“I am leaving tomorrow, but I will try and come by,” Jodi told him.
At 6 P.M. on June 17, Mimi, Dallin, Michelle, and Jodi arrived at the Mesa police headquarters building on North Robson. They were there to be fingerprinted and to provide saliva for DNA testing. Jodi was the only one who declined to sit down with the detective for a follow-up interview. She said she had been speaking with a close friend who had convinced her that there were a number of people talking about her involvement in Travis’s death, and as a result, she was now uncomfortable speaking to him without first consulting with an attorney.
Travis’s friends were equally uncomfortable being at the headquarters with Jodi. Almost all of them were already convinced that she had killed him, and they viewed all of her actions since his death as suspect. They had been offended when four days earlier, on June 13, she had posted a photo gallery on her Myspace page dedicated to Travis. It included twenty-five pictures, most of them with Jodi and Travis posing together in various locations they had visited. She titled the collection “In Loving Memory of Travis.” As if that weren’t enough, Jodi had been calling some of the friends, trying to find out the latest in the murder investigation, which they found disingenuous. In fact, Travis’s friends became outraged when Detective Flores, at one point, told Chris and Sky Hughes that Jodi was no longer a suspect, that she had been cleared. It was a ruse. The police wanted Jodi to think she was not under suspicion, though the group at the station house could not have known that she was still law enforcement’s number-one suspect.
Among the evidence the police were amassing on her was the activity on Travis’s telephone. The significance of a voice mail from Jodi wasn’t immediately appreciated but soon it would be. At 11:48 P.M. on June 4, Jodi left an upbeat message for Travis in which she apologized for not making it to Mesa and told him that she and her friend Heather were planning to see Othello in early July and invited him to join them. Of course what police quickly learned was that the voice mail was a cover, a poorly designed smokescreen that Jodi used to strengthen her alibi. And it might have actually worked, if it hadn’t been for the crucial piece of evidence at the scene of the crime.
The first significant break in the case came ten days after Travis’s body was discovered, in the form of the memory card found in the digital camera police had discovered in Travis’s washing machine. Although the camera had clearly been put through the wash, Michael Melendez, a computer forensics detective with the Mesa Police Department, had been able to recover numerous pictures from it, including some that had been deleted.
The deleted photos included images of Travis, who was naked, standing in various poses in the shower, his muscles toned and well defined. He was reaching his arms up as he soaped his body. The photos were eerily reminiscent of the famous shower scene in the classic Hitchcock movie Psycho, except instead of Janet Leigh, it was Travis dripping in water and danger. Astoundingly, it appeared the recovered photos had been taken before, during, and after his murder. One of the last photos of Travis alive showed him staring intently into the camera, his handsome face betraying a subtle anxiety as droplets of water rolled down his cheeks. It was time-stamped June 4, 2008, at 5:29 P.M.
Less than a minute later, at 5:30 P.M., another photo showed Travis sitting on the slippery floor of the small shower stall, an extremely vulnerable position. Forty-four seconds later there’s a blurry photo of the bathroom ceiling. It’s believed to have been inadvertently snapped as Travis was attacked. About a minute later another photo, taken upside down and apparently by accident, shows Travis lying on his back, with large amounts of blood around his neck and shoulders, the bathroom in the background. Remarkably, the photo also revealed the right pant leg and foot of the killer, who was possibly reaching down to move the body. The murderer was wearing a dark-colored sock or shoe and striped sweatpants, probably blue, with a zipper on the back of the cuff.
The last photo, also upside down, appeared to have been taken by accident as well, and was snapped one minute, sixteen seconds after the previous one. After it was enhanced, that photo revealed the bathroom hallway and baseboard drenched in a dark, bloodlike liquid substance.
Detective Melendez retrieved another six photos that had been taken prior to the shower pictures, time-stamped June 4, 2008, starting at 1:40 P.M. The first showed Jodi Arias posing naked on Travis’s bed. There were, in fact, four photos of Jodi posing in the nude, some in extremely provocative and graphic sexual positions, leaving nothing to the imagination. The other two were of Travis, who was also naked in both images, a tube or bottle of KY lubricant next to him. The photos were the smoking gun, irrefutable proof that Jodi was lying when she told Detective Flores she had not seen Travis since early April 2008. Police now had the evidence to prove that she had been the last person to be in contact with Travis Alexander before his death.
Detective Flores sat on this stunning information for nearly three days before he finally spoke to Jodi Arias again. On Saturday, June 21, she had left a message with her telephone number on his cell phone, asking that he call her back when he had the chance. That Tuesday, June 24, the detective returned the call.
“What can I do for you?” he asked when Jodi answered the phone. She told him that, when she had reached out to him four days earlier, she had been having a really bad day. She explained that her car had gotten a flat tire on the way to the airport, so she had missed Travis’s funeral in Riverside on June 21. That day, there had been a 9 A.M. family service at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Fourth Street, followed by a 10 A.M. funeral service, and a burial at Olivewood Memorial Park, and she had missed them all.
Despite missing the funeral, Jodi had been present on June 16 for a memorial service in Arizona in honor of Travis. Jodi had flown there on the morning of Sunday, June 15, to attend the memorial the following day at Travis’s church. Jodi was invited to stay with Dan and Desiree Freeman, who lived with their parents in Gilbert. Dan picked up Jodi at the Phoenix airport after which Jodi, the Freemans, and Aaron Dewey, a Mormon friend in their social circle, attended the regular Sunday service at Travis’s church. The next day, Jodi planned to go to the memorial with Aaron. He picked her up at the Freemans and, as they headed to the church with some extra time, Jodi had a special request. She asked Aaron to drive by Travis’s house because she wanted to see it. Though the house was still locked and sealed, the crime scene tape had been taken down. Aaron and Jodi sat outside and talked, before walking around the front yard. Aaron detected nothing unusual in their conversation.
At the memorial, the crowd numbered at least five hundred friends, co-workers, and church members. The distraught and grieving group gathered to share memories of Travis. The memorial program included a verse Travis wrote in a blog less than two weeks before he died: “The Gold from Within.” Aaron sat with Jodi during the service. He said that she sat with her head down, displaying no emotion and no tears. “People commented after about that, saying things like, ‘She loved him, he was brutally killed, and she has no tears. What’s up with that?’ ”
After the service, Jodi was “kind of bubbly, going around talking to people and catching up.” She had also arranged to have three to four binders of photos of Travis, including some with her in them, displayed on a table at the service. She invited those in attendance to find photos with special meaning, remove them from the plastic sleeve, and write a message on the back. Her intent, according to Aaron, was to give the photos to Travis’s family. Needless to say, many people were dumbstruck to see Jodi there. To them she was the first suspect on a list of one. How dare she show her face among them and pretend to grieve his death? She worked the crowd, hugging Travis’s friends, acting as though she was making her first trip to Arizona since early April. Travis’s friend Taylor Searle was completely unnerved when Jodi approached him for a hug and a chat, recalling how his mind began to race. “My mind tells me that I should not be talking to you right now because you’re the one that did this. But I’m also con
fused because you’re here so I don’t want to be a complete jackass if it turns out it wasn’t you. So, I’m gonna be pleasant with you, but I don’t wanna talk to you. Those are the kind of things going through my mind, just throwing me off, like, Hey! ’cause I didn’t know what was going on: why was she there?” In what Travis’s friends regarded as a positively diabolical move, Jodi also sent a large bouquet of irises to Travis’s grandmother Mum Mum expressing sympathy. Horrified, Mum Mum immediately threw them in the trash.
Perhaps because of the awkward reception she had received at the memorial service, Jodi had deliberately missed Travis’s actual funeral in Riverside. Yet here she was again talking to Flores on the phone, appearing to be helpful and asking if there had been any new leads in the case. She even apologized to the detective for having declined to speak to him during her visit to the station the day after the memorial.
Jodi explained that she might be traveling to Tucson, Arizona, in the coming weeks and could stop by headquarters to meet with him then, on the way through. She also offered to give a statement over the phone, if the detective preferred, but she couldn’t give it that instant. They agreed on a call at 10 A.M. the following day. Just as they were about to hang up, Detective Flores blurted out a question. “Did you send Travis an email about coming down to visit him?”
Jodi admitted she had written him an email a week or so before his murder, but as he had not responded, she assumed he was probably in California. She also knew that he was traveling to Cancún, Mexico, and said she had been planning to stay at his house and visit with friends while he was away. Travis had an “open-door” policy, and according to Jodi, he let her stay there in exchange for taking care of his pug when he was out of town. Ultimately, Jodi said finances had prevented her from going to Mesa, so she had traveled to Southern California and Utah instead.
Before the call ended, Jodi had a practical question for the detective: “How will I get the belongings that I left at Travis’s house?” she wanted to know. She had left a few items of clothing there and was wondering how she could get them back. Given the grisly nature of Travis’s murder, Detective Flores thought this concern was odd. The detective would learn soon enough just how unusual a woman Jodi Arias really was.
The following morning, Detective Flores dialed Jodi’s cell phone at the appointed time. He started his questioning with the basics of how she and Travis had met and when they had first started dating.
“We met in September,” Jodi began; “the following weekend he invited me to church, and the following Wednesday he gave me The Book of Mormon and I started reading it. I got baptized on November 26 . . .”
She didn’t dwell much on nine of the first ten months they had been together, but moved forward to describe the end of the relationship. “Travis has kind of a commitment phobia, I guess you could say,” she offered. She said that the ironic part was breaking up “around the same time” she had moved to Mesa in June 2007. Besides commitment issues, the problem had been trust.
“I have been in relationships before where the other guy wasn’t faithful and there is just this like distinctive gut feeling that you just have,” Jodi explained. “I had this feeling with Travis, and I gently asked him about it. He got really upset and he was like, ‘no there is nothing there, don’t worry about it.’ ” She told the detective that she was aware Travis had been texting a lot of girls, but Travis had written it off as being flirtatious but innocent. Jodi described an incident the previous June, when Travis had been napping and she had taken his phone to snoop. “There were tons of girls that I had never heard of. I knew he knew a lot of people from the business, which didn’t bother me, but . . . There were plenty of plans, like where do you want to meet, what is the best place to make out in?”
She said she confronted him, and they broke up, because she did not feel he could be monogamous. She said they each associated with a different ward in Mesa, hers being the University Sixth Ward, and Travis’s being the Desert Ridge Ward, but she spent some time at his. Still, they both knew they weren’t on a path to marriage, despite the romantic and intimate sides of their relationship.
Detective Flores told Jodi that some of the people he talked to had some very unpleasant stuff to say about her. “You seem like a pleasant person, and they were saying that you were kind of obsessive after the breakup, and things like that. What was going on to make them think that?”
“The only thing I can think of, and I realize that because I was at his house a lot, um, but I didn’t go to his house unless I was invited over, or if he knew that I was coming over.” She went on to describe a system she and Travis had to alert each other of a pending visit. “He would send me text messages late at night like ‘Hey, I’m getting sleepy . . .’ And that was like, that became my cue or code word for coming over. ‘I’m going to sleep now, sneak into my room and wake me up’ kind of thing. That would happen a lot.” When Detective Flores asked if that meant there was still a sexual relationship going on, Jodi said that there was.
The detective knew that Jodi had no idea that photos of Travis and her naked in his bedroom had been recovered from Travis’s camera with the time stamp that proved that she was with him right before he was murdered. He played dumb when he started a line of questioning about the camera. He asked her if she remembered anything about it, like when it had been purchased or what brand it was. Jodi said she remembered Travis had asked her for some advice, knowing she was a photographer. She thought he had purchased it in April or May, and she had advised against anything Kodak, but did not know his ultimate choice. The detective wondered if she knew any reason why anyone would want to destroy it, without revealing where it had been found, and Jodi said “no.”
Detective Flores wanted to know where Jodi had been the day Travis was killed. Jodi told him on Monday, June 2, 2008, she left Northern California for Salt Lake City, Utah, where a Pre-Paid Legal conference was taking place that Wednesday and Thursday. She first drove to the airport in Redding, California, where she rented a car rather than drive her mechanically unreliable vehicle. Once her car was rented, she went to Monterey, California, five hours off course to Salt Lake City, to hang out with friends for the night.
The next day, Tuesday, June 3, she drove farther south to Los Angeles, five more hours out of her way. She was going to visit Darryl’s sister, who had a new baby. “I’m a photographer, and she just recently had a baby, and I’m trying to build up my portfolio,” she claimed. The new mother wasn’t around when she got there, and at that point, she said, she headed northeast to Salt Lake City, eleven hours away.
The detective asked her if she had spoken to Travis along the way. “I did talk to him Tuesday night . . . It was brief though, um . . . like that was a matter of two minutes. It wasn’t really an in-depth conversation.” Jodi told the detective she was just leaving a Starbucks in Pasadena, just outside Los Angeles, and called Travis to see if he was in the area.
“Do you know what time that was?”
“Ten o’clock? . . . It was late, kind of a late evening. I mean for us that’s not late.”
Detective Flores wondered about the purpose of the call.
“Um,” Jodi said. “I was just calling to check in, say hey. I was calling people, because I was on the road, just bored.”
“Oh, so you were on the road at that time?”
“It was real brief, um. He was nice and cordial, but he was acting like he had hurt feelings.”
“The reason I ask is we’re trying to figure out when [the murder] actually occurred,” Detective Flores explained. “And people are saying they lost contact with him maybe, you know, Tuesday or Wednesday, people aren’t sure.”
“I talked to him last Tuesday, and I’m sure I called Wednesday. I know I called him again from the road twice,” Jodi recalled. “I did send him text messages. I know I sent him a picture.”
Jodi claimed her long drive to Salt Lake City took her through Boulder City and Las Vegas, Nevada. When she said she had pu
lled over to sleep in her car, Detective Flores asked her how she kept safe, wanting to raise the issue of a weapon. He baited her by sympathetically telling her that she might be safer if she traveled with some protection, even saying Arizona was a place where you didn’t have to register a weapon like you did in California.
“I’ve actually looked into handguns, because I have lists of things I’m really scared of . . . I’m trying to overcome, and that’s one of them,” Jodi said. “I’m looking into that, because handguns are expensive. You know, it’s not really in my price range right now.”
Jodi wanted the detective to know she had a new man, Ryan Burns, who met her when she got to Salt Lake City. He also worked for PPL, and she had gone to the conference to meet him. She was implying that her interest in pursuing Travis, described by those who had talked to Flores as her “obsession,” was now done.
When the call was over, Detective Flores started doing the timeline math, and Jodi’s story wasn’t adding up. She claimed that driving from Yreka to Salt Lake City via Los Angeles and Las Vegas had taken her forty-eight hours. Mapping her route, including a ten-hour rest stop, he concluded her trip would have taken a maximum of twenty-nine hours. Adding Mesa to the route would add a few hours, but there were still ten to eleven hours of additional time to spare.
He called Ryan Burns that afternoon to see what he could corroborate. Ryan confirmed that he knew Jodi Arias. He had met her in Oklahoma at a PPL seminar a couple of months earlier. The trip to Utah had been in the works for about two weeks. Ryan said Jodi called him on Tuesday, June 3, and told him that she had left the Monterey area at around 11 P.M., and she would meet him on Wednesday, June 4. She never told him she was going via Los Angeles. She said she had forgotten her cell phone charger, so the phone was turned off to save battery power for most of the drive. It was 11 P.M. on Wednesday, the day they were supposed to meet, when she finally called him. She had driven in the wrong direction, gotten lost, and then had run out of gas. She said she was currently one hundred miles from Las Vegas, according to the sign she had just passed. When she finally showed up, it was 11 A.M. on Thursday, June 5.
Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias Page 10
