Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (15 page)

T
he following morning, I swiped my security badge past the card reader and the barrier arm rose slowly as it granted me access into the parking garage at around 7:15. It’s not that I was keeping track of the time, but I reflexively looked at my watch because I was surprised to find a space not too far from the walkway leading into our office building. I was not accustomed to seeing the garage half empty, because I normally arrive about an hour later, when the only place to park is usually on the roof, where every spot is exposed to sun.

Though I was looking forward to continuing the review to see how far the Darryl Brewer summary might go, I wasn’t starting the day early because of that. It was more the fitful night of sleep I’d just had, brought on by my hesitation about what to do. I wanted to tell Detective Flores that Darryl Brewer had said in an interview that Jodi Arias had planned on traveling to Mesa, but I was concerned that if I shared my findings with him, he might prepare a police report detailing my impressions that would then have to be disclosed to Arias through her counsel. Because of everything I’d seen of Arias’ skill at bending the truth to fit her needs, I feared that once she saw my line of inquiry she would have time to formulate an explanation. Even if her explanation wasn’t totally plausible, it wouldn’t matter; all she needed was an opening and she would be able to give a reason that would diminish the value of my discovery.

Withholding this information from Detective Flores would
not be easy. Since the beginning of the case, he and I had been in almost constant contact, sharing ideas and comparing notes, and in that time, I’d come to rely on his judgments of Arias and the case. It would be a struggle to keep this information to myself, and as I sat down to read the rest of Brewer’s summary, I felt uncomfortable about not sharing it.

I returned directly to page 357 of the defense materials, where Brewer described how Arias had initially called him sometime in May to let him know that she was intending to drive to Mesa and wanted to borrow the two gas cans for her trip. He said she got “testy” when he asked why she needed them, and she didn’t call him later in the week as she promised she would, but her testiness did not stop her from phoning him a second time, in the last week of May, to again inquire about borrowing the cans. During that call, she told Brewer she needed the gas cans because she was going on “a long trip,” and she didn’t want to run out of gas.

Brewer recalled that a few days later, on June 3, Arias showed up at his house in Pacific Grove, California, near Monterey, at around 7:30
A.M
. After joining him and his young son for breakfast, she asked to use his computer to check her e-mail. I wondered if she was expecting to receive a communication from someone, perhaps Travis.

After a very short visit, she was on her way by 9
A.M
., with two of Brewer’s five-gallon plastic gas cans in tow.

After about forty-five minutes, I realized it was time for me to go to court on a different case, even though I wanted to continue reading to see where the story went. Grabbing my monthly planner and the case file, an orange folder containing the relevant documents and minute entries, I left my office. As I sat waiting for my matter to be heard by the court, I paid no attention to the other cases that were also on the morning calendar, because my mind was back at my desk with the materials I had just been reading.

I knew police had not found the gas cans during the execu
tion of the search warrants in Yreka, so I wondered where they were. I also found myself wondering about Arias’ motivation for bringing the cans on the trip. Although the cans would have allowed her to fill up at stations in Nevada and Utah where gas was cheaper, I was pretty certain that saving money was not the true motive for taking them on the trip. Arias would still have to pay the higher price in California and gas cans are heavy and cumbersome and can leak if not properly secured. At most she would get a few cents a gallon in savings, which hardly seemed like a good reason justifying the inconvenience and danger of using them.

“State of Arizona vs. . . .” The judge’s voice announcing my case jolted me out of my ruminations and brought me back to the matter at hand. After a discussion of procedural matters with the judge, which only took a couple of minutes, I immediately left the courtroom and walked back to my office.

Although I returned expecting to get right back to my reading, other matters and repeated phone calls kept pulling me away, and it was already noon before I was finally able to return to the story about the gas cans. The summary of Brewer’s interview continued on for another three pages, which I read slowly and carefully, but after finding nothing else related to the topic of the gas cans, I decided to take lunch.

As I prepared to leave the office, a black binder labeled
Police
caught my attention, and I remembered that when detectives had executed the search warrant on Arias’ grandparents’ house in Yreka following her arrest, they had found an Airwalk brand shoebox containing some personal papers of hers, including receipts. I wondered if there were any receipts that showed the places she might have stopped for gas while on her trip to Mesa and Utah, so I called Detective Flores and asked if he could provide me with copies of everything they had found in the box.

When he asked me what I was looking into, it struck me that normally I would have readily shared what I was think
ing, but I wanted to protect my thoughts about what I had just read in Brewer’s summary. So, I trotted out an excuse, telling him I just wanted to see how long it had taken Arias to drive from Northern to Southern California, which was actually part of the reason I wanted to see the receipts.

Flores provided me copies of the contents of the box within the week. Among other papers there were about fifteen receipts in the box. Arias had a single Washington Mutual card that could be used either as a debit card tied to her bank account or as a MasterCard credit card. I spread out a map of California on my desk, so that I could visualize Arias’ movements based on the story the receipts told. I recorded each receipt on a legal pad in chronological order. To help keep track of Arias’ various stops, I added a running list of each destination mentioned in the receipts, starting with Redding, where she rented the car.

The first receipt was for Budget Rent A Car System, Inc., indicating that Arias had rented a white Ford Focus in Redding, California, on Monday, June 2, 2008, at 8:04
A.M
. The detailed receipt included the rental contract, which called for the car to be returned after four days on Friday, June 6, by 8:15
A.M.
The same receipt indicated that she returned the car a day late, on Saturday, June 7, at 1:08
P.M
., after having driven it 2,834 miles.

A second receipt, stamped June 2, 2008, at 8:41
P.M
., indicated that Arias purchased gas at a Valero gas station in Santa Nella, a small hamlet of less than two thousand people. She used her bank card to pay $20.14 for 4.751 gallons of gasoline. On the map, I noted that Santa Nella was approximately 272 miles south of Redding, and circled both locations on the map.

According to the next receipt, dated the following morning, June 3, Arias visited a branch of Washington Mutual Bank in Monterey, California, just after 10:00
A.M
., where she made three transactions. Writing “Monterey” down on my legal pad and circling it on my map, I could see it was right down the
road from Pacific Grove, where Darryl Brewer lived. Apparently, the bank was her first destination after she left his house.

From there Arias headed southeast to Salinas, the city where she had lived for part of her childhood. Salinas is around twenty miles, approximately a thirty-minute drive, from Monterey. While in Salinas, she stopped at a Walmart that Tuesday afternoon around 3
P.M
. and purchased five items, as shown by the receipt. I noticed that she paid cash for her items rather than using the bank card, as she had for other purchases she’d made along the trip, and spent a total of $43.90.

The receipt showed that she bought two packages of Noxzema face pads and two tubes of Neutrogena SPF-85 sunscreen. The last item on her receipt was labeled “5G KERO CARB” for $12.96, and by that description it was impossible for me to tell what it was, so I called a Phoenix-area Walmart store to find out. The manager I spoke to told me that the last item on that receipt was a five-gallon gas container. He made it clear that, although “KERO” seemed to be an abbreviation for kerosene, manufacturers of those containers use the label “kero” on containers designed to carry gasoline. He told me that the “CARB” notation was added to give notice that the container met the EPA carbon-emission standards.

I now had confirmation that Arias had bought another gas can to add to the two she’d borrowed earlier in the day, but I remained unsure of what it meant. The cash transaction suggested that there was an ulterior motive for the gas cans, one that was surreptitious in nature. It was the first time I had evidence that I could use at trial to show that Arias had engaged in some sort of activity that she wanted to go undetected.

I wanted to follow the path she’d left behind as far as it would take me, so I scrutinized the remaining receipts to see if there was any other anomaly about her trip. Arias’ next destination was Pasadena, a city about three hundred miles south of Salinas. According to the store receipt, her initial stop in that city was at a CVS pharmacy, where she checked out
at 8:31
P.M
. after buying over-the-counter medications and water—all with her bank card, no cash. Approximately ten minutes later, she bought an egg salad sandwich at Starbucks, also using her bank card.

But with the next string of receipts, the paper trail created even more questions. After Starbucks, Arias drove to a nearby ARCO gas station, where she made three separate gasoline purchases from the same station. With the first purchase, Arias used her bank card, choosing not to go inside, but rather to use the Payment Island Cashier (PIC), the machine where the gas pumps are located that will take either cash or debit and credit cards. Arias dispensed 8.301 gallons and paid a total of $35.06, completing that transaction at 8:42
P.M
. Interestingly, there was a transaction fee of 45 cents assessed because she chose to use her bank card. If the point of using gas cans was to save money, then this fee would have largely negated any savings that she might have hoped to gain.

From there, things only got more strange. The next receipt was for a purchase at the same ARCO and same pump, time-stamped approximately four minutes after the first. The receipt showed that she initiated this transaction at 8:46
P.M
., but unlike the first transaction, she walked inside and paid the clerk forty dollars in cash for 9.594 gallons of gas, instead of continuing to use the PIC, where she had just used her bank card. This was enough to fill two gas cans.

After the Walmart purchase, this was now the second time that she had paid for something involving the gas cans with cash. Seeing the pattern, I began to suspect that anything associated with the gas cans was going to be a cash sale. I couldn’t imagine what her motivation was, but I hoped a review of the rest of the receipts would make it clear to me.

I looked through the rest of the receipts and found a third purchase at that same ARCO only seven minutes later, at 8:53
P.M
. It involved the same clerk as the previous purchase and was also a prepaid transaction for $20.00 in cash, which
bought the equivalent of approximately five gallons of gas. She ended up only buying 2.774 gallons, costing $11.56, so I immediately surmised that this final gas can probably still had some gas in it, which could have come from either an earlier stop or from there being some gas in the can when Darryl Brewer gave it to her.

In all three instances, she used the same pump, Number 2, which left me visualizing Arias going back and forth between the pump and the minimart, like wipers on a car windshield. The difference was that I knew the purpose of the windshield wipers was to wipe away the rain. With Arias, shuttling between the pump and the clerk made no sense and seemed random. Although her behavior seemed odd, without more information it didn’t prove anything. At this point all I had were some receipts from California and a map with circles around the cities—I had no idea if Arias had taken the gas cans any farther than Pasadena.

While I didn’t find any more receipts from gasoline purchases in California, or any at all from Arizona, there were two gas receipts from transactions made in the early morning hours of June 6, at a Tesoro gas station in Salt Lake City, Utah. These purchases took place three days after Arias’ June 3 stop at the ARCO station in Pasadena. Since I knew that she traveled to Arizona in that time, this left me with two possibilities for the lack of receipts between June 3 and June 6; either she had purchased gasoline elsewhere and had thrown the receipts away, or she had used the gasoline in the cans from the ARCO in Pasadena rather than stop at another gas station along the way.

Her gas purchases at the Tesoro gas station in Salt Lake City on Friday, June 6, started at 3:57
A.M
. The first receipt was for a pay-at-the-pump transaction of $41.18 for 10.672 gallons. Arias then walked inside and paid at the counter for another purchase of gasoline seven minutes later, at 4:05
A.M
., as shown by the second receipt. This time she pumped 9.583
gallons for $36.98. In both instances she used her bank card to pay.

I was convinced that she still had the third gas can with her at this point in her trip, but the amount of gas purchased in Salt Lake was consistent with having only filled two gas cans. I reviewed all the receipts one more time to make sure I had not missed one, but there was nothing there indicating any more purchases in Salt Lake City. By all appearances it looked like she hadn’t used the third gas can during that stop, and I had no way of knowing whether it was in her possession for the remainder of the trip. The rest of the shoebox receipts were miscellaneous purchases, including for food, and added nothing to further advance the inquiry.