CHAPTER 21
WADING THROUGH THE FOG
After the prosecutor’s devastating cross-examination of their client, the defense had an even taller mountain to climb if they were to convince the jurors that Jodi Arias was not a cold-blooded murderer, that she had acted in self-defense when she had taken Travis’s life.
In a bid to reach that summit, the defense paraded out two mental health experts, Dr. Richard Samuels, a clinical and forensic psychologist, and Alyce LaViolette, a psychotherapist and domestic violence expert. Dr. Samuels was called to explain Jodi’s alleged memory loss at the time of the killing. He would argue Jodi did go into a fog, which he labeled “dissociative amnesia,” and “post-traumatic stress disorder”; Ms. LaViolette was going to support the defense claim that Jodi had been abused, and, thus, was justified in killing Travis, or at least in defending herself. If believed, Jodi could be convicted of something less than first-degree murder or, at a minimum, save herself from the death chamber. The defense lawyers and the witnesses may have felt emboldened by the specter of the death penalty, telling themselves since Jodi’s life was on the line any theory was fair game, no matter how farfetched or offensive to the family of the victim. What few saw coming was the monumental backlash that awaited them, a public outrage so intense it even sent Alyce LaViolette, the domestic violence expert, to the hospital reportedly with anxiety attacks after a public campaign was launched against her.
Dr. Samuels took the stand first. His arrival in court on March 14, Day 31 of the trial, was met with a smile from Jodi. Dressed in a dark suit, blue button-down shirt, and red tie, the balding, bespectacled witness appeared relaxed and composed as he settled into the witness box, pages of handwritten notes in his lap. The jurors also seemed alert and interested. They were finally going to hear from an expert witness for the defense, who would hopefully have a credible explanation for Jodi’s bizarre and violent behavior.
Jennifer Willmott handled the questioning, giving her co-counsel Kirk Nurmi a break. Willmott began with the routine foundation questions—name, education, and credentials. Dr. Samuels had a Ph.D. in biopsychology and thirty-five years of experience working with people who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), police officers among them.
According to Dr. Samuels, Jodi had been traumatized by the violence of Travis’s death, which had caused her to develop dissociative amnesia (DA), a memory loss associated with severe trauma, thus rendering her unable to recall the killing. He said in cases of DA, the sufferer typically complains of foggy memory just after the start of the traumatic event and just before the ability to remember is restored. But there are times when memories are not even created so there’s nothing to restore. That occurs when the part of the brain responsible for creating and storing memory is impaired, which he suggested may have happened with Jodi.
Samuels based his opinions on twelve interviews he conducted with Jodi at the jail during the three-year period from September 2009 through 2012, as well as psychological tests he had administered between November 2009 and January 2010, nearly two thousand pages of case material. He also used Jodi’s media interviews. He rendered two main opinions: She suffered from PTSD brought on by acute stress disorder as a result of killing Travis and from dissociative amnesia brought on by severe trauma, which explained her “fog.”
“How did you conduct the interviews with Ms. Arias?” Willmott asked.
“I always began by asking her what was on her mind that day,” the psychologist replied. “I usually have my agenda, some areas I want to explore, and I will get to the those [sic] areas . . . You can easily tell what’s most difficult for the individual, because they skirt around that particular issue, and that allows me to develop an approach later on down the line to finally get the information.”
Dr. Samuels recalled that the first time he met Jodi in September 2009, she was still telling the “two intruder” story. “It wasn’t until I confronted her about the truthfulness of that story that she admitted to killing him in self-defense,” he recalled.
“Is this unusual?” Willmott posed.
“I’ve had patients that I’ve worked with who haven’t told me the whole story, so yes, this is not at all unusual,” Dr. Samuels said, noting that it is common for defendants not to tell the truth at first.
Willmott next asked him to speak about biopsychology, the study of how the brain functions. Martinez vehemently objected to the use of the prepared PowerPoint presentation that Dr. Samuels was about to deliver, as Martinez was entitled to review it in advance and was given no notice of it. After some discussion, Judge Stephens agreed to allow jurors to consider it, but ruled that she would not allow them to take a copy into deliberations with them. Throughout the trial the judge gave considerable leeway to the defense to pursue their strategy, and most legal pundits presumed it was to make absolutely sure she didn’t give the defense a solid basis for appeal. The fact that the death penalty was a possible outcome seemed to make the judge doubly careful that she not give Jodi an excuse to later claim she had received an unfair trial.
A colorful diagram of the human brain was flashed up on the screens, while Dr. Samuels pointed out the area where memories and emotions were created and described what effect stress could have on the brain’s ability to store memories.
“Do humans have any control over how their brains record memories?” Willmott asked.
“No,” was Dr. Samuels’s answer. To address Jodi’s contention that she had been in a “fog” after the murder, Samuels contended that a person fleeing a scene was operating on “automatic.” He maintained that while stress could render a person unable to control their emotions, it did not prevent him from fleeing a traumatic situation, hence Jodi’s ability to flee the house and drive herself into the desert. “In this ‘fog’ people can even drive cars. It’s entirely possible and actually highly likely that someone would not be able to recall anything about a situation. Or, if they do, it would be foggy or bits and pieces. But this is common, this is well known, and it’s not really arguable.” Martinez seemed to be itching to ask, Could they also clean up crime scenes, dispose of evidence, and execute cover-ups? But the prosecutor’s turn would come.
Dr. Samuels emphasized that a person suffering from “dissociative amnesia,” the term he used to describe Jodi’s state immediately after the killing, may only remember bits and pieces, and even experience a sense of detachment, similar to that of an out-of-body experience. “Perpetrators of horrible crimes can also develop post-traumatic stress disorder for having acted as the source of the crime,” he said, an observation that certainly didn’t help his cause.
Throughout his six days of testimony, Dr. Samuels likened Jodi’s alleged PTSD to that of police officers and soldiers, a comparison that enraged the public and did not sit well with at least one of the jurors, who would later ask if it wasn’t true that both police and soldiers kill as part of their job and duty.
When asked why Jodi had not told anyone what had happened, Dr. Samuels explained it was “a classic symptom of acute stress disorder.” He maintained that Jodi was in a state of “acute stress,” a precursor to PTSD, on the night she killed Travis, as evidenced by the excessive strength she exhibited in dragging his body to the shower and her inability to recall the most violent details of the killing.
“What does that tell you when someone the size of Miss Arias is lifting up someone the size of Mr. Alexander?” Willmott asked.
“It would tell me that she is in a flight or fight mode,” the expert replied. Dr. Samuels speculated that Jodi had lied to investigators as a way to cope with the trauma of killing Travis and that much of her behavior following the attack was associated with PTSD. In a description that made the Alexander family—listening feet away—livid, Dr. Samuels described Jodi as a “pacifist,” and theorized that she likely could not reconcile her behavior with her personal beliefs, which may have been why she created a story in which someone else killed Travis.
In respon
se to questions about Jodi’s journals, and the absence of any mention of abusive behavior on the part of Travis Alexander, Dr. Samuels said he was not surprised. “Some people go through life with a defense mechanism impeding their lives,” he said.
Dr. Samuels explained that Jodi’s heavy make-out sessions with Ryan Burns just hours after brutally killing Travis was “another way for her to cope with the horror.” Sending flowers to Travis’s grandmother may have been an expression of “genuine sorrow,” according to Dr. Samuels but it was also consistent with behavior of an “alternative reality.” He explained that amnesia can help protect a person who may also create an alternative reality to put distance between them and the horrific event in which they participated.
By the time it was his turn, Juan Martinez was more than ready to attack Dr. Samuels’s opinions, which Martinez believed were all based on his blind acceptance of Jodi’s lies. But before Martinez dismantled this acceptance, he first suggested that Dr. Samuels’s PTSD diagnosis was severely flawed, obscured by his affection for Jodi. Martinez noted that the psychologist had “gifted” Jodi the self-help book, Your Erroneous Zones, by Wayne W. Dwyer. It was Martinez’s position that Dr. Samuels had compromised his objectivity as an expert by crossing the line into therapy. “There is a code of ethics that prohibits you from providing gifts to the defendant,” Martinez barked. “Isn’t it true you provided the book to her because she was depressed?”
“For her low self-esteem,” replied Dr. Samuels, denying that the nine-dollar book he purchased for Jodi on Amazon.com was a gift. He said he had sent it to her because she was contemplating suicide, and he knew she could not get the book on her own. He vehemently denied giving Jodi “therapy,” explaining that he had informed her lawyers of her suicidal ideations. He also denied being in Jodi’s thrall, despite Jodi’s now established reputation for turning on the charm with men, as she clearly tried to do with Detective Flores in her interrogation tapes, where she tossed her hair and stretched seductively.
Going after Samuels’s methodology, Martinez also suggested that anything gleaned from the tests for PTSD was completely unreliable. He administered them to Jodi in January 2010 when she was still adhering to the two-intruder story. In other words, he was building his diagnosis on the framework of her outright lies. Dr. Samuels had concluded at the time that she witnessed the trauma—the murder of Travis—and suffered from PTSD as a result. In a stunning admission, Samuels was forced to acknowledge that, even though he later learned she had lied to him and that she committed the killing herself, he did not re-administer the tests. It was a jaw-dropping lapse that had people in the gallery looking at each other with raised eyebrows.
“All the answers here are based on a non-sexual assault by a stranger,” Martinez steamed. After a prolonged, heated back-and-forth, Dr. Samuels finally agreed that he had erred and should have repeated the test after Jodi changed her story.
Martinez ripped into Dr. Samuels about other lies from Jodi that he ignored or failed to include in his written report, mostly in the sexual arena. Jodi had told him that Travis was the only man she had ever had anal sex with, which was a lie; it had been established earlier in the trial that she’d had anal sex with Darryl Brewer. Martinez also pointed out that Jodi’s description to Dr. Samuels of being bound at both the wrists and the ankles in the hours before she killed Travis was not consistent with her testimony, where she had said only her wrists were loosely bound. It was also inconsistent with the nude photos taken the day of the murder, in which there was no evidence of rope on the bed.
Another inconsistency that Martinez raised was a detail that Jodi gave Dr. Samuels about the killing. She had told Dr. Samuels that Travis “was pulling at her sweater while chasing her into the closet.” On the stand, Jodi told the jury that once she ran into the closest, she slammed the door shut. Surely, she could not have done that and retrieve a gun from the top shelf if Travis was so close that he was pulling on her sweater. Finally, Jodi had told Dr. Samuels that there were many pictures of women’s breasts on Travis’s computer, which was yet another lie. Police found no such photos in their thorough search.
“So it’s not important to you that the defendant lied to you?” Martinez wanted to know.
“These inconsistencies did not affect my opinion,” Dr. Samuels responded.
“Generally speaking, if an individual lies to you about something that you consider insignificant, no harm no foul?”
“The presence or absence of breasts . . . I did not see the need to pursue it any further. I didn’t see it as relevant . . . it was my judgment call not to include it.”
Martinez railed into Dr. Samuels for failing to corroborate Jodi’s stories with the facts, after she had consistently demonstrated a pattern of lying. His home run was the doctor’s failure to retest Jodi after she changed the story to self-defense. Martinez also accused the doctor of upping Jodi’s score on her post-traumatic stress diagnostic test. After misplacing some test papers, the doctor rescored the test and gave Jodi a higher score.
“I scored it twice,” Samuels admitted.
“That’s a change, right?” Martinez drove home.
“That’s a change,” Samuels concurred, adding that with either score Jodi still met the criteria for PTSD. But the damage had been done—the witness had effectively been disarmed.
Even though many court observers thought Samuels had gotten cut to shreds, jurors could be seen stuffing their questions into the basket throughout his testimony, and it would take an entire court day to answer them. When he was finally done, Dr. Samuels had been on the stand longer than anyone except Jodi. He had made his first appearance on March 14, trial day thirty-one, and now it was March 25, the thirty-sixth day of the trial. It had been an exhausting stretch, and his relief at being dismissed was palpable.
Through it all, Jodi sat fiddling at the defense table. Jodi seemed to relish the experts; they were here for her, supporting her side of the story with technical terms and educated assumptions, while their presence validated her and stroked her ego. They were even willing to fall on the sword of Juan Martinez to do so. For a very limited amount of time, Jodi could fantasize that she was understood and was even winning. Dressed in a brown shirt beneath an ivory V-neck sweater, she appeared pleased to see the next defense witness, a domestic violence expert with a national reputation.
Alyce LaViolette was a psychotherapist who was in court to support Jodi’s claims of abuse. Until this trial, LaViolette had a great reputation as an advocate for abused women. Her lengthy and impressive résumé spanned twenty pages and included lists of her projects—both paid and volunteer—on behalf of victims of spousal abuse. One of her initiatives, Alternatives to Violence, was one of the first programs in the United States for men who were abusing their domestic partners. LaViolette had developed domestic violence training programs for the Departments of Children and Family Services in both Los Angeles and Orange County, California, had published numerous articles on the topic, and had received awards for her work on behalf of women. What’s unclear is whether she initially knew she was risking her reputation by taking the stand in support of the defendant in a case that had become increasingly emotionally charged as the testimony progressed.
Testifying at the State of Arizona v. Jodi Ann Arias trial would not be her first time in the witness box. She had occasionally served as an expert witness in both criminal and civil court. She had first been contacted by Jodi’s attorneys in September 2011, after Jodi had claimed she had killed Travis in self-defense, in a “justifiable murder.” Jodi’s attorneys had wanted LaViolette to establish that, at the hands of Travis, Jodi was an abused woman, and thus she believed her life was in imminent danger. The plan was to make it seem reasonable for Jodi to believe the words Travis allegedly spoke in the bathroom—“I’m gonna fucking kill you”—while supposedly lunging at her. However, it was unclear whether LaViolette truly understood the stakes at play in the trial. By putting herself in the position of defending a
habitual liar, she ran a risk—to herself professionally and to the cause she’d spent a lifetime supporting—and in the process she would soon be accused of betraying the millions of genuine victims of domestic violence.
LaViolette was not a psychologist, so she was not licensed to administer psychological tests. She reached her conclusion that Jodi was abused by analyzing the defendant’s journals, as well as a few of Travis’s. She had also examined some of their texts, emails, and IM exchanges and the statements Jodi had made to authorities. Finally, she and Jodi had spent more than forty-four hours in private conversation, and she would use those conversations as well.
LaViolette was going to run into a lot of the same problems that tripped up the witness before her, Richard Samuels. Critics say like Samuels, she, too, had bought hook, line, and sinker into the sex, lies, and audiotapes propagated as the truth by Jodi. Juan Martinez, aware of where she was going, was already chomping at the bit to grill her. Alyce took the stand on the afternoon of Day 36, March 25, looking confident in a bright blue blazer, her gray hair trimmed short. She may have later rued the day.
After being sworn in, the middle-aged professional took her place in the witness box. Soon she was giving the jury a tutorial in domestic violence using a chart called the “Continuum of Aggression and Abuse,” a tool she had developed that she used in her assessment of domestic violence. She broke down her continuum into five columns, each labeled with a type of domestic abuse, increasing in severity from left to right. They are: “Common Couple Argument,” “High Conflict,” “Abuse,” “Battering,” and “Terrorism.”
Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias Page 30
