Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias

by Velez-Mitchell, Jane

  Jodi had a reasonable defense. “He gave me his Facebook password and his Myspace password. And I gave him my Facebook password and Gmail account password. And we did that a few months ago to reestablish trust between us . . . It just didn’t work, and he got upset and we changed our passwords after that . . .”

  “How long ago?”

  “Not long ago . . . two weeks ago, maybe? I don’t know about his because I wasn’t going to try to get back into his accounts anymore . . . And as far as ever getting into his emails, that never happened. He would just have his computer on, and he’d leave his Gmail window up, and there were times where I went on his computer to look up other things, and if his Gmail window was open, I would just close it.”

  “We are getting a search warrant for his email, but we can tell where those things were accessed from. I just wanna make it clear that if you did access it from somewhere else at a certain time, we’re gonna know.”

  Jodi was not intimidated. “I’ll tell you right now that I did,” she said assuredly. “He gave me his passwords . . . but I only accessed Gmail and Myspace because those were the only passwords.”

  Jodi had just contradicted herself, because seconds earlier, she had mentioned she also had his Facebook password. Flores pretended to ignore her slipup.

  “How long ago?” Flores wanted to know. “When was the last time?”

  “Weeks ago. We had a conversation where like, he made it clear he wasn’t comfortable with that anymore. And I changed my Gmail password again, and he saw another guy’s email there and gave me a hard time about it . . . We’re both trying to move on . . .”

  “There seems to be a lot of jealousy issues.”

  Jodi seemed to know where this was leading, so she went on the offensive. “I think it was jealousy on both parts,” she responded. “For me, it wasn’t so much jealousy as it was, I just wanted him to be honest. And one of the reasons I moved was because we were spending too much time together, we weren’t moving on. I guess I could have dated other people, but our social circles were so small that any time he heard about something . . .”

  “Okay. Did you move down here . . . because of him?”

  “Yeah, because of him primarily . . . because of Travis.”

  “People were saying to call you because you probably know what happened and possibly had something to do with it.” The question came out of the blue.

  “Oh gosh, no, I . . . ,” Jodi stammered.

  “Yeah, that’s how bad it was getting at the scene. I needed to talk to you to see why they would say something like that, why they would start pointing fingers in your direction.”

  “I don’t know, maybe because I’m the ex-girlfriend?” The conversation had clearly taken a turn for the worse, but Jodi tried to face it head-on. “We had a lot of fights.”

  “Were there a lot of issues? Obviously, it wasn’t a great relationship.”

  “It was a great relationship until we started fighting . . . I had a suspicion . . . that he wasn’t being faithful, and I found a bunch of text messages that were no good. And rather than being an adult about it and confronting him, I kept it in and let it fester, and I was miserable . . . I realized this is no kind of relationship, so it finally all just came out. He was really apologetic, but we both just realized that neither of us could be in an adult relationship. And that was the end of a black year. So at that point we continued to see each other, a long time after that.”

  “I’m glad I did get a hold of you,” Flores commented. “It clears up a lot of the concerns that I had. I don’t think it’s what these people thought was going on.”

  “I should probably tell you that when Travis got upset, he would send me text messages and things. You’ll probably find Gmail, Facebook, you’re welcome to access all of my accounts.”

  “We’re probably going to subpoena all of his Facebook and Gmail and everything to see who he was communicating with. I’m not sure how far back we go, usually six months to a year . . . I hate telling people over the phone, but it is a homicide, it was an angry situation. When we see something like this, we think, these people hated each other. Somebody went in there to hurt him, and they did, and they hurt him really bad.”

  CHAPTER 4

  JODI’S MEN

  Jodi never returned to high school after her junior year. Instead, she took a series of waitressing jobs, and Bobby eventually got a job busing tables. Between them they made enough to make ends meet.

  Bobby did not have his own place; he lived with an elderly couple whom he considered his grandparents. The property was in bad shape—cigarette smoke hazing the interior light, linoleum buckling in the kitchen, and an unkempt lawn begging to be mowed. Inside, the house was a complete mess, with stuff hoarded in every corner. Amid that chaos, Bobby had carved out a bedroom of his own, and when Jodi moved in, she shared that space with him.

  At first things seemed to go well, until Jodi claimed she discovered that Bobby was being unfaithful. According to Jodi, Bobby was exchanging affectionate emails with another girl, which Jodi admitted she discovered with a little sleuthing on Hotmail. Jodi said the two would go to the library so they could each check their respective personal email accounts. While there, Jodi happened to see an email from another woman in Bobby’s inbox. In an early sign of Jodi’s penchant for espionage, or perhaps fabrication, she said she left the library with Bobby under the guise that she was heading to work, but secretly returned to the library, where she was able to access his account. She then printed the letters at the library and formulated a plan to confront him.

  Impulsively, and seething with jealousy, Jodi called in sick to her job, found Bobby, and handed her evidence to him. While Bobby was understandably shocked that Jodi went to such lengths to trap him, Jodi said she felt righteously angry, calling it her first experience with being jilted and deceived by a man.

  Despite her discovery, Jodi didn’t leave Bobby, possibly because of her fear of abandonment. Jodi said the two broke up so many times that she found herself constantly packing and unpacking all of her things. But she hadn’t reached the point where she wanted to end it for good. Something in her wouldn’t let her detach. What ailed Jodi would become a source of great debate. The entire nation of amateur armchair psychologists and professionals would weigh in on it. Was Jodi bipolar? Did she have borderline personality disorder or detachment/attachment disorder? Did she suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, or was she a sociopath or even a psychopath? These psychological issues would be fodder for speculation both inside and outside the courtroom, with opinions on it at every turn.

  Jodi seemed to make a lot of self-destructive choices, and several claimed that she changed completely after moving in with Bobby. One visitor to their place expressed shock at their living conditions. Others insisted Bobby wasn’t the problem, that some other emotional or psychological issue was rising up in Jodi as she matured into her teenage years. A friend recalled the night Jodi called very upset after an argument. Jodi later claimed that Bobby had tried to choke her during an argument, using his martial arts training to put her in a stranglehold that almost made her pass out. She claimed she had even called 911 for assistance, but said Bobby had taken over the call and had given the operator an excuse. Jodi said she brushed off the assault as an isolated incident and continued to live with him. You have to wonder, given her propensity toward violence, if perhaps Jodi was the one who was violent. She seemed to have a penchant for relationship turmoil.

  Eventually, circumstances pulled Jodi and Bobby apart. Bobby, possibly wanting to get some space between himself and Jodi, relocated across state lines up to Medford, Oregon, fifty miles north. He lived with a roommate named Matt, while Jodi headed south to live for several months with a good friend back in Santa Maria, the town she still loved best and had always missed ever since she had been stripped away from it at the end of eighth grade.

  Living space at her friend’s house was tight, as the family already had five members sharing crampe
d quarters. Still, they embraced Jodi and lovingly welcomed her into their home. She arrived in the summer of 1999 and stayed through Christmas. She found a job waitressing at a local Applebee’s, but soon became quite lonely. Her best friend had started college that fall and was busy with her studies and playing on the college softball team. With her friend otherwise occupied, Jodi probably began to realize the consequences of her decision to drop out of school and leave her parents’ house. She had tried to re-create the good feelings she remembered from her childhood in Santa Maria, but this was now a different time. Jodi was lost, and she needed to find something or someone to hang on to, to make her feel grounded in the world.

  Perhaps that’s why Jodi just couldn’t seem to get her mind off Bobby. Acting on the possibly faulty notion that Bobby had no car, no food, no money, nothing, that didn’t deter her from reinitiating contact with him. Santa Maria was ten hours from Medford, Oregon, but she made her way to his doorstep with a bagful of groceries left anonymously for him to find. Jodi claimed Bobby instantly knew the care package was from her and called to thank her, but others saw Jodi’s mysterious delivery as a creepy move. Creepy or generous, she would complain that Bobby wasn’t nice to her, but she was soon making the long drive up to Medford on the weekends to hang out with him anyway.

  Jodi was getting a little disheartened with Bobby, however. When she observed how chivalrous and kind Bobby’s roommate Matt was with his girlfriend, she realized she was not being treated well. In her journal entries, she wrote of her growing friendship with Matt and his ability to “spiritually help others.”

  In January 2000, Jodi confided her dissatisfaction with Bobby to friends who suggested she make a list of pros and cons to see if the relationship was worth saving. She came up with three pros right off the bat: “made me feel beautiful, “could make me laugh,” “would scrape the ice off my car in the winter while I stayed inside and warmed up.” Next, she moved to the cons column. The list stretched for more than three pages: “unsympathetic when I need a shoulder to cry on,” “tells me to ‘fuck off’ on a weekly basis,” “trashes my name to anybody who will listen,” “tells me he loves me but takes it back minutes later,” “trashes my family and my friends.” The list went on and on. She accused Bobby of flirting with other girls on “the party line, the Internet, and at parties and bars,” and claimed he had called her “the worst, filthiest, most unimaginable names in the dictionary.

  “The list doesn’t even begin to mention the fact that he likely cheated on me . . . including all aspects of an alternate love affair,” she wrote. “But if he wanted me to go away so badly, why didn’t he just tell me?” Given Jodi’s intense neediness, maybe Bobby had already told her to leave him alone, but she hadn’t listened. After all, he was the one who had moved to another state and she was the one who pursued him again.

  Jodi’s next move would be her strangest to that point, and it would also foreshadow odd behavior in her future. Even though things weren’t going well with Bobby, Jodi moved to Medford, Oregon. She said she liked it and wanted to relocate there. Her unhealthy pattern had begun: she would complain about an ex-boyfriend, but then would move very close to him in spite of the turmoil that he’d supposedly brought into her life. Perhaps it was her fear of abandonment. Or maybe she wanted to be near Bobby to whip up drama, such a staple of her relationships. She could distract herself from the self-loathing that often plagues those suffering from mood disorders. Or perhaps she already had her eye on Bobby’s roommate Matt, whom she was lavishing with compliments in her journal. Regardless of her underlying reasons, her behavior had characteristics of stalking.

  Jodi was still in touch with her parents, at least sporadically. She wrote in her journal that her parents were exasperated at her life choices and begging her to focus on achieving something. Jodi wrote about a day spent in Yreka with her father. “Patterns of thought. I hope I don’t fall into any and I hope I can uproot those which I’ve embraced since childhood,” she began. “Went to Yreka today. I was sitting with my dad in the little Jodan Karate Dojo and we were watching the kids warm up for class when somehow he and I got on the subject of my life for the past two years. He just kept shaking his head disbelievingly, stating that he couldn’t believe I had just wasted my life and thrown away two years. I responded by telling him that it wasn’t a waste, and that I’ve taken a lot from that experience . . . But he couldn’t believe it and kept repeating and objecting, stating that two years is such a long time, such a waste, and that I was just being rebellious by not listening to anyone.”

  The Ariases later confided that they sometimes debated whether their beautiful, promising, but clearly troubled daughter was suffering from bipolar disorder, which is characterized by wild mood swings. Based on their later interviews with law enforcement, it seemed they were wondering if they would ever be able to reclaim their daughter, a hope that was quickly dashed when they learned she had moved in with Matt.

  Jodi had started dating Matt not long after she got to Medford, perhaps remembering how chivalrous he had been with his former girlfriend. But, given Matt’s connection to Bobby, it was beyond awkward. Jodi had to have known it would cause her former boyfriend emotional pain for her to hop in bed with his roommate, but she did so nevertheless. She found yet another job at Applebee’s and when she had enough money, she and Matt rented a one-bedroom apartment together. On occasion, she would run into Bobby. Such encounters with him were inevitable given she had chosen to move to his town. But Jodi went further at times, calling Bobby repeatedly, both at home and at his job, and even leaving mysterious things on his doorstep. Sources have said that Bobby even became quite fearful of her and they regarded him as a stalking victim. Bobby has chosen not to go on the record with the author, so the only account of his and Jodi’s relationship is Jodi’s alone, which should always be met with skepticism. Nonetheless, Jodi had begun her pattern of relationship obsession and of vine swinging from one boyfriend to another, bitterly disenchanted with one man as she grabbed on to the next. In Jodi’s world, it seemed a lover was either wonderful or horrible, with no in-between.

  Matt and Jodi were together for a couple of years. Matt described her as gentle and caring, someone who would go into the bathtub to rescue a bug so it wouldn’t get washed down the drain. With Matt, Jodi continued her odyssey through the spiritual world she had begun at age eighteen. Despite being raised as a nondenominational Christian, Jodi, through one boyfriend or another had taken a curious interest in alternative religions—fundamentalist Christianity, Wicca, Buddhism, and Hinduism, to name four. Matt had a few books on witchcraft for the purpose of seeking spiritual alternatives. He had once even dabbled in it, but he had already moved into studying the mystical Eastern religions by the time Jodi started dating him. They explored the spiritual world together, taking “New Age”–type meditation seminars with roots in Hinduism or Buddhism, best described as a modern version of transcendentalism. Sometimes the seminars were quite a distance, as far away as Portland, four hours north of Medford, or San Francisco, six hours south.

  Jodi believed she was in love with Matt, and for a time things between them seemed good. She wrote of feeling “blessed” to be with a man so kind and caring. “It is simply incredible, the fact that we are here building our dreams together,” Jodi wrote in her journal, dated February 6, 2000. “I can’t even imagine trying to pull something like this off with [Bobby]. In fact, I can’t even imagine having wanted to do such a thing. Living with him was a disastrous nightmare. Yet, putting up Christmas lights in February with [Matt] is so close to heaven-sent, that even now I still question what I ever did that was considered worthy enough for God to make this union between us a reality.

  “. . . I guess I’m still not quite used to this feeling of loving a person, a beautiful soul, so completely and actually have that love returned, no, not just returned, but reciprocated at a level which actually matches mine, if not exceeds it. That is something I had always sought in [Bobby], but n
ever found.”

  But just three months later, in May 2000, Jodi sounded like a different person. Her emotional instability was apparent in her journals as she wrote about missing her times with Bobby. “He was my dream, he was my all, my everything,” she said in her entry dated May 11. She added, in a somewhat ominous reflection, “Why do I feel like we still have unfinished business?”

  By July she had seesawed back to loving Matt. “How grateful, how lucky, and how privileged I am to walk by his side in this lifetime,” she noted on July 12. But by October, Jodi had become disillusioned. “I feel utterly fucking worthless, useless and destructive,” she began her entry of October 8, 2000. “Like maybe I am failing at life, failing at my karmic lessons and failing at my relationship with my beloved.”

  January 2001 saw Jodi’s relationship with Matt beginning to crumble. “So often, it seems like Matt really doesn’t give a shit. Sometimes, I feel like I’m just some stereotypical ‘woman’ who sits at home and isn’t important,” was her entry on January 3.

  Later that month, Jodi consulted her mother about her feelings of disillusionment. Sandy Arias told her daughter that she liked Matt, but Jodi needed to realize that “he’s never going to change.” In her journal entry dated January 18, 2001, Jodi complained about his housekeeping. It infuriated her that he left the house such a pigsty, and expected her to pick up after him. She also expressed annoyance at his constant lack of money. She wrote of feeling put upon by his continued inability to pay his share of the bills, and that they had to cancel evenings out with friends due to Matt’s lack of financial resources. To remedy the situation, the two decided to get their own places. But Jodi feared it was not a permanent solution, “just running from the problem.” The man Jodi had envisioned as her Prince Charming had turned into a disappointment. This would happen over and over again, with man after man.