The disparity of affection was disconcerting for Jodi. Over the course of their relationship, Jodi began to feel like she was Travis’s dirty secret.
* * *
After they officially became a couple, Jodi’s resolve to marry Travis strengthened.
It was beyond an infatuation; Jodi strongly believed Travis was “the one.” She told many people that she could not imagine marrying anyone else or for some other man to be the father of her future children.
“I began to fall in love with him,” Jodi recalled. “I felt pretty intense as far as being in love with him.”
Her adoration of Travis was a devouring, consuming sort of love. She loved and adored him with an almost selfish intensity. It was almost as if she wanted to inhale him—absorb his soul.
Jodi had altered her life for Travis and converted religions. In doing so, it seemed she believed there was an unspoken agreement that they would one day walk down the aisle.
While Travis liked her, he did not feel the same. He appeared to compartmentalize his relationship with Jodi as a completely separate aspect of his life. While his associates with Prepaid Legal all knew about Jodi, most of his LDS friends in Mesa knew nothing about her.
Jodi sensed something was wrong. When he introduced her to a new friend or acquaintance in Mesa, she noticed that no one seemed to know he had a girlfriend—something she found alarming. Travis was apparently keeping her away from his inner circle.
Jodi seemed jealous of anyone in Travis’s life. Anytime he mentioned the name of another female, she became quiet and her expression would darken. When she asked about the women, Travis maintained they were just friends and denied he was seeing anyone else.
“I can be flirtatious, but there’s nothing going on,” Travis told her repeatedly. “I’m not dating anyone else.”
Over the course of their relationship, however, Jodi’s jealously took a toll.
At the Prepaid Legal event in Oklahoma that March, Clancy Talbot was among the dozens of his friends from the company who were in attendance. On the night of the executive ball, Clancy had a little too much to drink, and at one point staggered over toward Travis and laid her head on his shoulder. To brace her, Travis grabbed her by the waist. At the sight of her boyfriend even touching another woman, Jodi fell apart.
“I just got this feeling inside like my stomach flip-flopped,” Jodi recalled. “I couldn’t believe he was doing that, especially in front of our friends. I felt like I wanted to cry, but I didn’t want anyone to see that.”
Jodi slipped away into the women’s bathroom. She locked the stall door, put her feet on the toilet seat, and wept for an hour.
The next day, Jodi followed Clancy into the bathroom.
“She cornered me in the bathroom, she was shaking and upset,” Clancy said. “She just kept saying the same thing over and over.”
Jodi explained that she was now with Travis.
“I am more upset with Travis than I am with you,” Jodi said, trembling. “But I wanted to let you know Travis and I are official now. We are together now.”
After several minutes, a friend of Clancy’s came into the bathroom and she was able to escape. Years later, Clancy would look back on the encounter.
“It was just so strange, so weird, so creepy,” Clancy recalled. “Jodi was so possessive. She didn’t want anyone anywhere near Travis.”
For the next few days, Travis and Jodi fought about the incident. But even after they made up, doubt and suspicions continued to plague her.
Jodi would later admit she was jealous in their relationship, but it was only because she believed she was being two-timed.
“There’s sort of a distinctive feeling that comes when you have that sneaky suspicion that somebody might be not so monogamous,” Jodi recalled. “I had a suspicion.”
* * *
By the spring of 2008, Jodi’s financial situation had worsened. Her savings had been depleted and she owed thousands on her credit cards.
In May, Jodi moved out of her house in Palm Desert, just months prior to the pending foreclosure. To try to get back on her feet financially, she resumed working as a waitress at the Ventana Inn and Spa in Big Sur. Because she could live and work at the resort for the season, Jodi was able to save money.
When she wasn’t working, Jodi spent much of her time in Mesa, where she often attended Prepaid Legal sales conferences and LDS gatherings with Travis’s friends. Jodi always seemed polite and pleasant, yet highly possessive. She would follow Travis from room to room. At social gatherings, if he were to speak with someone else, Jodi kept one eye on him, monitoring his every move.
Embedding herself into his life, Jodi attempted to form friendships with many close to Travis. Jodi used these new friendships to fish for information about Travis and his whereabouts.
“She intentionally tried to get as close as she could to anyone Travis was close to,” said Sky Hughes.
One Sunday after church Travis invited several friends, including Taylor Searle, back to his house to make cookies. When Taylor first saw Jodi strutting around Travis’s house like she lived there, he was taken aback.
“When I met Jodi, she kind of announced herself as his girlfriend,” Taylor said. “And that was a surprise to me at the time because I know he had interest in other girls.”
On another occasion when Jodi was in town, Travis’s neighbor, Dave Prusha, attended a Prepaid Legal briefing. While he was there, Dave had a casual conversation with Jodi, where she brought up her relationship with Travis.
She made it clear to Dave—a practical stranger—that she wanted to marry Travis. Dave felt pity for Jodi. He knew Travis did not feel the same and wasn’t ready for marriage. Later, Dave spoke privately with his neighbor. Travis confided in him that he knew he had to break up with Jodi.
“I know I need to end it,” Travis said. “It is unfair to continue the relationship with Jodi when I don’t feel the same.”
CHAPTER 14
While Travis had always been content being single, as he approached thirty, his perspective began to change. While he was accomplished in every other aspect of his life, a wife and family had eluded him.
As he did some soul searching, a quote from David O. McKay, the ninth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, troubled him: “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.”
Travis realized he was lonely. Although he had been dating Jodi for five months, he didn’t see a future with her. Travis recognized he didn’t have a true partner in life, something he yearned for.
“I have become renowned for being single, unfortunately,” Travis wrote on his blog in 2008, months after his birthday. “I used to imagine myself as some dangerously handsome tycoon in Time magazine, as one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. I had a bit of a swagger because of it—a smirk on my face, a pep in my step. Then I turned thirty.”
As a thirty-year-old unmarried Mormon, Travis would be in the minority, especially among his friends. As a core LDS teaching, the church encourages young adults to marry soon after returning from their mission. Most marry in their late teens and early twenties.
“Most of my peers have been married for years and have several children,” he wrote. “As you can imagine from friends and family alike, I am constantly getting grilled and lectured over my solitary status. I have countless scouts that, out of love and concern, are diligently looking underneath every rock and tree for a mate to get me hitched to.”
Travis wanted his future wife—his eternal companion—to be a moral Mormon woman who was spiritual, worthy, and pure. He decided he was finally ready to shift his focus toward finding a wife.
“I realized it was time to adjust my priorities and date with marriage in mind. Not to ask someone on a date because I planned on marrying them, but to date someone to look for the possibility of marriage with them,” he wrote on his blog. “This type of dating to me is like a very long job interview and can be exponentially more mentally taxing—d
esperately trying to find out if my date has an axe murderer pent up inside of her and knowing she is wondering the same thing about me.”
Beyond a legal marriage, Mormons believe in a divine union known as a celestial marriage, which lasts beyond the grave and through eternity. If a couple is married only by a civilly recognized authority, Mormons believe the marriage will end at death.
For a celestial marriage, also known as eternal marriage, to occur the couple must be sealed in the Mormon Temple. A temple sealing is considered one of the very highest ordinances that Mormons can receive. Not only do Mormons value a temple marriage as something highly desirable and extremely sacred, they also believe it is a prerequisite for the highest degree of being in the afterlife.
It’s possible Travis felt he and Jodi were just too different for such a marriage. Maybe he was turned off by her extreme jealously and obsessive behavior. Or, perhaps, the fact that she slept with him before marriage tarnished Jodi in his mind. Whatever the cause, he did not consider Jodi marriage material.
Travis decided it was time to end his relationship with Jodi.
* * *
While Travis was contemplating ending the relationship, Jodi began to have her own reservations. She believed her boyfriend was unfaithful.
“I had been getting my suspicions about things. He was treating me a little differently—a little more distant, a lot more flirty with other women, and it just made me uncomfortable,” Jodi said. “When I tried to talk to him about it, he blew up and got very defensive, even though I didn’t accuse him of anything. So it was kind of a red flag.”
Jodi tried to convince herself that Travis was not cheating, and that she was reading into things that were not there because of the past infidelity with her prior boyfriends. But she continued to express doubts.
In June 2007, Travis and Jodi were visiting friends in Utah. Travis went to his room to take a nap, leaving his phone in the living room on the couch, wedged between two cushions.
Quickly, Jodi snatched the phone, darted into the back room, and shut the door. Clicking around the phone, Jodi found Travis’s text messages and began to read them.
As she read the messages, Jodi began to tremble. She knew Travis had a lot of female friends, but he always maintained the relationships were innocent. On his phone, however, Jodi discovered more than just flirty messages. In many of the messages Travis discussed making plans with other women.
“Where do you want to meet,” one message read.
“Wherever would be best to make out,” Travis had replied.
Jodi’s stomach sank—Travis was cheating on her.
“I was devastated when I discovered that he wasn’t being faithful to me,” Jodi wrote in her journal.
For the next two weeks she kept the information to herself, not revealing what she had discovered on the phone. Travis and Jodi had a vacation scheduled in a couple of weeks and she decided to wait to expose Travis’s infidelity until after they returned.
But while Jodi tried to act like everything was normal, behind the facade she was brokenhearted.
On June 18, 2007, they left for a week-long vacation, beginning in New York, where they toured significant Mormon sites as well as checking destinations off on their list.
Among their first stops was Niagara Falls. While in New York, Travis and Jodi also traveled to see the Finger Lakes—a series of long, narrow lakes resembling fingers.
In addition, they also drove to the Sacred Grove, a forested area near the border of western New York State, across from the former home of Joseph Smith, the prophet founder of the Latter-day Saints movement. The Sacred Grove was the location where Joseph Smith had his first vision, which led him to the golden plates that he was later said to translate into The Book of Mormon.
After leaving New York they stopped in Cleveland, Ohio, where they toured the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a massive museum containing thousands of artifacts from the history of rock music.
On the second part of their trip, Travis and Jodi flew into Huntington Beach, California, for a free Prepaid Legal trip Jodi had won through the company. They spent five days relaxing on the beach and soaking up the sun at the resort’s pool.
Throughout the entire trip, Jodi was cold and aloof. Cursed with the knowledge that her boyfriend had been cheating, Jodi spent most of the vacation sulking.
“What’s wrong?” Travis asked repeatedly.
“Nothing,” Jodi answered, trying her best to seem normal.
At one point, while Travis was sleeping, he received a text message from another woman. Jodi grabbed his phone and read his messages once again.
“Sorry I didn’t get back to your last text message,” the other woman wrote. “What time is it there?”
Jodi scrolled through the phone to read the message Travis had last sent, which read: “I really miss you…”
Because the woman had asked about the time in Huntington Beach, Jodi sent a reply.
“Cuddle time with Jodi,” she wrote. “Good night.”
“Then I deleted the message, went to sleep, and never mentioned it to him,” Jodi later told a friend.
In Huntington Beach, Jodi also spoke with her friend Leslie Udy. Jodi first met Leslie in September 2006, at the same Prepaid Legal convention where she had met Travis. They struck up a conversation and discovered they had a mutual love of photography and other things in common.
With blond hair with brown streaks and bangs that framed her face, Leslie was a few years older than Jodi. Despite the fact that Leslie lived in Utah, she and Jodi became good friends. To Leslie, Jodi confided her suspicions about Travis.
“She mentioned that she was concerned he might be seeing someone else, some other girls,” Leslie said in court. “I asked her why she would think that? She said she had seen some texts on his phone.”
On their last day together, Travis and Jodi stopped by Anaheim, where they spent the day at Disneyland and Disneyland California Adventure.
For a few fleeting moments on the trip, Jodi felt connected to Travis, which was even more painful because it reminded her of how much she truly loved him.
“I knew the relationship couldn’t continue like that,” Jodi recalled. “I was kind of waiting for the right moment to tell him.”
While Jodi planned to end the relationship at the end of the trip, she couldn’t quite bring herself to look in Travis’s eyes and tell him they were over. Instead, she confronted him days later by phone.
“There’s some things I want to talk to you about,” she told Travis.
Jodi confessed about seeing the messages from other women. Travis apologized, but to Jodi he seemed only mildly remorseful. He did not grovel for the transgression.
“I don’t think either of us is ready to be in this kind of relationship,” Jodi told Travis.
The trust was broken. They both seemed to agree it was better that they were no longer a couple.
“I don’t think I could trust him fully to be monogamous,” Jodi later told detectives. “And I didn’t think he thought he could trust me to not get into his phone again.”
On June 29, 2007—about a month before his thirtieth birthday—Travis and Jodi officially ended their relationship.
While Jodi was crushed, Travis seemed relieved. He was ready to start the next chapter of his life and was optimistic about finding true love.
“This life is a beautiful life. A life that is all the more beautiful when we find someone of like mind, heart and spirit to share it with,” he wrote on his blog. “Genesis is right, ‘It is not good that man should be alone.’ Certainly the synergy, that comes from a marriage of two equally yoked people yields limitless potential.”
* * *
Travis did not mourn the loss of Jodi. In early July 2007, days after their breakup, Travis began dating a girl from the singles ward. Her name was Lisa Andrews.
Lisa was wholesome and spiritual—the exact type of girl Travis was looking for in an eternal companion. An Arizona State University st
udent, she was intelligent and funny, with a bubbly personality. On her blog, she described herself as a person who enjoys “a healthy conversation, with maybe a hint of debate,” and someone with a “love for all things Disney, Kevin Costner, and Karaoke.”
Travis had first seen Lisa during the summer of 2006, one year prior. Eleven years younger than Travis, Lisa was just nineteen at the time.
It was a Sunday and Travis was at church. Services had just ended and the congregants were trickling out of the building. As usual, Travis was going room to room collecting the trash.
He entered the Relief Society Room, which is designed and tailored for female congregants to gather for class. Decorated with tablecloths, flowers, and curtains, the room was the most feminine in the meeting house.
Chatting with a group of friends was a beautiful girl with long blond hair, soft blue eyes, a sun-kissed tan, and a bright smile. Travis stopped for a moment, watching her. Lisa turned and left the building, never noticing Travis.
“I don’t remember this encounter, but he swore it was the first,” Lisa Andrews recalled. “To be honest, I don’t remember ever seeing or talking to him until months later.”
That fall the ward hosted a campout. On the drive to the campground, Travis rode in the same car as Lisa and five others, including Lisa’s boyfriend at the time, Steve Bell, and her sister, Allyson.
During the drive, Lisa learned much about Travis, including the fact that he loved to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and hated body hair. Travis referred to himself as a “man-scaper,” and thought hygiene was important.
“I brought extra toothbrushes,” Travis told Lisa. “I know at least one person will forget.”
Later, he mentioned that only one person admitted to forgetting their toothbrush, but he knew there were others.
“During all that, he still found the time to make fun of me and Steve, saying that we were too mushy, and why didn’t we just start making out already,” Lisa recalled. “I could not believe the nerve of this guy.”
After the campout, Travis mercilessly teased Lisa about the way she snorted when she laughed. Perhaps Lisa didn’t consider at the time that Travis was teasing her the way a schoolboy does when he has a crush on a girl. To her he was just “the old guy in the ward” who would show up at church events dressed in his flashy suits.
Picture Perfect: The Jodi Arias Story: A Beautiful Photographer, Her Mormon Lover, and a Brutal Murder Page 11
