Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (13 page)

It didn’t take much to foresee that defense counsel were considering self-defense as an option. Pleading self-defense would allow Arias to say that Travis was such a bad person he deserved what she doled out to him on June 4, 2008. It appeared from their requests for the electronic correspondence that defense counsel was motivated by their intent to use Travis’ words to cast him into the role of villain, a role they would insist he play. And Arias was being recast as a victim, a role she’d sought as hers from the beginning of the case.

In June 2010, not long after the e-mail and text messages were made available to them, defense counsel made an unexpected disclosure to me. It was printouts of ten letters they had received via e-mail on Sunday, April 11, 2010, from someone with an e-mail address identifying himself as “Bob White.” Accompanying the letters was a single sentence written by “White,” ostensibly seeking to distance himself from the case, “I came across these but don’t want to be involved.”

As indicated in existing public filings, each of the letters attached to the e-mail was supposedly written by Travis where he mentions sexual acts and fantasies, and purportedly admits conduct that would be considered deviant or unlawful. By order of the court, the specific content of the letters was sealed on July 15, 2010.

Anyone can create an e-mail account under a fictitious name, and it seemed that was the case in this instance, because “Bob White” was never identified beyond the name provided on the electronic correspondence. Even more suspect was that the whereabouts of the original letters was never disclosed by defense counsel. The method in which they came to light and the fact that the letters were not originals immediately raised a red flag and signaled that an investigation into their authenticity was in order.

Three weeks after the disclosure of the Bob White letters, defense counsel advised me through a “notice of defenses” filed with the court that they would now pursue a justification defense related to domestic violence, commonly known as self-defense. Despite previously claiming she either hadn’t been at the scene or that the killing was committed by intruders, Arias was changing her story again and now admitting that she had killed Travis and had done so for a justifiable reason.

In her latest version of events, Travis became angry and attacked her, making her fear for her life, because she dropped his camera while she took pictures of him in the shower. She
admitted that no one else had been in the bathroom with them, contrary to what she had told Detective Flores back on July 16, 2008, when he interviewed her in Yreka. Arias was also claiming that on several occasions Travis sexually and physically abused her and had slapped her and choked her.

This was in sharp contrast to the Travis Alexander she had previously described to Detective Flores during their telephone conversations and her face-to-face interviews with him. Changing stories would normally be the death knell for a defendant because any testimony with inconsistent stories would surely be rejected by a jury, except that Jodi Ann Arias was different in her physical appearance, affect, and demeanor and was skilled at making the implausible seem true.

Any questioning of her would be extremely difficult because as I had seen in her interviews and phone calls, she could seamlessly meld the truth with her untruths making her statements seem consistent.

Getting at the truth in court would be especially difficult because there were just two people present in Travis’ bedroom on June 4, 2008, and only one of them, Jodi Arias, was alive to tell
her
story. The challenge was all the more daunting because it included discrediting her assertion that Travis was a cad who hit her at times and spoke to her in a demeaning tone, as illustrated by some of the text messages and instant messenger conversations now available. The clanging of his “3 hole wonder” comment, in particular, reverberated loudly, as it provided support for her allegation that Travis was abusive, making for what appeared to be an almost insurmountable hurdle. Given the damning electronic conversation, I had to admit that Arias’ self-defense claim seemed to have a chance of succeeding.

Providence seemed to have miraculously come to her aid through these ten letters allegedly written by Travis, and it was no coincidence that her claim of self-defense arose shortly
after her defense counsel received Bob White’s e-mail containing the prejudicial letters. If they could be authenticated and the acts described within them proven to be true, I knew they would present a nearly impossible hurdle to clear at trial. Jurors might even acquit Arias in reaching their verdict if they believed Travis was a reprehensible individual who had been abusing her.

P
eople would be amazed at the stories I hear in this job, everything from situational amnesia, where the accused claims he or she cannot remember anything about the crime, to denying his or her presence at the crime scene when there are pictures or video to prove otherwise. It is never easy to ascertain when a person is telling the truth, and the task becomes even more difficult when the individual has nothing to lose and everything to gain by being deceitful.

Jodi Arias’ filing with the court announcing her new strategy left me with little recourse but to go back and reexamine the police investigation more closely, as well as review any other information I might not have previously read. I had already amassed a voluminous amount of material, more than in any other case I could remember. Nearly a dozen three-ring binders full of investigative materials, file folders stuffed with photographs and documents, and stacks of miscellaneous papers crowded the bookcases that spanned nearly an entire wall of my small office.

A quick reexamination of the police materials yielded no evidence of any claim of domestic abuse. Other than her expressed disappointment to Detective Flores at learning that Travis had been communicating with other women during their relationship, she had offered nothing but compliments and praise for the man she was now claiming had abused and terrorized her. While it contradicted her current claims, this alone would not be enough to discount her assertions. I needed
to find some concrete proof that I could hold up in front of a jury to repudiate her allegations.

Everything the Mesa Police Department had done in their investigation had focused on placing Arias at the scene of the crime and proving
she
had been the one who killed Travis. With her change in strategy, she was effectively sticking her tongue out at them, negating the importance of the evidence they had already collected and presenting me with a wholly different task. Nothing in the photographs, police reports or countless other documents addressed the issue of self-defense, so much of the investigative material was now of little use to me.

A sense of alarm began to take hold, if only for just a minute. It felt as though I were standing on a lunar landscape, pockmarked with gaping craters having been shipwrecked there with no way of returning back to Earth. As I looked at the bookcases in my office, I slowly recited the labels of some of the black binders lining the shelves:
Photographs,
Cell Phone Records, Text Messages, Arias’ Statements.

My concern over the state of the case was compounded by my knowledge of how well Arias had handled herself when faced with incontrovertible facts and pointed questions. I had spent hours watching the interviews she had done with Detective Flores at police headquarters in Yreka, and I had reviewed the raw footage of her stellar performances during her two jailhouse interviews with
48 Hours
. Even though the story she was now telling was different from the one she’d told on those previous occasions, she was quite good at coming across as the victim.

I started by revisiting everything the police had done, trying to identify avenues that could possibly have been explored had the investigation not been so duly focused on proving that Arias was the killer. I knew this was counterproductive, so I took a few hours out of the office, hoping that something
I hadn’t yet thought of would crystallize. Upon my return, I found myself back in front of the bookcases once again.

Placing some of the binders I had already skimmed back onto the bookcase, I noticed a large manila envelope inside an accordion folder on the second shelf. Inside were more than three hundred pages of background material that had been provided to me by Arias’ first defense team months earlier as part of the discovery process. Because these reports were intended as an argument for why Arias should be shown leniency if faced with the death penalty, I hadn’t reviewed them in detail, but had merely browsed them. Typically, I don’t review in-depth the items meant for the sentencing phase of the trial this early in the proceedings while I’m preparing for the guilt phase. But the vulnerability of the case as it currently stood compelled me to take a closer look at these documents.

The materials included Arias’ work and educational histories, dozens of photographs, and interviews with family members, a friend, and two ex-boyfriends. All of the interviews had been conducted between October 23, 2008, and April 26, 2009, by an investigator working on Arias’ behalf and were sent to me in summary form, so I couldn’t read the actual text of the discussions. If the interviews had been recorded, I hadn’t been provided with any of the audiotapes.

As this material had been assembled to illustrate why Arias didn’t deserve the death penalty, I was aware that it was meant to present her in the best possible light, so I didn’t expect to find much that would be helpful in discrediting her self-defense allegation. Probably because there was nowhere else to look, I decided to wade through the pages and started reading the contents whenever I could find time. Because I was carrying a caseload that included other prosecutions, I had to carve out reading time in between my court appearances, witness interviews, phone calls, and filing of responsive pleadings.

I am methodical when it comes to reading case materials,
and I have acquired habits that help me with this tedious process. I closed the door to my office to avoid the need to constantly look up every time someone walks by and to muffle the noises from the copy machine just outside my door. I turned off the ringer on my cell phone, so I could devote my full attention to the materials, and with a black rollerball pen in hand, I began to read.

I started my review by looking at Arias’ employment history, which showed that she had worked mostly as a food server in various restaurants in Arizona as well as California. It struck me that she was probably doing a job she did not enjoy, as she had floated from restaurant to restaurant, only staying for several months at each. Her more recent employment records included documented disciplinary actions that, in at least one case, had resulted in her termination.

Mimi’s Café in Mesa had fired her for “unpleasantness and services issues.” As she acknowledged in one of her journals, “I got two complaints in 3 days. They said I wasn’t smiling enough & that I didn’t seem happy. That’s probably the case.” Employment records from P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, also in Mesa, showed that her “lack of attentiveness towards her tables has lead [
sic
] to refills being missed.” The owner at the Purple Plum in Yreka, one of the two places Arias had been employed just prior to Travis’ death, told the defense investigator that “she [Arias] was not attentive and wouldn’t take care of her customers—except for males.” He also complained of having to “redirect her to wait on customers to do her job,” as well as her refusal to work on Sundays.

While her inconsistent work history did not touch on the issue of her self-defense claim, it did offer a small window into Arias’ life away from Travis. She approached her work unenthusiastically, not caring about the quality of her service, perhaps because she knew the next server job was just an application away.

I then turned my attention to reading about Arias’ educa
tional history. According to her academic transcripts, she had dropped out of Yreka High School after her junior year, and there was no record that she had ever returned to obtain her diploma or that she had earned a GED. Looking closely at her transcripts revealed that she had been achieving top grades and accolades from all of her teachers during her freshman and sophomore years, and was enrolled in honors English courses for both years. But her academic performance dropped dramatically in the eleventh grade, which she completed with mostly Fs and a few Ds.

During her junior year, Arias had moved in with her grandparents because of tension at home with her mother. In an interview with the defense investigator, Arias’ maternal grandmother, Caroline Allen, recalled waking her granddaughter up in the mornings and believing that once she left the house, she was heading for school. Only later did she learn that Jodi was ditching classes to hang out with a young man named Bobby Juarez, who family members described as a high school boyfriend.

Like her employment record, Arias’ educational history, while interesting background, really didn’t touch on the self-defense claim in any way, so I turned my attention to the conversations that the investigator had summarized with other members of Arias’ family, which included her parents, Bill and Sandy; her three siblings, Carl, Joey, and Angela; her half sister, Julie; her maternal grandfather, Carlton “Sonny” Allen; a cousin; and two aunts.

I was surprised to read that nearly everyone that the investigator spoke with echoed what Arias’ parents had told Detective Flores in their initial interview with him—that Jodi could be hurtful and unkind, especially to her mother. She would regularly call the house and out of nowhere berate her mother for the strangest of reasons, before suddenly slamming down the phone. As the family members told it, one time Jodi called her mother to say she had just gotten a haircut; when Sandy
said it probably looked nice, Jodi became upset and started screaming at her.

Her parents also said that on at least two occasions there were incidents that had turned physical. Bill Arias recalled one time when Jodi hit her mother for no apparent reason, and he smacked his daughter in response. Arias’ half sister, Julie, recounted another incident when Jodi and Sandy were sitting side by side, Sandy lightly touched Jodi, and Jodi kicked her mother in response.

Arias’ childhood friend Zeyna Corronzo also told the investigator of a trouble-filled relationship between Arias and her mother. She informed the investigator that she and Arias first met at Los Padres Elementary School in Salinas, California, and they remained close even after Arias moved to Santa Maria, and then to Yreka. While Zeyna expressed great fondness for her childhood pal, whom she described as “very bright,” “hilarious,” and “like a sister” to her, she admitted that when Arias got angry, she “really laid into” her mother, who tried to control and calm her, but Arias “wouldn’t listen” and was grounded “a lot” because she was so “defiant.” Even when she knew the consequences, Arias just didn’t care, Zeyna said, telling the investigator that of Bill and Sandy’s four children, Jodi was the most “unruly.” “She would say to Sandy, ‘I hate you, I wish you weren’t my mother,’” Zeyna recounted, remembering one time when Arias kicked a hole in the wall because her mother was angry with her.

Reading through this, it was not lost on me that Zeyna was the only friend who had been interviewed by the defense investigator, leading me to suspect that Arias was a person who had difficulty bonding with and keeping friends, especially women. Thinking back, this point emphasized why the police’s decision to send Siskiyou County Detective Rachel Blaney into the interview room with Arias had not yielded the desired results. Arias’ troubled relationship with her mother and the glaring absence of any interviews with female friends
other than Zeyna illustrated her inability to relate to women in the same effortless way she had of connecting with men.

Other family members’ interviews further complicated the portrait of Arias’ relationship with her family. Her brother Carl described his sister as someone who tended to live above her means and wondered if her extravagant spending habits, such as driving an expensive car when she had no money, coupled with her tendency to overreact and blow up at people for no reason, pointed to mental illness, such as bipolar disorder. He cited as an example her “out-of-the-blue” phone calls to her parents’ house, during which she would yell and shriek and then hang up. More interesting was the disturbance Carl described between Arias and her father after her recent move back to Yreka. Carl explained that at his sister’s request, their father had rented a storage shed for her, but said she grew belligerent when she saw the unit, yelling and calling her father “stupid” for choosing the wrong size.

Arias’ cousin Aimee Lantz said Jodi would be “snide” at family functions and speak sarcastically to others. Aimee’s assessment was that Jodi could be a total “bitch.” This sentiment was echoed by Jodi’s maternal grandparents, the Allens, who said their granddaughter would correct the way people spoke. They mentioned that if you talked to her “you had to use perfect grammar and speech.”

These descriptions were in line with what her parents had told Detective Flores, and it struck me just how out of step this collective illustration was with the idyllic childhood Arias had described to Flores. The woman detailed in these records was a huge departure from the demure, soft-spoken one who had presented herself during her conversations after her arrest in Yreka and her jailhouse interviews with the national media. As I read on, a different composite began to emerge, one of a churlish grammar tyrant who was mean to her mother and seemed to derive pleasure from belittling and correcting others.

Her family perceived Jodi as someone who would react in
unpredictable ways, even when people were being kind to her. This theme kept arising in these statements—usually as it pertained to her mother. While having a nasty temper did not prove her a murderer, it did demonstrate a pattern of behavior when it came to how she interacted with people about whom she purported to care. She could clearly be cruel, volatile, and impulsive when the mood struck her.

Perhaps the most striking thing about these interviews was how replete they were with negative tales of her background. After all, this was a composite that was prepared by her defense team and meant to portray her in a positive light. Instead the picture of her that emerged was anything but positive. Even when speaking to someone who was sympathetic to Jodi’s cause and trying to help her defense, it seemed her family could not help but show the true nature of Jodi Arias.

As I let all of this sink in, I spent a few moments preparing some notes about what I had just read before putting the folder back on the shelf and heading out for my next appointment. It was several days before I was able to get back to the materials provided by defense counsel, but I decided to shift my attention. This time, I concentrated on some of the peculiar behaviors Arias’ family described around the time of Travis’ memorial service in Mesa. Detective Flores had told me that Arias had traveled to Arizona to attend the memorial service, which took place a couple of weeks after police had discovered Travis’ body, and that Travis’ family and friends had found her presence there both strange and disturbing. What I hadn’t heard was how she had behaved after the service, which was part of the interview summary from Arias’ half sister, Julie.