Then in June 2007, Jodi read texts on Travis’s cell and discovered he was cheating. After their trip to New York and Huntington Beach, she broke up with him by phone on June 29. But the next day they resumed speaking.
“I still loved him and I thought he was serious about changing, so I continued to be intimate with him,” she said.
Once Jodi had moved to Mesa, their sexual relationship grew increasingly kinky. Performing each of Travis’s sexual fantasies, they had sex on the hood of a car, in a bathtub, and while he was dressed in his designer suits.
“He had a list of fantasies he wanted to fulfill,” she said. “I enjoyed making him happy, so I was willing do the things he liked to do. And while he was doing these things, he was paying attention to me. So I got something out of them too in that regard.”
She dressed up as a school girl, wore lingerie while he took pictures, and used sex toys in their lovemaking. According to Jodi, they also incorporated candy in their oral sex play—using Tootsie Pops and Pop Rocks.
On one occasion, she acted out a fantasy where he came to her house and she gave him oral sex on her porch, without uttering a word. At the end of the encounter, he threw her a Toblerone chocolate bar.
After she moved to Mesa, Travis paid Jodi to clean his house. In court, Nurmi presented an e-mail with a photo of a woman dressed as a sexy French maid, wearing a short black skirt, a tiny apron, stockings, and stilettos. According to Nurmi, it was another way Travis demeaned Jodi sexually.
Throughout her testimony, Nurmi submitted several pornographic text messages from Travis to Jodi, lending a glimpse to the X-rated nature of their relationship.
“When it’s done, the intensity will make your body feel like you’ve been raped, but you will enjoy every moment of it.”
“You’ll rejoice in being a whore that’s sole purpose in life is to be mine to have animalistic sex with and to please me in any way I desire.”
Nurmi addressed Jodi’s feelings about these messages.
“Were you willing at this point in your life to have animalistic sex with him?” Nurmi asked.
“Probably.” Jodi glanced at the floor.
By then, Jodi knew Travis was dating other women, but could not stay away.
“Why not break up with this guy?” Nurmi said.
“Right now we’re focusing on the negative things. There are things he did that made me feel like a million dollars,” Jodi said. “He would say little things that were sentimental that had meaning between us. He would still allude to the fact that he wanted to marry me, even though I don’t think he was very serious.”
* * *
On her fourth day on the stand, Jodi made a disturbing claim—portraying Travis not only as a sexual deviant, but as a pedophile.
On January 21, 2008, Jodi said she unexpectedly entered Travis’s bedroom to retrieve a porcelain angel he had given her.
“I walked in and Travis was on the bed masturbating, and I got really embarrassed,” Jodi said. “He started grabbing at something on the bed.”
A picture went sailing off his bed and landed faceup near her feet. It was a photo of a young boy wearing nothing but briefs, according to Jodi.
“I was frozen for a minute,” she said. “I didn’t know how to react. It seemed like one of those dreams where something is really off.”
Nauseated, Jodi said she ran out of the house, drove home, and vomited. To collect her thoughts, she went to the visitors’ center of a Mormon temple. Eventually, she said she spoke to Travis about the incident.
“Did you come away with the understanding that Mr. Alexander had a sexual interest in children?” Nurmi asked.
“Yes,” she said. “He preferred sex with women. It made him feel more normal.”
Even though she said she now believed Travis to be a pedophile, she continued to have sex with him.
“He seemed very ashamed with himself. He didn’t want to be that way,” she said. “When he had sex with women he felt like a normal heterosexual man, and that’s what he wanted to be.”
Contradictory to her claims, however, no pornography of any kind was discovered on Travis’s computers.
* * *
On Jodi’s fifth day of testimony, a recording of a sexual conversation between Travis and Jodi, which she had recorded just weeks before the murder, was played for the jury.
The recording was extremely graphic as they reminisced about their sexual history. Travis began talking about sex acts he wanted to perform on Jodi in the future.
“I am going to tie you to a tree and put it in your ass all the way,” he said.
“Oh my gosh!” Jodi gasped. “That is so debasing! I like it.”
They discussed a previous encounter where she braided her hair and they had sex in a bathtub. Jodi complimented his sexual stamina and called their encounters “surreal.”
“You were amazing,” she said. “Seriously, you made me feel like a goddess.”
They both began to moan and breathe heavily. Travis said he was touching himself.
“I wish those were my hands giving you a hand job,” she whispered.
Travis spoke of a future fantasy to video record him and Jodi having sex.
“It could be like legitimate porn in every sense,” he said.
“You make me so horny,” she said.
In court Jodi buried her head as she seemed to climax on the tape.
“The way you moan, it sounds like you’re a twelve-year-old girl having her first orgasm. It’s so hot,” Travis said.
“You’re bad,” she squealed. “You make me feel so dirty.”
After the recording was concluded, Jodi told the jury that she taped the sex talk at Travis’s request. She also claimed she was only pretending to climax because “when I masturbate it requires both hands.”
“I was faking then,” she said. “I wanted him to be turned on. I wanted him to like it.”
* * *
Over the course of their relationship, Travis and Jodi argued constantly. On the stand, for the first time, Jodi claimed that on several occasions Travis grew violent.
“Whenever he got mad it was like being in an earthquake. You don’t know how long it is going last or how bad it was going to be until it stops,” she said. “I was afraid, not for my physical safety, but just intimidated by him.”
Over time, Jodi became fearful of Travis. When he grew angry, she admitted to shaking, not in fury, but in fear.
“When he got mad at me I would visibly shake,” she said. “I would feel some sort of trepidation or apprehension or unsettled.”
She said Travis pushed her down twice. During an argument, he once backhanded her; during another he grabbed her wrist. In April 2008, he choked her, nearly leaving her unconscious.
“Did you fear for your life that day?” Nurmi asked about the day she was choked.
“It happened so fast,” she said.
Her most serious injury occurred on January 21, 2008, when during an argument, he picked her up and body slammed her. Calling her a “bitch,” Travis kicked her and broke her left ring finger, Jodi told the jury.
“I screamed really loud,” she said. “He stormed out of the room and left.”
After calming down, he helped make a splint for her finger, using Popsicle sticks. On the stand, Jodi lifted her hand revealing a crooked left ring finger she claimed was a result of the incident. It was the same finger, and injury, she had once told Detective Flores occurred on the day of Travis’s murder.
* * *
Over the months she lived in Mesa, the back-and-forth relationship with Travis left Jodi despondent. At one point she considered suicide, she testified.
“Throughout the fall I had been feeling suicidal, and I thought that was the point I wanted to go through with it,” she said.
She asked to borrow a gun and eventually called a suicide hotline.
On the stand Nurmi asked why she continued to talk to Travis.
“He pawned his car off on me, so I st
ill had that connection,” she said.
On other occasions, however, Jodi had said he helped her out by giving her the vehicle, providing her the “easiest terms possible.”
Nurmi pressed. “Why were you so craving, or so desirous of positive attention from Mr. Alexander?”
Jodi said she was still in love. She knew she was making a mistake but at that point in her life Jodi was admittedly making bad decisions.
In April, Jodi moved back to Yreka, where she said the “fog lifted.”
But while she seemed to be moving forward, she continued to talk to Travis. Long distance, however, he became increasingly cruel.
Angry text messages and e-mails were presented in court.
Through April and May Travis called her a “pure whore,” “sociopath,” “liar,” and referred to all the “crazy shit” she had done.
“You are a liar to the core of who you are, it seems,” he wrote.
The broken BMW also appeared to have become contentious.
“You are a real piece of work. By the way, thanks for keeping your end of the contract by paying for the car you destroyed,” he wrote. “You are more and more like your mom every day.”
In other messages he wrote: “Bitter feelings are brewing in me towards you”; “I’m asking for you to stop doing it.” He also called her “the sociopath I know so well.”
On the stand, Jodi claimed Travis’s anger was due to her insistence he get mental help for his sexual deviancy and jealously because she was talking to other men. Days later, however, Travis’s tone took an abrupt turn.
“You’re one of the prettiest girls on the planet,” he sent her in a text.
In her testimony, Jodi said the constant swinging pendulum of emotions left her despondent.
“I felt bullied,” she said. “It was just miserable.”
* * *
After seven days of testimony—detailing every aspect of her life—Jodi finally began describing the events leading up to the murder.
When it came to her hair color, Jodi maintained that she changed it in April or May, weeks before the crime. Photos were admitted into evidence showing time-stamped photos of her hair colored brown before June.
On May 28, when the gun was stolen from her grandparents’ house, Jodi said she was at a Buddhist monastery on the Oregon border without cell phone reception.
“Did you break into your grandparents’ home to steal this gun?” Nurmi asked.
“No,” Jodi said.
“Did you orchestrate or tell anyone else to steal this gun?” he asked.
“No,” she maintained.
On June 2, she said she did not rent a car a distance from her home to conceal her movements, but because the rental agency only offered cars in certain towns. She chose one where her brother lived.
As for the car color, Jodi did ask for a replacement because red is too flashy. “I’ve always been told not to drive red cars. They get pulled over more often.”
During her road trip, Jodi admitted to stopping by Darryl Brewer’s house to borrow gas cans, but it was only because gas was cheaper in Utah and she was on a budget. She confessed to buying a third gas can at Walmart but said she returned it that very same day, receiving cash.
Jodi also stuck to her story about a group of kids outside of Starbucks flipping her back license plate upside down. “I noticed some skaters hanging around there, and they were all laughing as I was walking up to my car.”
She maintained she had not originally intended to go to Mesa to see Travis. Rather, she said, he persuaded her over the course of several phone calls to make a detour.
“He said he would wait up,” she said.
After speaking with Travis the last time, Jodi turned off her cell phone, but not because she didn’t want her phone traced in Arizona. She did so because she couldn’t find her car charger. “My battery was getting low, I didn’t want to be without cell phone service or gas driving across the desert.”
Jodi arrived at Travis’s house in Mesa around 4 A.M. and parked in the center of the driveway. She walked around to the side of her house, carrying with her a suitcase, backpack, purse, and laptop.
“Did you have a gun with you?” Nurmi asked.
“No,” she said.
“Did you have a knife?”
“No.”
Inside the house she found Travis on his computer in his home office, his dog by his side. For a minute, Jodi stood watching him. Napoleon barked, alerting Travis to her presence. Travis approached her.
“He greeted me. He had a big smile on his face, and he kissed me on the lips,” she said. “He had his hands around my waist at the top of my butt, and he was pulling me towards his body.”
Although Travis wanted to have sex, Jodi was tired, and they just went to bed. Jodi said she was the one to awake first. When Travis woke up at 1 P.M., they had sex.
For the encounter, Travis tied her up—something they had done before, Jodi said. Only this time they used soft decorative rope, which Travis cut using a knife.
He put the length of rope behind his sleigh bed and tied two nooses at the ends for her wrists. But when Nurmi asked where Travis placed the knife, she said she couldn’t remember—an early indication of where her testimony was headed.
“There are a lot of things I don’t remember about that day,” she said.
As Jodi described how Travis performed oral sex on her with her wrists tied to the bed, she stared downward, speaking quietly.
“Are these sexual subjects difficult for you to talk about?” Nurmi asked.
“Yes,” she said, “this one in particular because of how the day ended.”
Quickly Travis and Jodi both grew bored with the rope. She slipped her wrists out of the nooses and tossed it on the floor.
They began photographing each other in sexual poses. She said they also made a sex video by setting the camera on the night stand. It was never recovered by forensics.
“We reviewed it, then deleted it,” she said.
After sex, they went downstairs and into his home office. Jodi gave Travis a CD of photos from their vacations together. Jodi lay on the floor beside Napoleon as Travis inserted the disk into his computer.
But because the disk was scratched and Travis’s computer had a virus, he was unable to view the pictures. In frustration and anger, he threw the disk against the wall.
“It ricocheted against the wall and landed on my head and hit the carpet,” she testified.
As Travis’s temper flared, Jodi stood up. He grabbed her, spun her around, and bent her over the desk. Grabbing both her arms, he twisted her right arm behind her back.
“Were you thinking he was going to hit you?” Nurmi asked.
“I wasn’t thinking that.” She shook her head. “He had only done that once at that time.”
She claimed Travis pulled down her pants, had rough intercourse with her, and ejaculated on her back. In the downstairs bathroom, she cleaned herself off.
Travis and Jodi then proceeded upstairs for the last photo shoot of Travis’s life.
Jodi said Travis wanted the photos because he had gotten to his top physical peak in preparation for his trip to Cancún.
“Why was the shower selected?” Nurmi asked.
“It was selected for the water. We were going for a certain effect with the pictures and the water.”
Travis posed in the shower as she snapped photos, reviewing them and deleting the ones she didn’t like.
After snapping the last image of him seated on the shower floor, the camera slipped out of her hands, skidding across the tile floor and landing on the bath mat.
At that moment Travis “flipped out,” she said.
“He stood up, and he stepped out of the shower,” she said. “He picked me up and body slammed me on the tile.”
Travis was screaming at her, calling her a “stupid idiot.”
While he stood seething and spitting, Jodi rolled on her side and sprung up. With Travis in pursuit, she ran d
own the long bathroom hallway into a walk-in closet that met the bedroom. Suddenly, she remembered something she had found in his closet during a cleaning project—a .25 caliber gun he stored there.
With the sound of Travis’s footsteps behind her, she jumped up, grabbed his gun, and ran out the other end of the closet, back inside the bathroom.
While she pointed the weapon at him, Travis charged at her, like a “linebacker.”
“I turned around and pointed it at him so he would stop chasing me,” she said. “I didn’t mean to shoot him or anything. I didn’t even think I was pulling the trigger. I didn’t know that I shot him. He lunged at me and I fell.”
Travis landed on top of her, screaming, “I’ll fucking kill you, bitch.”
After that, Jodi said her memory became foggy.
“There’s a lot of that day I don’t remember,” she said. “There are a lot of gaps.”
“What do you remember?” Nurmi asked.
“Almost nothing for a long time. There are some things that have come back over the years,” she said. “There is like a huge gap. I don’t know if I blacked out or what.”
On the stand Jodi claimed she had no memory of stabbing him, slicing his throat, dragging him across the bathroom floor, or putting him in the shower stall. “I just remember trying to get away from him.”
The next thing she remembered was dropping the knife. It hit the tile floor with a clank. Jodi looked down at the body next to her and started screaming.
“I just remember dropping the knife and being very freaked out and screaming,” she said.
Few details emerged beyond a vague memory of putting the knife back in the dishwasher.
“What else do you remember?” Nurmi asked.
“Not much,” she said. “I remember more the feeling at that time, not pictures, and things that I can bring back. It was like mortal terror. I’d pissed him off the worst I’ve ever seen him pissed off. He was angry at me and he wasn’t going to stop.”
The next thing she knew she was driving west, barefoot and bloody, the sun in her eyes.
Picture Perfect: The Jodi Arias Story: A Beautiful Photographer, Her Mormon Lover, and a Brutal Murder Page 31
