Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (6 page)

Whoever broke in also took a .25 caliber handgun belonging to her grandfather that he kept secured inside a dresser in one of the other bedrooms. This was the same caliber weapon that had been used in Travis’ killing. Police noted that other guns stored next to the .25 caliber pistol were left behind.

It struck them as strange that other items of value were
similarly untouched throughout the house. A large amount of change sitting in the dresser where the gun was kept remained undisturbed. It was mostly quarters, which could have been easily carried away.

Arias reported that her laptop was undisturbed in the clothesbasket underneath some clothing where she left it. She claimed she normally kept the laptop covered up in the basket, so that it would not be stolen if there ever were a burglary.

When Arias answered the door that Tuesday, July 15, she had already been notified by coworkers from Casa Ramos that police had called the restaurant and were looking to speak with her, so finding the Yreka officer on her front stoop that morning was probably not a surprise. She was compliant when the officer told her he wanted to get more information about the burglary and asked her to step outside, at which time she was arrested for the first-degree murder of Travis Alexander arising out of the indictment issued by the Maricopa County Grand Jury less than one week earlier.

After Arias was driven to the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office, police executed a search warrant on her grandparents’ house and the rental car. They began with the bedroom Arias had been using. There, they found a number of things that could prove useful, including journals, phones, a personal computer, an external hard drive, and an Airwalk brand shoebox. When police looked inside the shoebox, they found miscellaneous papers and receipts from her trip in June.

Police then turned their attention to the rental car parked in front of the house. The three boxes in the backseat were mostly filled with clothes and personal items. Police did find two kitchen knives in one of the boxes. In a suitcase they saw a plethora of condoms. They later recovered a Hi-Point 9mm semiautomatic handgun that had been put in the spare tire compartment in the trunk of the car. The weapon was in a handgun case, along with an unloaded magazine. It seemed unusual that a gun and knives would be making another trip
with Arias. She did not volunteer any information about where she was headed on her impending excursion.

Once Arias was taken to the sheriff’s office, Detective Flores began his first in-custody interview with her. As he would tell me later that evening when he called, he started out by advising Arias of her Miranda rights and telling her that she did not have to answer questions that made her uncomfortable. Arias responded, “I would love to help you in any way that I can,” which was almost exactly what she told Flores on June 10 when she ostensibly called the Mesa police department looking to find out what happened to Travis.

According to Flores’ evening phone call from Yreka briefing me on the interview, he confronted Arias with pointed questions about the DNA results on the bloody latent palm print and the photographs retrieved from the memory card on Travis’ camera. He told me Arias remained steadfast in her denial that she had been at Travis’ house on the day of the murder, even after he showed her some of the photographs of her posing nude on Travis’ bed on June 4.

Arias was booked into the Siskiyou County Jail later that day after her interview with Flores. The white pants and gray top that she was wearing when she was arrested were taken away and replaced by orange jail garb worn by all inmates. During the booking process, as her mug shot was taken, she managed to coquettishly tilt her head to the right and smile for the camera, almost as if she were posing for her high school yearbook. It didn’t seem to impress her that she was being booked into jail because she was being accused of killing Travis.

Flores called me again the following day on July 16 and told me there was a second interview with Arias, this time with a female detective from the Siskiyou Sheriff’s Office. The rationale behind introducing a female voice to the interrogation room was that Arias might be more forthcoming with a woman, but the change in the gender of the person conducting
the interview produced the same results. Arias continued to say that she had not been in Mesa and had not hurt Travis.

Detective Flores told me that while speaking with the female detective, Arias asked to see him. He said that once he entered the interview room, her story from the day before changed and she finally admitted that she was at Travis’ house on June 4. But, she did not admit killing him and instead told Flores a story of a man and woman who surprised the two of them as she took pictures of Travis in the shower. Arias claimed that she survived the attack because the assailants were only there to kill Travis. Flores mentioned that Arias even attempted to cast herself in the role of heroine by saying she had fought against the female attacker even though the woman was armed with a knife.

According to her revised tale, Travis was alive at the time she made her escape, and shortly before she fled, he had managed to ask her to go get help. When asked if she had called the police, Arias admitted that she had failed to contact anyone, claiming that her cell phone was dead, preventing her from using it.

In checking out her story, police visited the rental car company in Redding, California, a city approximately 100 miles south of Yreka, where Arias rented a car for her supposed trip to Utah on June 2. The rental car employee, Ralphael Colombo, remembered the transaction.

When police showed him a photographic line-up composed of six photographs of women, which included one of Arias smiling during the booking process as her photograph was taken, and five others with similar facial features to hers, he immediately recognized Arias and blurted out that her hair had been blonde when he rented the vehicle to her. Neither Flores nor I really understood the implications of Arias’ change in hair color at the time, but it would later became clear that dying her hair was part of her plan to enter and leave Arizona undetected.

Colombo recalled that when he initially offered her a red car she declined and asked for one that was lighter in color, with Arias ultimately choosing a white Ford Focus. Not lost on any of the investigators was the fact that Arias drove for approximately an hour and a half to rent a car in Redding, although there were two other car rental agencies only minutes away in Yreka. But, Yreka is a small town with a population of approximately 7,500, so perhaps she figured there was less of a chance she would be recognized at the airport in Redding, where she could blend in as just another customer.

Colombo told police that in addition to renting Arias the car, he had also been the one to clean the vehicle after it was returned. He remembered that the floor mats had been missing, and that there were stains resembling “Kool-Aid” on both the backseat and the front passenger seat, leading him to assume that kids had been in the car. He also expressed surprise at the odometer reading, which showed that she had driven over two thousand miles, because she had told him she would only be using the car locally.

Arias remained at the Siskiyou County Jail until she was extradited to Phoenix, where she made her initial court appearance on September 6, 2008. Upon arrival at the Maricopa County Jail, she was brought before a commissioner who, based on my recommendation, set her bond at two million dollars. Five days later, Arias appeared for her arraignment and formally entered a plea of not guilty to the first-degree murder charge. The Office of Public Defense Services was appointed to represent her.

The first time I saw Jodi Ann Arias was at a status conference on October 22, to discuss the progress of the case with the court. She was sitting in the jury box, where she looked out of place. She seemed somewhat small and frail, almost virginal in her black-and-white-horizontally-striped jail garb. I took note that a jury might find her sympathetic because of her seemingly unpretentious façade. It was hard for me to see
how all that violence could have come from this person. She didn’t look like someone who could have committed this type of killing—but then, no one does.

Prior to Arias’ case, I’d tried ten death penalty cases in Arizona. Deciding that the death penalty should be sought is not a decision that is taken lightly. If the Maricopa County Attorney elects to seek the death penalty, the State must file a notice within sixty days of the arraignment informing the court and defense counsel of its decision. In this case I filed such a notice on November 6, 2008, indicating that the State would be seeking the death penalty should Arias be convicted of first-degree murder. The basis for my request was that the killing was especially cruel. In Arizona, “especially cruel” describes the infliction of physical or mental anguish upon the victim before death. It also requires that a defendant know or should have known that suffering would occur.

The killing in this case was especially cruel because Travis Alexander suffered as he staggered in the bathroom and made his way down the hallway trying to escape Arias as she carried out her relentless attack. Travis suffered with each stab wound to his back, chest, hands, and head. He didn’t die immediately. It was a slow and painful death.

Arias’ excessive use of force reminded me of another case in which I’d sought the death penalty some years earlier. The victim in that case had been a man by the name of Joseph Andriano, who had been killed in October 2000. The similarities between Joe Andriano’s murder and Travis Alexander’s were uncanny, even though they were not related. Both murder scenes were bloody, both men were killed by more than one means, and both had been found with gaping wounds to their throats, the result of being sliced with a knife.

In the case of Joe Andriano, he had been killed by his wife, Wendi, a cute thirty-year-old blonde. The two had been mar
ried only a few years and had two children when Joe learned that a lump on his neck, once thought to be benign, was malignant and terminal. Wendi saw his misdiagnosis as an opportunity to make money and contacted a lawyer about initiating a medical malpractice suit. She even attempted to obtain a life insurance policy on Joe after she learned he had incurable cancer.

She began dating other men soon after they were told of his cancer and almost immediately fell in love with Rick a tenant in an apartment complex she managed. The complex was in the Ahwatukee section of Phoenix, and once their relationship started, she let him live in the apartment rent-free. Somehow Rick found out that Wendi’s husband was dying, and he was unnerved enough to end their relationship.

The breakup did not sit well with Wendi. She would randomly show up unannounced at Rick’s apartment, but he still wouldn’t take her back. So she hatched a plot to kill her husband. She started the process by creating the fictitious name of Anne Newton, which she used to buy some sodium azide, a propellant for air bags. Sodium azide is not immediately fatal if ingested but can cause respiratory failure leading to death.

Wendi began implementing her plan to kill Joe by emptying some of her husband’s medication capsules and refilling them with the poison, intending to give them to him to end his life. Apparently, she could not wait the six or so months it would take for his cancer to kill him.

On the last night of his life, Wendi took Joe to a barbecue at his parents’ house in Casa Grande, a city in Pinal County halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. It was the fourth day of Joe’s chemotherapy regimen and he was not feeling well. Once they returned home after midnight, Wendi gave him the capsules laced with the sodium azide. Wanting to make sure it was enough, she also added sodium azide to the stew that she was warming up for him. The dose wasn’t immediately fatal, but Joe started throwing up and asked her to call 911.

Moments later, Wendi told Joe she had placed the call, but claimed that emergency responders were too busy to come out. In truth, she hadn’t called at all. She later phoned a female friend Chris to come over, hoping she would then have a witness to her husband’s death. When Chris arrived, Wendi was waiting for her outside the apartment and admitted that she had not called 911. After the two finally entered the apartment, Chris saw Joe lying on the floor, conscious but very ill and literally begging for help. He told Chris that he had been lying there for forty-five minutes without any aid. It was then that Wendi went to another room and finally placed the 911 call.

Within a few minutes, the sirens could be heard approaching the house. Chris walked outside to meet the fire department, but realized she had left her purse inside. When she tried to reenter the apartment, she found the front door had been locked and instead of letting her in, Wendi threw her purse out into the breezeway.

When the paramedics knocked on the door, Wendi failed to answer. After approximately five to ten minutes of knocking, one of the paramedics called the dispatcher, who reached Wendi by telephone. The dispatcher convinced Wendi to come out and speak with the paramedics. Rather than coming out the front door, Wendi went out the back, jumped the fence, walked around the apartment building and met the paramedics in the breezeway outside the locked front door. She informed them that Joe had a DNR, (do-not-resuscitate order), and their services weren’t needed. With that information, the medical emergency response unit left the scene without ever seeing the patient, a protocol that would later be changed.

Several hours passed before Wendi again called 911, this time claiming her husband had attacked her after she complied with his dying wish to know if she had been unfaithful. She confessed to him, and he attacked her, forcing Wendi to kill him in self defense. When paramedics finally got inside, they found a bloody scene. Joe had been beaten with a barstool in
excess of twenty times before ultimately being stabbed in the neck with a knife. At the autopsy, it was discovered he had also been poisoned.

I prosecuted Wendi Andriano in 2004. After an emotional trial that lasted three and a half months, she was convicted of first-degree murder. The jury imposed the death penalty, finding the killing to be “especially cruel.” She was the first woman to be sentenced to death by a jury in the state of Arizona. She has been on women’s death row ever since, sharing the distinction with only one other woman.