“I don’t remember bringing the gun with me, but I remember throwing it in the desert,” she said.
“What about the rope, did you take that with you?” Nurmi asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Eventually it went into the Dumpster. It was behind a gas station.”
Looking at her hands on the steering wheel, she saw they were stained with Travis’s blood. She pulled over in the middle of the desert and washed off with bottled water from the trunk of her rental car. At that moment, she was unsure if Travis was even dead.
“I don’t think I fully realized, but I knew that it was really bad and that my life was probably done now,” she said. “I thought he was not alive at that point.”
“Was there a part of you that hoped he was alive?” he asked.
“Yes. Of course,” she said. “I wished that it was just a nightmare that I could wake up from.”
“Did you still love him?” Nurmi asked.
“Yeah, I did,” she said quietly.
“Do you still love him now?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a different love, but yeah I do.”
Eventually, Jodi said she found her phone charger. She got back in her car and continued driving. Passing a sign that said she was a hundred miles from Las Vegas, she came upon a checkpoint for the Hoover Dam.
“At this point I realized I was in really deep trouble. I started thinking of what I could do to delay the inevitable,” she said. “I was scared what would happen to me. I was thinking of all sorts of things—my family, myself, what would happen.”
Her following actions and lies were all an attempt to cover up her crime.
“I knew my life was pretty much over. I didn’t want anyone to know that that had happened or that I did it,” she said. “I started taking steps to try and cover up that I was there. So I did a whole bunch of things to try and make it seem like I wasn’t there.”
On her way to Utah, she called Ryan and told him she had gotten lost and slept in her car. Then, she also called Travis and left the voice mail. Because she was crying, she kept replaying and rerecording the message so she sounded cheery, explaining the sixteen-minute phone call on the cellular records.
When Jodi arrived in Utah, she did her best to act like nothing was wrong. She told everyone the story of getting lost and explained the bandages on her fingers were due to cutting her hand on a broken glass at work.
On the stand, Jodi said the cuts were unrelated to the killings and she had actually broken a glass at Travis’s house, a wound that reopened during the attack.
That night in Utah, Jodi admitted to being intimate with Ryan, partially because she was trying to please him and give him what he expected.
“I just wanted to seem like normal, like I was okay, like I didn’t just do what I did,” she said.
Creating an illusion of normalcy, she returned to Yreka, went back to work, and waited for the phone call that Travis’s body had been found. As “the clock ticked down” to her inevitable arrest, she tried to convince herself and everyone else that nothing had happened.
Just after midnight on June 10, she got the call from Dan Freeman.
“I saw his name on the caller ID, and I thought that would probably be the phone call I was dreading,” she said.
Dan told her the police were at Travis’s house. Phoning Travis’s bishop, Jodi confirmed the discovery. At that moment, reality sunk in for Jodi.
“I doubled over and started sobbing really hard and I couldn’t stand up,” she said. “I was hoping the whole thing wasn’t real, that it was just a nightmare and none of it had ever happened.”
The next afternoon she called Detective Flores, offering her assistance in the investigation in an effort to disassociate herself with the killing.
“I though that if I didn’t call him it would look more suspicious than if I did call him,” she said. “I was kind of also calling him to see what information I could garner from him.… I wanted to try and determine how much time I had.”
In court, Nurmi asked Jodi why she didn’t confess.
“I couldn’t imagine admitting to something like that; I couldn’t imagine doing something like that,” she said. “I began that facade right away.”
A few days later Jodi attended Travis’s memorial service. “I thought that if I didn’t show up it would look suspicious because Travis and I were close.”
Knowing the arrest was imminent, she threw out items related to the sexual encounters with Travis—including the Spider-Man underwear. At the time of the arrest she admitted she was preparing to flee Yreka, but claimed she was moving to Monterey, so she would be away from her family at the time of her arrest. On July 1, she purchased the 9 mm handgun for her own protection.
“I didn’t feel safe at all after June 4,” she said. “I wanted to someday see myself being a responsible gun owner.”
After taking possession of the gun, she started to contemplate suicide.
“The idea to kill myself didn’t occur to me until I had possession of the gun, and I realized how easy that could be,” she said.
* * *
Jodi was arrested the morning of July 15, as she was packing her car and preparing to leave Yreka. She now admitted to lying to Detective Flores in the interrogation room.
“The main reason was because I was very ashamed of what happened,” she said. “It was just shameful. I didn’t want anyone to know I had anything to do with that.”
After being confronted with the evidence, however, the gravity of the situation set in. She concocted the story of the two intruders.
“I began to tell him things that would connect with their forensics and create a way for me to not have been responsible for it,” she said.
She said she didn’t admit to the physical and sexual abuse, because she wanted to preserve Travis’s memory. “I was very concerned about both of our reputations. I didn’t feel like I had a future anyway. There’s no benefit to me, there’s no benefit to anyone else to say those things.”
Over the next few months she repeated the story of the intruders to various news outlets because she said she cared about how she would be perceived.
“I didn’t want to be known or remembered as someone capable of what happened. I wanted to portray a different picture of myself,” she said. “I made up this big stupid story for Flores, and I felt I should stick with it. I stuck with it for a long time.”
All the while she said she wanted to die. Yet in jail, she made only one suicide attempt, stocking up on Advil and trying to slit her wrists with a razor.
Finally, in the spring of 2010, she said she confessed to “the truth.” It was after much soul searching and the realization that her family would love her regardless.
On the stand, she repeatedly stated she wished she could take it all back, but said she found solace in the knowledge that Travis was in heaven.
“I have a million regrets. I was scared of him and I reacted, but I will always regret everything about that,” Jodi said. “It helped me to know he was okay and he was in a better place. And maybe he wasn’t mad anymore.”
* * *
For eight days Juan Martinez sat at the prosecution table, scribbling notes and making occasional objections. On February 21, Martinez sauntered to the front of the room and began his grueling, five-day cross-examination of Jodi Arias.
His questioning was often bogged down in lengthy sidebars and detours through the evidence. At times, his antagonism lapsed into vitriol as he bantered with Jodi.
Through most of it, Jodi seemed defiant. She called Martinez “angry,” corrected his grammar, and dodged questions. She appeared haughty, smirking at the prosecutor and, at one point, giggling.
By the end Jodi would crumble.
In meticulous detail, Martinez examined Jodi’s long litany of lies.
“You have problems with the truth,” he said, his voice rising. “You lie, don’t you?”
Martinez pried into details of her sex life and
excoriated her for her frequent memory lapses.
“Give me the factors,” he said. “I want to know about a specific circumstance. What factors influence when you’re having a memory problem?”
Jodi shot back, “Usually when men like you are screaming at me or grilling me or someone like Travis is doing the same.”
Martinez raised his voice and acted out scenarios in dramatic fashion. As she dodged questions, he cut her off mid-sentence. Jodi held her own, appearing to smugly toy with Martinez as she grinned and repeatedly answered yes-or-no questions with “sure” and “I guess.”
The exchanges rattled the seasoned prosecutor as the case at times devolved into a showdown of wit and will. The judge had to admonish both to stop speaking over each other.
“You are making my brain scramble,” Jodi said, blaming the circular questions for her not being able to give responses. “I think I’m more focused on your posture and your tone and your anger, so it’s hard to process the questions.”
“Are you having trouble understanding?” Martinez asked.
“Sometimes,” she said, “because you go in circles.”
The back-and-forth sniping went on as the focus turned to Jodi’s claims that she tried to kill herself while in the county jail—with Advil and a razor—but couldn’t go through with the act because it “stung” when she nicked herself.
“You said it stung and that’s why you stopped,” he blasted. “Can you imagine how much it hurt him when you stuck that knife right into his chest?”
Martinez also confronted Jodi with the two magazines that contained the secret coded messages. On the large monitor at the center of the room, Martinez showed each message printed in the margins of the magazine.
Once strung together, he had Jodi read the message for the court. “You fucked up. What you told my attorney the next day directly contradicts what I’ve been saying for over a year,” the message began.
Martinez pointed out the magazines were intercepted just days after the prosecution interviewed Matt McCartney and just four days before a pretrial hearing.
“You tried to get someone to lie at that hearing, didn’t you?” Martinez asked.
“No,” she replied.
For hours Martinez grilled her about her make-out session with Ryan Burns, while Travis’s body lay rotting in the shower.
“Did you know he was dead when you and Mr. Burns were kissing?” Martinez asked.
“I guess I knew, I wasn’t accepting it,” Jodi said.
“So if you didn’t think he was dead, it was okay with you to roll around with Mr. Burns?” Martinez pressed.
Under the ruthless questioning, Jodi had difficulty explaining the state of her mind as to how easily she could end up in the arms of another man.
“I wasn’t ‘there’ in my head,” she replied through her tears.
But Martinez tore into her once again, charging that she was “there” enough to call Ryan, and to leave a voice mail on Travis’s cell phone in an attempt to cover up her grisly attack.
“Are you ashamed that you killed him?” asked Martinez.
“Most definitely,” she replied.
Throughout his cross-examination, Martinez frequently showed video clips from interviews that Jodi did with police. He juxtaposed her text messages, e-mails, and journals with her testimony about being assaulted by Travis, challenging whether the abuse really happened.
Martinez forced Jodi to admit that during these assaults she never called the police or told anyone who could back up the claims. In fact, on the dates in question Jodi actually wrote loving things about Travis in her diary.
Martinez displayed one journal entry from the date Jodi claimed Travis had backhanded her in his car.
“It doesn’t say anything there that he backhanded you, does it?” Martinez shouted.
“No, of course not,” Jodi said.
“Please take a look at it,” Martinez said, pointing to the screen. “It doesn’t say ‘I love the backhand,’ it says ‘I love his lips.’”
Martinez also challenged her assertion that she once caught him pleasuring himself to a photograph of a young boy.
“You caught Mr. Alexander masturbating to some images of boys, correct?” Martinez said. “And it’s so noteworthy to you that you waited until after you killed Mr. Alexander to tell anybody about it, right?”
“I waited years,” she said.
“You chose to keep that allegation until about two years ago?” he countered.
Martinez then presented text messages from the date of the alleged encounter that showed Travis and Jodi exchanged text messages throughout the day, making no reference to any unsettling incident.
Martinez noted the duplicity of her portrayal of Travis and painted Jodi as a stalker and the aggressor in the couple’s sex life, although she denied his allegations.
The graphic and often antagonistic testimony continued throughout the week, with Martinez arguing that Jodi was hypocritical in her attitude to sex—switching between actively instigating it and then claiming she felt used.
“Your participation was equal to him?” asked Martinez.
“I would say it was mutual,” she claimed. “I didn’t feel like a prostitute during, it was just afterwards that I did.”
Martinez recounted Jodi’s admitted lies to authorities, friends, and family in the days after she killed Travis. He pointed out that even her lies were changing as she spoke to various media organizations.
“I couldn’t keep my stories straight,” Jodi confessed. “It’s all the same thing, just different versions—I couldn’t keep my lies straight.”
Martinez also played the cheery voice mail that Jodi left for Travis.
“Did you send it so he could reach you from the grave?” he asked.
* * *
For most of Martinez’s onslaught of questioning, Jodi maintained a tough and confident demeanor on the stand. But on the final day of cross-examination, Martinez seemed to break her.
Flustered and floundering, she gave teary admissions about the slaying.
Her arrogance fell away to emotion, as Martinez guided her through the last minutes of Travis’s life. Presented with the photo of Travis’s body slumped in the shower, Jodi began to sob.
“Were you crying while you were shooting him?” Martinez asked.
“I don’t remember,” she blubbered.
“Were you crying when you were stabbing him?”
“I don’t remember.”
“How about when you cut his throat, were you crying then?”
“I don’t know,” she cried repeatedly.
She acknowledged that she attacked him with a knife.
“Would you agree that you’re the person who actually slit Mr. Alexander’s throat from ear to ear?”
“Yes.” She took off her glasses and dropped her head in her hands.
“You’re the one who did this, right? And you’re the same individual that lied about all of this, right?” he pressed.
Martinez concluded his cross-examination, returning to Jodi’s previous statement where she said no jury would convict her because she planned on committing suicide. He pointed out that in the interview Jodi said she would not be convicted because she was innocent.
Finally, he questioned her cover-up of the crime scene, including taking the gun and the rope.
“You were trying to alter the crime scene, right?” he shouted.
“It would appear that way,” she said.
At the end of the fifth day, Martinez turned to the judge and said simply, “I don’t have anything else.”
Unassumingly, he returned to his chair at the prosecutor’s table.
* * *
Nurmi spent two days during redirect on reviewing the evidence. Diary entries were reread, the phone sex tape was replayed.
He questioned Jodi about the gaps in her memory and whether she actually remembered stabbing Travis. Jodi said she had attempted to piece together the events of the day based on
what she had learned after the fact.
“The events of June 4, 2008, do you want to remember those events?” Nurmi asked.
“I have made attempts to piece things back together,” she said, her voice cracking. “There’s a part of me that doesn’t ever want to remember it. It feels like I’m the person who deserves to sit with those memories that I don’t have right now. Those were my actions and it’s my responsibility.”
Jodi was asked to repeat the exact events on June 4. This time she made a key change in detail, describing the gun as being in a holster.
Finally, Jodi spoke in loving detail about the man she killed and expressed profound regret.
“I wish I could turn back the clock and make some different decisions. If I could go back in time I would choose differently as far as Travis of course. But it goes back further than that,” she said. “If I had never gone to the MGM Grand, if I had never signed up for Prepaid Legal, if I had never watched the DVD and just left it sitting collecting dust—at any point and time I could have made a different decision and we’d all be in different places today.”
* * *
After fifteen days and more than sixty hours of Jodi’s testimony, the jury had a chance to ask her direct questions.
Arizona is one of three states that allow jurors to pose questions to witnesses after the lawyers have finished their questioning. The more than two hundred juror questions largely focused on the details of the killing and gaps in Jodi’s story.
“Why did you take the rope and gun with you?” “Why did you put the camera in the washing machine?” “Why didn’t you call 911 after the shooting?”
Most of Jodi’s answers were “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall.”
The jurors asked about Jodi’s memory problems and why she took so long to come forward with this latest version of events.
“Did you ever see a doctor for your memory issues?” “Have you ever taken medication for your memory issue?” “How is it you remember so many of your sexual encounters, including your ex-boyfriends, but you do not remember stabbing Travis and dragging his body?”
The questions seemed to show skepticism from the jury.
“Were you mad at Travis while you were stabbing him?” one question read.
Picture Perfect: The Jodi Arias Story: A Beautiful Photographer, Her Mormon Lover, and a Brutal Murder Page 32
