared with a new variation on the same story: suspicion, betrayal, and abuse. She starred as the victim in each scenario.
Arias’s calculated manipulation was never more obvious than during her affair with Travis Alexander. Alexander was successful, loved, and happy, everything Arias wanted for herself. Their relationship was undeniably fueled by intense sexuality and endless deception. Arias’s sexual prowess was overwhelming, and Travis fell for each devious move she made. Taking advantage of Travis’s Mormon beliefs, which prevented him from exposing their sex affair, Arias built a wall between him and the truth.
But Arias’s manipulation could bring her only so close to Travis, and, when faced with rejection, she got angry. Instead of facing reality, Arias created a convenient new truth: Travis was no longer her lover but rather her tormentor and source of humiliation. A jealous rage overcame Arias, and, suddenly, she wanted revenge, taking days, maybe even weeks, to plot out Travis’s murder. She thought through and planned all of the logistics of how she would kill the supposed love of her life.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the crime, beyond its grisly nature, was that, in the weeks following Travis’s death, Arias carried on with her life, living as though his blood was never on her hands. There was no sign of remorse, no sign of grief or self-loathing for the heinous crime she committed. Not even when police conf
ronted her with the overwhelming evidence of her culpability was she willing to accept the burden of the truth and own up to her role in his death.
With this book, Jane Velez-Mitchell goes behind the scenes of what has become one of the nation’s premiere case studies on killers who lie and liars who kill. She sets out to uncover the real Jodi Arias, decoding the mind of a killer. In the coming pages, she unpacks this case in full, from Arias’s childhood to the stunning guilty verdict.
By diving deeper into the facts of this case, we can all learn a life lesson. While most of us are honest, straightforward, and trusting, predators exist who are the exact opposite—deceitful, cunning, and dangerous; three words that perfectly describe Jodi Arias.
PROLOGUE
As she sat on the witness stand, only one thing about Jodi Arias was clear: the woman was a chameleon.
Once upon a time, before the trial had begun, before she’d been taken into custody, before she’d killed her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander, Jodi Arias had been a bombshell. During her relationship with Travis, her hair had been dyed blond; her makeup had been tasteful, with just the right amounts of lipstick, blush, and mascara; and her alluring face had been radiant.
The woman on the witness stand bore little resemblance to that Jodi. She wore no makeup, though her skin had grown pale from lack of sunlight. Her mousy brown hair had returned to its natural state, with thin, wispy bangs cut right at the eyebrows. When she dated Travis, she hadn’t worn glasses, but during her trial a large, unavoidable pair of glasses was often fixed on the bridge of her nose. It was unclear whether she actually needed the glasses, but their presence had the unmistakable and deliberate effect of making her look like a librarian—a librarian who happened to be on trial for murder.
There was nothing subtle in this transformation or in the public’s fascination with it. From the first words of the defense’s opening statements, people had been clamoring for more, and most days the gallery was packed to the gills with spectators eager to witness this chameleon firsthand and hear the inner workings of a case that was more sexually charged than any in memory—possibly ever. Indeed, though this was a murder trial, the sexual exploits of Jodi and Travis were the bedrock of the case, with both the prosecution and defense alike putting the most intimate details of the pair’s sex life on full display for the jury. The fact that cameras were permitted in the courtroom to broadcast the stories of their steamy sex to the world made things even more lurid. Voyeurs everywhere came out of the woodwork, and outside the court, gallery tickets were briefly scalped for hundreds of dollars until court officials cracked down.
But this wasn’t just about sex. A brutal crime had been committed—the cruel, bloody slaughter of Travis Alexander, who at thirty years old had been an active member of the Mormon church. Not only did he possess athletic all-American good looks, he was adored by his community—and people were hungry for justice. According to the prosecutor, Jodi had killed him three times over on June 4, 2008, leaving him with twenty-nine knife wounds and shooting him in the right temple. Even though the gunshot was probably a gratuitous postmortem act, two of the twenty-nine knife wounds were definitely lethal: the fatal stab to the heart, and the six-inch slice across Travis’s throat, a gash that went three and a half inches deep from ear to ear and severed his airway and carotid artery. Five knife injuries on Travis’s hands were defensive wounds, sustained in his desperate effort to fight off his attacker.
Fueling the graphic details of the murder was the fact that Jodi had already admitted responsibility for it. Jodi’s two court-appointed lawyers promised jurors there was a reasonable explanation for all of this. Her testimony had been littered with implications of self-defense or perhaps battered woman’s syndrome; however, Jodi’s credibility was extremely suspect. In the early days of the investigation, she had denied being anywhere near Travis’s house on the night of the killing. Then she changed her tale, admitting she was there but insisting that two strangers, a man and a woman dressed in ski masks had done it. Finally, she’d come around to admit she was solely responsible, only this time she concocted a new story alleging that abusive behavior by Travis had pushed her to kill him.
For his part, the prosecutor, Juan Martinez, was confident that the evidence would prove Jodi Arias was guilty of premeditated first-degree murder, even though the defense wanted to paint her as a woman left dazed and disoriented by acute stress disorder, dissociative amnesia, and post-traumatic stress disorder after an angry, violent encounter. The stakes were enormously high for both sides. Jodi’s life and the lawyers’ careers rode on the outcome. Though the death penalty was on the table, it could be considered only with a conviction of murder in the first degree.
The fascination with both Jodi and the case had started at the murder, crescendoing steadily for four and a half years. By the time the trial started on January 2, 2013, it was at a fever pitch. After Jodi’s attorneys had rolled the dice, calling Jodi herself to the witness stand on February 4, it had become insane. From that moment forward, the crowd of devoted true crime followers and regular folks at the courthouse mushroomed, with more and more people trying to witness up close the testimony of this femme fatale.
In the fifteen days during which Jodi had been testifying, she had been addressing questions from both sides, fending off attacks from Prosecutor Juan Martinez and spinning her version of events with the help of her own lawyers, Kirk Nurmi and Jennifer Willmott, who fed her carefully phrased questions. What emerged was a graphic, often uncomfortable level of detail about the sex life that Jodi and Travis had shared. She had described in full color every kinky sexual behavior she and Travis had ever engaged in. They had anal sex; they tried bondage; their fantasy sex play made porn writers blush. In a phone sex recording played in open court they talked about zip-tying Jodi to a tree with her dressed as Little Red Riding Hood while they performed wild sex acts outdoors. Jodi had recorded the late night conversation between the two that went on for more than half an hour. On the tape, Travis’s voice, sleepy, baritone and raspy, is in sharp contrast to Jodi’s soft, young, giddy tone. They delightedly recall the time they had experimented sexually with Pop Rocks and Tootsie Pops; the pleasures of oral sex; their sex in a bubble bath; the lubricants and bikini waxes; and the mutual masturbation on both sides. The moans of orgasms could be heard at various points of climax. The entire courtroom, jurors and gallery alike, had sat in awkward self-conscious silence as this extremely private pillow talk was broadcast as evidence. Some in the audience had been visibly embarrassed.
The explicit testimony seemed especially hard on those who knew and loved Travis. His sister, Tanisha Sorenson, a fixture in the gallery pretty much every day since the trial had started on January 2, took in the information as stoically as she could. She was not one to keep her feelings about Jodi to herself. “I know this might sound creepy, but I hope to get to watch her die someday after she’s on death row,” she had told a reporter early on. Tanisha was joined in the gallery every day by her sister Samantha and her brother Steven. The other four siblings were there less often, but all of them had to travel great distances to hear the secrets of their brother’s sex life spilled into open court.
The graphic nature of the sexual content was amplified by the fact that both Travis and Jodi were Mormon, though Jodi had not been a Mormon when she and Travis first met in September 2006. By most accounts the connection between them was immediate and electric, and within two months, Jodi had converted to the Mormon faith, with Travis performing her baptism. But her conversion didn’t change the fact that out-of-wedlock sex acts are absolutely forbidden in the Mormon religion. The church’s Law of Chastity couldn’t be clearer: “Before marriage, do not do anything to arouse the powerful emotions that must be expressed only in marriage. Do not participate in passionate kissing, lie on top of another person, or touch the private, sacred parts of another person’s body, with or without clothing. Do not allow anyone to do that with you. Do not arouse those emotions in your own body
.” All this can be found in chapter 39 in The Book of Mormon.
According to Jodi’s testimony, Travis had told her all about the Law of Chastity and its taboos. His explanation was that “vaginal sex was the ultimate place to not go until marriage,” but any other sex acts, while not being condoned, were in a gray area that might make them okay. The very night of her baptism, Jodi claims, the two went to the gray area, with abandon.
After fifteen extraordinary days of Jodi on the stand, it seemed to many in and out of the courtroom that there could be nothing left to ask of this strangely mesmerizing defendant. Both her attorneys and the fiery prosecutor had finally run out of questions. But, now, on Day 16 of Jodi’s testimony, it was time for a different set of questions—from the members of the jury.
In Arizona, criminal trial court proceedings allow time for interaction between a witness and the jury, giving the jury an opportunity to ask a witness direct questions through the judge. Arizona is only one of a handful of states that routinely allow juries to do this, the thinking being that such exchanges encourage jurors to be engaged and attentive during the trial. Each juror writes his or her questions on a piece of paper while the witness is testifying. They are then placed anonymously in a wire basket in front of the jurors to be vetted and read by the judge at the end of each witness’s testimony. Both the prosecution and the defense attorney are allowed to argue against questions they deem inappropriate or irrelevant, but ultimately the judge makes the final decision on what gets asked. Then the attorneys are allowed another round of follow-up questions of the witness based solely on the scope of the jurors’ questions.
Maricopa County Superior Court judge Sherry Stephens was on the bench, and she would be the reader of the jury’s questions. Over the course of the trial, Judge Stephens had turned neutrality into an art form, her monotone voice and bland expression studiously avoiding any hint of what she might be thinking. Given the barrage of questions that the defense and the prosecution had already asked of Jodi Arias, the number of new questions the jury had for her was astounding. More than two hundred additional inquiries had been picked from the hundreds in the basket of jury questions. The eleven men and seven women on the panel, with no one identified as “alternates” until after closing arguments, had been busy. Without much emotion, the judge turned to Jodi, seated in the witness box, and read the first question.
Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias Page 1
