Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (2 page)

I
n central Arizona during the summer, no matter what time of day it is, it can always get hotter, and as I stepped out of my car on the morning of June 10, 2008, with the temperature already in the mid-90s, I had the distinct feeling it was going to be a particularly hot one.

I’d never been to this part of Mesa, Arizona, before, but taking in my surroundings, I noticed that the streets had the quiet feel of the suburbs. The neighborhood was the picture of urban tranquility, and if the empty driveways were any indication, most residents were already at work that Tuesday morning. There wasn’t even a dry gust of wind stirring the trees or the sound of children playing, but I wasn’t surprised by this apparent calm; I’d learned a long time ago that most murder scenes are eerily silent in the aftermath of the violence.

At 8:35 that morning, I’d received a phone call from Sergeant Dana McBride, a supervisor with the Mesa Police Department, notifying me of a homicide and asking me to respond to the scene so that I could conduct a walk-through before the victim’s body was removed. The investigation was nascent and there was only very basic information he could share: a thirty-year-old man named Travis Alexander had been murdered inside his own home.

I was in my twelfth year with the Homicide Bureau of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office in Phoenix, Arizona, having transferred into the unit in October 1996. Prosecutors assigned to the Homicide Bureau are required to take on-call
shifts, and in the event that a murder occurs during their shift, that prosecutor must go to the scene in order to become familiar with the intricacies of the case and meet with the detectives and officers working to make an arrest. Technically, my twenty-four-hour on-call shift had ended at 8:00
A.M
., and the call had come in after this. But although the schedule indicated that I was done at 8:00, I didn’t agree with such a strict approach; besides, given that the body had been discovered the previous evening while I was still on call, it only seemed fair that I respond rather than shirk the responsibility onto the next on-call attorney on the list.

The facts that I had learned from the sergeant on the phone were that the victim shared a home with two roommates who had not seen him in a couple of days. On the evening of June 9, 2008, a friend, Marie “Mimi” Hall, worried about Travis’ recent lack of communication, had stopped by his house. When no one answered the door, she called two friends to come meet her so they could go inside together, because she was afraid to enter on her own. One of Travis’ roommates who happened to be home and had not heard Mimi at the front door then unlocked the master bedroom door, and the group found Travis’ nude, contorted, decomposing body in the shower of the en-suite bathroom. Mimi immediately called 911 and alerted police to the situation at 10:27
P.M
. Sergeant McBride added that he did not know how the victim had been killed.

After hanging up, I left the office and began the approximately thirty-mile drive to Mesa, a city in the east valley. Travis Alexander’s home was located in a bedroom community miles from the center of the city. As I’d driven through his neighborhood, it seemed the kind of place where people move to raise their kids, and while there are many places of worship for many denominations, I knew the area to be particularly Mormon. Grocery stores stay open late. Movie theaters and restaurants abound. Crime—even petty offenses—was infre
quent, and usually the only violence that touched their lives was what the residents saw on television.

Travis’ home was an upscale tract house similar in style to the others in the subdivision, tan with brown trim and a Spanish-style roof. When I arrived, I walked up to the officer standing at the front door and let him know that I was ready for my walk-through whenever the lead investigator, a detective named Esteban Flores, was ready for me. I hadn’t worked with Detective Flores before, but I knew that he was reputed to be methodical and thorough in his investigations. A half hour later, I was allowed inside the home, and after I covered my shoes with protective booties, Detective Flores, a stocky former marine in his late thirties with close-cut black hair, met me just inside the front door.

As my eyes adjusted from the sunlight outside, I began to focus on each detail in the home as it was presented to me. The main reason for having prosecutors in the Homicide Bureau on call was that doing a walk-through of the location where the murder occurred gave us firsthand knowledge of the scene and victim. While we never assisted the police in their investigation, I always tried to use the walk-through to my advantage to get a head start on understanding the homicide I would be handling.

Glancing around the home’s first floor, I was struck by how orderly everything was, giving no indication that there had been trouble here. It was immaculate, and nothing seemed to be out of place. I’d been to many murder scenes and in the majority of them the furniture and household items inside the homes are strewn about or knocked down. Here, the only out-of-place item was a steam vacuum cleaner, which had been left standing in the middle of the living room floor.

As always, in a scene like this, I had my hands deep in my pants pockets to make sure I didn’t touch or disturb anything, a habit I had developed years earlier. Standing beside me, De
tective Flores gave me the little information about Travis the police had been able to confirm at this early stage of the investigation. Travis sold memberships through direct sales and network marketing as an independent contractor for Pre-Paid Legal Services, a business that provided access to legal services for its members who paid a fee to join. His friends said he was Mormon and faithfully attended services at the local church.

Detective Flores motioned me to follow him up the stairs. At the foot of the staircase was a doggy gate that had been pushed aside by the same friends who had discovered the body. The victim’s dog, Napoleon, a black pug, had already been removed from the house and was with one of Travis’ friends. We speculated about whether the dog had been there for some time without food or water, but noticed that at least there was a pet door insert in the sliding door that opened into the kitchen from the backyard allowing him to go in and out of the house.

At the top of the stair landing on the right, there was a makeshift home theater, with beanbag chairs, a big-screen TV and DVD player, a projector, and movie posters on the walls, including ones of Humphrey Bogart, Al Pacino, the Rat Pack, and Marilyn Monroe. Nothing there was disturbed, although there was a camera case lying next to one of the beanbag chairs. The camera itself was missing.

To the left were double doors that opened into the master bedroom. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was that the room felt cool. The air conditioner had been set to the mid-seventies, making the room seem chilly compared to the heat outside. The king-size bed in the center of the room had been stripped bare; there were no sheets or comforter, and a white mattress cover was balled up in the middle of the bed. Light streamed in through two windows on either side of the bed. On the nightstand was a book,
1,000 Places to See Before You Die,
by Patricia Schultz. Two pillows missing their pillowcases were on the floor near a pair of flip-flops. Carpet remnants
had been cut and glued to the upper sole of the flip-flops in an apparent effort to make them more comfortable to wear.

Taking my first steps into the room, I immediately noticed a large amount of blood on the carpet bordering the hallway leading to the bathroom. The blood was brown and crusted in an ovoid stain, with a concentration of bloody footprints around it oddly reminiscent of hoof prints left at a riverbank after a wildebeest migration. These footprints started and ended around the stain, indicating that the person had been careful to avoid tracking the blood anywhere else in the bedroom.

I didn’t walk down the hallway that led into the bathroom, but I could see that the tile floor was dotted with blood patches and the walls intermittently smudged with blood. There were crime lab technicians inside the hallway attempting to find any latent fingerprints—a latent print is a chance impression left at the scene of a crime that may not be immediately visible to the naked eye—or biological material for DNA testing.

I also noticed a number of detectives busy searching the bed area, while others processed the large walk-in closet with a door leading from the bedroom on one end and the bathroom on the other. Detective Flores directed that we walk through the closet on our way into the bathroom where the body had been found. Although we were wearing “booties” over our shoes, we ran the risk of transferring the blood on the hallway floor to other areas of the crime scene should we go down the hallway.

As we passed through the closet, I noticed it was orderly and organized. Baseball caps were lined up in a row. Several pairs of Levis, each clipped to a hanger by the hem hung lengthwise. Casual shoes sat on a shelf above the dress shoes, each pair aligned with its mate. To the right were Travis’ suits, and next to them were his shirts, which seemed to be arranged by color. In the middle of the closet was a bench for dressing and putting on shoes. A framed picture of Abraham Lincoln hung on the small space of wall between the two shelf units, as if
watching over Travis’ clothing. Some luggage was stored next to the door leading into the bathroom.

The orderliness of the closet stood in stark contrast to the chaos of the bathroom, and as I looked around I first saw a sink streaked with brownish-red blood. The blood covered the faucets and was splattered on the mirror. Blood was also strewn around the floor and on the baseboards, marking a grim trail either toward or away from the shower stall, where Travis Alexander’s naked body lay on the floor crammed into a fetal position—legs bent to his chest, head pressed onto his right shoulder, feet pushing against the wall. After days in this cramped repose, his extremities were turning black. It was obvious that his throat had been slashed, but there were also stab wounds visible on the upper chest. The body had apparently been rinsed off, but there was still an active discharge emanating from the gash in his throat.

There was a clear sixteen-ounce plastic tumbler resting between his right arm and the wall of the shower. Detective Flores and I discussed two possible alternatives for the tumbler. One was that it had been used to wash the body. That explanation did not make sense, because the body was already in the shower. It was more likely used in an attempt to wash away the blood in front of the sink and down the hallway, which had only served to distribute the blood to different places on the tile floor. A cardboard box on the floor of the bathroom linen closet next to the sink had soaked up some of the blood and water, leaving a light pinkish-red pattern on its’ sides.

The cut to the throat had almost certainly been delivered with a knife, and although I hadn’t seen anything resembling a gunshot wound, there was a .25 caliber casing lying on top of a small concentration of blood on the floor in front of the sink, where I first noticed a variety of blood patterns, indicating that Travis had stood there before making his way down the hallway. Police had searched throughout the house, but no weapon—not a gun or a knife—had been found.

Standing there, taking in the spectacle, I couldn’t help but think Travis must have suffered greatly. I’d seen a lot of crime scenes since I’d joined the homicide unit, and this one spoke to an over-kill. This murder seemed methodical and I didn’t think it was a crime of passion. It also seemed less angry and more purposeful. Only later would I find out just how goal-oriented the murderer had truly been because as it turned out, Travis had been killed three times over—stabbed in the chest next to the heart, slashed across the throat, and shot in the temple.

My eyes moved slowly around the bathroom one more time. I knew that it would be memorialized in photos and diagrams and that the whole room would be cataloged and measured by the investigators now working in the master bedroom suite. I would revisit this disturbing scene many times in the future through the photographs taken and the reports yet to be written, but I wanted to preserve as much as I could in my mind, so that wherever the investigation led I wouldn’t forget the bloody scene now in front of me.

Flores’ voice stirred me from my thoughts.

“Several of Travis’ friends and acquaintances keep talking about an ex-girlfriend named Jodi,” he said. “They all think she may have done it. They say she is a real stalker type.”

Flores said this “Jodi” had already called the police department asking to speak to a detective involved in the investigation and he was going to return her call as soon as he could. At this time, it didn’t seem strange that an ex-girlfriend had called the station—more than anything it was just interesting.

As we left the upstairs bathroom, Detective Flores stated, “We found a camera in the washing machine on the first floor. Let’s go downstairs so you can look at it.”

The door of the top-loading washing machine was open, allowing me to bend over and peer inside. To the left of the agitator was a black camera nestled amid the wet clothing, indicating it had been put through the wash cycle and from
the discolored look of the brown towel also inside, it appeared that bleach had been used.

“I don’t know if we are going to get anything out of it,” Flores told me, gesturing toward the camera, “but we are going to process it to see what we can find.”

I also looked inside the dryer and saw what appeared to be the missing bedding from the room upstairs. It included the king-size comforter and sheets matching the bed in the master suite.

“All this took time, you know,” Flores said, and I nodded in agreement. The clean up had not been restricted to the killing scene upstairs—it was throughout the house, including the downstairs laundry room.

Cleaning up after a murder scene is extremely rare; this was only the second time I had come across one manipulated to such an extent.

Q
uestions about the crime scene and motive swirled around in my head as I merged onto Interstate 17, heading toward my office in downtown Phoenix. I was anxious to get back and jot down some notes while the scene was fresh in my mind. I was still on the freeway, but knew I was getting close when I looked to the north and saw the copper dome of the Maricopa County Administration Building coming into view. The copper had started to turn green, which gave the building a classic look. I liked seeing it, knowing that I was almost back to my office in the nerve center of the city.

The Phoenix area is a sprawling metropolis of many smaller cities collectively known as the Valley of the Sun. Land is cheap, and although people build farther and farther from downtown, the feeling of wide-open space is not compromised. Over three million people occupy the metropolitan area’s more than five hundred square miles, so there seems to be room for everybody.

I’d first arrived in the valley from my home state of California to attend law school at Arizona State University in August 1981. I remember driving past the school’s campus in Tempe early one morning and thinking it was already quite hot. It probably seemed hotter than it really was because my car didn’t have air-conditioning. As I drove around, I was listening to the radio and heard the disc jockey raise his voice and announce that it was “cool in Phoenix.” I thought it was some sort of joke until I realized that the station’s call letters were
KOOL. Despite the temperature that day, the pleasant year-round weather became the reason I stayed in the Phoenix area. On those very hot days, I just keep reminding myself that it is a dry heat. Besides, it really is always “cool” here in the valley.

My ten-story, cement-and-glass office building in downtown Phoenix spans the entire block between Third and Fourth Avenues on West Jefferson Street. When we moved into the offices in the mid-1990s, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office occupied four of the ten floors, and a few years later, the Homicide Bureau expanded onto another floor, the fourth floor. I chose the southeast corner office, which has a view of the Maricopa County Fourth Avenue Jail, and have been there ever since.

I like the layout of the courthouse facilities. Our building is connected to the Maricopa County Superior Court Complex, and I can walk across “the bridge,” a glass-enclosed walkway, to the courthouse without ever going outside. This is especially convenient on those days when the temperature rises above 110 degrees. Ours is one of the largest prosecutorial offices in the country, with more than three hundred attorneys serving a population of about four million people. The number of employees varies, but there are usually around nine hundred full-time workers, including attorneys, investigators, paralegals, victim advocates, and support staff. The number of attorneys in the Homicide Bureau, now called the Capital Litigation Bureau, fluctuates, with an average of fifteen attorneys, including me. Everything that happens in the legal sense happens here, so I am in the middle of the action at all times, which suits me well.

It was shortly before noon by the time I finally parked my car in the garage. After a quick sandwich at the Change of Venue café on the second floor of my office building, I began filling out the incident report about my walk-through of the murder scene. It was only one page, asking for the basics—date, time, and place.

In this case, investigators didn’t know the date Travis Alexander was killed. His body had been found on the ninth of June, but given the state of decomposition and that Travis hadn’t been heard from in a week, police couldn’t tell how long he had been there just based on what they recovered at the crime scene. Where the form asked for “suspects,” I left it blank. But in the hours that followed, as the investigation deepened and Flores gathered more information from Travis’ friends and roommates at the scene, the identity of the suspect gradually began to shift from “unknown” to “Jodi Arias.”

Travis’ friends described Arias as “clingy” and a “fatal attraction” type. Apparently the two of them argued a lot, so much so that one of Travis’ roommates had been able to detail some of their disagreements. The main source of conflict related to Jodi Arias moving to Mesa
after
she and Travis had broken up. She had been living in Palm Desert, California, and in July 2007, a couple of weeks after their breakup, she moved to Mesa. One of Travis’ best friends, Taylor Searle, told detectives about a conversation Travis said he’d had with Arias just the previous week, during which Travis let Arias know that he did not want to ever see or talk to her again. Searle said that according to Travis, this had made Arias very upset.

Of particular interest was the information provided by Mimi Hall. She had been one of the people who found Travis’ body. She told police that she had met Travis at a singles function at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) in Mesa. They had been spending time together as friends since about February or March, and they even went out on a couple of dates.

Mimi was scheduled to travel to Cancún, Mexico, with Travis on June 10 and hadn’t heard from him in about a week. She had made it clear that they were only going as friends, and even told him that he was free to invite someone else if that made him more comfortable. Apparently, it was too late to change the plans, so they agreed to go as friends. As the
trip approached, Mimi became increasingly concerned when Travis failed to return her telephone calls, respond to her text messages, or answer her e-mail correspondence. The night before their scheduled trip, she finally decided to go over to his house to make sure nothing was wrong.

It was some time after 9:00
P.M
. when Mimi arrived there. Before approaching the house, she called her mother and asked that she stay on the line with her as a precautionary measure. She was concerned because she knew an old girlfriend named Jodi had been stalking Travis, and he’d told her that she had actually followed them on one of their dates. With her mother on the phone, Mimi knocked on the door and rang the doorbell over and over again without receiving an answer. Although a light was on upstairs, no one came to the door. The only response was from Travis’ dog, Napoleon, who kept barking and jumping at the door in an agitated state.

Mimi was now concerned that something might have happened to Travis and called mutual friends, Michelle Lowery and Dallin Forrest, to come over and help her try to enter the house. A short time later, the group gained entry into the garage using the pad access code, which allowed them to walk into the house through the unlocked pantry door.

They were greeted by Napoleon, who was running around downstairs. When they didn’t find Travis on the first floor, they went upstairs to check his bedroom, but the door was locked and nobody answered when they knocked. Travis owned the house, but to meet expenses he rented rooms to roommates, Zachary Billings and Enrique Cortez, both of whom he’d met through the LDS church. Billings was with his girlfriend in an upstairs bedroom and offered to go downstairs to get the key.

After unlocking the door, Billings and Forrest entered the room to see if Travis was inside. They’d gone only a few steps when they saw the large spot of blood on the bedroom carpet. They followed the blood down the blood-streaked hallway and
into the bathroom, where they found Travis’ decomposing body stuffed on the floor of the shower. After seeing the body, the two men hurried out and told the others that Travis was dead and Mimi called police.

Mimi was a dedicated Mormon girl, which was part of the reason Travis said he found her so attractive. As a devout Mormon himself, he wanted to get married and raise a family, and he believed Mimi was someone with whom he could spend the rest of his life. The problem was that after going out a couple of times, Mimi found that she was not attracted to him in that way. For his part, Travis thought she was the one and believed it was a relationship he could still explore.

Mimi told police that Travis was always a gentleman during their dates, never did anything inappropriate, and didn’t even try to kiss her. Although the relationship was platonic, she had agreed to travel with him to Cancún because she’d been there before and had enjoyed it.

Mimi said she didn’t know much about Jodi Arias, but did know that Travis had been the one who baptized Arias into the LDS church and that she had moved to Mesa from California after their breakup to be near him. She described Arias as a stalker ex-girlfriend and was worried about her because she believed her to be “obsessive.” Travis had told her that Arias would sneak into his house through the doggy door insert in the sliding glass door leading into the kitchen. Mimi had heard that Arias had hacked into one of his online accounts, either Facebook or e-mail, and had stolen his personal journals. She said Travis had confronted her about it. Mimi thought that Arias was dangerous enough that she feared for her safety.

Police also questioned Travis’ roommate Zachary Billings. Billings said that he had started renting a room from Travis beginning in late January 2008 and was charged a monthly rent of $450. When asked about Jodi Arias, Billings said that she would hang out at the house all the time when Billings first moved in back in January. He knew she had moved to Arizona
from California shortly after she and Travis broke up, and that she had rented a room in a friend’s house just a few miles away to be close to Travis.

Billings said Arias’ move had been a source of conflict between Arias and Travis. She would call at inappropriate times and show up at the house unannounced, which led to arguments between her and Travis. Billings recalled that Travis was dating someone else back in January. He couldn’t remember the woman’s name, but said they broke up in mid-February and that he believed Arias had been the cause. The new girlfriend didn’t like that Arias was always “hanging around” and told Travis that until he “dealt with Jodi” things between them wouldn’t work out.

Billings recalled that when he came home on either Wednesday, June 4, or Thursday, June 5, the furniture on the tile floor downstairs had been moved. He said Travis had just bought an upright floor cleaner and he noticed it standing downstairs when he first walked inside. He also said that the banister leading upstairs was “slick,” as if it had been cleaned.

I had wondered about the upright floor cleaner when I first saw it during the walk-through of the scene. We’d passed it on the way from the upstairs bedroom down to the laundry room. And after I saw the cleanup efforts in the bathroom, I remembered thinking that the killer might have used it to clean something up in the downstairs living room area.

Billings said that eventually someone moved the furniture, with the exception of the floor cleaner, back to its proper place in the living room. He believed the other roommate, Enrique Cortez, might have done it.

Police also talked with the other roommate, Cortez. Cortez said he couldn’t remember for sure, but he believed that the last time he saw Travis was when he got home from work on Wednesday evening. He recalled that Travis was downstairs and talking on the phone, perhaps on a conference call. There
was nothing unusual about that night, but the next night when he got home from work he was surprised to find that the front door was locked. Travis never worried about break-ins and always kept the front door unlocked. Cortez didn’t have a key and was forced to enter the house through the garage using the keypad. He recalled that as he walked through the living room he noticed that the furniture had been moved and pushed off the tile floor. He also remembered seeing the floor cleaner in the middle of the room and assumed that Travis was getting ready to clean the tile.

That evening, as he and his girlfriend were leaving the house to go to Temple, they noticed Travis’ “CTR” ring sitting on the kitchen counter. Cortez found it strange because Travis typically didn’t go anywhere without it. “CTR” stands for “Choose the Right,” and is worn by Mormons to remind them to resist temptation. Also out of the ordinary was that the doggy fence was up on the landing, stopping Travis’ dog from going upstairs. This was unusual because Travis only restricted Napoleon’s access to the living room area of the house.

Detective Flores also told me about another ex-girlfriend of Travis’, Lisa Andrews, who had dated Travis on and off for a number of months in 2007 and 2008. She was the one who’d mentioned Arias as the reason for her breakup with Travis. She recalled that she and Travis had fallen asleep one night while watching television in the upstairs loft area. They’d been awakened by the sound of Napoleon barking and noticed a light going off downstairs. When Travis went down to investigate, he found Arias standing in the kitchen area. She admitted to him that not only had she let herself into the house, but she had been upstairs watching them sleep.

Andrews told detectives she received a threatening e-mail from a “John Doe” the morning after she spent the night at Travis’ house:

You are a shameful whore. Your Heavenly Father must be deeply ashamed of the whoredoms you’ve committed with that insidious man. If you let him stay in your bed one more time or even sleep under the same roof as him, you will be giving the appearance of evil. You are driving away the Holy Ghost, and you are wasting your time. You are also compromising your salvation and breaking your baptismal covenants. Of all the commandments to break, committing the act of whoredom is one of the most displeasing in the eyes of the Lord. You cannot be ashamed enough of yourself. You are filthy, and you need to repent and become clean in the eyes of God. Think about your future husband and how you disrespect not only yourself, but him, as well as the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Is that what you want for yourself? Your future, your salvation, and your posterity is resting on your choices and actions. You are a daughter of God, and you have been a shameful example. Be thou clean, sin no more. Heavenly Father loves you and wants you to make the right choices. I know you are strong enough to choose the right. Your Father in Heaven is pulling for you. Don’t ignore the promptings you receive, because they are vital to your spiritual well-being.