Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (4 page)

“Any idea what everybody’s talking about? What everybody’s saying? What their suspicions are?” Flores asked.

For the first time, Arias sounded flustered. She stepped over her words until she was finally able to formulate a coherent response. She explained that most of her information had come from the bishop from her church ward in Mesa, and that it mostly related to what police had done thus far in their investigation. “Um, he basically said that they took everybody and separated them. And I don’t know who ‘everybody’ is.”

After saying she’d called around to get additional information, she added, “And I heard from my friend, um, that there was a lot of blood,” her voice filling with emotion. “And I don’t know if that’s just a rumor that’s going around or if it’s true . . .”

“Okay, well, I can tell you that we are investigating it as a homicide,” Flores informed her.

She appeared eager to educate the detective on Travis’ physical strength, explaining that in an attempt to get into shape for his impending trip to Cancún, he had begun a diet and exercise regimen that had him taking nutritional supplements and engaging in intense workouts with heavy dumbbells. “And he’s so strong, I mean, there are a couple of times we’ve tried to wrestle just for fun and he showed me some moves and there’s just no—like—I don’t see how anyone—unless maybe there were two people—I don’t see how anyone could overpower him . . .”

She seemed to be telling Flores to not even waste his time considering her as a suspect because her physical strength was no match for Travis’. But she didn’t stop there and in what
appeared to be an attempt to influence the investigation went even further by advising him to look for two people.

“Why would somebody want to hurt him?” Flores asked. “Did he owe somebody money? Did he have any worries or concerns about anybody?”

Arias claimed that Travis did owe people money, including one outstanding loan from a friend for about six thousand dollars, but she insisted the lenders were all “good friends,” who would never harm him if he failed to make good on his loans.

Flores was about thirty minutes into the call when he advised Arias that “certain people” his detectives had interviewed had not portrayed her in the best light. “I don’t want to make you feel bad . . . but they didn’t have the best of things to say about you.”

Arias’ one-word reply belied no emotion. “Okay,” she responded.

He went on to describe some of things that Travis’ friends had told investigators, including some of the more hurtful comments. “There was also some talk about you,” he added, “you know, spying on his e-mail and Facebook accounts, those kinds of things.”

Arias sounded unfazed by the unflattering depiction, and even offered an explanation that appeared to counter what Flores had been told, although I would soon learn that her ability to tailor a response to negate a truth was one of her obvious strengths. “Oh, he gave me his, um, he gave me his Facebook password and his MySpace password, and I gave him my—which one? I gave him my Facebook password and my Gmail account password. And the reason we did that is because—it was kind of dumb—we did that months ago, and we thought, um, what’s, what can we do to try to reestablish trust between us?

“. . . And, um, you know, well, why don’t we start with that? And so that’s what we did. And, you know, it just didn’t
work. He got really upset finally and he’s like, ‘You know, this isn’t working.’ Um, and I said, ‘All right. This is too much of a headache. Let’s just change our passwords.’ So we did. We changed our passwords after that.”

“How long ago did you guys change them?” Flores wanted to know.

“I changed mine, gosh, not too long ago. Probably three weeks ago, maybe? And I don’t know about his. Because I haven’t—once he made it clear that he wasn’t comfortable with that anymore, I didn’t even try to get back into his accounts anymore.”

Flores advised her that police intended to obtain a search warrant for Travis’ e-mails, as well as his Gmail and Facebook accounts. “And we can tell where those things were accessed from by IP addresses. . . . I just want to make it clear that if you did access it from somewhere else at a certain time, you know, if you accessed it from California, we’re gonna know.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell you right now that I did,” Arias admitted.

As Flores continued to move the conversation along, he shifted to Arias’ move to Arizona, and as I sat there, listening to the tape, the response he got to his next question gave me pause. When asked if she had moved to Mesa because of Travis, Arias told him, “I moved there because of him, and I moved away because of him.” She added that financial pressures and a desire to be closer to her family were two other factors she considered when deciding whether to leave Mesa, but she made it clear that putting some distance between her and Travis was at the top of the list.

Flores said, “Yeah, because when we first arrived on the scene, and I started talking to people and—and some of his closest friends began mentioning your name as, ‘You know, hey, you need to call her, because she probably knows what happened to him or she possibly had something to do with it.’”

“Oh, gosh,” Arias replied coyly. “No, I had nothing . . .”

Flores barely acknowledged her denial. “That’s how bad it was at the scene,” he continued. “And, you know, I needed to talk to you to find out why they would say something like that. Uh, why would they start pointing fingers in your direction right away?”

As I would soon learn, Arias had a justification for everything. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m—maybe because I am the ex-girlfriend. We’ve had lots of fights,” she reasoned. “We started fighting because I did the wrong thing and got into his phone because I had a suspicion,” she said, once again repeating the details of their subsequent fights and ultimate breakup.

Flores imparted his appreciation of her apparent candor. “Well, you know, I’m glad I did get ahold of you,” he told her in a gracious tone. “It kind of clears up a lot of questions that I had. And, a lot of the concerns . . .”

As he attempted to sign off the call, Arias suddenly raised a red flag. “I should probably tell you that when he got upset, he would send me really mean e-mails,” she offered without prompting. “Um, he would send me mean text messages and things. Um, you’ll probably find some stuff on his Facebook. I know for sure you’ll find it on his Facebook and definitely in his Gmail. And you’re welcome to access all of my accounts, too, if you want.”

Flores explained that police would probably subpoena Travis’ Facebook and Gmail accounts to see with whom he had been communicating and what was being said. He then opened the door for Arias to impart her theories. “You know, in a case like this, we need to know who had some type of beef with him. . . . Why they would do something like this. . . . And I was just hoping maybe you could kinda point me in the right direction. . . .”

Arias immediately put forth a name, a former tenant of Travis’ who she claimed had moved out on bad terms in the spring of 2007. “What happened was, he got kicked out because he was considered like borderline sexual predator. Not
like a rapist, but coming on to girls, and it’s, you know, really looked down upon in the church . . . and so he was disfellowshipped and Travis said, ‘And you need to get out.’ You know, ‘Get your stuff out of my house.’ It was said over the phone because he and I were in, um, Missouri. . . .”

Arias said the ex-tenant was a “really big guy,” but added, “he doesn’t seem violent. He seemed pretty gentle, like, a little bit thuggish. . . .”

“What about any of his neighbors? Any problems with anybody?” Flores posed.

Arias had one neighbor in mind, someone Travis had told her about, although she claimed she didn’t know the guy personally. According to Arias, Travis had said, “He hates me,” and when Arias asked him why, Travis’ response was “I think he’s jealous, because he’s a forty-something-year-old that has to go to work every morning and I’m a successful, twenty-something-year-old that stays all day in my pajamas at home.”

“This is more than jealousy. This is something else,” Flores said of Travis’ death. He asked Arias if she had any questions for him, and she listed several. “Do you know when all this happened?” she wanted to know. “You said that maybe multiple people because he was a guy, maybe you can talk about this, but was there, um, there, like, any kind of weapons used? . . . Was there a gun?”

The weapons used in the attack had not been made public yet, so it immediately struck me that she knew to ask about a gun.

“I can’t say what type of weapon was used,” Flores told her, “but, yeah, I’m guessing there was a weapon used by the type of injuries that were left behind. Um, do you know if he had any weapons in the house?”

“Uh, his two fists,” Arias replied flatly, denying that he had any weapons.

“That’s it? No handguns or rifles?”

“No, he wasn’t one to keep any of that. . . .” Arias described Travis’ interest in wrestling and the UFC, and recalled that he liked “beating the crap” out of his punching bag, seemingly implying that he was given to physical violence.

At the time, it was easy to see this characterization of Travis as being physically imposing as just an additional detail in the growing portrait of him. But in the months and years ahead, I often found myself returning to this initial call and thinking about how even back then she was attempting to portray herself as a victim by claiming that Travis had a bad temper as shown by the mean electronic correspondence he had sent her. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t been implicated; she was already laying the groundwork for her ultimate defense in her first conversation with police. As I would soon learn, Arias seemed to always be thinking several steps beyond her current story.

O
ver the next three days, Detective Flores called me frequently, as he and the other investigators continued to process the crime scene and uncover new, disturbing details in the process. His updates weren’t meant to seek my guidance, but to keep me informed, so that I would be prepared to make a decision on the charges to be filed once the person or persons who killed Travis came to light. While there was still no definitive suspect, Jodi Arias was on a very short list of one.

Flores told me the killing had been much more violent than the initial scene had suggested. There had been many more stab wounds than what we’d been able to see as we bent over to look at Travis while he lay crumpled inside the shower. Investigators from the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner had unfolded the body to find multiple wounds to the upper back and several more to the torso. They also discovered that the gash to Travis’ neck was much deeper than we had originally believed, and they noticed for the first time that he had been shot in the right temple, providing an answer to the empty shell casing found lying in front of the sink resting in Travis’ blood.

The doctor conducting the autopsy, Dr. Kevin Horn, would later report that Travis Alexander received three mortal wounds, each of which alone would have caused his death: a stab wound near the heart, the slice to the throat, and the gunshot to the right temple.

In his opinion, Travis was stabbed first in the chest, with the
knife cutting into the protective sac around the heart and perforating the superior vena cava, a major vein that comes down from the head and the upper body draining into the heart. This stab wound did not cause Travis to lapse into unconsciousness immediately, and he would have been able to move about for a few minutes before he eventually died. Travis received many defensive injuries to his left hand and one to the right, proving he survived and was conscious long enough to either grab the knife blade or raise his hands to protect himself.

According to the medical examiner, Travis’ throat was then slashed, cutting the jugular vein and carotid artery as the knife was pulled from one side of his neck to the other. The cut also severed his windpipe, preventing him from screaming or calling for help. It was approximately three to four inches deep, reaching all the way back to his spine. This wound would have been rapidly fatal, and Travis would have lapsed into unconsciousness within a few seconds of its infliction. Although Travis was still alive when his throat was slashed, he would not have been able to make any voluntary movements such as putting up his hands after the wound was inflicted.

The medical examiner also found that the last fatal injury was the gunshot wound to the right temple, which perforated the brain and came to rest in Travis’ left cheek. The doctor could not determine how far away the gun was when the shot was fired. But he could say that the shot would have caused Travis to lose consciousness almost immediately, and he would not have been able to engage in purposeful activity to defend himself.

These details from the medical examiner proved helpful in understanding how the actual crime unfolded, a picture that would become even more clear through the blood spatter analysis of Lisa Perry of the Mesa Police Department. Perry’s opinion was that the source of the blood, Travis Alexander, had stood over the sink with blood falling onto the vanity. And while he stood there, force was applied to his body, causing
the blood spatter patterns on the mirror. She also determined that Travis had already bled on the floor when the shot rang out, because the casing landed on top of blood that had been previously deposited near the sink.

Based on the autopsy and the blood spatter analysis, it was clear the attack started with Travis being stabbed in the chest while he was still in the shower, and continued with the assailant stabbing him in the back repeatedly as he stood over the sink, causing the blood misting on the mirror. The attack moved to the end of the hallway at the door breach to the bedroom, where Travis’ throat was slit, as shown by the large ovoid stain on the carpet. His body was then moved back to the sink area, as corroborated by the contusions to the right leg, which were consistent with the body being dragged. The casing near the sink indicated that Travis had been shot in the face in that area, before his body was put back in the shower.

About a week into the investigation, Flores called my office with some curious news. Arias had traveled more than one thousand miles—fifteen hours on the road—from Northern California to Mesa on June 17 to provide biological swabs for use in DNA testing and to provide fingerprint samples. Given Arias’ claim that she hadn’t seen Travis since April, it was unusual that she would volunteer to drive that distance to give her fingerprints and her DNA to the police.

“This woman is calling us, coming out to see us, so clearly she doesn’t think she is a suspect,” Flores told me. “But we don’t know anybody else who would want to kill Travis Alexander except for her.” She claimed to have an alibi, that she wasn’t even in Mesa at the time of the killing, but the investigation had no other leads and had uncovered no other enemies among Travis’ business contacts or friends.

Her behavior struck us as peculiar, but all we could do was speculate. Maybe she believed that police would be less in
clined to investigate her because she was so willing to assist us. At this point, there was still no case against her and no way to identify her as the killer.

Each time Flores and I spoke, our discussions about Arias were akin to a catchy song that you can’t seem to get out of your head, where you sing the same lyrics and hum the identical tune. So it was with our conversations every time he called. We always said that it was Arias who killed Travis; but we agreed we just couldn’t prove it at least for now.

All that began to change on June 19, when I got a phone call from Flores. I heard the eagerness in his voice, and I knew he had something important to tell me. The crime lab had managed to retrieve photographs contained in the memory card of the Sanyo camera that had been found in the washing machine at Travis’ house.

“You’re not gonna believe this,” Detective Flores said with unusual excitement. “There are pictures of Arias naked at Travis Alexander’s house on June 4, so she was there.”

“How did you guys get them?” I asked. It seemed too good to be true.

“They were deleted, but we got them,” he said.

He explained that although they had been deleted, a detective had been able to recover the photos from the unallocated space of the memory card. Police believed that someone had wanted these photos permanently gone, because they had taken the five separate steps to erase them.

Detective Flores started to describe the photographs to me over the telephone, but given that they placed our only suspect at the crime scene, I was anxious to see them for myself. So Flores offered to drive the thirty miles from the Mesa Police Department to my office. When he arrived, he already had the copies neatly arranged and separated into three groups in a blue three-ring binder, which he placed on my desk and opened to the first page. All but a small number of the photographs could be proven to have been taken on June 4, 2008.

The initial photograph in the first group, which was snapped at 1:42:53
P.M
., placed Jodi Arias in Travis’ bedroom on the afternoon of June 4, although she had denied being there no more recently than April. In this photo, Arias was lying naked on Travis Alexander’s bed, her arms outstretched and her right leg bent at the knee, exposing the area between her legs. In the lower right-hand corner of that picture, barely visible, appears to be a knee, so police knew Travis must have been the photographer. Arias’ hair was in pigtails, one resting just above her left breast. She was not looking directly at the camera, posing seductively with her head turned slightly to the right. Flores and I had a hard time believing that the person we suspected of killing Travis had apparently had sex with him that same day.

Flores then showed me the other five photographs that had been taken during the same afternoon session. One, snapped at 1:44:00
P.M
., was a close-up shot of Arias’ anal and vaginal areas.

Another, taken by Arias fifty seconds later, showed Travis naked and on his back, exhibiting his erect penis. In the foreground of that photograph was a bottle of KY personal lubricant. This photo confirmed that the other participant in the sexual activity that day was indeed Travis. There was now no disputing that Arias had been there on June 4, on the day of the murder, contrary to her protestations to Detective Flores during their June 10 phone call.

A fourth photo, taken at 1:47:14, was also of Travis. He was on his back and looking at the camera, with his right arm extended, as if motioning Arias to come over to him. The personal lubricant had been moved so that it was now closer to the head of the bed.

The next photo, which did not have a time stamp, showed Arias, propped up on her elbows, turning her body to the camera as if to show off her breasts and vaginal area, her left pigtail cascading over her shoulder onto the bed, the right one lying between her breasts.

The last of these six pictures showed Arias’ legs spread to display her pubic area. It appeared she had either waxed or shaved in the recent past. Clearly, the couple was captivated by the moments now captured by the camera.

I can’t say that I was shocked by the photos as I looked at them. Sexual picture-taking has become a commonplace activity these days, especially with the advent of smartphones, all of which are equipped with cameras. And it didn’t surprise me that there was a sexual component to this killing. It seems the majority of the homicides that pass across my desk have some sexual element to them. If it isn’t about sex, it is usually about money.

What was unexpected here was seeing Travis and Arias engaged in sexual activity, because they both practiced the Mormon faith, a religion that prohibits any type of sex before marriage. In all of these photos, Arias appeared extremely uninhibited in her poses and seemed very relaxed in front of the camera, indicating that perhaps she had engaged in this type of sexual foreplay in the past, perhaps even with Travis.

But to me, the lasting impression of these pictures had little to do with the explicit nudity they portrayed. What struck me as significant was that Travis was lying in his bed, a place of obvious emotional comfort, only a few short hours before he was bathed in his own blood.

As I was about to see, there was a tranquil lull that was documented in the second group of photographs. There were twenty in all, featuring a nude Travis Alexander in the shower. The first was snapped at 5:22:24
P.M
. and the last one was taken eight minutes and six seconds later, at 5:30:30
P.M
. All had been similarly deleted but not permanently erased.

The first sixteen captured him standing in the shower, water cascading down his head and body.

The last four were of him sitting on the shower floor. The first of these was snapped at 5:28:54
P.M
. His solemn expression and the way the water was cascading down his cheeks
gave the appearance that he was crying. The last one, taken at 5:30:30
P.M.
, is the last picture of Travis Alexander alive. Approximately forty-five seconds later, the killer, who we now believed was Arias, began her assault, as indicted in the final set of deleted photographs. This last set was comprised of three images that had been taken inadvertently. Two of the three had been snapped when the camera had been upside down, and had appeared dark when first viewed. The detective had enhanced them until he saw Travis’ body in each of these photographs. These images were pivotal, because they showed someone dragging the body down the hallway as the attack was coming to an end—suddenly the events of the crime weren’t conjecture because police could see what had happened at these two distinctive moments.

The first photo in this set of three was time-stamped at 5:31:14
P.M
. It was blurry, but one could see the bathroom ceiling above the shower. It did not show either Travis or the person attacking him and Detective Flores and I agreed that it had been taken either immediately before or during the first part of the stabbing.

The second photo was snapped one minute and two seconds later, at 5:32:16
P.M
. Travis was on his back in this one. He was at the threshold between the bathroom hallway and the master bedroom, with his head on the carpet and his feet on the tile. His throat had already been slashed and his head was partially elevated. There was blood flowing from the right side of his neck onto his upper back, spilling onto the tile floor and the edge of the carpet. This accounted for the large amount of blood I had seen on the carpet area during my walk-through of the crime scene. The person whose stocking foot is in the foreground looked to be grabbing or lifting Travis’ right arm. There was a stripe running down the side of the person’s pant leg. I asked Detective Flores if investigators had found any pants at the crime scene resembling those in
the photograph, but they had not located any clothing like this.

Detective Flores then showed me the last of the three pictures of this set, which was taken one minute and sixteen seconds later, at 5:33:32
P.M
. In this one, the killer is seen dragging Travis back along the hallway toward the bathroom, blood rolling down his back.

This last picture in the sequence was inadvertently snapped as Arias dragged Travis’ body to the sink area, the place where she shot him in the head before continuing to drag him to the shower, where she stuffed his body into the standup stall. But, this also marked the beginning of her cleanup at the scene, which included the rinsing of the body and deleting the photographs. The cover-up also involved taking the plastic tumbler and throwing water down the hallway. It appeared Arias cleaned her feet at some point to avoid tracking any blood throughout the rest of the house and took the bedding and camera downstairs to put them in the washing machine.