When Travis’s family received the letter, they were disgusted. By then they had learned of the evidence against her and were convinced the right person would stand trial for the murder.
Slowly, Jodi began to adjust to life behind bars.
When she was first transferred to Estrella Jail in Phoenix, Jodi was locked up with another inmate named Donavan Bering. With a ruddy complexion, Donavan was an obese, middle-aged woman with short graying hair and glasses.
Donavan was being held on charges of accessory to arson. In May 2008, she helped her friend burn down a dental office in Sun City West in order to collect the insurance money. They had doused the office with gasoline and set it ablaze using matches. Investigators immediately suspected arson, and four months later Donavan and her friend were arrested.
In jail, Donavan took Jodi under her wing and provided her protection. They passed their days reading books and playing cards.
Meanwhile, as the facts of the case were uncovered, the media gravitated to the scandalous “fatal attraction” murder. And Jodi Arias suddenly became a very popular inmate.
CHAPTER 32
Jodi Arias gently patted her nose with cosmetic powder and dabbed a bit of gloss on her lips.
“Sorry,” she said. “Don’t roll the tape yet.”
Jodi was surrounded by television cameras inside an interview room at the Estrella Jail. She was dressed in the shapeless black-and-white striped prison garb, with a pink ID tag around her wrist. She sat poised, her legs crossed at her ankles, as she checked her makeup.
Behind bars, just days after being extradited to Phoenix, Jodi was holding a press conference. Television crews from every local station, and several print reporters, gathered to speak to her about the heinous charges. As she primped for her debut, Jodi appeared to relish the attention.
“There have been a lot of people that have been speaking out and saying things, you know, on their side. This isn’t a two-sided story. This is a multifaceted story,” Jodi said, her tone flat. “There are many sides to this story. And I just don’t feel like mine has been represented.”
As she spoke about her relationship with Travis, Jodi softly smiled. “He was the first person to share the gospel with me and give me a copy of The Book of Mormon. And he challenged me to read it and I did.”
Jodi described her adoration of Travis. “I cared very much for him.”
“Were you in love with Travis?” a reporter asked.
“I think that being in love and loving someone are two different things,” Jodi said. “And there was a point in time where we were in love but it was short lived.”
“Why did you guys break up?” another reporter asked.
“Umm.” Jodi glanced at the floor. “There was sort of a breach of trust in our relationship.”
“On your part or his part?” asked a reporter.
“Both.”
“And you guys couldn’t move past it?”
“Um, no,” Jodi said with a wry grin. “We really couldn’t move past it.”
Jodi openly spoke about her sexual relationship with Travis and how it continued after they broke up. “We both kind of knew that what we were doing wasn’t for the best. We needed to correct our behavior for spiritual reasons.”
Jodi said she knew their sexual relationship was considered a sin. Throughout their relationship it was a closely guarded secret. “As much as Travis and I told ourselves and everyone that we were just friends at the time, I think that our behavior was not as innocent as we tried to make it.”
A reporter asked about allegations that Jodi snooped through Travis’s phone. “But were you obsessed with texts? Those are the allegations.”
“No. No, not at all,” Jodi said.
Travis was the one who was obsessive when it came to text messages, according to Jodi. He had a strong, persuasive personality and she said she went to his house when summoned. “He wouldn’t allow me to not answer a text message. If I didn’t respond, he would keep calling and calling until I did. And so to me that was an obsessive behavior on his part. It was just—I took it as a compliment. He wanted to talk to me.”
Reporters also asked about allegations that Jodi was obsessed with Travis.
“He admitted a lot—he got a lot of grief from his friends about the amount of time that we spent together,” Jodi said.
“Did they not like it?”
“I don’t know that it was so much that. I think they were more concerned with his future prospects for marriage.”
Most important, Jodi addressed the charges against her.
“I have to ask you this. Did you kill Travis Alexander?” asked a reporter.
“Absolutely not.” She shook her head. “No. I had no part in it.”
“So you had nothing to do with Travis Alexander’s death?” another asked.
“Nothing to do with it,” Jodi said adamantly. “I didn’t commit a murder. I didn’t hurt Travis. I would never hurt Travis. I would never harm physically. I may have hurt him emotionally and I’ll always regret that.”
When she left his Mesa home, Travis was alive, according to Jodi. She declined to address the state of his well-being. Concerning the forensics Jodi said, “There’s a good reason for all of that, but it will be saved for the courtroom.”
She did, however, admit the evidence was overwhelming. “I need to be honest. There’s a lot of evidence and it’s very compelling. None of it proves that I committed a murder, none of it.”
Jodi said that at times, sitting in jail, she had felt helpless, but her faith in the Lord left her with a deep sense of peace.
“I would be shaking in my boots right now if I had to answer to God for such a heinous crime,” she said, her tone flat. “But I’m very grateful that this is one thing I will never have to answer to. This is not one of those things that will be brought up. I’ve done many things that are shameful, but this is not one of them.”
Over the subsequent weeks, Jodi granted numerous interview requests. In most murder cases, the accused rarely speaks to the media because their statements could later be used against them in court. Against the recommendation of her public defenders, however, Jodi spoke to any reporter who visited her.
At first, she never mentioned the story she told Flores about the two intruders. Instead, she seemed more interested in exposing Travis as a sinner. Many of her statements focused on their sexual relationship.
Then in September, Jodi was visited by a producer from the tabloid news program Inside Edition. She granted the request and sat down in front of the camera. With national exposure, Jodi now publicly revealed her story of the two intruders.
“What really happened in there?” the reporter asked.
“Two people took Travis’s life—two monsters,” she said.
Jodi claimed she didn’t know who they were and said she couldn’t pick them out of a police lineup.
“You did not stab him twenty-seven times,” the reporter asked, “or slit his throat from ear to ear?”
“That’s heinous.” She shook her head in disgust. “I can’t imagine slitting someone’s throat.”
The interview ended with Jodi addressing the charges and her unwavering confidence she would be vindicated.
“No jury is going to convict me,” she said. “Because I’m innocent. And you can mark my words on that one. No jury will convict me.”
* * *
In her most high-profile interview, in the fall of 2008, Jodi spoke with reporters from the CBS crime show 48 Hours Mystery. By then she had been locked away for more than a month, which seemed to have an effect on her.
“I’ve been sitting a lot in my cell thinking, what a waste. You know, I did have my whole future ahead of me,” Jodi said. “I had everything to lose and nothing to gain if I were to kill Travis.”
On the episode, Jodi went into further detail about the mysterious intruders, embellishing the story she told Flores. In this version, the male intruder put the gun to her head and squeezed the trigge
r, but nothing happened. The gun had jammed or misfired. Jodi grabbed her purse and ran out the front door.
“It was the scariest experience of my life. It just was so unreal; it was like a movie unfolding—a horrible movie. I could think only, if there was a way that I could get to Travis and get us both out of there, but it just seemed impossible,” Jodi said. “I ran down the stairs, and out of there. And I left him there. I ran out the front door and I got in my car. I drove forever and ever until I was in the middle of the desert. The rest of it is a blur.”
CHAPTER 33
On Halloween 2008, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office filed a notice of intent to seek the death penalty against Jodi Arias.
In seeking to execute Jodi, prosecutors concluded the first-degree murder was committed in an “especially cruel, heinous or depraved manner.” It wasn’t just the brutal manner in which Travis was killed. Her behavior following the slaying had been so cold, had shown such lack of empathy, that she was classified in a rare group reserved for only the most inhumane of murderers.
Even for a veteran prosecutor like Juan Martinez, it would likely be a challenge to convince a jury to sentence a pretty young woman to death. But considering the vast amount of evidence against her, Martinez felt the punishment was warranted.
Jodi’s case was assigned to Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sherry K. Stephens, a shrewd former prosecutor. The trial was originally scheduled for February 2010. Over the next five years, however, it would be delayed numerous times.
A potential death sentence somewhat divided Travis’s friends. While some objected to it on principle, others believed Jodi Arias deserved no less than death for her crime.
As for Travis’s family, his siblings believed Jodi was pure evil. They wanted her to die for murdering their beloved brother in cold blood.
“I hope to get to watch her die someday after she’s on death row,” said Travis’s sister Tanisha Sorenson in a television interview. “Even if it’s in twenty years from now, the death penalty is what she deserves.”
In jail, Jodi seemed undisturbed by a possible death sentence. In interviews she actually said she would prefer execution.
“If a conviction happens, I know I won’t be the first person to be wrongly convicted and possibly wrongly sentenced to either life in prison or the death penalty,” Jodi said during her interview with 48 Hours Mystery. “Personally, if I had my choice I would take the death penalty, because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison.”
Later, Jodi’s own words would come back to haunt her.
* * *
As the seasons passed, broken hearts slowly began to heal.
For nine months, the house on East Queensborough Avenue sat vacant. The lights were off, the shutters closed tight.
Travis’s family considered selling it. But by then property values had plummeted. Travis owed $359,373 on the house, but it was worth less than $290,000. They let the house slip into foreclosure. In February 2009, it was sold at auction and the new owners moved in.
Travis’s beloved dog, Napoleon, was willed to Travis’s best friend, Deanna Reid. In California, she gave the dog the kind of life that Travis would have if he had lived.
Meanwhile, Mesa homicide detectives continued to build a case against Jodi, focusing primarily on information recovered from the electronics seized during the searches. Travis and Jodi’s phones and computers contained hundreds of photographs, text messages, and e-mails that needed to be examined.
During the year and a half they had known each other, Travis and Jodi had exchanged over 82,000 e-mails and text messages. By combing through the files, detectives attempted to piece together the complicated nature of their relationship. While in the very beginning, Travis had been loving toward Jodi, by the end his words were filled with hurt and anger.
By the time of his murder, something had divided Travis and Jodi.
A deep resentment, born of jealousy and pain, seemed to consume Jodi. Love turned to hate. Her obsession grew deadly.
* * *
By 2009 Jodi’s press tour came to an end. At the insistence of her attorneys, she stopped granting media interviews and eventually the news coverage became less frequent.
Over the next few months, Jodi made use of her time in jail—getting her GED and learning Sign Language. She passed her days drawing, mainly with colored pencils she purchased from the jail commissary and cardboard from the back of a yellow legal pad of paper.
Behind bars, she was regularly visited by Mormon missionaries and even a bishop. While maintaining her innocence for the murder, Jodi sought redemption for her sexual encounters with Travis.
Periodically, a few of Travis’s friends came for jailhouse visits, primarily in desperate attempts to make sense of the unexplainable. Jodi also maintained regular correspondence with many of the people she had met through Travis—penning dozens of letters.
In September 2008, she had written one of the executives from Prepaid Legal concerning her case.
“I am writing this letter in regards to Travis Alexander, whose life was taken last June. He was a good friend of mine. I am also, at present, in custody as I am being charged with his murder,” Jodi wrote. “I am not writing this solely to plead my own innocence. That goes without saying—as Travis meant the world to me and I would never harm him.”
Jodi explained she was aware of the upcoming Prepaid Legal conference in Las Vegas where Travis’s memory would be honored. She insisted that it be made clear at the event that she was innocent until proven guilty. In closing, she made a plea.
“It is with a spirit of humility that I would ask that if I am in any way referenced during Travis’s memorial at the team breakout, that my implied innocence is taken into account.”
Months later, in March 2009, Jodi wrote a four-page letter to her former love interest Ryan Burns.
“I know you probably think I am a total psychopath and frankly, that is among the lighter things I’ve been labeled in the preceding months,” she wrote.
Jodi explained that, while in jail, she had come to accept that “which seems beyond comprehension,” and had come to “grips with what seems so impossible to accept.”
“Yet, accept it I have mostly,” she wrote. “I still indulge in a little resistance on occasion, a bit of grinding my heels into the ground.”
In mentioning Travis, she maintained she was innocent of the murder.
“Ryan, you were never in danger with me. I hope you truly know that somewhere within, although what others think has gradually become less and less important to me,” she wrote. “The only danger Travis was ever in because of me was ‘spiritual danger’ and of that we were both guilty of endangering each other.”
She finished by thanking him for the ways he had enriched her life.
“It is no longer important to me that you believe me,” she wrote. “You will know for yourself one day.”
* * *
In 2009, Donavan Bering pled guilty and was released from jail, after being sentenced to five years of probation. But her friendship with Jodi continued, as they spoke periodically by phone and met for regular jailhouse visits.
Through it all Jodi’s family would stand by her. But because they were out of state, Donavan asked her friend, Ann Campbell, to visit Jodi in jail as well.
Among Jodi’s most ardent supporters was her ex-boyfriend Matt McCartney. In their relationship, Matt had always been chivalrous. Visiting her in jail, he vowed to do anything possible to save her.
As often is the case with high-profile murders—especially involving a beautiful female—Jodi attracted a lot of attention. Intrigued by Jodi’s many media appearances, dozens of people reached out to her—sending postcards and making regular visits.
Many offered their support and claimed to believe in Jodi’s innocence. She wrote each of her followers, forming several pen pal relationships.
One of her regular visitors was a man named Bryan Carr. Husky, with a shaved head, Bryan reached
out to Jodi after discovering they had mutual friends on Facebook. He visited her regularly and they became friends.
Eventually, she would attract a loyal network of defenders who—although they never met her—were somehow captivated by Jodi Arias.
CHAPTER 34
Even in the dead of night, the jail was never silent. The omnipresent moans and cries of other inmates continuously echoed off the cement walls.
Jodi, who was once a sound sleeper, became easily stirred awake. She spent many sleepless nights lying in her bunk, staring into the darkness.
Memories of Travis haunted her. During the day she would be reading a book or eating a meal when suddenly Travis consumed her thoughts. As much as she tried, she couldn’t erase him from her mind.
In 2009, Jodi began relating stories of these “intrusive thoughts” to a forensic psychologist who was hired by her defense to evaluate her.
Heavyset and bald, with a ring of thinning gray hair, Dr. Richard Samuels had worked for over thirty years as a psychologist, before specializing in forensic evaluations, examining criminals—primarily sexually violent perpetrators.
Over the next few years, Samuels would meet with Jodi more than a dozen times. In the beginning, Jodi was despondent and appeared to be suicidal. At various times throughout her incarceration, she would be medicated with tranquilizers and antidepressants. Because he was concerned about her mental health, Samuels later sent her a self-help book on self-esteem and depression.
During their first few visits, when Samuels inquired about the murder, Jodi stuck to the story of the two intruders. While the doctor was skeptical, he didn’t question her claims. Instead, to conduct his evaluation, he administered tests to determine if she was suffering from any mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder.
Months passed and Jodi remained steadfast—she had done nothing to harm Travis. Then in the spring of 2010, she had an abrupt reversal.
Picture Perfect: The Jodi Arias Story: A Beautiful Photographer, Her Mormon Lover, and a Brutal Murder Page 27
