Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias

by Velez-Mitchell, Jane

  “You told us, the reason you lied was you were thinking about your family.”

  “Yes.”

  “If there’s a good reason for it, it’s okay to lie?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You were concerned about your family?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your reputation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thinking more of yourself when you were making this statement to the detective, right?”

  “I can’t say that.”

  Even the smallest points became the focus of semantic debate. Martinez was focused at all times. He tried one more time to get Jodi to admit that her use of the word “help” with detective Flores was totally self-serving and misleading. If she had really wanted to help him she would have admitted to knowing the things that only the killer would know for sure.

  “Other than you, who would be sure?” he asked her in subdued frustration.

  “God,” Jodi answered after a quick pause to think it through.

  “Well, we can’t subpoena God, can we?” Martinez shot back.

  Jodi even answered the rhetorical. “I don’t think so,” she said, turning to address the jury, as was her habit. Martinez’s response to that was quickly objected to, and sustained, by Judge Stephens. Even spectators would know it was argumentative, and irrelevant.

  The rest of the afternoon was spent highlighting Jodi’s lies to Detective Flores about the crime itself. “The whole interview was a lie,” was the way Martinez summarized it best.

  The prosecutor was clearly getting annoyed at Jodi’s evasiveness and attitude. Jodi slipped into one of her self-serving answers that she had contemplated suicide, and Mr. Martinez started to smoke through the ears. He told Jodi she really needed to stop talking about her suicide attempts, saying she had played that card many times. That, of course, brought up the definition of the word many. Juan Martinez then made an insightful point he would resurrect months later in his summation. Jodi conceded that her weak attempt to slit her wrists shortly after her arrest was too painful to carry out. The tiny razor cut to her wrist had “stung” too much. Martinez dove in: “Can you imagine how much you must have hurt Mr. Alexander when you stuck that knife in his chest? That must have really hurt, right?” Martinez was seething. Again, Nurmi’s “Objection!” was sustained.

  For the people watching the case from the outside, many loved that Martinez was scolding Jodi the way they wanted to, leading the prosecutor’s star to rise fast in social media. Systematically, he was dismantling each and every claim of physical abuse Jodi made against Travis, claims that many felt made a mockery of battered women’s syndrome and made it that much harder for real victims of domestic violence to be believed. Outside the courthouse “Juan Martinez for Governor” buttons and signs had begun to pop up.

  Another area Martinez probed was Jodi’s diabolical and cruel behavior towards Travis’s loved ones after she killed him. Jodi had gone out of her way to offer condolences to Travis’s family. She had the gall to send a bouquet of irises to his grieving grandmother coupled with a note reading “you are in my prayers.” Not surprising, his grandmother threw the flowers away as soon as they arrived. Jodi sent an eighteen-page letter to the same grandmother on what would have been Travis’s thirty-first birthday, July 28, in which Jodi explained in detail how two masked intruders butchered and shot Travis and how she had escaped. It was hard to fully comprehend the mentality of somebody who would butcher a man, then cozy up to his devastated family and feed them intricate lies on the premise that she wanted to console them.

  The evidence against Jodi was overwhelming but, even by the third day of cross she refused to be rattled; if anything, she seemed to rattle the prosecutor, or at least annoy him. He would ask a long question, pause for her answer, only to have her respond with an “I guess,” and get him ranting again. After one showdown, Jodi said she couldn’t even remember the question. “I think I’m more focused on your posture, your tone, and your anger,” she told her infuriated opponent.

  It was yet to be seen if the seasoned prosecutor’s theatrics were playing well with the jury. Some court observers complained that much of the testimony was going adrift from the brutal, cold-blooded killing of Travis Alexander and had a lot to do with showboating. Others said Jodi’s disrespect of the prosecutor played right into his hands, showing jurors she was far from the pliant wallflower she claimed to be with Travis. She was revealing herself as a passive aggressive manipulator who not only liked playing mind games, but was good at them.

  One area of cross that landed squarely was Martinez’s examination of Jodi’s infamous gap in her memory that began right after she shot Travis. Martinez pounced on the idea that her blackout when it came to murdering Travis was way too convenient, too unbelievable. Prosecutor Martinez showed just how absurd it was by explaining how Jodi deleted numerous photos from Travis’s camera after killing him and how each deletion involved a complicated process, not the kind of intricate maneuver one accomplishes in a blackout.

  The fourth day of cross began with sex, sexual aggression, sexual fantasies, and more lies. Martinez was not afraid to elicit details, so those attracted to the case for prurient reasons were certainly satisfied. Jodi was delightfully happy through much of the sex testimony. She seemed to take amusement in watching someone as clever, sophisticated, and old as Martinez use terms generally spoken in the bedroom. Not as amusing were the questions about the murder. Parts of the CBS 48 Hours hour-long program featuring Jodi’s early interview were aired. There she was on the courtroom screens, larger than life, spewing what everyone now knew were outright lies and doing it believably in the same calm tone she was using during her testimony. Someone might as well have been screaming, Liar, liar, pants on fire.

  The last day of cross-examination was Thursday, February 28, and the twenty-fifth day of the trial. Martinez wrapped up his grilling of the defendant by focusing on the critical minutes in Travis’s bathroom when she slaughtered him, and her bizarre conduct afterward as she tried to cover her tracks.

  Jodi was in tears, or pretended to be, for most of the testimony. She was squeezing a tissue and sipping water for composure, but Martinez was relentless.

  By this time Jodi rarely swiveled in her chair to address the jury seated to her right. She tried to address Martinez, but even then she often preferred to look down. Martinez relentlessly punched holes in Jodi’s story about what happened in the final seconds in Travis’s bathroom. The state said she ambushed him in the wet shower with a knife to the chest, then stabbed him repeatedly in the back, then slit his throat and finally shot him with the gun she stole from her grandfather. The prosecutor stressed what many of Travis’s friends kept saying on television, that Travis didn’t own a gun for Jodi to grab from the top of the closet. No holster or ammo box were even found, to which Jodi postulated that she thought Travis kept the gun unloaded. However, Jodi was still insisting that Travis body slammed her after she dropped his camera so she ran into his closet, grabbed his gun, and shot him as he came at her again like a linebacker before going into a fog. The prosecutor shattered her version of events with a simple question.

  “How is it if you are shooting him [first] the shell casing . . . landed in blood?”

  “It didn’t land in blood,” Jodi replied contradicting a crime scene photo that clearly showed the shiny metal shell stuck in a coagulated pool of red blood.

  Prosecutor Martinez ignored her. “If the gunshot is the first blow there should be no blood?”

  “I don’t agree,” Jodi said, ignoring the obvious reality.

  There wasn’t a detail Jodi had previously given that wasn’t challenged. If Jodi said the camera bounced this far when it hit the tile, Martinez would point out how that was impossible. If Jodi said her head was facing south after the body slam, Martinez would point out that that made no sense, to know which way your head was facing when you were knocked out. He also said that Travis would never have been able to body sl
am her with one leg in the shower and one leg out, as she had testified previously. The holes just kept coming. How could she roll out from under him to get away? How could a man in good shape, as Jodi had described him, not be able to catch her?

  “He doesn’t catch up to you?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “There’s a door there?” he asked about the closet.

  “Yes.” Jodi was crying uncontrollably or at least pretending to.

  “Able to close it?”

  “I slammed it,” she managed.

  “It have a lock?”

  “Not that I know.” The tears had no bottom.

  “Ma’am, were you crying when you stabbed him?”

  “I don’t know,” she sobbed.

  “Take a look, you’re the one that did this?” he asked in a tone gentler than before, showing her the all too familiar autopsy photo of Travis’s back with the cluster of stabbings.

  “If he is being stabbed in the back, he’s no threat to you,” he stated more than asked.

  “I could only guess. I don’t know what you’re asking me,” Jodi mumbled back, hanging her head and covering her face. But Jodi’s oh-so-clever sidestepping had stopped working.

  “Would you agree that you are the person who slit his throat from ear to ear?” Martinez demanded.

  “Yes.”

  Martinez then confronted her with voice mails, a text, and an email she sent Travis in the hours and days after she murdered him. “There’s no reason to leave a message for a dead man?” Martinez asked.

  On June 6, 2008, at 9:58 A.M., she sent Travis the following text: “Hey, I need to know when you’re going to deposit that check.” This was a reference to the two-hundred-dollar check she had mailed him a few weeks earlier as payment toward the BMW Travis had sold her. The police found the uncashed check during a search of the house.

  Martinez asked if she had sent that text as part of a cover-up. Jodi, crying again, said she didn’t want to face the consequences of what she had done.

  Martinez then produced an email Jodi sent to Travis on June 7 at 10:21 A.M. He asked Jodi to read it aloud. Through her tears, she started to read it, but broke down. Martinez took over. “Hey you, I haven’t heard back from you. I hope that you’re not still upset that I didn’t come to see you. I just didn’t have enough time off. It’s okay, sweetie, you are going to be here in less than two weeks. We’re going to see the sights, check things off ‘The List,’ and all kind of fun things. Oregon is beautiful this time of year. Yay!! Be happy!!”

  As he neared the end of a five-day cross-examination, Martinez replayed part of Jodi’s 2008 interview to Inside Edition, in which she said no jury would ever convict her, because she was innocent.

  Martinez followed up. “You believe you’re going to be acquitted because you came in here and told those stories.” Jodi reiterated that she intended to commit suicide before the trial. Martinez shot back, “But you said ‘I’m innocent.’ Even that’s a lie, isn’t it?”

  Soon after, Juan Martinez turned and walked back to his table.

  The trial had begun the day after New Year’s Day. The state presented twenty witnesses in nine days. The defense case began in late January. Jodi was the defense’s eighth witness but, when Kirk Nurmi went to begin his redirect examination of Jodi, spring was around the corner. It was March 4, almost eight weeks since the start of the trial. As expected, Martinez had eviscerated much of her story, and Nurmi was going to try to rehabilitate her reputation by once again trying to elicit the human side, not the cold sociopath that Martinez had jack-hammered to the surface. Damage control was tantamount, and this was probably his last opportunity. Even though the expert mental health witnesses were waiting in the wings, Jodi did not seem like someone suffering from mental illness, who was so delusional she could not distinguish between right and wrong.

  By this point, Jodi had been on the stand for thirteen days, eight on direct and five on cross-examination. Spectators were experiencing so-called Jodi fatigue. Perhaps the jury was too, weary of the same flat affect punctuated by the rare sob. If Jodi’s testimony was anything, it was too long. The questions weren’t particularly difficult, but often, the minutiae were tedious and circuitous, with the back and forth trumping the issues. Nurmi was no dynamo, but he hoped Martinez had perhaps made it possible for him to make Jodi a bit sympathetic. Four of Travis’s siblings, sitting behind the rail in the front row and directly in Jodi’s line of sight, would scoff at any attempt to elicit pity for their brother’s killer. Their solidarity was as daunting as it was admirable.

  Nurmi began by asking Jodi if she killed Travis, just as he had when she first took the stand a month ago. Jodi again took personal responsibility, admitting she killed him, adding only that she killed him after he tried to kill her. She had no intention of killing him when she arrived, she told her attorney, ignoring the now overwhelming evidence of her premeditation.

  Nurmi tried to rehabilitate Jodi on a number of points. One was whether her bent left ring finger was injured during the killing or months earlier in a violent outburst by Travis. He displayed for the jury a photo of Jodi and her younger sister Angela from May 2008, that he said showed the injury to the finger. Nurmi also attempted to diffuse what seemed to be strong evidence of Jodi’s jealousy. Then, of course, there was the sex, which was rehashed, realigned into lists of who initiated what and how many times this or that happened. With Nurmi’s guidance, Jodi repeated the many things she did sexually, emphasizing what she claimed she did not enjoy but had done anyway just to please Travis.

  A key focus of the redirect was on Jodi’s journals. Several pages had been torn out, and Jodi explained she had removed them because her writings might have upset Travis. There was also her purported adherence to the Law of Attraction, an ask and ye shall receive philosophy of positive thinking. Jodi said she was determined to keep her journal positive, especially knowing Travis might read it. Explaining to the jury that she wanted to protect Travis, she said she deliberately kept her journal free of negative entries, like Travis’s supposed incidents of violence or the alleged sexual act with the photo of the young boy, instead accentuating only the positive. To the overwhelming majority of the public who thought Jodi had made up the beatings and the pedophilia, this excuse about her journals felt like just another lie of convenience.

  Still Nurmi soldiered on, asking Jodi to read aloud from a journal entry she wrote on August 26, 2007. “I love Travis Victor Alexander so completely I don’t know any other way to be. . . . He makes me sick and he makes me happy. He makes me sad to miserable, and he makes me uplifted and beautiful. All in all, I shouldn’t be wording this as if he makes me feel these things. It all originates from within. All of my darkness is the result of my own creation. It is the fruit of my thoughts, planted continually and without too much repetition.”

  When the redirect finally ended, there was only one more thing keeping Jodi on the stand: questions from the jurors. Throughout Jodi’s fifteen days of testimony, jurors had submitted so many questions for her that the attorneys needed hours to review them. The judge told the jurors not to return the following day until midday. Meanwhile, the attorneys used the morning of March 6 to review more than two hundred questions and prepare their arguments for which ones, if any, should not be asked. The jurors’ written questions had been collected by the bailiff at every court break during Jodi’s testimony. The clerk maintained them in the order in which they were received. When asked by the judge, they would stay in that order. For the remainder of that day and half of the next, Jodi answered questions such as:

  Why did you put the camera in the washer?

  You told Darryl you wanted to abstain from sex before marriage. If so, why did you have sex with Travis?

  What is your understanding of the word skank?

  Why would you take the time to delete the photos off the camera after you killed Travis?

  How is it that you were so calm on the television interviews?


  Did you see a doctor for your memory issues?

  Would you decide to tell the truth if you never got arrested?

  After all the lies you told, why should we believe you now?

  Questions the judge did not allow included: What was your reason for switching defense attorneys? Considering all of the lies you’ve told and admitted to, would you consider yourself to be a pathological liar?

  After the jurors’ questions were asked, Nurmi and Martinez got another round of follow-up questioning of Jodi based solely on the jurors’ questions. However, those questions were broad, covering most areas of the evidence. For his part, Martinez took time to grill Jodi on her pedophilia accusation and whom she had told, possibly hinting that a particular friend was willing to lie on her behalf about Travis’s attraction to boys. Martinez also had a Perry Mason moment, when he whipped out the proof that Jodi had three gas cans with her, not two, on her trip from California to Arizona and on to Utah. In addition to the two she borrowed from Darryl Brewer, a third one was purchased in Salinas, California, on June 3, 2008. Martinez also produced gas receipts from Jodi’s gas purchases in Salt Lake City to prove that she had bought enough gas to refill her car and the three five-gallon cans.

  The final grilling was about how Travis was first attacked—was it with a gun, as Jodi insisted, or a knife, as the state argued? Martinez wanted to know why she pointed the gun at his head if she didn’t think it was loaded. He also wanted to know where the knife came from.

  “Did you have the knife in your hand when you shot him?” Martinez wanted to know.

  “No, I did not,” Jodi replied.

  “That means you needed to get it from somewhere if you didn’t have it in your hand.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know where it was,” Jodi said. Many felt Jodi’s entire rope bondage story was told solely so she could claim a knife happened to be within easy reach.

  Which fatal wound came first, the stab wound to the heart or the gunshot to the head could be important to the question of cruelty, the factor that qualified the case for the death penalty. According to the state, the injuries sustained by the knife wounds followed by the shot were crueler. A juror’s question following Martinez’s conclusion asked why Jodi hadn’t just shot Travis twice, rather than switch weapons if she was that scared. She explained that the gun had fallen in the scuffle and was impossible to find, and the knife was at hand. At the end of the day, it probably didn’t make that much difference which fatal blow came first. Twenty-nine knife wounds and a shot to the head? That was beyond hellishly cruel in any order.