“He was in hell because Lisa wouldn’t talk to him,” Taylor Searle recalled. “Through all this, Jodi was just driving him crazy. She was a thorn in his side.”
From Lisa’s perspective, she wasn’t bitter or angry with Travis. In fact, she still loved him. She felt she needed to create distance so that they both could heal.
“I knew we couldn’t remain close after the final breakup or else I would end up back with him,” Lisa recalled. “We didn’t speak for months.”
On March 31, Travis and Lisa were both at the same house for Family Home Evening. Just seeing her, he caught himself welling up in tears. Later that night, he sent Taylor a text message.
“Dude, I’ve been missing Lisa lately,” he wrote. “It’s getting to me.”
“How’s ‘Project Mimi’ going?” Taylor asked.
“It’s not,” Travis wrote. “She has showed zero interest lately. I thought no action would be the best action.”
Travis wondered if the fact that he hadn’t been as occupied as usual allowed his mind to drift back toward Lisa.
“So what do you want?” Taylor asked. “Do you want Lisa?”
“I don’t know. I know that I miss Lisa. I’m not sure what I want other than to not be lonely,” Travis wrote. “The past couple weeks loneliness has gotten me. It’s very unusual for me.”
On April 6, Travis tried contacting Lisa, sending her a text message. She did not respond.
* * *
Throughout the spring, Travis and Mimi continued to talk.
“I would hear from him almost every day by text, e-mail or phone,” Mimi said. “I knew he liked me a little more than I liked him.”
When she started a film and book club, Travis offered his loft as a meeting place.
That coming summer, Travis was invited to be part of an upcoming Prepaid Legal trip to Cancún. The company was paying to send its top four hundred leaders to Mexico, and both Travis and Chris Hughes were on the list.
Travis had originally invited Jodi to accompany him on the trip, according to several of his friends in Prepaid Legal. At one point the trip’s organizer even had Jodi Arias’s name recorded as Travis’s Cancún companion. But after Travis started dating Mimi, he decided he wanted to bring her as his guest, although he was unsure if they had progressed to the point in their relationship where an out-of-town getaway would be appropriate. He asked Taylor’s advice.
“I’m trying to figure out if I should ask her to go to Cancún,” Travis said. “It’s in two months but I have to put a name on the ticket pretty soon. So the timing is risky.”
“That’s pretty heavy,” Taylor responded. “A bit risky.”
Travis decided to “play it cool,” and see how the next few weeks went with their relationship.
* * *
In April 2008, Jodi was preparing to leave Mesa. She rented a U-Haul truck, loaded Travis’s old BMW on the back of a dolly, and drove away.
Glancing in the rearview mirror, she saw white smoke billowing up from the BMW. She pulled the truck over to the side of the road. Later, she learned she had left the car in “drive,” causing extensive damage.
“There was black oil and white smoke all over the place,” Jodi said. “It was completely ruined.”
The car was towed to a Mesa auto shop. For the next few weeks Travis and Jodi worked with their respective Prepaid Legal attorneys to figure out who would be responsible for the damage.
Jodi later said that Travis was understanding about the incident, and she agreed to pay for the damage.
“I trashed his car and he took it so well,” Jodi later told detectives. “We were trying to figure it out through our lawyers. That was a debt I promised to pay. He never had any doubt I would pay him back.”
In early April, Jodi spent her last week in Mesa at Travis’s house, sleeping in his bed, having sex.
That week, Travis and Jodi continued to argue. At one point, she got in the truck to leave, but came back and stayed for two more days.
Their final fight that week was ugly. In anger, Jodi stormed out of the house. Travis followed her out on the porch, yelling.
“He went over to the front porch and he turned around and flipped me the double bird and then walked in the house and shut the door, so I just drove away crying,” Jodi said. “It hurt my feelings. I didn’t want to leave things like that.”
After the incident, Travis told his neighbor Dave Prusha about Jodi’s foolish error with his BMW. He said it was further confirmation that Jodi was nothing but trouble.
“You won’t be seeing her around anymore,” Travis told Dave.
When Jodi left Mesa, Travis seemed relieved. He thought he could finally move forward with his life and get back on the right spiritual path. His entire mood seemed to lighten.
“When she moved back to California, he was rejoicing, just jumping for joy,” Taylor recalled. “He was like, ‘I feel like I have the biggest burden lifted off my back and I can live my life again.’”
With Jodi a thousand miles away in Yreka, Travis’s friends thought he was done with her for good. But as it would turn out, the story of Travis and Jodi was far from over.
CHAPTER 17
More than a decade had passed since she dropped out of high school and moved out of her parents’ house, and Jodi Arias had little to show for her life.
In 1998, she was broke, working as a waitress, drifting along with a directionless future. Now twenty-seven, she was back in Yreka, no closer to her goal of becoming a wife and mother.
Because she didn’t get along well with her parents, she stayed in the cramped spare bedroom of her grandparents’ house, which was filled with boxes containing her meager belongings. Soon after moving, Jodi found work as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant called Casa Ramos, and later at a diner, the Purple Plum. She also furthered her fledgling photography business, booking a few wedding gigs.
Living so far away from Travis, Jodi felt both relief and despair.
“I started feeling after I moved to Yreka like this cloud was lifting off of me,” Jodi said. “I was still depressed, but I felt better than I did in Mesa.”
Despite everything that had happened between them, Jodi and Travis continued to communicate through text messages, e-mails, phone calls, and instant message chats. And Jodi’s mood remained dependent on Travis. If they were getting along, she was upbeat and positive about the future. When they argued, her depression worsened. Still, she couldn’t imagine her life without Travis, couldn’t let him go.
“I still had feelings for him and I still wasn’t making the best choices for myself. I would still call him and I would still answer his calls when he called me,” she said. “We almost continued the same thing except from far away.”
* * *
On his unending quest of self-discovery, Travis often wrote down his thoughts. His writing was intuitive, introspective, and highly idealistic.
In addition to his book and journals, in April 2008, Travis started a blog. This wasn’t something he was too serious about. “I don’t care too badly if anyone reads this, I guess it is just more for me,” he wrote.
He called it Travis Alexander’s Being Better Blog, describing it as “just a bunch of random thoughts, excerpts from a book I am writing, or me being stupid.”
In the blog, he wrote about his life philosophy, religion, motivational tools, and his quest to find an eternal companion. His first post, dated April 14, 2008, concerned the importance of living a purposeful life.
“We only live once; we don’t get another shot if we screw it up. Why not live life to the fullest?” he wrote. “On our death beds, none of us will wish they watched more TV or read more tabloids or listened to foul music, and they certainly won’t wish that they blamed their lives on someone else a little more.”
* * *
In Yreka, Jodi paid close attention to Travis’s new online endeavor. Reading his blog, she posted complimentary comments.
“This is my favorite post,” she wrote on an entry about find
ing the meaning of life. “It’s loaded with inspiration, humorous sarcasm and fresh perspectives, love it!”
For Jodi, the blog seemed to be another way for her to stay connected to his life. Thirteen days after Travis started his blog, Jodi created her own blog. She called it Something to Think About, describing it as “random musings, observations and insights regarding everyday life and beyond.”
In it she never mentions Travis or any relationship. Instead, her writing seemed to closely mimic Travis’s own philosophical and introspective reflections. The similarities were eerie.
It appeared that she was trying to prove to Travis, through her writing, that she was as much of a visionary as he was.
Days after each of Travis’s entries, Jodi would post her own blog on the same topic. On April 14, in a religious post titled “Why We Are Here,” Travis wrote about accountability and making a difference in the world.
“It is my prayer that we live all the days of our lives,” he wrote. “That we will be brave enough to unplug from the matrix and let the greatness within us manifest to all the world.”
Fifteen days later, Jodi wrote an oddly comparable posting titled “Awakening,” even using the same terminology: “unplug from the matrix.”
“How you are defined by others has no relevance when you finally wake up and unplug from the matrix. Open your eyes and realize who you already are—a child of the Divine.”
In a posting about limitless potential, Travis quoted spiritual activist and author Marianne Williamson.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.”
Two weeks later Jodi quoted that exact same passage. Introducing the quote, she wrote: “The following is borrowed from Marianne Williamson’s book A Return To Love, and has made the rounds on the Internet since its initial publication over 16 years ago. It doesn’t just bear repeating, but it is in harmony with the theme of this post, and couldn’t be more well-written.”
On April 16, Travis wrote about the impact of the “law of attraction.”
“The more intensely we focus on the achievement of something the more ‘the law of attraction’ works in our favor,” he wrote.
Just eighteen days later, Jodi wrote her own posting about the law of attraction.
“About six months ago I stopped believing in the law of attraction or at least the accuracy therein. And do you know what I found out? I found out that even when you don’t believe in it, it still continues to work with perfect precision.”
In Jodi’s final post, she wrote about her deep yearning for internal gratification and fulfillment.
“I want to search it out in evergreen forests, fields of tall, golden grass, desert sands, moonlit nights, in the eyes of other children of God, in the eyes of every living creature. It is in all of these things, yet it is fleeting. It has the power and potential to move me to tears in a matter of seconds,” she wrote. “Yet somehow, I don’t believe that all of the wandering in the world will lead me to its attainment. Somehow, I know it’s right here inside of me.”
* * *
Meanwhile, Jodi also had a new man in her life.
In April 2008, she had attended another Prepaid Legal conference in Oklahoma City. At the conference she was briefly introduced to a man named Ryan Burns.
Brawny, with dark hair and a chiseled face, Ryan vaguely resembled Travis. Ryan lived in Utah, had a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and worked for Prepaid Legal under the management of Dave Hall.
Like Travis, Ryan was a rising star in the company. As an executive director, Ryan earned upward of $10,000 a month selling legal insurance.
By sheer coincidence, Ryan had been inspired to succeed by Travis Alexander. When Ryan first started selling Prepaid Legal in 2007, he initially struggled. After three months he had considered leaving the company. Then, he attended a Prepaid Legal seminar where Travis had been hired to speak.
“I was struggling, not doing so well. I was even thinking about quitting. And then at some point Travis Alexander was flown into town as a guest speaker,” Ryan later recalled. “I attended that training and I was inspired by him. It kind of changed my business around.”
Like Travis, Ryan was also a Mormon. Ryan, however, had not been active in the LDS community nor had he been to church for more than a year.
Ryan and Jodi’s conversation that first meeting was brief. Although they talked for a few minutes, he was instantly attracted to her.
In late April, at the encouragement of friends, Ryan called her.
“Hey, do you remember me?” Ryan asked.
That night they talked for about half an hour. The next day they spoke again. Over the next few weeks they talked three to five times a week, mostly around 10 P.M., when their days were done.
With Ryan, Jodi presented herself as a devoutly religious Mormon convert and a driven entrepreneur. Jodi told him about books she enjoyed, including Atlas Shrugged, Think and Grow Rich, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and The Greatest Salesman in the World, all of which were Travis’s favorite books.
Ryan saw Jodi as a beautiful woman and a driven young professional.
“When I initially met her she was a businesswoman at a national convention for entrepreneurs, so I thought that was an attractive trait,” Ryan testified. “We had a lot of the same interests. She was a really good conversationalist on the phone. We just had a lot in common.”
Jodi also spoke about going to church, reading the scriptures, and the importance of the gospel. When she learned Ryan hadn’t been to church in more than a year, she encouraged him to return.
“She would often tell me about her religious beliefs—The Book of Mormon, and how she felt,” Ryan said. “She was trying to bring me close to God.”
* * *
By late April 2008, Travis had gotten nowhere with Mimi. On Saturday, April 26, they had a date, but Mimi called at the last minute to cancel, saying she was sick.
As a gesture of affection, Travis went to the store and bought her an herbal remedy, juice, apple cider vinegar, and two Shel Silverstein books. He arranged it in a wicker basket and left it on Mimi’s doorstep. Afterward, he sent her a text message to look outside her front door.
Later, he told Taylor about the encounter in an online chat.
“I was gonna try to turn lemons into lemonade and just make a push. Take a risk,” Travis wrote to Taylor. “I was sick of getting put off. I was making my intentions obvious. I was dejected by the date falling apart and needed to gain some ground.”
Ten minutes after leaving the basket on her doorstep, he received a text from Mimi, “You shouldn’t have.”
“Why not?” Travis asked via text message.
“Thanks a ton, but don’t be so nice to me,” Mimi wrote.
“What’s wrong with being nice to you?” he replied.
Travis waited twenty minutes but got no reply. He sent another text.
“Listen I had no ulterior motives in doing the basket thing. I think when someone is sick, it helps to have stuff like this to make you better, just like chicken soup,” he wrote by text. “However it is no secret that I am interested in you. I have no idea if the feeling is mutual. You are a hard one to read. But I need to know if I am going to ask you out again, because I don’t want awkwardness when I ask if you want to go out. I don’t want you to feel obligated and I don’t want to waste either of our time. So I need to know if you are at all interested or curious, if you are, we will reschedule, if you are not, that’s totally cool.”
&n
bsp; All night Travis waited for a reply, which he never received.
The next morning he saw Mimi at church. She approached Travis and asked if he received her text. Travis told her he had not.
“Let’s chat later,” Mimi told him.
That evening they spoke on the phone. She told Travis she was “interested and curious,” but wasn’t sure as to what degree.
“I don’t know either but I know I want to take you out still if you want me to,” Travis told Mimi. “And time will tell for both of us.”
The uncertainty with Mimi set Travis off kilter. He told her he had a hard time being himself around her.
“You’d like me more if I could have more confidence but the environment makes that hard,” Travis told Mimi. “I think too much, but it’s because it’s hard to know what you are thinking.”
Mimi told him to stop overthinking the situation. When she was ready, she had no problem making the first move.
“Just relax. Don’t worry about it,” Mimi said. “Time will tell.”
After that discussion, Travis felt more secure about their future relationship. He decided to invite Mimi to Mexico.
“I thought what the hell, no guts no glory, and so I asked her a few days later,” Travis told Taylor.
On May 1, he called Mimi.
“Hey,” Travis said. “Do you want to go to Cancún with me?”
At first Mimi was reluctant, but Travis assured her that it would be innocent and that they would be staying with an LDS family in separate rooms. All expenses would be paid so she wouldn’t be obligated to Travis in any way.
Mimi giggled. “Yeah, sure.” She decided she would go.
Later, Travis called the trip’s organizer with Prepaid Legal. Because the tickets had not yet been purchased, he was able to change the name on the reservations from Jodi Arias to Marie Hall.
Travis was thrilled—he felt things were finally progressing in his relationship with Mimi.
“Mimi is going to Cancún with me. She told me today,” Travis told Taylor. “This is good for a lot of reasons.”
Travis was excited for Mimi to see him speak at a Prepaid Legal conference, where he was completely in his element. In that environment, Travis knew he would shine.
Picture Perfect: The Jodi Arias Story: A Beautiful Photographer, Her Mormon Lover, and a Brutal Murder Page 15
