Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (23 page)

Another member of the Mesa Police Department who would testify was Heather Conner, a technician experienced in finding latent prints at a scene and comparing them to a suspect’s prints. Conner had collected a left palm print in blood from the west wall of the bathroom hallway and determined that the latent palm print was Arias’, establishing that Arias had been at Travis’ house. That her palm print was on the west wall, where one of the retrieved inadvertent photographs showed Arias’ foot at Travis’ head as blood runs down his right shoulder, would go far in removing any doubt that the jury might have that someone other than Arias had killed Travis.

Heather Conner had also been present when the hundreds of photographs were taken of the crime scene, documenting the body, bathroom, and master bedroom from every angle. It would have been counterproductive to show every one of those photographs to the jury, so I spent days narrowing the number that I would introduce down to 140. The photographs I selected showed the entirety of the scene, which would help the jury understand how the killing occurred and also help them appreciate the pain and anguish inflicted by Arias on Travis.

Although photographs accurately depict the size and relationship between items, they are not a life-size representation, which is why I like to bring in the actual object or documents whenever possible. I had spent a great deal of time going through the items that had been collected as part of the investigation. In looking at the piece of carpet that had been cut from the master bedroom showing the ovoid blood stain, I was surprised to see how much larger the pattern was than I remembered it from my walk-through. Because the carpet swatch had been cut from the floor, I was able to look underneath it and noticed that the blood on the underside appeared diluted, just like the blood on the side of the cardboard box sitting on the floor of the bathroom linen closet. It was obvious that Arias had used the plastic tumbler to apply water to that area of the carpet in an attempt to clean up the scene by pouring water on the blood.

I realized that the actual section of carpet would be far more impactful to the jury than an 8½-by-11-inch photograph, giving them an understanding of how profusely Travis was bleeding as Arias chased him down and slit his throat at the end of the hallway.

Another item from the house that caught my eye was the goldish-brown bath towel that police had found in the washing machine. It was the mate to the one I had seen hanging in Travis’ bathroom, although this one was now discolored in
spots from having gone through the wash cycle with bleach. It seemed clear that Arias had been the one to put it in the washing machine with the bleach to remove any biological material she may have left behind, so if a DNA test were done, there would be no evidence to show she was there. This would be significant for the jury to consider when assessing Arias’ claim that she was confused and could not remember much about the attack or her actions after she killed Travis.

Also important was that one of the goldish-brown towels had been found in the washing machine next to the camera, showing that Arias appeared to believe that adding bleach would destroy the photographs linking her to the crime, which would help answer for the jury the question of why she had failed to take the camera with her when she left Travis’ house that day.

Once the police photographer finished taking pictures, investigators from the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner had come in and placed the body in a bag to remove it from the crime scene for examination by Kevin Horn, M.D., a doctor with that office. As Dr. Horn would describe, Arias first stabbed Travis in the chest, then slashed his throat, finally ending her attack with a shot to Travis’ right temple. He would also tell the jury that Travis was conscious for the first part of the attack and tried to protect himself from the knife, as indicated by the defensive wounds on his hands.

To avoid any confusion about the caliber of the casing found near the sink area, I intended to call Elizabeth Northcutt, a forensic firearms examiner with the Mesa Police Department. She examined the casing found in the blood in front of the sink and determined it was .25 caliber. She also examined the bullet fragment recovered by Dr. Horn from Travis’ head and found that it was consistent in weight with a .25 caliber round. Northcutt would also speak to the difference between a revolver, which does not eject the casings after the bullet is fired,
and a semiautomatic handgun, which extracts and ejects the casings, and is the kind of gun that was used to shoot Travis in the face.

I knew that Detective Flores would be grilled about an assertion he made at a court hearing very early in the case that was at odds with Dr. Kevin Horn’s findings. That hearing was to determine whether there was probable cause to believe that the killing was especially cruel, addressing whether Travis suffered emotionally or physically as a result of being stabbed and shot. I had called Flores to testify and reprise Dr. Horn’s opinion as to the sequence of the fatal injuries leading to Travis’ death. My decision to call Flores instead of Horn was an acknowledgment of how busy Horn’s schedule was at the time. There was a shortage of doctors at the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner, and I knew that the rules allowed for Flores to testify based on what Horn might have told him. Detective Flores does not have any medical experience, and his knowledge of the sequence of events was predicated on a very brief phone conversation with Dr. Horn that took place a couple of days before the hearing. It was unclear whether Horn understood what Flores was asking, but the end result was that Flores interpreted what he heard to mean the shot to Travis’ temple happened before the stab wounds.

The defense had raised this inconsistency in prior pleadings, so I was sure they would raise it again at trial. It was a point of little consequence, because no one could dispute that Travis suffered extreme physical pain and emotional distress as shown by the defensive wounds on his hands. I hoped defense counsel would continue to focus on this “inconsistency” rather than spend time on the self-defense claim.

Corroborating the testimony of Dr. Horn would be forensic chemist Lisa Perry of the Mesa Police Department, a blood spatter expert who could detail Travis’ movements during the attack based on the blood patterns in the bathroom. Her opin
ion was that the attack began in the shower, where Travis’ blood was first shed, and moved to the sink area, where Arias repeatedly stabbed him in the back as he stood over the vanity. Somehow Travis made his way down the hall toward the master bedroom until collapsing at the doorway, where his throat was slashed. Arias dragged him back down the hallway to the sink area, where she shot him in the face, with the ejected casing landing on blood already pooling on the floor. Perry’s testimony would be offered to help fill the gaps left by the thick “fog” that prevented Arias from remembering most of what happened during the attack.

Testimony from Jodi Legg, a forensic chemist with the Mesa Police Department, would be another scientific piece in proving that Arias was the person who murdered Travis. Legg had examined the biological evidence collected at the scene and found a mixture of Travis’ and Arias’ blood on the hair and the bloody palm print found on the wall in the hallway. The significance of this was that it placed Arias at the scene at the time of the killing, when blood was being shed.

Perhaps the most important pieces of evidence during my case were the deleted photographs that Mesa Police detective Michael Melendez retrieved from the memory card of Travis’ camera. The photographs helped prove that Arias was the person who killed Travis on the afternoon of June 4, 2008, and at least two of those pictures showed how she dragged his limp body down the hallway after she rendered him unconscious. If there was any doubt as to her identity, the photos of their afternoon sexual foray showed not only her private parts but her face as well. Melendez would also discuss the photos of Travis in the shower, which established that he and Arias were still together in the late afternoon, at 5:30
P.M
., minutes before Travis was killed, as shown in the three inadvertent photographs.

Once Arias was shown to be the killer, the emphasis of my presentation would shift to proving that she premeditated the
murder. Though I would only bring up the gas cans and the three messages she sent to Travis after his death during my cross-examination of Arias, I still had several pieces of evidence that I was going to introduce during my case in chief to demonstrate her planning of the murder. I would call witnesses to testify to the change of Arias’ hair color, her selection of a rental car location that was far away from Yreka, her removal of the floor mats from the rental car, her theft of the gun from her grandparents’ home, turning off her phone to avoid being tracked, and her removal of the license plates from the rental car.

The testimony of Detective Nathan Mendes of the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office would serve to point out other steps Arias had taken in furtherance of her plan to kill Travis. Detective Mendes held one of the keys to establishing the foundation for my theory about the gas cans, and through his testimony I intended to introduce a photograph of the Airwalk shoebox found in Arias’ bedroom at her grandparents’ house and the twenty-two receipts from Arias’ trip that had been found inside. He had been one of the officers who assisted the Mesa Police Department in the execution of the search warrant on the Pine Street home on July 15, 2008, and could speak to the items that had been found. My plan was to ask him about the receipts while he was on the stand in an expeditious fashion, almost as if they were an afterthought, so once they were in evidence, I could come back to them later, after I had introduced the borrowing of the gas cans through my cross-examination of Darryl Brewer.

Through Detective Mendes’ testimony, I also wanted to show that Arias’ decision to rent a car at the Budget counter at the airport in Redding, located ninety minutes from Yreka, instead of from one of two local rental agencies, Hertz and Enterprise, was a deliberate act to avoid being recognized. Officer Mendes was the detective who had assembled the photo lineup that included the booking photo of Arias. He had shown it
to the Budget rental agency employee Ralphael Colombo on July 17, 2008, and would testify to Colombo’s positive identification of Arias and to his statement that she was a blonde when she rented the car from him on June 2, 2008.

Like Mendes, Colombo would travel from California to testify about his interactions with Arias when she rented the vehicle and when she returned it to the counter at the Redding airport. He would confirm his immediate selection of Arias from the photo lineup and that her hair was blonde when she rented the car. Colombo would also testify about his observations when Arias returned the car on June 7, with four missing floor mats and an unanticipated number of miles on the odometer.

Officer Kevin Friedman of the Yreka Police Department would speak to his role in the investigation of the purported burglary of Arias’ grandparents’ house on May 28, 2008, during which her grandfather’s .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun was reportedly taken.

Arias’ traffic stop in West Jordan, Utah, would be introduced through the testimony of Officer Michael Galieti, who would describe how he pulled her over after observing that her rear license plate was upside down.

Ryan Burns stood out as an example of Arias’ pattern of chasing love from state to state, and was illustrative of her tendency to jump into a relationship and imagine it being more than it was. Burns would testify that Arias was calm when she arrived in Utah after the murder. And he could speak to her aggressive pursuit of sexual intimacy almost immediately upon her arrival in Utah. This emerging picture of Arias was at odds with her self-portrayal as a woman who submitted herself sexually to the whims of men.

Burns would also indicate that he was familiar with the route between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, which was a straight drive north on Interstate 15 all the way to Utah, with
no need to exit the freeway. Burns could also refute any claim that Arias was either on the road to Utah or with him at the time of the killing. He was the person who initially informed me about the traffic stop by Officer Galieti of the West Jordan Police Department. He also saw a cut on Arias’ hand when she arrived in Utah, when he also immediately noticed that she had changed her hair color to brunette.

Detective Larry Gladysh of the Mesa Police Department would testify that powering off a cell phone would make it impossible for police to trace its movements. He would also tell jurors that Arias’ cell phone was powered off just west of the Arizona border and turned on just south of the Nevada border. I would also call the custodians of records for the cell phone companies Verizon and Sprint to introduce the phone records should there be any question about the calls that were made.

I don’t normally script the order in which I call witnesses to the stand. It is almost impossible to adhere to it, because testimony may be longer or shorter than anticipated and scheduling conflicts usually arise, making it impossible to pinpoint an exact date and time the next person will be called. I made an exception in this prosecution for the testimony of Arias’ friend Leslie Udy, because I wanted her to be last person the jury would hear before turning the case over to defense counsel.

After Arias was “notified” of Travis’ death, she called Udy on the morning of June 10. Udy would recall that Arias was distraught and crying, asking how somebody could do that to Travis. As she sobbed, she told Udy that Travis was such a wonderful person, and she couldn’t imagine why anyone would do that to him. Udy received a second call from Arias around 2
A.M
. on June 11, during which Arias was hysterically crying, explaining that this was the time of day that she would talk to Travis and now he was dead. She said she had lost her best friend and didn’t know what to do.

As Arias sobbed about losing her “best friend,” she knew she was the sole cause of her supposed anguish, because she was the one who had ended Travis’ life. This juxtaposition spoke volumes, and it would be a powerful image on which to end the presentation of my case, because it demonstrated how deceitful Arias could be when it was to her benefit.