Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias

by Velez-Mitchell, Jane

  It took a moment for Jodi’s grandfather to absorb that what he thought was Jodi’s alibi was worthless. He apologized for his error, saying he was only trying to help her. He had honestly thought she was at work that day. The officer concurred that he would have probably done the same thing for a member of his family.

  Meanwhile, the search of the residence was under way. Items of interest that the police took away were Jodi’s personal journals and a box of receipts that detailed Jodi’s trip to Utah during the month of June. Several receipts covered locations in California, Nevada, and Utah that police could use to map out her route around the time of Travis’s death. There were no receipts, however, that would corroborate her being in Arizona.

  Meanwhile, in the rental car, police executed another search warrant and found evidence that suggested Jodi was planning to leave town. They speculated that she had gotten word about the indictment and that they were closing in on her, because the rental car was indeed packed with boxes of books and Jodi’s clothing in suitcases, much as the surveillance team had observed. Hidden among the clothes were two knives and ammunition for a 9 mm handgun, but no gun was found. A few weeks later, however, police received a call from someone at Hertz rental car at San Francisco International Airport. While the white Chevy Cobalt that Jodi had rented was being serviced and cleaned, a 9 mm gun had been discovered hidden in the wheel well. It was not the gun used in Travis’s murder, but it did match the ammo found in the car during the execution of the search warrant. Later, Jodi would claim she bought the gun because she had been planning to drive to Monterey to kill herself, not wanting to commit suicide in her hometown near her family. This would not be the last time Jodi would explain away suspicious behavior by saying she was driven by thoughts of suicide.

  While the search took place at Jodi’s grandparents’ house, a simultaneous search of Jodi’s parents’ house was also under way. It turned up nothing of interest in relation to the case. Both of Jodi’s parents volunteered to go the Yreka Police Department to be interviewed by Detective Flores about their daughter.

  Upon arrival at the station, Sandy Arias was completely shaken up by the arrest. Clutching a tissue and fighting tears, she told the detective she thought she was going to puke. The physical similarities between Jodi and her mom were striking—both possessing high cheekbones and pretty brown eyes. In front of the detective, Sandy was having a hard time composing herself. She said she had been happy to have Jodi back near her again after so many years in Monterey, Palm Desert, and Mesa, but she confessed that she and her daughter did not have a good relationship. Jodi appeared to have mental problems, happy one minute and crying inconsolably a couple of hours later. A friend had even used the word bipolar to describe Jodi, although it was not a professional opinion.

  Sandy knew about Jodi’s recent trip to Salt Lake City via Monterey and said her daughter seemed fine when she got back. She said Jodi had learned about Travis’s death a couple of days later and cried for three or four days, while refusing to discuss it. When Sandy finally spoke to her daughter, she asked Jodi if she had gone to Arizona, and Jodi swore she had not. Her mother had no reason not to believe her. In fact, after Jodi came back from Travis’s memorial service, Sandy said they seemed to get along better than they ever had. Jodi would come over and hang out with the family and be on her computer. “Maybe this death has made her see that life is short,” Sandy lamented. “It’s changing her. The last few weeks, I talked to her more than I had ever talked to her at eighteen.”

  Sandy paused to speculate on things she imagined Jodi might complain about concerning her childhood. “You get this fantasy in your head that you had a rotten childhood,” she said, seeming to want to set the record straight. “The only time we searched her room was once. She was in eighth grade. She was growing pot. I couldn’t find my Tupperware container, and she had it on the roof growing pot.” After that, she said, Jodi didn’t want to be near her. Even when Jodi lived in Monterey, she didn’t want her mother to visit for fear she’d snoop through her stuff. Sandy also reflected on how smart Jodi was, saying how Jodi read a lot of books and often wished that her mom could be more intellectual.

  Sandy said she knew Jodi was anxious about being questioned regarding the murder, and it may have scared her because she bought a gun. She also mentioned that prior to learning about Travis’s death, Jodi had been anticipating a visit from him, his first to Yreka. The two were planning to visit Crater Lake National Park, in Oregon, mentioned in Patricia Schultz’s 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. In fact, it was supposed to be that very weekend coming up. At that, she paused to contemplate. “Maybe she did do it, but I can’t imagine her doing it,” she muttered softly.

  The hardest part of the interview was revealing just how much evidence had been amassed against her daughter, such as the fingerprints, the DNA, and the hair. In spite of it all, Sandy was still incredulous, in disbelief that her daughter could kill and then return home as if everything were normal. She elaborated on Jodi’s talk of suicide and a late-night call from a friend of Jodi’s years earlier, who said she needed psychiatric help.

  Crying off and on throughout the interview, Sandy’s mind began to skip. She mentioned Travis’s family and how much pain they must be in. She admitted that her daughter was having financial problems. “She’s really in debt. She bought a house with her other boyfriend. [She had] house payments, she maxed out credit cards trying to pay her part of it, she thought she could dig herself out. We brought her up here, we tried to get her back on track,” Sandy explained, sobbing.

  Most of all, Sandy wanted to know what would happen to Jodi next.

  “She’s booked in the county jail,” Detective Flores answered. “The court in Phoenix will ask for an extradition. She could fight it or go along with it. It’s usually a moot point. It’s going to happen anyway, unless California has more serious charges.”

  “What happens if she’s found guilty?” Sandy asked.

  “She’ll be sentenced.”

  “For the rest of her life?”

  “She has to be found guilty first.”

  Next, the detective interviewed Jodi’s father, William “Bill” Arias. He looked older than his years, most likely because of his poor health. He had had both kidneys replaced years earlier, as a consequence of a motorcycle accident and subsequent kidney cancer. His thinning hair was combed over to one side. He was wearing thick frameless glasses and a pink button-down shirt. Bill said that Jodi and he were not very close.

  “My wife talked to her more. We didn’t get along good. She’s a strange person . . . She was strange, real friendly, sometimes she’d be in a rage, screaming at my wife. All I could tell you, she had financial problems. Broke up with her boyfriend. I’ve never even seen a picture of Travis.”

  Bill also recalled the time right before and after Jodi learned Travis had died. “She [had been] acting so normal. He was found on Monday, the 9th. That weekend, she bawled her eyes out. She came over to the house and said Travis was murdered.” In the days leading up to her arrest, Jodi had been preparing to leave Yreka for a few days. Bill had helped her rent a car, but he had a lot of questions for her. Why had she quit her job? Why was she leaving town if she wasn’t guilty? It was her last chance to tell him what was going on. Jodi didn’t open up at all, even though they talked for an hour and a half. Instead, she used the excuse that she didn’t want to tell him anything, for his own good, to avoid his becoming involved in any way. She kept repeating that she was leaving town for Monterey for a few days because she didn’t want to be a part of it, which left her father with more questions than answers.

  He, too, mentioned how Jodi’s relationship with him and his wife had become strained after the discovery of Jodi’s marijuana plant on the roof of the house. “After that, something turned in her head, and she hasn’t been honest with us since then. She had a house in Palm Desert. We told her we want to come visit her. She didn’t want us to stay in her house, because she was afraid we w
ould snoop.” Jodi’s father said that when she was in Palm Desert, she was crazy for a year. She’d call up crying hysterically, needing money. As for her subsequent stint in Arizona, Bill knew his daughter had also become very upset when she saw Travis with another woman in his house, referring to an August 2007 incident when Jodi was peeping in Travis’s living room window and saw him with another woman. She called her father shortly afterward in tears.

  Bill explained to Detective Flores that, when his daughter finally moved back to Yreka from Arizona, she brought all of her stuff in a rented U-Haul. Bill said Jodi decided to live with her maternal grandparents, because his house rules were harder to abide by. “We have rules and regulations. She stays up [all night] and sleeps all day,” he said.

  “She work as a bartender still?” Detective Flores asked.

  “She was,” Bill replied. “She got hysterical and quit her job.”

  Detective Flores wanted to know about the rented car. Bill said they had rented it, because Jodi’s car was screwing up, maybe because she hadn’t checked the oil. He had helped her load some of her stuff into the rental.

  “Did she have access to a firearm?” the detective asked next.

  “She just got a gun,” Bill explained. “I asked her, ‘what do you need a gun for?’ She said she wanted to feel safe.”

  Detective Flores repeated to Bill the things he had told his wife, that Jodi was being booked and being seen by a judge. Bill cut him off with a late thought about Jodi’s mental condition. “I told her one time, have you ever thought of yourself as being bipolar? She cried . . . then I told her, ‘I’m just kidding.’ ”

  “Does she seem to be obsessive?” Detective Flores asked.

  Bill didn’t answer. “She was gonna stay in town and work . . . she said she was gonna get a job and straighten her life out.”

  CHAPTER 10

  FLIRTING WITH DANGER

  Jodi Arias once said that aspects of her sexual relationship with Travis Alexander made her feel like a “used piece of toilet paper.” Travis Alexander also referred to their intimate relationship as demeaning to him, once complaining to Jodi that he felt like nothing more than “a dildo with a heartbeat.” But the story of how their sexual affair became so toxic depended on who was telling it, and in the end, only one of them was alive to talk.

  When Jodi Arias finally began telling authorities the tale of her romance with Travis, she had been arrested, and her own photography had irrefutably placed her at Travis’s home at the time of the murder. Sensing her life was on the line, she began spinning an intricate, X-rated tale of their affair that enraged Travis’s family and friends, as it painted both him and their relationship in a very different light. From the start, Jodi’s version of events and her portrayal of Travis’s behavior seemed suspect to those who knew them both, and while everyone around them acknowledged Jodi and Travis had sex, questions still remained about what kind of sex it really was and who was actually the one doing the seducing.

  There is little doubt that the two had sexual chemistry. What has been less explored is the crucial role that timing played in Travis and Jodi’s relationship. Each was at a critical juncture in their personal life when they first met at the convention in Las Vegas in September 2006. Both Jodi and Travis had a heightened desire to find a mate and marry. For Travis, his age was a key factor in his rush to find a wife. He was a single man approaching the big 3-O. Even being over twenty-five and still single was viewed as an oddity in the Mormon Church, where marriage and family were paramount. Being in your thirties and single was viewed as a problem.

  In every one of Travis’s prior relationships, he had brought up the possibility of marriage early on. He had asked Linda Ballard to marry him, but she had turned him down. Then, for a time, it had seemed Deanna was the right woman. She wanted to get married, but this time it was Travis who had the commitment phobia. Meanwhile, as he was getting older, the median age of the available Mormon women was getting younger. Early on in his relationship with Linda Ballard, which had begun when she was nineteen, the age difference between them had been an issue, and many of the women in their teens and early twenties in his Desert Ridge Ward likely viewed Travis as too old for them. Everybody knew that Travis was in search of a wife, but each time he returned to the Young Singles Ward, he found himself that much older than the available pool of single women.

  When Travis met Jodi in Las Vegas, he was only ten months shy of his thirtieth birthday. The Family Ward loomed at the end of his thirtieth year, and if that wasn’t ominous enough, he already knew pretty much every eligible Mormon prospect in his Mesa world and was coming up empty.

  Jodi arrived in Las Vegas with a crisis in her personal life as well. She had been twenty-two when she first started dating Darryl Brewer, and although she knew then that he was not interested in remarrying, she was young enough not to care. Four years later, she wanted a more committed relationship, if not with Darryl, then with someone who would marry her. At twenty-six, her biological clock was ticking, and she wanted to start a family.

  Jodi and Travis’s first meeting in Las Vegas had created a connection that had promise, and both thought their luck had turned. Travis went back to Mesa with Jodi heavily on his mind, while Jodi went back to Palm Desert, hoping that Travis would call. Her wish came true the very next day. It soon became a nightly ritual that Travis would phone Jodi at 8 P.M., right around the time she was getting home from her job at the restaurant.

  According to Jodi, the things Travis said to her got her thinking. He was a motivational speaker, so he had a talent for making people look at their lives and begin to implement positive changes. He advised Jodi not to settle for mediocrity, and was most likely referring to her dead-end relationship with Darryl. He was a firm believer in going after what you wanted and making things happen, and he wholeheartedly encouraged Jodi to do the same. He also jokingly teased that dating a man of Darryl’s age was akin to dating her grandfather. She deserved better. Travis also talked about how important marriage and family were, and he expressed an interest in her. Jodi may have even thought, Travis is it, he will ask me to marry him, although he never expressed himself like that.

  The phone calls quickly became more, and within days Travis invited Jodi to join him at Chris and Sky Hughes’s home in Murrieta, California, the very first weekend after they had met. Jodi didn’t hesitate in accepting and was so delighted with the budding relationship that she took the bold step of ending her relationship with Darryl. Just four days after returning home from the convention, she told Darryl, the man she’d been dating for four years, that it was over. It appeared Jodi had her sights set on marrying Travis with no more encouragement than his weekend invitation.

  Jodi sat Darryl down at the kitchen table and told him their relationship was going nowhere. She knew he didn’t want to get married, and she no longer wanted to have sex, as she was saving herself for her future husband. What she didn’t say was that she also wanted to be free to pursue her interest in Travis. Despite the abrupt nature of things, the breakup was amicable. They owned the house together, and they agreed they could continue sharing it for the time being, but they would sleep in separate bedrooms.

  Her obligation to Darryl removed, Jodi happily accepted the invitation from Travis to join him for the weekend party at the Hugheses’ house in Murrieta, only an hour and a half from Palm Desert. Chris and Sky Hughes were the “it” couple, the Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt of the local Mormon world. They were tall and attractive, imposing yet charming, and everyone wanted to be in their circle. Jodi arrived in Murrieta hours before Travis showed up, easily fitting in with the crowd. She’d met some of them briefly at the convention and knew Sky from when she borrowed her dress for the PPL banquet dinner.

  According to Sky, Jodi behaved quite normally throughout the afternoon. She was dressed conservatively and appeared comfortable socially—shaking hands with everybody she met, carrying on interesting, intelligent conversations, making eye contact with confiden
ce, and impressing everyone present with her friendliness, grace, and charm. Nobody said anything about her being improper or out of place; she was totally normal, another guest at a beautiful weekend get-together.

  Travis arrived by 9 P.M. He brought a few G-rated movies with him. Adhering to the Mormon faith, he never dabbled in anything rated R. He even had a filter on his home DVD player that would block any content above a PG rating. He never cursed, but used substitute words that were acceptable replacements, with Mother-freaker being a perfect example. Travis’s movies provided the focus for the rest of the evening. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed them, joking, laughing, having good clean fun. When they were over, all the guests went home, except for Jodi and Travis.

  That night, Jodi was given her own bedroom by her hosts; however, the details of the night grew fuzzy after that. In Jodi’s version of events, Travis came to see her in her bedroom after everyone else had gone to sleep. It was a rendezvous they had planned earlier in the night, and Jodi was expecting his arrival. In her telling, Travis came on hot and heavy right away, although she admittedly didn’t resist. They were French-kissing and lying side by side on the bed. Travis began to remove her clothes, which Jodi said made her feel apprehensive, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings or spoil the mood, so she didn’t say no. She felt the two had chemistry, and she didn’t want to snuff it out. Jodi recalled that Travis was wearing his temple garments, the Mormon church’s symbolic protection from the evils of the world, under his sweatpants. Before long, the temple garments were discarded in a joint effort, and according to Jodi, Travis then performed oral sex on her. She then reciprocated, with him ejaculating in her mouth. When the two awoke early the next morning, Jodi claimed they were both naked, and that eventually Travis got dressed and left the bedroom.