Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (18 page)

With Deanna now out of the courtroom, Arias refocused her attention on Nitterauer. “Okay, so what about the magazine brings you here today?” she asked.

“I wrote something to—a message for my boyfriend [to] give to a codefendant of mine.”

“And do you remember which magazine you wrote the message in?”

“
Digital Camera
magazine,” Nitterauer replied, citing the name incorrectly.

“And what about the other magazine?”

“The other was the
Star
magazine, and it had the pages circled . . .” she replied.

This too was an erroneous fact, as I knew the numbers found on the page of
Star
had not been circled, and I intended to assertively point that out to Nitterauer during my cross-examination.

“So, in the
Star
magazine, you indicated certain pages in reference to the
Digital Pro
magazine?” Arias continued, perhaps hoping to remind her witness of the correct name of the magazine that had contained the cryptic messages.

“Yes” was Nitterauer’s one-word response.

“And so that would contain the message in the
Digital
—”

“Objection, leading,” I interjected.

“Sustained,” Judge Stephens ruled.

“Sorry. So the message was for whom? Sorry,” Arias continued, seeming slightly taken aback by my opposition to her question and apologizing not once but twice.

When Nitterauer provided the name of the supposed intended recipient of the magazines, Arias asked her final question. “Your codefendant?” to which Nitterauer replied in the affirmative, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, I think that’s it,” Arias said before returning to her
chair at the defense table. She had posed just ten questions and she was done.

I waited for her to sit down before starting with my first question. “Ma’am, one of the things you indicated to us just now was that the pages were circled, right?” I began.

The witness offered up a more specific reply, which was equally incorrect. “The numbers for the pages were circled . . . on the third page in the back.”

“On the back of it, you circled the page numbers?” I asked, confirming her response.

“Yes.”

“And with regard to the other magazine that contained messages, you indicated that you were the one that wrote whatever messages were on there, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you wrote them on the left margins, right?”

“I put them all different places, like in the seam of the book, on top of the book, in the little areas where there’s clean pieces of paper on the magazine.”

“. . . And that was on the photo magazine, correct? . . . And then the
Star
magazine is the one with the page numbers? Those are the ones that are circled?”

Nitterauer again affirmed that the numbers in
Star
magazine were circled, which was problematic because when she was shown the magazine, she couldn’t even find the page on which the numbers were written. She also claimed to know that the issue of
Star
she had wanted Anne Campbell to deliver to her codefendant had a photo of Casey Anthony on the cover, but when I asked her to describe where on the cover Ms. Anthony’s photo was located, she could not provide an answer, seeming not to actually know who Anthony was or what she looked like.

“Where would Casey Anthony’s picture be?” I asked, holding up the issue in question.

“On the cover,” she replied.

“What part of the cover?”

“I don’t know” was Nitterauer’s reply.

“Even looking at it, you don’t know where it is?”

“No.”

Nitterauer also testified that she had gotten the issue of
Star
at the end of June or beginning of July, which was impossible, as the weekly magazine was dated July 25, 2011.

“I don’t know, maybe I have the wrong date,” the witness conceded.

“Or maybe you are not telling the truth?” I retorted.

At the close of my cross-examination, Arias stood and performed her redirect examination.

Through a series of simply worded questions, Arias worked to reestablish that Nitterauer had indeed been the one who had written the messages in
Digital Photo Pro
and the corresponding page numbers in
Star,
but after failing in her attempt to rehabilitate her witness she tried to place the blame on me for Nitterauer’s erroneous statement that she had circled those numbers. “So, I don’t recall you saying that you circled the pages in the interview. Juan said that.”

I was prepared for the fight, and before Arias could even finish her sentence, I stood to voice my objection. “I am going to object to the defendant testifying,” I declared. “The record speaks for itself.”

“Okay,” Arias acknowledged, shrinking back on that accusation to put forth another, equally improbable excuse. “Is it possible you’re mixed up?”

“Yes,” Nitterauer said, grabbing the bait.

“You don’t remember exactly when you wrote in the magazine?” Arias coached, prompting me to object once again.

“Sustained,” Judge Stephens ruled, and directed Arias to rephrase her question.

This was the first hearing at which I cross-examined a witness presented by Arias and in her presence, so she hadn’t
known how to prepare Nitterauer for my manner of questioning.

Nitterauer’s account did not hold up under scrutiny, and the testimony ended up assisting the prosecution. More than that, the experience proved useful in other ways. After years of seeing how Arias manipulated situations and people to her advantage, it was instructive to watch as she floundered in a courtroom, where rules are nonnegotiable.

After Nitterauer stepped down from the witness stand, the hearing was continued until August 15, when I was expected to call the remaining witnesses and Arias would question them, continuing to act as her own lawyer. But when we arrived on August 15 to resume the hearing, there was a change in the proceedings. Arias had chosen to stop representing herself, and after the reappointment of Nurmi and Washington as defense counsel, I was surprised when they withdrew their objection to my request that the letters be excluded from use during the trial.

And with that, the letters were gone from the case.

Even though Nurmi had claimed to Sky Hughes that the authenticity of the letter he showed her had been verified by a handwriting expert, this claim had fallen apart under closer scrutiny. It was an abrupt reversal, and defense counsel never gave a reason to the court for their decision agreeing to withdraw the letters.

Whatever the defense counsel’s rationale for withdrawing them, the case had a new reality. Without the Bob White letters to aid her, Arias’ claim of self-defense was weakened substantially, because it was based solely on her uncorroborated word. She had painted herself into a corner with her different stories and now had no choice but to stay the course with her latest one.

T
hough I’d successfully dealt with the Bob White letters, they were only part of the problem. I still had to contend with the instant messages and various electronic communications that portrayed Travis as someone who was quick to anger and used sexually offensive language toward Arias. These messages and words were probably going to be admissible, and they seemed to support Arias’ claim that Travis could be verbally and physically abusive and, at times, sexually inappropriate.

I needed to find a way to counter this interpretation of the messages. Rather than challenging Travis’ written words, I chose to focus on what might have provoked his angry missives, which meant looking more closely at his constant antagonist, Jodi Arias. There had to be a reason, even a bad one, to help explain his harsh written outbursts.

In Arias’ telling, Travis was the sexual aggressor of the two, while she was the more passive one, a self-characterization that helped form the foundation of her self-defense argument.

The electronic correspondence showed them both to be sexually aggressive in their own ways, and a different story of what was going on between them appeared to unfold. Travis may have had his moments of harsh words for Arias, but his messages like “3 hole wonder” did not seem indicative of his behavior throughout their relationship. Those harsh moments were just that—moments. They showed all too clearly that there were times when Arias could push Travis too far, and
like anyone pushed so hard, he got angry. Combined with the shame and guilt that he was already feeling toward himself as a religious person in this highly sexual relationship, there were times when her antagonism resulted in words that he couldn’t take back. This didn’t make his lashing out acceptable on any level, but viewed through this lens, it was clear that these charged moments of anger were the exceptions, not the rule.

In order to counter the idea that Arias was simply a passive figure and Travis a constant sexual aggressor, I needed to move beyond the instant messages and e-mails, which would always be open to interpretation from either side, depending on who was discussing them. I began to think back to what I knew of her previous relationships.

I remembered reading something which spoke to Arias’ demeanor in an intimate setting during the interview that the defense investigator had done with Darryl Brewer back on October 6, 2008—the interview that had first put me on the trail of the gas cans—so I pulled out the binder with his summary to verify my recollection. When the investigator had asked Brewer about his intimate relationship with Arias, Brewer had talked about when they first met. “The first time, she was pretty aggressive,” he recalled when speaking to the investigator, describing Arias as “enthusiastic” and always “comfortable” sexually and with intimacy. Turning this information over anew, it was intriguing how different Brewer’s characterization of Arias was from the way she was portraying herself now that she was claiming she had killed Travis in self-defense.

I wanted to find out if Arias had been as sexually forward with Ryan Burns as she had been with Darryl Brewer. She had visited him in Utah less than twenty-four hours after she’d been intimate with Travis before she killed him, so I wanted to find out how sexually appropriate she had been with Burns, especially after having rolled around in Travis’ bed a day before.

To prepare for my call to Burns, I decided to review the telephonic interview police had conducted with him on June 25, 2008. The information he had provided to them was silent with regard to any sexual interplay that he and Arias may have had, but my review was not in vain, as I did find another discrepancy in the story Arias had told Burns about why her cell phone hadn’t been working during the drive from California to Utah.

Burns told police that Arias called him on Tuesday, June 3, 2008, at around 11:00
P.M
., to let him know she had just left the Monterey area and would be arriving in Utah the following day. He didn’t hear from her again until approximately twenty hours later, when she phoned him the evening of June 4, claiming to have driven in the wrong direction, gotten lost, and run out of gas. She told Burns she had just passed a highway sign that read
100 MILES TO LAS VEGAS
, which would put her on Highway 93 North passing through Kingman, Arizona. Her stated reason for not contacting Burns sooner was that she had forgotten her cell phone charger and turned off her phone to save the battery.

This was in stark contrast to what she had told Detective Flores on July 15, 2008, just after her arrest in Yreka. During that conversation, Arias claimed that her cell phone had powered off on its own just east of Pasadena, California, and it wasn’t until she found her cell phone charger, which had lodged itself under the passenger-side seat, that she was able to power it on north of Kingman.

That Arias had told two different stories about the cell phone charger, one to Burns and the other to law enforcement during an official police interview, convinced me even more that she had deliberately powered off her cell phone to avoid being detected in Arizona. This certainly spoke to her planning of the murder, because it was another step she took knowing it would be impossible for police to electroni
cally track her movements if her phone was powered off. This became one more point I didn’t want to forget to discuss with Burns on the phone.

It was midmorning when I reached Burns on his cell phone, and from the outset he sounded eager to cooperate. I explained that I had some questions for him that had not been covered during his interview with police, assuring him that I was not recording our conversation or taking notes. I avoid using a recorder when I speak with witnesses because I want them to be comfortable knowing there is no recording device, and I don’t take notes because I don’t want to stop the flow of the conversation by asking the person to repeat something to enable me to write it down.

“I am happy to tell you what I know,” Burns said.

I didn’t want to initiate the conversation with questions about his intimate relationship with Arias, so I began by asking him about his living situation. He explained that back in June 2008 he had resided with his parents in West Jordan, a suburb of Salt Lake City, but that his quarters were private and separated from the rest of the house.

Next, I asked him about Arias’ failure to arrive in Utah on the morning of June 4, as she had promised, and he indicated that he’d started to worry when she didn’t turn up as scheduled. As the hours passed without hearing from her, he grew increasingly concerned and called around to mutual acquaintances in the Salt Lake City area, hoping that they had heard something. It struck me that his community was close-knit and he felt comfortable calling others to share his concern. When he learned that no one had heard from her, there was nothing he could do but wait and hope she was okay.

Burns told me that it wasn’t until later that evening, while out to dinner with two friends at the Cheesecake Factory, that he finally received a call from Arias, claiming she had gotten lost and would be in Utah some time the following morning.
Burns recalled that she was in good spirits and was looking forward to seeing him.

When she finally arrived the next day and greeted him outside his front door, he told me he was surprised to see that she was now a brunette, since she’d been a blonde when he first met her.

“You’re a lucky guy that girls come to see you,” I said, trying to move the conversation to the more pertinent topic of their physical relationship. I knew that Ryan Burns was Mormon, and I wanted to be respectful, but I needed to find out what had happened during their brief time together.

When I asked if they had kissed, he revealed that Arias was more than a willing participant, as she kissed him first. Burns described the kiss as “passionate,” so I asked him if anything else had happened. He admitted that the two had engaged in sexual behavior the only night she was in Utah. He explained that after attending a PPL meeting in Salt Lake City, the two went to dinner with friends and then back to his house, where they watched a movie together. He recalled that Arias was tired, so the two lay down on his bed for a nap, so she could get a few hours of sleep before starting her drive back to California. Upon waking, according to Burns, they engaged in romantic kissing and grinding of their pelvic areas, with Arias straddling him while the two were fully clothed.

Listening to Burns’ narrative, it was surprising to hear that Arias would be so intimate and aggressive with him given what, according to her, she’d just been through with Travis. After all, if her version of events was to be believed, less than two days earlier, she’d slept with Travis, who had caused her to fear for her life to the point that she’d killed him. And yet, in spite of all this apparent emotional trauma that she’d experienced, here she was with Burns, carrying on in a sexual manner as though nothing had happened.

“Did anything unusual happen while you guys were together?” I asked.

It was then that Burns told me something that had not been mentioned in the police report. Shortly after Arias arrived at his house on June 5, the two drove in separate cars to a restaurant, where they were meeting friends for lunch before going to the PPL seminar. It was around noon, and he was driving in front of her, when he looked in his rearview mirror and noticed that she had been pulled over by a member of the West Jordan City Police Department. He watched as Arias spoke briefly with the police officer and was allowed to drive on without being cited.

Once they arrived at the restaurant, Burns asked her what had happened with the cop, and she explained that he’d pulled her over because her rear license plate was affixed upside down. She claimed that some kids had been goofing around near the front of her car while she’d been inside a restaurant while driving through California. She added that when she came out to the parking lot the kids saw her approaching, dropped the front license plate, and took off laughing. She’d picked up the plate and put it in the backseat of her car, telling Burns those kids were the ones responsible for removing the back license plate and replacing it upside down.

At the end of my call with Burns, I was anxious to know more about what had happened with the traffic stop, so I attempted to get a copy of the police report detailing the events. I phoned the police station in West Jordan and was told that a report of the traffic stop had not been generated because Arias had not been cited. I know that each dispatch operator also generates another, less detailed report, and I immediately called the dispatch center and requested the event log for the traffic stop. The log did not include much information, but it did indicate the name of the police officer, Michael Galieti, and the time of 12:03
P.M.
when he had pulled Arias over on June 5.

After leaving a message for him, officer Galieti returned my call, and I asked about the traffic stop hoping he remembered
pulling Arias over. As it turned out, he remembered the stop quite well, saying it was the only time in his career where he had seen a car being driven with a rear license plate affixed upside down. He also said that there was no front license plate on the car when he stopped it that day and remembered that the driver was a woman whom he identified as Jodi Arias. When I asked if she had provided an explanation, he told me that during traffic stops he hears a lot of stories, and hers was that her friends—not strangers—must be “playing a joke on me.”

It was impressive that Arias was able to spin a spur-of-the-moment tale so convincingly that she was able to talk a police officer out of giving her a ticket for the infraction. And once again, just like with her story about the cell phone charger, she’d told Ryan Burns one thing and law enforcement another.

With these two competing versions revealing her untruthfulness, it seemed evident that Arias had removed both license plates before she arrived at Travis’ house in Mesa in the early morning hours of June 4. This would have made it difficult for anyone to identify the vehicle should it have been seen at or near Travis’ house. She had apparently never put the front license plate back on the car and had remounted the back one upside down, leading to the stop by Officer Galieti.

After my conversations with Burns and Galieti, I made the decision that I was going to call both of them to testify, and as required by the rules, I filed a notice letting defense counsel know of my intention. As with every other potential prosecution witness, defense counsel indicated that they wished to speak to Burns and Galieti, so that they could ask them questions and tape-record their answers. Rather than inconvenience the two individuals with a trip to Arizona, I informed defense counsel Laurence Nurmi that the interviews would take place in Utah, and as is my normal practice, I would also be present during the interviews—not to interrupt or question, but simply to observe.

The conversation Nurmi had with Ryan Burns was con
ducted in an interview room at the West Jordan City Police Department. Nurmi was a hulking man with close-cropped hair and rimmed glasses. He was dressed casually in contrast to my dress shirt and tie, and he had a legal pad in front of him that he would refer to while asking questions, along with a tape recorder. Burns was in his late twenties, approximately six feet tall, with red hair and green eyes. We all sat at the table, and I began the dialogue by thanking Burns for coming. I let him know that Mr. Nurmi was one of the lawyers for Jodi Arias and wanted to ask him some questions.

During these kinds of interviews, my attention is always focused on the witness, not defense counsel, as I am looking to see their demeanor and style in answering questions, as well as their level of composure. Burns had an air of confidence, and I sensed that he would tell the story as he remembered it without being unduly influenced by the question. Nothing emerged from Burns’ interview that was of a surprising nature, except I realized that he was three years younger than Arias.

I wasn’t timing the interview, but it seemed like about thirty minutes had passed when Nurmi indicated that he had no more questions, and I let Burns know the interview was over and again thanked him for making himself available.