Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (9 page)

“Mm-hm.”

“Remember I told you that card was destroyed?”

“Mm-hm.”

“I didn’t tell the truth, ’cause I wanted to make sure those photos were accurate. And we can pull deleted photos . . . we can pull every photo that was ever on there, pull the pixels together, get the time stamps on them, not all of them, but most of them have time stamps on them and we can verify those time stamps. . . .

“And I have pictures of you in Travis’ bedroom with Travis, pictures of him, and it’s obvious you guys are having sex, taking photos of each other, and they’re dated and time-stamped on the day he died.”

“Are you sure it’s me?” Arias asked incredulously. “I mean that—’cause I was not there.”

Flores forged ahead, advising Arias that the camera had actually taken pictures by accident during the time that Travis was killed.

For the first time, there was a reaction. “Really?” she asked, the muscles in her forehead tightening, perhaps indicating that the detective had struck a nerve.

Watching Arias skillfully manipulate the realities being presented to her, I couldn’t help but think ahead to a possible trial. If she were to take the stand, she would be difficult for me to deal with, because her stories streamed forth so effortlessly. If I was going to show she was untruthful, I would have
to come up with something factual like a receipt, something that she was not aware of or that she had forgotten about. Otherwise, there was a real chance a jury might be taken in by the seamless delivery of her answers.

I turned my attention back to the video just in time to hear Flores make mention of a gun. “A record check shows that you guys reported a gun stolen, a .25 auto, that just happens to be the same caliber as the weapon used to kill him,” he told Arias referring to the burglary her grandfather had reported to Yreka police that past May.

“A .25 auto was used to kill Travis?” she whispered, acting as if she were surprised at the revelation.

“Yeah, along with multiple stab wounds,” Flores responded.

But the information about the caliber of the gun used wasn’t enough to change her story either, and as Flores prepared to show her the photos that proved their sexual encounter, she seemed to double down on her innocence.

“If I killed Travis, I would beg for the death penalty,” she said.

Detective Flores continued to push, in what seemed a calculated effort to draw out a confession. But as hard as he pressed, he still couldn’t stop the conversation from going around in circles, with him laying out what police had found and Arias deflecting her involvement.

“I was not at Travis’ house on Wednesday the fourth,” she repeated.

“You were, ’cause that is when the bloody palm print was left on his wall,” Flores advised her. “. . . I’ve got pictures of you that I’ve blown up and you’ve got that little mole right there . . .” he said, pointing to a small mark on her left lower cheek. “It’s you, it’s obvious . . .”

“I wasn’t there,” Arias maintained.

“. . . There’s pictures of you laying on the bed in pigtails.”

“Pigtails?” she asked incredulously, cocking her head to the side as if in disbelief.

“. . . I can show you some of these pictures. Do you want to see the pictures? Will that change your mind?” Flores suggested they take a short break so he could retrieve them. Arias called out to him as he rose to leave the room.

“Detective,” she wailed with a hurt look. “I am not a murderer.”

W
hen Detective Flores returned to the interview room, he was carrying the same blue three-ring binder he had brought to my office at the start of the investigation.

“What kind of gun is that?” Arias asked him, referring to the weapon in his holster. It appeared she wanted to show some interest in him, and maybe even flirt with him a little.

“It’s a Glock.”

“I just got a gun.”

“Did you?”

“Mm-hm.”

“They’ve probably found it by now,” Flores told her, referring to the police officers executing the search warrants on the homes of her grandparents and parents, as well as the rental vehicle in which she had packed three boxes and a suitcase. The 9mm gun would later be found stashed in the trunk of the rental car.

Arias remained impassive as the detective sat down in the chair across from her, held the binder in his lap so as to shield the pictures from her view, and began to leaf through its pages. “These are just a few photos, and I want to be careful showing—not showing you certain photos because some of them . . .”

“Please don’t show me . . .” Arias pleaded with seeming anguish.

After reviewing several of the pages, Flores placed the book on the table opened to a photograph of the exterior of Travis’ house that had been taken by police at the crime scene. “Remember that?”

Arias hid her face in her hands and began to sob. “If Travis were here today, he would tell you that it wasn’t me.”

“No, my job is to speak for Travis right now, and everything Travis is telling me is that Jodi did this to me,” Flores explained in a stern but mild voice. Returning the binder to his lap, he again glanced through its pages, momentarily stopping to consider several photographs before deciding on one. Sliding the book toward Arias, he showed her a close-up shot of Travis’ face, his hair wet and water cascading down his face. “Remember him?”

“Is he naked—in the shower?”

“Yes, he is . . .” Flores replied. “Soon after you and he had sex on his bed.”

Looking directly at the detective, Arias tried to neutralize the impact of the photographs now before her. “Travis would never go for that,” she stated matter-of-factly. “The last time we had sex in his bed was in April.”

Flores was undeterred. “This didn’t come out very good ’cause they’re copies of actual photos,” he explained, purposefully placing his legal pad over the lower portion of the next image—a shot of Arias naked and lying back on Travis’ bed in a sexual pose. “That’s you—and I wanted to cover you up because . . . that’s all of you.”

“Oh!” Arias uttered with an air of surprise. “That looks like me,” she confirmed, perhaps her way of avoiding having to admit the obvious.

“. . . You can look at the rest of it if you want,” Flores suggested, prompting her to lift up a corner of the legal pad so she could view the full image.

“There’s a few of those,” the detective told her, “and there’s a few more, which I’m trying not to show you, because I don’t want to put you out there like that to people.

“Let’s just say I’ve seen all of you, and I’ve seen all of Travis, but the one that sticks out in my mind is of Travis on the autopsy table. And I’m not gonna show you that one, or should I?

“But this one,” he said, flipping the page to one of the snapshots that had been taken by accident, “it’s your foot, Jodi.” He used his pen to highlight parts he wanted to call to Arias’ attention.

“Those are your pants. That’s Travis.”

“This is his bathroom,” she agreed, appearing to study the image before again starting to cry. “That is not my foot!”

Flores did not give an inch. “Those are your pants,” he told her.

“I have . . . those pants at home, if these are the same ones. I don’t have a zipper there, though, not on mine . . .”

Next came another round of photographs. “You see the date, 6/4/08 at 5:22
P.M
., that’s when it started . . . Right there, see that?”

Arias picked over the little details in the photos that Flores highlighted.

“Do you see the spots here?” he asked her now showing her the photograph of the latent print on the west wall. “They look a different color because we used a chemical to enhance this . . . that right there is blood. It’s a mixture of yours and his, and that’s your palm print of your left palm.”

“I don’t have any cuts on my left palm,” Arias offered.

“Nobody said that your cut was on the palm. Do you have any recent cuts that are healing?”

“Well, my cat scratches me . . . little things, these are all her work. You can see,” she said, pointing out little marks on her left arm before again challenging the results of the latent palm print identification. “How can that be my palm print?”

“’Cause you were there,” Flores replied, moving his chair to sit closer to Arias. “There is no doubt in my mind that you were there. There is no doubt in my mind that you did this, none. So, you can go until you’re blue in the face and tell me you weren’t there and you had nothing to do with this, but I won’t believe you. I will not believe you, because Travis is telling me that you did this to him.”

The interview seemed to drag on. While Flores finally got her to agree that the photographic evidence was “very compelling,” she diffused its value, suggesting the images could have been “modified” or “altered,” and the date and time stamps could have been “tampered with.”

“I didn’t modify anything,” Flores countered.

“I don’t think you would,” Arias responded, perhaps sensing she might alienate the detective if she continued in this vein.

After watching her repeated denials, I was momentarily caught off guard when suddenly Arias appeared to change course—from accusing the police of manipulating the time stamps on the photos to questioning whether it was Travis’ camera that may have taken those photographs.

“Can I, can I ask you, I don’t know if you know this, oh, I have a camera and it’s in my storage unit that I don’t use anymore, but that Travis used frequently,” Arias began. “And we took pictures with it. Um, this is, I don’t know . . .”

“Do you remember taking
these
pictures?” Flores asked, directing Arias’ attention back to the collection of photographs in the blue binder on the table between them.

“There were many pictures . . . we took tons and tons of pictures, some I saved, most we deleted,” she claimed. It was clear Detective Flores didn’t know where she was going with her answers, but he continued to lead her along in the direction of what he thought would be an admission.

“We took a bunch the week before I left . . . We took a bunch over the last six or seven months. Last year, even when we were still dating, but we would delete them mostly. There were some he sent me that I didn’t delete. Um, what I’m asking is, is it possible that, you know, that my memory card would have been in his camera? They’re interchangeable.”

And with that Jodi Arias had another possible explanation for how those photographs came to be in Travis’ camera. When initially confronted by the existence of the images from the
camera found in the washing machine, she tried several different possible denials, ranging from the images not being of her, to the police tampering with the time stamps on the images, and now something far more complicated and wholly implausible. She advanced the notion that someone had switched the memory card in the camera found in the washing machine with the camera she had previously used to take photos of herself and Travis.

Though she’d been at an apparent dead end, she was unwilling to cede the point. She seemed prepared to keep evading, creating ever more elaborate fictional scenarios—anything to avoid the truth. She had clearly realized the photos’ significance and was looking for a way to discount them, thereby removing what appeared to be the only indisputable piece of evidence placing her at the crime scene. It seemed she thought she knew enough to explain away the DNA evidence collected at the scene, the blood, the hair, and perhaps even the palm print, but she was at a loss to find a rationalization for the time-stamped photographs.

Detective Flores realized what she was trying to do and pointed out that her theory of switched memory cards was completely implausible. “Your camera’s here, his camera’s there, he just bought that camera.”

“Well, the other camera that I used before that is broken. Now it’s in my storage unit.”

“Are you saying those pictures are on that camera?” Flores asked in an attempt to clarify what she was alleging.

“What I’m saying is I had several memory cards for this camera that I don’t have anymore, so I guess . . . it’s so far-fetched,” she conceded. “But, I guess it’s possible that my card could—”

Flores interjected. “So you’re saying somebody took your pictures or card and is framing you and put that into his camera?”

“I’m just saying that if my memory cards were left at his
house, he could have, he would have used those for his camera. I don’t know. I can explain the blood, though, and I can explain the hair. I don’t know about the palm print.”

There it was. She really did believe that she could smile at the detective and have him believe that such a scenario was possible. Even in light of the scientific results, she held true to her story. Flores had spent two hours and forty-seven minutes with her and was no closer to an admission than when he started. The interview drew to a close with Arias asking to use the restroom.

As soon as the detective left the room, she let out an audible sigh and threw her entire body back in the chair, her arms outstretched to the wall.

“You should have at least done your makeup, Jodi, gosh,” she whispered aloud.

She next sang part of Dido’s “Here With Me.” She then spent a few seconds searching through the plastic garbage pail on the floor behind her. I was surprised when she suddenly stood up, placed her head on the floor and did a handstand, her body perfectly aligned with the wall.

Returning to the table, she sat quietly for a few moments before breaking into eerie laughter and then a few verses of “O Holy Night.” Her search of the small table in the corner yielded a piece of paper and a pen that she used to scrawl as she waited for someone to come for her.

After reviewing Jodi Arias’ interview of July 15, I turned my attention to the videotaped statements of her parents, William (Bill) and Sandy Arias.

Detective Flores interviewed the couple the same day, shortly after having spoken to Arias. I was curious to see if they had provided any information that would either support or undermine their daughter’s unwavering claim that she had nothing to do with Travis’ death. Detective Flores had already
told me that they had no information, but I wanted to hear what they had to say.

The couple were celebrating their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary in September 2008. Jodi was the oldest of their four children. Bill also had a daughter from a previous marriage. Their interviews were conducted separately, so that they would not have a chance to tailor their stories. Investigators typically don’t meet with the parents of suspects, because they seldom have much to offer related to the killing. However, in this case, Arias had returned home to Yreka, and both of her parents could speak to her daily activities and movements in the days before and after the killing.

Interestingly, Jodi’s father, Bill Arias, had some concerning things to say about his daughter. He had just celebrated his fifty-ninth birthday, but appeared older, likely because of health issues involving his kidneys. Without prompting, he began to paint an unflattering picture of a young woman who didn’t really get along with either of her parents.

“She’s a strange person,” he said at one point, “because some—you know, after she left the house, you know, she just kind of got strange, you know. She’s really friendly sometimes. She’ll call and be real sweet, and ten minutes later, she’ll call in a rage, you know, just screaming at my wife. And she did that for, uh, gee, the last year and a half she was doing that.”

What began to emerge was that the story of the relationship with Travis she had told to her family was in stark contrast to the way Travis’ friends and people who knew the couple had described it.

Arias had indicated to her parents that she and Travis had considered getting married. Bill described a phone call he received from his daughter shortly after she had moved to Mesa. “She called me hysterically crying,” he recalled. “. . . She snuck up at his house and she looked in the window and she saw him on the couch with another woman. And here they—she was planning on marrying this guy. So she just left.

“But then she stayed there, you know, for I don’t know how many months . . . six months or something . . . and Jodi would not let anybody say anything or discredit him, either. ’Cause I did say a few things after she told me that he was with another girl, I said, ‘You need to get the hell out of that town and leave that guy alone.’ But then, every time I called her, she was over his house, every time I called her.”

In listening to the conversation, Flores and Bill Arias seemed like they were old friends sharing stories about a distant relative. Arias’ father recounted a three-hour conversation he and his wife had with Jodi soon after Travis’ death. Bill was on the dialysis machine when Jodi had stopped by for a visit. He and Sandy were trying to find out why she believed she needed to leave town. “And she goes, ‘’Cause I might be blamed for something.’ I go, ‘What?’ And she goes, ‘I can’t tell you.’ She goes, ‘I just won’t tell you.’ And she—she refused, never told us.”

Bill went on to say that Jodi quit her job at Casa Ramos after learning police had called the restaurant asking to speak with her. “I said, ‘Well, what are you running away for if you’re not guilty?’” To which she replied, “’Cause I don’t want to be a part of it.”

Flores took the opportunity to relate the challenges he had confronted when trying to speak to Jodi. “Well, I talked to her for over an hour and a half and—and I left with some more questions than I had answers for. You know, I, I, still don’t know why. She just refused to tell me.”

“She don’t talk to us, either,” Bill commiserated with Flores, telling him that Jodi treated her mother “like crap . . . I mean verbally abusive on the phone with her. You know, we could never ask her anything about her personal life ever since the day she left the house.” As it turned out, neither Bill nor Sandy had ever even seen a picture of Travis until after he’d died. Jodi never showed them a thing.