Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias

by Velez-Mitchell, Jane

In the aftermath of Jodi’s decision, Sandy and Bill Arias were beside themselves. Even when Jodi had been struggling, they had always had high hopes for their eldest daughter. Jodi was smart, pretty, and poised, and they believed she was going to accomplish something of importance in her life. They did not understand her rebellion. Simple statements or requests would become twisted, resulting in frivolous battles. Jodi seemed to misconstrue everything they said. They were at a loss as to how to turn things around and recover the daughter they loved. Possibly the intensity of her emotions frightened them, and rather than intervene by finding her professional help, they continued to employ futile, simplistic fixes. Her father had even resorted to disconnecting the car battery to keep her home, which was successful short term, as Jodi did not understand the workings of a car engine. But as it turned out, the Ariases were unable to stop their daughter from taking the drastic step of leaving home for good that summer.

  Jodi recalled the night of her escape from her parents’ home. She had packed up what little she had. She knew she had to check her car to see if her father had unhooked the battery again. She was as far as the living room when she heard one of her parents upstairs, so she jumped onto the couch and pretended she was asleep. She ended up dozing off and woke up to find her mother in the kitchen making breakfast. Not to be foiled, she then said that she was going to school, so luckily her mother didn’t see her grabbing her cat as she headed out the door. In a flash, Sandy and Bill’s beautiful but willful child was gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  FIRST WORDS

  This is Jodi.”

  The voice on the other end of the phone was girlish, almost pleasant. It had been a late night of questioning for Travis’s roommates and friends, but by the following morning Detective Flores had begun to expand his interviews. It was clear that investigators would have to speak with Jodi Arias soon; what was unexpected was that Jodi would be trying to get a hold of them. Word of Travis’s death had spread quickly among his friends and colleagues, and Jodi had received a late-night call, informing her of what had happened. A friend of Travis and Jodi’s, Dan Freeman, called her at 11:00 P.M., just thirty minutes after Travis’s body was found. Jodi became silent, then broke down sobbing when he told her Travis was dead. After a few moments, Dan cut the call off because Jodi wanted to “be with herself.”

  Less than two months earlier Jodi had abandoned Arizona after living in Mesa for ten months and had moved back to California. Being hundreds of miles away from this tragic news, she spent the rest of the night calling long-distance to Arizona, reaching out to Travis’s friends there to find out what was going on. At one point as Travis’s friends gathered outside his house, Jodi called one of them, who happened to be standing next to Detective Flores at the time. He asked the detective if he should answer the call. It seemed almost all of Travis’s friends already had their fingers pointed squarely at Jodi. The question was whether the police would come to the same conclusion.

  In addition to calling Travis’s friends, Jodi had been busy calling police headquarters twice, leaving a number where she could be reached. With Jodi probably aware that it would only be a matter of time before the police came knocking on her door in Yreka, California, perhaps she thought she could deflect attention away from herself by offering to assist them. At a minimum, she needed to know what the police knew.

  Finally at 10 A.M. on June 10, less than twelve hours after Travis’s body had been discovered, Detective Flores called her back.

  The detective introduced himself. “I have a message from one of my patrol officers that you needed to talk to me about something?”

  “Well, I just wanted to offer assistance . . . I don’t know a lot of anything, but . . .”

  “What have you heard so far?” the detective asked.

  “I heard that he was, that he passed away, and it was, I don’t know . . . I heard all kinds of rumors,” Jodi said. She stuttered over the few things she claimed she had heard. “There was a lot of blood, his roommate found him, his friend found him, people were . . . I’m sorry, I’m upset, but um . . . I heard that nobody’s been able to get a hold of him for almost a week, and that was about the last I spoke to him, too, and that’s why I thought . . .”

  Flores listened attentively, trying to glean from her conversation either inconsistencies or things only the killer could know. This early in the investigation, she was no more a suspect than anyone else. Nobody had seen her near Travis’s home in a while, and as far as Flores knew, she might have an airtight alibi.

  Jodi continued her assistance. “I . . . my friend said I should call you anyway and let you know of the last time I talked to him.”

  “Yeah, absolutely,” Flores replied with encouragement. “I mean, any help we can get from anybody who contacted him . . .”

  Jodi didn’t wait for him to finish his thought. “I used to talk to him quite regularly,” she offered. “I used to live there [in Mesa], but I live in Northern California now. I moved a few months ago. After I moved, we kept in touch regularly . . . a couple of times a week. I hadn’t heard from him. I talked to him on Tuesday night. I looked at my phone records on the Internet to check, and I definitely talked to him Tuesday night.”

  Flores was increasingly interested. “That Tuesday night, do you remember the time?” he asked.

  “I wanna say like a quarter after nine, but probably between eight thirty and nine thirty.”

  “What did you guys talk about?”

  “Um, it was brief. He was, I was driving out to Utah, and you know, he was like ‘are you gonna come out and see me?’ And I was like ‘no.’ He was supposed to make a trip up here at the end of the month. We’re doing this thing called ‘one thousand places to see before you die,’ and it’s been featured on the Travel Channel. We sort of got into it last year, where we’re starting to see all these different places on the list ‘one thousand places.’ It is a lot to see, but we each had that goal, and one of those was the Oregon coast. And so he was gonna come up here for that, and we were gonna go see that . . . crater lakes [sic].”

  “Was that trip already scheduled or was it just something you guys talked about?”

  “It wasn’t officially, like dated, but I was planning to make the trip down there. But it was supposed to happen in May, and then it was supposed to happen last week, but that didn’t work out. And he was going to Cancún today and um, and then he said as soon as he gets back from Cancún, he was going to drive up the coast and when he reaches me, we’ll do some things, and then he’ll continue up the coast to Washington and see some friends up there. And then I guess that was to happen in July, that he was supposed to go to Washington, D.C.”

  Flores could sense that Jodi was projecting a portrait of a relationship where all was rosy between Travis and her—very different from what he’d been hearing from Mimi Hall and Zach Billings. In Jodi’s version, it appeared she and Travis talked regularly, they were going to see a thousand places together before they died, presumably of old age, and they couldn’t have been more compatible. Undeterred by this discrepancy, Flores turned his attention to any potential suspects she might know of.

  “Okay,” Flores said, “did he have any issues with anybody here in town? Any enemies?”

  “You know, he got his tires slashed,” she declared. “It was last year, he said he was worried about that. And I was worried, too. He never locked his doors, and I would tell him ‘lock your doors,’ and he said ‘you’re not my mom.’ And he comes from a bad city, Riverside, California, violent. And I come from a similar neighborhood, and my parents always said to lock doors. He doesn’t have that habit, because he lives in a great neighborhood, and it’s never been an issue. Nothing’s ever been stolen.”

  The truth of the matter was that the murder did not look like it was motivated by burglary. Valuables had not been reported missing, and things that could have been taken weren’t. Not only did the intruder have enough time to drag Travis’s body from the bedroom into the shower and rinse
it off, but there had been time to run a load or two of laundry. This was not a botched or panicked burglary. Because Travis’s body had sustained so many brutal knife wounds, many in the back, it seemed very passionate and personal.

  Flores was curious about Jodi’s view of her rapport with Travis. “How would you describe your relationship with him?” he asked.

  Jodi seemed to be forthcoming. “We dated for like five months. And we broke up, and we continued to see each other for quite a bit. You know? Right up until I moved,” Jodi said, referring to her recent return to California.

  “When did you guys break up?”

  “We officially broke up June 29 of last year. But we . . . even though we broke up and decided to remain friends . . . I feel embarrassed talking about this but it was . . . but it wasn’t boyfriend and girlfriend . . . it was more like kind of buddies . . . you know what I mean?”

  “You guys were not like romantically together at any time?”

  “We were intimate, but I wouldn’t say romantic as far as relationship goes. We were in no way headed toward marriage.” Jodi answered the questions with a frankness that bordered on detachment.

  “When you say intimate, does that include like a sexual relationship with him?”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “Kind of embarrassing to talk about . . . ?”

  “Yeah. And if you could keep it kind of confidential? It’s really looked down upon in that church, I mean, I’m telling you this to help you in any way I can.”

  Raised in both the Catholic and Mormon churches, Flores had knowledge about how the Mormon church would have viewed this relationship. In many ways, Detective Flores was the exact opposite of the hard-drinking, smoking, raunchy detective that Hollywood scriptwriters love to create. He’d been married to the same woman for more than two decades and had five children with her. A homebody who loved to cook for his kids, Flores chose to identify with the Mormon church when he married his wife, who was also Mormon. He knew plenty about the religion, including the rules that Jodi and Travis were breaking by being intimate.

  Now that Flores had Jodi admitting she and Travis had been lovers, he was in a better position to get her to reveal other crucial details. “I appreciate it,” he said, using the classic technique of seeming to befriend the person being investigated. The detective moved the conversation along, looking to map out a timeline. “So you moved back to California a couple of months ago.”

  Jodi guessed that she had moved back on April 10.

  “Did you stop by his house to say goodbye to him?”

  “Oh, yes,” Jodi replied. “I was completely moved out of my house, and I stayed at his house for about a week. I practically lived there. I spent the night there several times a week when I lived there. I came over and I cleaned his house a lot. He paid me a little bit to keep his house nice and clean. Sort of like a housekeeper.”

  The detective asked if Jodi had ever met any of Travis’s roommates, to which she replied that he’d had several. One guy who had been there moved to Utah, she thought, and one had moved to Phoenix. She said that she and his current roommate Zach, a returned Mormon missionary, had “sort of connected” because they communicated by instant messaging. She claimed not to know if he still lived at the house, and Flores confirmed that he did.

  Flores used the opening to expand on the profile of the renter. “What do you think about Zach . . . what was his relationship with your ex-boyfriend?”

  “He seemed like a nice guy when I first met him,” Jodi stated. She explained that she had met both Zach and his girlfriend at the house.

  With the Mormon religion on the table, Jodi talked about Travis’s position on substances. Mormons don’t drink alcohol and don’t use tobacco, drugs, coffee, or tea, she stated. “He was just super strict on that,” she told Flores, referring to Travis. “He wouldn’t even take Excedrin for headaches because it had caffeine. I’m a little less strict on that . . .”

  “There are a lot of Diet Cokes in the fridge,” Flores commented.

  “Yeah, they’re not Travis’s,” Jodi responded. “I can guarantee you that. He wouldn’t even touch Coke.”

  The conversation returned to contact between Jodi and the victim. “And that was around April that you last saw him, right? You haven’t been back in town since?”

  “No, I haven’t at all,” answered Jodi.

  “Somebody had mentioned your name, that you had been back in town for like a week, a couple of days.”

  Jodi said that she had been planning on going, but hadn’t acted on it, but Flores was on to something. “You haven’t been physically down here since you left?”

  “Since I moved, no, I haven’t. I was gonna go this week actually and stay at his house while he was in Cancún, but it’s just not in the budget.”

  “Is that something you guys had scheduled?” Flores questioned.

  Jodi went on to explain that Travis frequently let his friends stay at his house, and that according to Jodi’s calendar, she was going to stay at Travis’s place the following week. She had emailed him about it, being so last minute. Now that Jodi’s timeline was getting closer to the murder, Flores’s interest increased. “And when was that email sent out?”

  “Just a few days ago,” Jodi replied. “I’m in front of the computer, so I can check right now. Let me log in to my account.” In a few moments, she had her answer. “I sent one on June 7. He got a little upset when I told him I wasn’t driving out. He gets upset really easily . . . I don’t know, we kind of . . . guilt each other.”

  “So you guys have a decent relationship as friends?”

  “We did. We had . . .”

  For the first time, Flores let Jodi know her name had come up in the investigation. “Because the people we talked to, they said your relationship was kind of rocky, got a little crazy at times . . .”

  “It did. What happened was when I broke up with Travis last year, it was kind of dumb. It was a bunch of drama . . . I had the suspicion that he was cheating on me, so I looked in his phone . . . it all blew up and we realized we couldn’t trust each other. We broke up at that point, but we were still attracted to each other . . . still loved each other. So, it wasn’t the best thing, but we still hung out all the time together. And it didn’t really help either of us to move on.

  “I haven’t really dated anyone since. And he told me he hadn’t dated anyone since, but then after that, he had. So, it’s all been kind of weird because we kept our dating life sort of from each other. Like a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. And I figured, ‘Okay, if he didn’t have a girlfriend, then it was okay me coming over.’ And if he didn’t think that I was with anybody, then that’s fine, too. So the less we knew about each other, the better off we were.”

  Flores moved the interview from the relationship to the crime scene. “You stayed in the house, knew the surroundings,” he continued. “Can you describe his bedroom bedding and stuff for me?”

  “Um, I spent a lot of time in there,” Jodi answered confidently. “I don’t know if it’s Egyptian cotton or what, but it’s really nice.” She went on to describe what should have been a five-thousand-dollar bed, a California-king-sized Intelli-Gel sleigh bed, but Travis had picked it up for really cheap. She was quite familiar with the bedding as well, knowing that his down comforter was encased in a brown-striped duvet cover with a button closure and that the sheets were more of a cotton/linen material in a brown-checked pattern. She described the many times the two had to reposition the comforter inside the duvet cover, grabbing corners and shaking it out to distribute it.

  Once those details were established, Flores moved the conversation to people and contacts other than Zach Billings, asking Jodi how she’d heard of Travis’s death and what people around Travis were saying about the death. When Jodi said that she’d heard it was being treated as a “suspicious death,” Flores cut in.

  “I can tell you that we’re investigating it as a homicide,” Flores stated. “It’s not a susp
icious death anymore. And it’s important to find out why someone would want to do harm to him. What kind of stuff he was involved in . . . or maybe it was as simple as a burglary or an intruder.”

  Jodi picked up on how hard it would be to overpower him. “One thing,” she added, “. . . when they said suspicious death, I thought, well he’s trying to shed pounds so he looks good for Cancún, so he looks good in boxers and in a bathing suit, swim trunks or whatever, so I know he takes supplements and he works out really, really hard. It’s a very intense routine . . . he had these heavy dumbbells that he uses . . . he’s so strong, there are a couple of kinds that he uses, we tried to wrestle for fun and he showed me some moves . . . unless there were two people, I don’t see how anyone could have overpowered him.” It wouldn’t be the last time Jodi spoke about it requiring two people to take him down.

  “Yeah, he was a pretty good-sized guy,” Flores said, having only seen him dead and crumpled over with little blood left in his veins.

  “Close to two hundred pounds,” Jodi stated.

  “Why would somebody want to hurt him?” Flores continued. “Money worries? Concerns?”

  “He did owe people money, but they were good friends,” she said, before proceeding to launch into a prolonged discussion of Travis’s finances and the fact that Jodi had recently written him a small check toward the BMW he had sold her. Flores let her talk, but sooner or later the conversation would have to shift back to their relationship. Finally he saw an opening.

  “We’ve been talking to people . . . don’t want to make you feel bad, but they didn’t have the best things to say about you,” Flores said, putting the rumors about their relationship on the table for the first time.

  “Okay.”

  “They said that you were either taking advantage of him, or hanging around when you weren’t wanted. They mentioned that sometimes you would end up going into his house. You were in his house when he didn’t want you there, and you were asked to leave, but you would continue to return. There was also some talk about you spying on his email, Facebook accounts, those types of things.”