Deanna clearly looked uncomfortable as she truthfully answered. “Yes, well into our relationship, after we moved to Arizona.”
Their sexual relationship lasted about a year. They ceased when they visited their respective bishops to confess and seek guidance. Nurmi ask Deanna a litany of embarrassing questions about Travis that he surely knew the answer to. But it was strategic—to emphasize once again what Travis had said about or to Jodi: “Did he ever use phrases with you like ‘you’re the ultimate slut in bed’?”
“No,” Reid answered.
“Did he ever talk to you about blowing enormous loads every time?” Nurmi had a text message from Travis to Jodi: “U put me on another planet. You are the ultimate slut in bed. No wonder I blow enormous loads every time.”
Deanna was becoming noticeably uncomfortable. “No,” she said.
Nurmi wasn’t done. “Did he ever ejaculate in your face?”
“No,” said Deanna.
“Did he ever call you a whore, a slut, a three-holed wonder?”
“No.”
“Did he ever tell you how he wanted to tie you to a tree, and quote, put it in your ass?”
“No.”
“Did he ever tell you the way you moan is like a twelve-year-old girl having her first orgasm?”
“No.”
“Did he ever tell you about wanting to cork the pot of a little girl?”
Deanna answered all in the negative.
Martinez jumped to the floor. His questions were not about sex, but abuse. “Did he ever call you names?” he asked Deanna with animated hands.
“No, he did not,” Deanna answered.
“Did he ever strike you or physically advance on you? Or inflict any physical violence on you?” Martinez concluded.
“No, never,” said Deanna. With that, Judge Stephens recessed court for the day.
CHAPTER 22
CLOSING ARGUMENTS
As hard as it was to believe, the closing arguments were finally at hand. Thousands of questions had been asked in fifty-four days of testimony. There had been twenty prosecution witnesses, eleven defense witnesses, nine rebuttal witnesses (although three had previously testified in the state’s case in chief), one surrebuttal witness, and two sur-surrebuttal witnesses (one was a recalled witness). The grand total: thirty-eight witnesses. More than six hundred exhibits had been presented. The jurors themselves had asked hundreds of questions, many exhibiting skepticism about the testimony of certain witnesses, primarily Jodi and her experts. However, no matter how seasoned the trial attorney or court watcher, it was impossible to predict what a jury would do. The verdict in the Casey Anthony trial had left the legal community befuddled and the public outraged. It appeared this panel sitting in judgment of Jodi Arias had adhered to the judge’s instruction to pay attention to the testimony and avoid all news about it outside the courtroom.
The jurors and the worldwide audience were saturated with testimony about sex and lies; abuse and lies; the Law of Chastity and lies; The Book of Mormon and lies; and the story of the murder itself. The spectacle had been five years in the making and had so far lasted four months, a little short of the five months Travis and Jodi had officially dated. As the trial was coming to a close, Maricopa County officials confirmed that the cost to the taxpayers of Jodi’s defense was approximately $1.6 million, a figure that was expected to rise.
It was widely known that Jodi could be executed for killing Travis. The prosecution made the decision to seek the death penalty within two months of Jodi’s extradition to Arizona in early September 2008. Jodi’s hope for acquittal was remote; her second-best shot, second-degree murder, had slim-to-none odds, while manslaughter also seemed a long shot. A conviction for premeditated first-degree murder was the prediction. If so, the trial would then move forward to the next phase, the aggravation phase. If the jury also unanimously concluded that an aggravating circumstance was proven, namely that the killing was especially cruel, then there would be a final phase to the trial where the jury would decide if Jodi lives or dies by lethal injection.
Given that the evidence of Jodi’s premeditation was overwhelming and that the defense had failed to drive holes in the state’s case, the focus shifted to speculation about whether there would be jurors who connected with Jodi and would at least spare her life. After all, they’d spent a lot of time with her face to face and, while their questions showed they didn’t buy her act, their familiarity with the defendant could make it harder to vote to kill her.
It was Juan Martinez’s job as prosecutor to make sure that, as the jury went into the deliberation room, they felt no such sympathy for a killer. That was the goal of his closing argument, and as always, he began with passion and graphic precision.
“This individual, the defendant, Jodi Ann Arias, killed Travis Alexander. And even after stabbing him over and over again, and even after slashing his throat from ear to ear, and then even after taking a gun and shooting him in the face, she will not let him rest in peace. But now instead of a gun, instead of a knife, she uses lies.”
The lies of Jodi Arias would be a theme of the closing argument, lest there was a juror left who might have been suckered by a Jodi “story” of abuse. “She uses these lies in court when she testified to stage the scene for you, just like she staged the scene for the police after she killed Mr. Alexander.”
Next, Martinez brought in Jodi’s crafty, almost cruel use of the media after the killing. “This woman, who would stage the scene, has even attempted to stage the scene through the use of the media. She has courted the media. She has gone on national television . . . has also attempted, or gone out in search of, the limelight. She has signed a manifesto, just in case she becomes famous. And to top it all off, she has indicated that she is innocent and that no jury will convict her, that none of you will convict her . . . Well, she is an individual, as you have seen, who has craved the limelight. So it seems that it is only fitting that . . . she now bask in a different kind of light, the light of truth.”
Martinez moved to the manipulative side of Jodi. “This is an individual who will stop at nothing, and will continue to be manipulative and will lie at every turn and at every occasion that she has.” Martinez used the examples of the gas cans and the gas receipts from Salt Lake City to illustrate his point. He reminded the jurors that Jodi’s story changed from having never been in Salt Lake City, to having never purchased gas in Salt Lake City, to admitting it was true only after being handed the three receipts with her name, “Jodi Arias,” on the printout from the Salt Lake City Tesoro two days after the murder. She was adept at adapting her lies.
Martinez noted that Jodi always cast herself in the role of victim. Whatever predicament she was in, it was always somebody else’s fault. She may have killed Travis, but it wasn’t her fault. “This individual that attempted to manipulate you believes based on what we’ve heard, that even though she may have engaged in actions, that she may have done certain things—none of it, absolutely none of it is her fault. Why could it possibly be her fault? If you look back in her history, which is the important part of it, involving her relationship with men, what do you see?” He summarized every significant relationship Jodi had been in, portraying her as a vine swinger, a stalker, and a self-pitying participant in them all. With Darryl Brewer, her longest lasting relationship, he sarcastically highlighted her as a victim of pathetically bad luck: “It’s not her fault because, well, Mr. Brewer doesn’t want to marry her. What’s a girl to do? It’s not her fault. She’s got to look for another guy, and it appears that he doesn’t want to have any kids, and she does. And so again, it’s not her fault. How could it possibly be her fault that somebody has free will? Absolutely not her fault, that’s what she tried to tell you.” But, he went on that, ever resourceful, Jodi started her hunt for a new man to manipulate. “To Travis Alexander’s misfortune, he was that boy.” (Well, Travis was almost thirty, but that was the word Martinez used.)
Martinez’s next focus was to put th
e sex and Mormonism in the proper context. “Can’t point the finger enough at Mr. Alexander, can’t point the finger enough at the fact that he’s a bad Mormon because he’s having sex with her? If he’s such a bad Mormon, then why stay with him? You’re the one that chose him. If he’s such a bad guy, why are you hanging out with him? And to compound things, well, she’s also Mormon, too. Why does she keep pointing the finger at him, when she is just as Mormon as he is? She converted in November of 2006.” After pointing out the absurdity of Jodi’s claim not to know the meaning of “chaste” he continued. “It is almost unconscionable for her to point the finger at Mr. Alexander when she’s in the same situation as he is. She has the same knowledge that he does. But again, she wants you to feel sympathy because, again, it’s not her fault.”
Stressing the misfortune of Travis meeting Jodi, Martinez said that at least in the beginning, when they resided in different states, Travis had had a chance to enjoy life before the “stalking” started. “Luckily for Mr. Alexander, I guess, in the beginning, this relationship was from a distance, and I say luckily because at least when she was in Palm Desert and he was in Mesa, Arizona . . . at least during that time, she couldn’t reach out and stab him, she couldn’t reach out and shoot him in the face. She couldn’t stalk him, couldn’t come over unannounced, she wasn’t living the ten minutes away. At least fortunately during that time, Mr. Alexander had some extra time to live.”
The stalking was as much a feature of the closing argument as the lying. “So what else does Jodi do? She does what every person who has caught their boyfriend, according to her, being unfaithful. What does she do? She moves close to him, moves from California to Arizona, specifically to Mesa, very close to him after they have broken up in the end of June of 2007. That’s what she does. Well, now this is when this stalking begins.”
Martinez elaborated by noting what she didn’t do in Mesa. “And what does she do when she comes out here? Well, rather than dating, rather than becoming involved in some sort of social scene in the Mormon Church or finding friends and that sort of thing, no. And something else, she begins to be more attentive, that’s the word.” He mentioned the August 2007 incident when Jodi peeped in Travis’s living room window one night and saw him kissing another woman on the couch. “And after she starts stalking him, or after this event of stalking, she doesn’t leave him alone. No, she comes over the next day, because she’s in the right. They’ve broken up and it’s okay if you’re broken up to come over and peep at your ex-boyfriend’s house and then in peeping, find him doing something and then wanting to get an explanation. What possible explanation could he ever have owed her at that point?”
As for the alleged violence against Jodi, Martinez emphasized, again, the complete lack of corroboration. “The reason there are no 911 calls is because it never happened. Everything in this case points to the fact that it did not happen. There are no medical reports; there are no friends. There is no one that can come in and say anything about this . . . There is absolutely nothing.” He ripped into Jodi’s assertion that the Law of Attraction prevented her from journaling negative events, reminding the jury that these “abuse” days were filled with entries of fond memories of kissing and snuggling. Even the abuse events she can’t keep straight, Martinez insisted with disdain, saying she was manipulating the evidence to fit the goal. He peppered his argument with examples of the numerous times Jodi was out of control: going to his house unannounced and totally unwelcomed at Christmas; hacking into his email account and reading his email; peeping through his window to watch him in his living room with another woman.
The prosecutor also took the opportunity to lay to rest Jodi’s most hideous lie, that Travis was a pedophile. “It is a hateful allegation with nothing to support it,” Martinez said about Arias’s claim that she’d caught Travis masturbating to a picture of little boy. “This is really the pinnacle, doesn’t get higher or worse than that.”
Moving on to the May 26, 2008, text/IM messages exchange filled with derogatory names about Jodi and used by the defense as corroboration of emotional abuse, Martinez explained, “And much is made by the defense that . . . he’s mean to her. Well, why wouldn’t he be mean to her? Yes, there are names that people are being called; that’s correct. There are not any nice names. But he is extremely afraid of her stalking behavior on May 26th when those names are called, and there is anger that is being exchanged back and forth and he sort of, capsulizes it by . . . using a term that’s not quite so sexual, but really capsulizes what it is going on here, and how the defendant attempts to manipulate the truth, when he says, ‘I am nothing more than a dildo with a heartbeat to you.’ That’s what he tells her, because that’s how he feels.”
Martinez continued arguing about this text exchange. “At that point when he’s writing that, he is extremely afraid of her because of her stalking behavior. And he does think she’s evil. And how prophetic, looking at the next words, how absolutely prophetic, no one can dispute that that is the truest . . . those are the truest words that are spoken in this case and they are spoken by Mr. Alexander, even though he is not here, through his writings. ‘You, Jodi Arias, are the worst thing that ever happened to me.’ Any doubt that that’s the truth? Do we need to look at the picture of his gashed throat? Do we need to look at the sort of frog-like state that she left him in, all crumpled up in that shower? Or do we need to look at his face, where she put that bullet in his right temple to know that what he says there is true? ‘You are the worst thing that ever happened to me.’ ”
Martinez could have stopped there, so powerful was the message, but he had yet to bring up the premeditation behind the murder. At this point, the prosecutor, totally on his A game, reminded the jury that the gun—allegedly stolen from Jodi’s grandparents’ home only two days after the big May 26 name-calling argument and days before the murder—had been the same caliber as the one used to shoot a bullet into Travis’s head. He elaborated on the phone call to Darryl around the time the gun was stolen, where Jodi told her former lover she was going to Mesa and needed to borrow his gas cans.
As part of her plan, Jodi even knew what color car she wanted or, rather, what color she didn’t want for her well-planned journey. It couldn’t be the red one she was initially offered. That would be too noticeable. The rental car was just for some local trips, according to what she told the car rental agent, even though when she returned it, the odometer showed she had driven 2,834 miles, the same distance as a cross-country trip from Los Angeles to New York. The rental agent also talked about her changed appearance, from blond when she rented the car on June 2 to brunette when she returned it on June 7, a day later than the agreement stated. Her hair color was another detail in the plan to mask her identity, as folks in Arizona only knew her as a platinum blonde. Martinez reminded the jury about Jodi’s cell phone being off during the very hours when pings would have otherwise placed her in Mesa at the crime scene and the removal and fiddling with the license plates on her rental car in an attempt to prevent identification.
Each one of these details pointed to planning and forethought, but taken as a whole, it formed a powerful, cohesive narrative of premeditation. “You know she’s premeditating the murder. She’s thinking about killing him. That’s all that’s required. The state doesn’t even need to prove a whole plan such as this. All the state needs to prove is that the defendant thought about the killing before she actually carried it out.” He added more to his point, just to eliminate doubt. “This is an extensive amount of planning, days, six days in advance, six to seven days in advance of her killing him, a week or so.” In other words, she began plotting a couple of days after Travis had told her to get out of his life for good in the May 26 text/IM breakup. The implication was that Jodi stewed for a day or so about his extremely negative reaction to whatever she had done and then got busy planning her revenge, which she executed on June 4.
The prosecutor continued to elaborate on Jodi’s long litany of lies, manipulations, and incon
sistencies, occasionally broken by a defense “Objection! Not in evidence!” until court was recessed for lunch at around 12:00 noon.
After lunch, Martinez picked up with Jodi’s lies, scoffing at a defense witness’s characterization of those lies as merely an “exaggeration.”
“Those statements to the police are important because they show how she can attempt to manipulate things and is able to say whatever fits the story at the time. So initially, when the police came to her, when Detective Flores came to her and asked her, well this is what we have, let’s talk about it, she denied everything. She kept saying, ‘Let me see the photographs. I want to see the photographs.’ The reason she wanted to see the photographs is because she wanted to conform her story to what the police knew, or what she thought the police knew.”
Addressing Jodi’s memory lapses, he trashed her performance on the witness stand. “She has an incredible memory, alright, when it comes to lying. And the witness’s manner while testifying, how it was that she testified . . . Well, you saw her at times attempt to cry, you saw her at times get angry, you saw her at other times just sullenly stand there, and you saw her at times, when the questions were getting difficult snap out, and try to, somehow, make the person that was asking the questions the villain, saying, ‘Well, you’re scrambling my brain. It’s not my fault.’ Again, it’s not my fault . . . That’s exactly what’s going on here. So, that it’s ‘not my fault that I keep lying here on the witness stand; it’s yours, because of the way you’re asking me the questions; the fact that you’re raising your voice, that’s whose fault it is.’ ”
Martinez emphasized that his role as prosecutor was to get to the truth, but Jodi wanted him to be the bad guy. “And that’s why I can snap at you from the witness stand; I can smirk at you from the witness stand, and look knowingly towards the jury, because it’s not her fault. It’s the person who’s asking the questions.” As Martinez emphatically pointed out, the only person with motive to lie was Jodi Arias herself.
Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias Page 32
