Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias

by Velez-Mitchell, Jane

  At that point, the detective brought up the murder. “You know . . . everybody is saying, I don’t understand what happened to Travis, but you need to look at Jodi. That’s one of the reasons I started looking at you a little bit closer and over the last month or so, I’ve gotten into Travis’s lives, talked to his friends, his family. I got a really good understanding of who he is now, and I got a very good understanding of your relationship with him. And I’m kind of just putting the two together . . . obviously, you weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend anymore.”

  Jodi was slightly tongue-tied. When it became clear that she was conflicted about spilling information on the sex life of a man who had committed to chastity, the detective helped her out. “Well, I’m sure if Travis could speak right now, he wouldn’t care what people thought about him. ’Cause they knew who he was.” Flores went on to describe his view of their relationship, based only on what he learned by probing Travis’s side, and his analysis was spot-on. “Well, the way Travis thought by, you know, getting into his head, and everything he’s written, his journals, and everything I found out about him, he truly had feelings for you. And for some reason he felt that the relationship between you and him was somewhat unhealthy. But he couldn’t stop it. And I assume it’s probably maybe the same way you felt about him . . .”

  Jodi agreed that their relationship was unhealthy. Even though Arizona was the “Mormon land of opportunity,” following Travis there after their breakup led to more sex, but less spirituality. She described signals that she would get from Travis to leave her residence and come to his home for a rendezvous. “My nightlife was about him . . . He would text me, I’m getting sleepy dot dot dot . . . zzz, and that was his code to, like ‘come on over’ kind of thing . . . the coast is clear. I lived five minutes away, maybe ten depending, and it was just too convenient and too easy, and it was fun, and we had fun. We were together. So, it wasn’t healthy, and I totally agree with that.”

  Jodi said she moved back to Yreka for three reasons: she needed to regroup financially, with her money situation described as being “in dire straits”; she wanted to be with her family in Yreka, especially urgent because of her father’s poor health; and she wanted to put physical distance between Travis and her. The nine months she had lived in Mesa had done nothing to promote a meaningful relationship between them. She made it clear that she had also been in intimate relationships with other men in her life, that her interpretation of Christianity and the Bible had always been true to the Ten Commandments, which did not say, “Thou shalt not fornicate.” When she converted to Mormonism, she had grown to understand the importance of chastity.

  While it may be laughably unreasonable to buy into her lifestyle as chaste, Travis had been a Mormon a lot longer than she had, so following his lead to the outer limits of chastity was not wholeheartedly absurd. She admitted to feeling guilty when she and Travis were doing things that would make a streetwalker blush. But, somehow, instant sexual gratification seemed to prevail.

  Jodi provided a lot of fodder for psychologists. She moved to Travis’s town only after they decided not to keep dating. The sex was hotter after the split. Big emotional moments came mostly on the phone. When Detective Flores asked Jodi if she and Travis ever seriously talked about getting married, Jodi said he had proposed to her in a telephone conversation. “Once we broke up, he brought it up, he actually proposed to me. That was really hard because we were on the phone and it was just like, none of that stuff should be done on the phone anyway, but I was hundreds of miles away, and I told him that I loved him. We didn’t say ‘I love you’ during our relationship, but we said it afterward. It was weird.” Skeptics would later say this conversation between Travis and Jodi never took place, but aside from Jodi Arias being a pathological liar, she would not be the first to look back and romanticize a toxic relationship that was driven by lust.

  Jodi provided the detective with a timeline. She did not dispute the fact that she and Travis were only official for five months, all of it long-distance, and that she had moved to Mesa within weeks of breaking up. She dismissed the hint from Detective Flores that this was kind of stalker behavior, saying she had found a roommate in Mesa back when she and Travis were still an item. Because she had to leave Palm Desert anyway, she was following through with a plan that was already in place. She said there were plenty of advantages for Travis, too, when she settled in his town, and in her telling, he’d even hired her to clean his house, knowing she could use the money so he wasn’t at all upset. Flores listened and let her go on. He’d likely already talked to people close to Travis who’d told the detective they’d heard him arguing on the phone with Jodi about her move to Mesa.

  During the course of the investigation, Detective Flores had also learned about Travis’s more recent relationships, and he brought those names into the conversation with Jodi. He asked her if she knew anything about Mimi Hall or Lisa Andrews, and she said she knew about them, had been shown Mimi’s picture on Facebook, and had been very happy for her ex. As far as jealousy was concerned, she said she was fully aware that Travis had a reputation for being a flirt. She went on to say that when she first started meeting Travis at the Hugheses’ house, Sky had often called her “Deanna” by mistake, referring to Travis’s ex-girlfriend. Jodi went on to describe how Travis treated her differently depending on the situation and whom he was with and how that hurt her.

  Detective Flores seized the moment to sum up the situation between them, as he was more capable of seeing it objectively. “He liked you, he loved you,” the detective said sincerely. “He wanted to be with you, but he was reluctant to make a commitment . . . and he truly didn’t think you were marriage material. And I don’t know why not. You’re a wonderful girl . . . and I don’t see how you guys couldn’t have made it, you know?”

  Jodi offered accounts of jealous moments between them that created arguments. In the stories she chose, more often than not Travis was the jealous one. Detective Flores knew Jodi’s own possessiveness and jealousy was likely a motivation for the murder. He wanted to hear what Jodi had to say about Travis’s plans to go to Cancún with another woman. The working theory was that Jodi, enraged about Travis’s pending vacation to Mexico with another woman, had gone there with an ultimatum: take me or else pay the price.

  “So, you know, moving over to his trip to Cancún . . . ,” he started. Jodi agreed she knew about it, although she threw the detective a curveball when it came to the timing. “When did you first find out about that . . . that he was going with Mimi?”

  “I found out about that at his memorial services on Monday,” she replied.

  “You didn’t know he was going to Cancún?” Flores asked, not believing that she had just recently learned that news. “You didn’t know he was taking Mimi?”

  “I think that’s awesome, actually,” Jodi answered, as if the vacation were about to take place, and she couldn’t be happier for the two.

  “Yeah, well, unfortunately . . . ,” Detective Flores said, hinting at the obvious. Instead, he revealed to Jodi that Mimi had told Travis she just wanted to be platonic friends, which had left him heartbroken. Jodi took responsibility for being part of the reason she and Travis were having trouble forging ahead in new relationships, the gist of which was they had compromised each other spiritually. These things being said in an interrogation room setting made their sincerity suspect. But, still, the detective wanted to know what kept Jodi so drawn to Travis. “What kept you with him? I don’t understand,” he asked again. “Why did you continue to go back to him? You know what he wants. You know that it’s not healthy, but yet you continue to go back, and it brings us to the point where we are now.”

  He brought up discussions he had had with friends of Travis who thought Jodi was being obsessive. “They are saying that you had become obsessive with him to the point where you would go into his house when he wasn’t there, or when you weren’t invited, and he would say . . . ‘I don’t want her here.’ ”

 
Jodi again had justification, if indeed Travis had been complaining. She said they had an open-door policy, which had advantages for both parties, as she often took care of his dog, Napoleon, when he was away. She also said they both understood that they had to keep their sexual trysts completely under wraps, implying that people with no knowledge of the situation might mistake her visits to Travis’s bedroom as completely unwanted and unsolicited because Travis was putting on a hypocritical façade.

  Detective Flores returned his line of questioning to Jodi’s road trip from Yreka to Salt Lake City at the time of Travis’s death. “The first week of June, you took a trip to Salt Lake City; remember that trip we talked about?” he inquired. “You had gone to Redding and rented a car.” She recalled the make and model, a white Ford Focus, and she had driven it straight to Santa Cruz, then Monterey for the night before heading to Los Angeles. “Instead of going to Utah, you went straight down to the Los Angeles area?” the detective asked, not lost on him that such a route was completely the wrong direction. Jodi said she had a photography gig there, so the detour was worth it. But from there, her tale of the next twenty-four hours was filled with information that would never be able to be confirmed . . . the photography assignment never panned out because of missed phone calls; the route to Salt Lake City was unfamiliar, so she had gotten lost; the nap in her car along the shoulder of a lonely road may have lasted several hours, as she described herself as a heavy sleeper . . . the list went on and on.

  “Did you actually cross over into Arizona?” asked Flores, offering Jodi a large map.

  “I crossed over twice I think,” answered Jodi pensively. “If my map is wrong, ’cause the 93 goes north, and I hit the 15 again, and then I hit here, and then I hit Arizona, and then I hit here . . . Somehow, I got north on the 93.” She then tried to make all those locations fit in with the days of the week that she was on the road. Detective Flores let her finish, all while doing his own math.

  “It would still leave eighteen-some-odd hours for something else, okay?” he finally said. “This is what people are focusing on, this trip that you took. ’Cause they’re saying, ‘she left, she didn’t get there until Thursday,’ and Wednesday, that’s when Travis was killed.”

  “I did not go near his house,” Jodi objected.

  Flores laid out his own timeline. “I do believe that you had time to come to visit Travis,” he said without raising his voice. “I truly believe it. Did you have the opportunity? Yes, you were traveling alone. There are no other witnesses. Your phone just happened to turn off from here to here . . .” Detective Flores used the map to show where Jodi’s phone had mysteriously turned off, exactly when and where her plan deviated from his version. “You need to be honest with me, Jodi.”

  “I was not at Travis’s house,” she insisted. “I was not.”

  Next came the bombshell. “You were at Travis’s house, and you guys had a sexual encounter, for which there’s pictures,” he announced. “And I know you know there are pictures because I have them. I will show them to you, okay? So, what I’m asking you is for you to be honest with me. I know you were there.”

  With that, Jodi’s story was a bust. The detective gave her doses of all the evidence they had, all pointing to her. Even then, she continued to play dumbfounded, saying she would never hurt him. She went so far as to ask to see the pictures, perhaps figuring she could talk her way out of them by saying they happened at a different time. The bloody palm print, identified as coming from her hand, was certainly going to be harder to explain. So was the fact that her hair was stuck in the dried blood and therefore had likely only arrived at the scene when the murder took place.

  “Jodi, Jodi, this is over,” Detective Flores said, releasing his detainee from the agony of having to keep creating possible explanations. “This is absolutely over. You need to tell me the truth.” He brought the gun stolen from her grandfather’s house into the scenario, noting it was the same caliber as the one used to shoot Travis. He recapped the fact that her DNA was mixed in with Travis’s blood, something that was an impossibility if she was not present at the time of the murder. Still, she resisted.

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

  “The motive is there, the jealousy issue . . . ,” Detective Flores began. When Jodi said most of the jealousy problems lay with Travis, he challenged her. “That’s not what everybody else says. They know he was jealous, but they think you were absolutely obsessed. Obsessed was the word that they used. That’s the word I hear from everybody. Fatal attraction. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that. ‘Look at Jodi. Jodi had to have done this.’ ”

  He told her that they had no other suspects and that detectives were currently at her grandparents’ house looking for the gun. He asked her if she had a pair of sweatpants with zippers and stripes around the backside. Only after she answered affirmatively did he tell her the image of such a pair of pants had been captured, probably by accident, in one of the photographs on Travis’s camera. “You were there, and you did this. It happened. There’s no doubt in my mind . . .”

  Detective Flores left for five minutes and returned with a blue binder containing the photographs recovered from the camera in the washing machine. After flipping through the binder, he stopped on a photo and placed the open binder on the table in front of Jodi.

  “Do you remember him?” he began.

  “Yeah,” said Jodi. “Is he naked? In the shower?” She perpetuated her lie by saying Travis would never go for something like that.

  “Soon after you and him had sex on his bed,” Detective Flores continued, not buying in.

  After a short pause, Jodi stumbled, “It couldn’t have been soon after.”

  “Umm? An hour or so?”

  “The last time I had sex . . .”

  “Two hours?” Detective Flores was determined.

  “. . . in his bed was in April.”

  Flores wasn’t buying it. He continued to thumb through the photographs in the binder, and as he flipped from page to page, he appeared to be deliberately stalling, saying one was too gruesome or another was not appropriate. Finally, he made his choice and pushed the binder to Jodi. The photo was apparently one of the photos of Jodi naked taken before Travis was killed, and Flores covered up part of her exposed body in the photo with a piece of paper, perhaps out of respect. Before she had too long to process the photo of herself, he took the binder back.

  “Let’s just say I’ve seen all of you, and I’ve seen all of Travis,” he offered, in case she might decide to become embarrassed. “But the one that sticks in my mind of Travis . . . is on the autopsy table.”

  He leafed through some more until another image struck him. As he was shifting the binder, he admitted that he wasn’t sure if he should share the photo with her, emphasizing that this was “just one of the photos that was taken by accident.” She didn’t react, and he placed the image in front of her, pointing to part of it.

  “That’s your foot, Jodi,” Detective Flores said. “And these are your pants.” Jodi studied it intently without showing much emotion, as the detective explained how the color of the pant leg had been changed by the enhancement on the print. Gesturing toward the photo again, Flores added, “And that’s Travis.”

  Jodi was quiet for a moment before finally speaking. “This is his bathroom. That is not my foot!”

  Putting her head into her hands, her long brown hair spilled out of her fingers. She fell into a long litany of excuses why those couldn’t be her pants, everything from the zippers being wrong, to there being too many stripes and too few zippers. Paging through the rest of the photos, Flores pointed out the time stamps on the images of her, proving irrefutably that she was there that day. He showed her some of the crime scene photos, too, in particular the one of the bloody palm print, explaining that there was no way that her palm print could have been made in the blood if she hadn’t been at the crime scene.

  Changing tactic
s, Flores put the binder away and moved his seat closer to Jodi, looking her in the eye. “There is no doubt in my mind that you did this—none,” he said, explaining how there was nothing she could say that would change his mind. “I will not believe you,” he said plainly.

  Still, Jodi remained adamant that there was no reason she would want to hurt him. When she started worrying about things her parents might think, he again had a suggestion. “I wouldn’t be worrying about your reputation right now,” he said. “I’d be worrying about the rest of your life.”

  Despite all of this clear-cut, irrefutable evidence, Jodi continued to grasp on to her lies. They’d been on the tip of her tongue for so long perhaps it was just impossible for her to avoid them. Her denials came so naturally, with no apparent hesitation in her voice. This didn’t seem like someone who was deliberating whether or not to tell the truth. This seemed like someone who had already made up her mind that the truth would not be spoken. When confronted with this binder full of irrefutable evidence, it would have been the perfect opportunity for her to confess; instead she doubled down on her lies, refusing to turn back and holding on to her story that she was not there.

  Ultimately, Jodi still wasn’t willing to take responsibility for the murder except for saying she should have been there, and maybe that would have changed the course of time and the murder would never have happened. Maybe whoever killed him wouldn’t have stabbed him over and over again, wouldn’t have sliced his throat from ear to ear, and never put a bullet in his head to finish him off. Maybe the shower pictures of Travis and the photos of Jodi nude, posed on Travis’s bed like Eduard Manet’s famous Olympia, were erroneously time-stamped. Maybe she didn’t own pants like the ones worn by the killer, and the bloody palm print was wrongly attributed to her. She said unequivocally that she was incapable of killing Travis. In her own words, she couldn’t even hurt a spider.