Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias

by Velez-Mitchell, Jane

  When Jodi was about eleven, the Ariases moved for the first time in Jodi’s life, going 157 miles south to Santa Maria, California, where Bill had a restaurant called the Branding Iron. Jodi seemed to adjust well to her new surroundings, developing a tight circle of six or seven girlfriends and taking to middle school easily. She attended the eighth grade at Orcutt Junior High School, on Pinal Street not far from Mary Grisham Park. One thing that friends at the time noticed was that Jodi always seemed to be babysitting the youngest two siblings, Angela and Joey. She carried around a diaper bag and was often seen pulling them around in a red cart. It was a lot of responsibility for a girl in junior high, and friends say she was often a no-show at the school dances and sporting events.

  Still, Jodi loved school. Once again displaying an affinity and natural talent for art, she drew inspiration from her art teacher, Mr. B, whom she credits with giving her “the creative freedom to veer from the linear syllabus and follow my own inclinations.” Though she was still in middle school, her year in Mr. B’s class solidified her love of the creative process. In part because of him, but also because of her friends, Jodi had really settled into her community, hanging out a lot with a best friend named Patti, with whom she was very close.

  It was not to last. About four years after the family moved to Santa Maria, Jodi’s mother found something that put an irreversible trend of suspicion into the mother-daughter relationship. Sandy discovered that a piece of her Tupperware was missing from the kitchen. In no time, she discovered that Jodi had taken the container to the roof of the house, where she was using it to grow a marijuana plant. Upset by the discovery, Sandy and Bill Arias decided to call the sheriff’s office to turn their daughter in. They felt they had to do something and hoped involving the police would scare her straight.

  Retelling the story recently, Jodi’s friend Patti, who was also in on the rooftop scheme, said the incident was blown completely out of proportion. “We took a pot seed and we planted it in a little Tupperware and it bloomed like one little leaf on it. And another little tiny leaf almost grew . . . and we put it on top of the roof so the sun would hit it. And then the neighbor told on us.”

  Patti said the cops came over and sternly lectured both girls, warning them they could end up in juvenile hall. Patti was also grounded by her father after Sandy called him. Beyond being embarrassed and ashamed, Jodi felt betrayed by her parents and, using the emotion many teenagers throw around with abandon, told friends she now hated them. Up until this point, friends said Jodi was not a rebellious teen and had not been acting out in a way that would have made her parents afraid that their child was getting involved in drugs and other kinds of teenage risk-taking behavior. But Bill and Sandy Arias were not taking any chances. In many ways this overkill response was indicative of the kind of strict parenting they would continue to display as Jodi got older.

  Indeed, Sandy Arias seems to acknowledge that this event marked the beginning of the deterioration of Jodi’s relationship with her parents. Afterward, Jodi grew distant and even paranoid. She began claiming that her parents would constantly search her room, making it so that she would never trust them again. For their part, her parents have insisted they did not continue to snoop in her room, even though Jodi was convinced they were always looking for something on her. Jodi started becoming dishonest, at least with them. Sometimes, Jodi was physically violent toward her mother. There was even an incident where she got so mad at her mother she kicked her for no reason during a family dinner.

  Around the same time, Jodi’s parents decided to move the family again, further complicating their family dynamic. This time, they moved 556 miles north, to Yreka, California, near Mount Shasta and the Oregon border. According to Patti, the news devastated Jodi. First, she was betrayed by her parents when they called the cops, and now they were ripping her away from her tight circle of friends, especially her very best friend, Patti.

  Recalling that difficult time, Patti said, “The last night Jodi was in town . . . she was crying and she said, ‘The reason I’m moving is because me and you get into too much trouble together,’ and I was just absolutely heartbroken because we were good kids. We didn’t do anything to get in trouble.”

  This was the third home in several years, a difficult situation for any teenager who wanted to be part of her school crowd. Jodi had to redefine herself with each move to fit in to the new culture and community she had been transported to.

  Yreka was a big change from both Santa Maria and Salinas. Santa Maria and Salinas were ethnically mixed agricultural towns, while Yreka, predominantly white and Anglo, was a more upscale tourist town for visitors interested in the historical period of the California gold rush. If her parents thought they were improving their lifestyle, it was an intimidating environment for the new teenager in town. The problems in the family would at least be inside the house and not be apparent or visible from outside the family’s white two-story home on Oregon Street, with the nice yard and gravel driveway in a well-kept neighborhood near the village.

  Jodi began the ninth grade at Yreka Union High School. People who knew her during that time had only nice things to say about her. They saw her as a good girl, kind and caring. According to her friend Tina, Jodi had a good sense of humor and wasn’t the least bit violent; in fact she actually had a kind and gentle spirit. Some who were students at the time said Jodi was not only accepted but even became popular at the school.

  Apparently that’s not how Jodi saw it. In Jodi’s telling of events, she never fully adjusted to life in Yreka. A while after arriving in town, Jodi wrote a letter to Patti, spilling out on paper how miserable she was and how she couldn’t make new friends in a small town where everybody else seemed to have known each other since birth. Jodi had just turned fifteen when she wrote the letter, dated September 16, 1995. It reads: “My dearest Patricia, I miss you so much. Nobody up here could ever take your place. No one up here listens like you do . . . Everyone here is pretty much the same as down there, except for one thing: I don’t feel like I belong . . . I can’t even join in the conversation because I don’t know what they’re talking about. They’ll say something to me like ‘can you believe so and so’s going with so and so, and they look so funny together’ and I’ll be like ‘no.’ I don’t even know who the hell they are. So it doesn’t matter to me. And that brings up another complaint. The only thing people do around here—I figured out—2 different groups or types of people: getting stoned—the stoners—and the gossips . . . preppy snobs.”

  “The move broke her,” Patti said years later, pausing as she recalled the letter.

  Jodi ended the letter by telling a story about the family van overheating. She painted a portrait of an average family juggling everyday challenges, but as a team, taking on obstacles in optimistically good spirits. There was no hint of an abusive family; rather, a loving family in it together for the long haul. In the midst of these moves and adjustments, another stress may have been weighing on Jodi: her father had been struggling with serious medical issues. He would later get a kidney transplant, but his persistent illnesses could have been very hard on Jodi and the rest of the family, as the man of the house was preoccupied with saving his own life.

  One friend said Jodi’s father was warmer than her mother. The friend said Bill liked to laugh, while Sandy was quieter and more reserved. Of course, with Bill in poor health the enormous burden of raising the sizable family was Sandy’s.

  No wonder Sandy might have seemed pensive, and no surprise that Jodi would have to take on more than her fair share of rearing her younger siblings.

  Through all this, art seemed to be Jodi’s one reliable outlet. In the letter to Patti, Jodi explained how she had just bought an oil painting set that strained her teenage budget, saying she took the leap because she was determined to paint more. “I’m going to start oil painting. I went and got a few supplies and in total it was $50.28. This stuff is outrageous. I got paints, I got paint thinners and canvasses to paint on.”
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br />   Jodi’s interest and talent in art was well known in the school. Many years later, her high school art teacher remembered her with praise, recalling how conscientious, mature, hardworking, and smart she was. He also thought she was extremely talented, with a mastery of all media. Not only was Jodi the first to complete his assignments, but she presented herself with perfection, not a hair, piece of clothing, or application of makeup out of place. He told a local paper, “She was the perfect kid; the kind of kid you would want your son to date because she just seemed so clean cut.”

  Despite appearances, things were far from perfect for Jodi. Sandy Arias said she found herself on the receiving end of hostile tirades from her fifteen-year-old daughter. The outbursts were baffling to both her parents, but Jodi felt her parents imposed too many restrictions, given that she was now in high school. Jodi’s friends agreed that her parents were on the strict side. While other freshmen and sophomores were allowed to stay out until nine or ten o’clock in the evening, Jodi had a dinner hour curfew of 6 P.M., and she couldn’t go out again after dinner. The rule was not bent to allow for even the evening after-school activities.

  Perhaps her parents were uncomfortable with Jodi’s emerging sexuality. She was changing fast, both physically and emotionally. She was a beautiful young woman who was beginning to realize that boys were attracted to her. She must have experienced the rush of power that many attractive young women feel when they first understand their effect on the opposite sex. Nevertheless, Jodi still felt insecure and like an outsider in Yreka. That could have been why she chose another outsider for her first romantic experience.

  In the ninth grade, she formed a friendship with a young man named Bobby, three years older than she, whom she’d met at a state fair. It had been the middle of summer, and the temperature was in the triple digits. Dressed in an eighteenth-century long black suit and wobbling along on crutches, Bobby was a standout in the crowd. A self-identified Goth, he was clad in all black, and everything about him from his hair to his eyes was dark and exotic. That night, he invited her to ride with him on the Zipper, an adrenaline-provoking ride that rotated while spinning the individual cars for two. Bobby lived six miles away, huge to a young teenager. After the ride at the fair, they didn’t see each other until a few months later, when Jodi saw him at a homecoming football game. She sauntered over to him and asked if he remembered her, he said yes, she gave him her number, and he soon called.

  In the beginning, Jodi and Bobby were just friends. He already had a girlfriend, so nothing could happen until those two broke up. When that eventually happened, Jodi and Bobby grew closer and unofficially started dating. Jodi’s dating rule was that young men who wanted to go out with her had to agree she was their one and only. Bobby, already graduated from high school but currently unemployed, had lots of free time. He would meet Jodi near the high school, and they would hold hands. Bobby had big dreams. He wanted to be an actor, but Jodi said he also had wild ideas about vampires, and he wanted to move to San Francisco to find them. According to Jodi, he wanted to stay with her forever.

  But others said Jodi was the one who really latched on to Bobby, beginning a pattern that would continue throughout her dating life in which she would abandon her interests and concentrate on the guy she was dating. His friends would become her friends, and his interests would become her interests. In Bobby’s case, he was into martial arts and friends say Jodi soon got into them, too. Small behaviors like this already showed that Jodi was exhibiting a tendency to obsess about the man in her life. This made her romance with Bobby tumultuous. There were dramatic breakups and ecstatic reconciliations; each dramatic breakup was supposed to be the last one.

  In the final quarter of tenth grade, perhaps to get her away from what they saw as bad influences, Jodi’s parents arranged for her to take part in a cultural exchange program in Costa Rica, ostensibly to learn Spanish. In no time at all, Jodi was dating the son of her host family, Victor, who was also sixteen. While Jodi’s friends believe she had passionate feelings for Bobby, Jodi described Victor as her first experience with the “warm fuzzies.” She said she wasn’t in love with Victor, but it was her first taste of feeling warm about somebody.

  Jodi celebrated her seventeenth birthday in Costa Rica with Victor. When she returned home and the two corresponded by mail, Jodi was on the receiving end of long, romantic letters, written in Spanish. Before long, Victor came to the States for a monthlong visit, two weeks of which he stayed with Jodi and her family. It was then that he gave her a promise ring to express his devotion. She was so in love she gave him a promise back—she would move to Costa Rica when she could and they would live there and start a family together. The thought was romantic, but completely unrealistic.

  As it turned out, Victor was rather jealous and old-fashioned, according to Jodi. He would make Jodi walk on the inside of the sidewalk to make her less visible to other men who might be driving by. One time, she spotted a male classmate at a drive-through restaurant and said Victor got upset. Not being able to handle his jealousy, she broke up with him over the phone during October of her junior year. She’d already complained that she had a controlling father; she definitely did not want a controlling boyfriend on top of it.

  As she neared the end of eleventh grade Jodi was clearly floundering. The small town, the insular high school, and the rigidly controlled home environment were just too much to bear. She wanted out. Though she was of well above average intelligence, Jodi’s grades were deteriorating. She told a friend, “I got my report card recently and my grades were bad. I’ve got to get with the program and raise them.” But Jodi also revealed to her friend that she was thinking of joining the army and even took the military’s popular test, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, designed to help young adults assess what occupations they might be suited for. Jodi added, “Then, a few days ago, some guy from the army called me and asked what I planned on doing after graduation and I told him I wanted to study medicine and he said judging from the results on my test I could probably go into any medical field I wanted to. Cool, huh?” But, she added, her mother and father immediately poured cold water on her explorations. “When I told my parents they got all mad and said that those people will say anything just to recruit a person.”

  Jodi desperately needed an escape route and, just in time, along came Bobby back into the picture, and they reconnected. They took a drive out to a little white chapel with a tall white steeple, where they decided to give their relationship another try. When Jodi’s parents got wind of it, they were totally disapproving. They had heard rumors that Bobby was into the occult. Jodi disagreed. She told her parents he was beautiful inside and out. He was just a sensitive soul who was searching. He was still eccentric and friends say he loved to play the Dungeons and Dragons board game. But at least he wasn’t chasing vampires anymore.

  Though Jodi’s parents didn’t like him, Jodi seemed long past caring what they thought. She was tired of their control. At every turn, she felt that they were on her case. She claimed that she once skipped class in order to study for an exam she thought was more important, and her father found out. After an administrator told him about the unexcused absence, he tracked his daughter down and grounded her until her eighteenth birthday, still three months away.

  Jodi made up her mind that she was going to drop out of school when the academic year was over in May. She was already getting a lot of D’s and F’s, and the fun of school was long gone. She may have just gotten tired of trying to fit in, being neither a stoner nor a preppy. She claimed her parents didn’t support her interest in art, the subject she loved the most, and she was sick of fighting with them. She interpreted their strictness as a rejection of her artistic abilities and this became a reason to blame them for her academic failures.

  While most teens act out, Jodi’s behavior already seemed to have diverged into something more serious. Friends say she wasn’t into drugs or alcohol, but rather appeared to have some escalating personality d
ysfunction. It had started about a year earlier, when she had gone around warning her friends about the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Jodi had been raised as a nondenominational Christian and wasn’t particularly religious, but an older man who frequented her father’s restaurant, where she sometimes waitressed, had done the math and determined that the catastrophic event would occur in September 1997. The idea that Jodi would get invested in this story and take it seriously enough to warn others raised doubts about how grounded in reality she was. To Jodi, the man in the restaurant seemed to be a reliable, valid source of prophecy, as he always carried a dog-eared pocket version of the New Testament and quoted Bible stories with authority. To others he might seem like a nut.

  Perhaps the story gave Jodi the opportunity to drum up some fear and excitement, creating unnecessary drama. At this point, signs were beginning to emerge that Jodi thrived on drama and knew how to create it. Was her willingness to believe fantastical stories a hint of why she would soon develop an uncanny ability to lie with abandon? Whatever Jodi’s relationship with the truth was at that point, the tension with her parents built to a head around age seventeen, just before she decided to move out of the house altogether. One of the unsubstantiated claims of physical abuse that precipitated the move was her father pushing her, causing her to hit her face on a doorpost and lose consciousness, only to wake up to her mother telling her father to be more careful. Jodi would maintain that this final abuse was what pushed her to move out of the house at seventeen and in with Bobby.