Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias

by Velez-Mitchell, Jane

  “So, we’re upstairs talking for a long time,” Sky recounted. “And, I just got this cold, weird, yucky feeling like I was being watched. And I mouthed to Travis. ‘She’s out there, outside of our door.’ And Travis whispered, ‘No way.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, she’s out there.’ So, we changed the subject—I don’t know how long but not for very long—and then she knocks. And Travis goes to the door and opens it and Jodi says, ‘Is everything okay?’ and Travis says, ‘Oh yeah, we’re just talking about some things,’ and she says, ‘Is everything okay?’ and he says, ‘Yeah, it’s fine.’ And she says, ‘Are you going to bed anytime soon?’ and he says, ‘Yeah, I’ll come down and say good night before I go to bed.’ She said okay. So she went downstairs. Travis looks down. She goes in her room and shuts the door.”

  Forty minutes later, Sky thought Jodi was eavesdropping again.

  “She’s out there,” she repeated. When Travis ripped open the door, Jodi was standing there. “The look on her face and the feeling Chris and I got is something I’ve never had before or since,” said Sky. “It was like pure evil. And it’s not hindsight. Just the darkest, yuckiest, scariest feeling that I’ve ever had.”

  Sky said that night she and her husband were actually frightened for their children. “Chris and I were talking and we’re like, ‘Do we need to get our kids, is she going to burn our house down?’ And we’re like, ‘How did we get in this situation where there is this girl in our house that we are afraid of?’ We don’t know, is she going to harm us? Is she going to harm our children? . . . And I said, ‘I don’t want her here. I don’t want her here ever again. We’re done with her. You need to tell Travis in the morning that she’s no longer welcome here.’ ”

  While the discovery of Jodi’s eavesdropping was unsettling, Travis wasn’t as freaked out as Chris and Sky were, and their decision to ban Jodi from the house caught him off guard. According to Sky, when Chris finally told Travis why Jodi was no longer welcome at their home, Travis was quite upset. “He was really hurt,” Sky said. “He didn’t understand. He kept saying Jodi was a really sweet person, but he was totally duped by her. I told Travis, ‘You’re not seeing what we see. There’s something wrong with her.’ ”

  Though they’d initially welcomed Jodi into their home, all of that goodwill was gone. Through small glimpses, Chris and Sky had come to see what Travis could not: that there was something unsettling and even frightening about Jodi’s behavior, something that could not be trusted. Travis respected both Sky’s and Chris’s opinions immensely, but now that Travis knew his friends disapproved of Jodi, his relationship with them was awkward for months afterward.

  However, their words may not have fallen on deaf ears completely. Perhaps in part because of Sky and Chris’s intervention with Travis, two months later Jodi and Travis were done . . . but not really. Some would say their relationship just went underground.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE NINJAS

  The following day, Jodi was brought back to the same interrogation room to resume the interview that had left Detective Flores so frustrated the day before. Jodi’s resolve to maintain her innocence, despite the overwhelming proof of her guilt, was not entirely unusual in this interrogation process. Often, the shock of being cornered and captured brings on denial, especially in someone like Jodi, who had assumed she was too clever to be caught. More time to think about it often leads to a softer stance and a willingness to talk the next day.

  The cameras for the July 16 interview again began to roll with Jodi alone. This day, she was wearing a jail-issued orange jumpsuit, her brown hair hanging neatly down across the front of her shoulders. Although she looked comfortable and relaxed, seated with her cuffed hands resting in her lap, she occasionally showed signs of nerves, cracking her neck and rubbing her eyes. When no one else came into the room for several minutes, she began to sing the final verse of Bette Midler’s love song “The Rose.” “Just remember in the winter / Far beneath the bitter snows . . . Lies the seed that . . .” Her a cappella rendition trailed off as sounds of someone arriving could be heard in the hallway behind the closed door.

  That day, Jodi’s first interviewer was Detective Rachel Blaney of the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office. Part of the hope was that a female officer might make Jodi more comfortable, especially in light of the sexual content of so much of this case. Blaney removed Jodi’s handcuffs, then spent the next several hours with her, trying to convince her that revealing her point of view at this early stage in the process could work in her favor later on. If Jodi remained unwilling to offer her version of what happened, then the portrait of her would be painted solely by the prosecution and would remain one-sided unless and until she decided to talk.

  The clock ticked away with very little to no headway. Jodi seemed less inclined to engage with this female cop, perhaps thinking that the subtle flirtations she relied on with men would be wasted on her. Again and again, Blaney reminded Jodi that the explanation of what her breaking point was, of what made her snap, could potentially better her situation in the long run. Detective Blaney played off her vanity. “You appear to be a cold-blooded killer,” she reminded Jodi about the current state of affairs, “and the media is going to feed off of that. Do you want to be out there like O. J. Simpson? Because nobody felt sorry for him. Nobody respected him, even though he maintained his innocence.” Occasionally, Jodi appeared ready to talk, but then she’d clam up again. Her moments of emotion usually came when she was reminded that her family was part of this now, too, by virtue of her actions. At times, Jodi appeared to sob when she acknowledged the pain the Alexander family was in, although skeptics would say she was faking it.

  “Grasping the reality of the situation” was what both Detective Blaney and Detective Flores had in mind for Jodi. But they were in for a surprise during the next part of the interview. When Detective Flores took over the questioning, what Jodi told him was far more ludicrous than what had come before. He came back to the table at Jodi’s request, as he had been in touch with Travis’s family as recently as that morning, and she wanted him to update her on their well-being.

  The interview continued at its snail’s pace for what seemed like an eternity. Jodi’s posturing and body language was markedly different with Detective Flores than with her female interviewer, and she grew much more talkative and attentive with Flores. With Detective Blaney, she had mostly sat with her feet planted firmly on the floor. Now she often pulled her feet up to the seat of her chair and wrapped her arms around her knees, sitting the way you would if you were relaxing by a campfire.

  Detective Flores knew what he was doing. He was trained to create an atmosphere of trust and ease, so Jodi didn’t stand much of a chance of manipulating him. There was nothing wrong with patience and pacing. The guilty party was across the table from him, so making her comfortable was more important than rushing her. He had been in this career long enough to know that most people accused of crimes, no matter how heinous, want to be liked and understood before they do much confessing. He allowed Jodi to ramble on about the beautiful things she remembered about Travis and their months together, and never suggested she speed it up. In fact, at times Jodi seemed so relaxed, it was as though she didn’t even realize she was under arrest for the murder of the man she was so fondly recalling.

  Eventually, when the opportunity seemed best, Detective Flores turned the interview back to the crime scene. He began by asking her if Travis had known she was arriving that night, “So, he knew you were coming . . . he was expecting you?”

  “I feel really powerless in here,” Jodi replied, a brutally honest statement in a sea of lies.

  “You think his roommates were there? Were their cars there? You would have had to have seen their cars.” Jodi said the cars were a hard predictor of who was home, because sometimes the roommates used the garage, so when she rolled in around 3 A.M., she didn’t pay much attention. (Perhaps by mistake, perhaps intentionally, Jodi had shaved one and a half hours off her road trip as s
he recounted the day. The evidence would later show that Jodi arrived at approximately 4:30 A.M.) “That makes sense,” observed Flores. “You’re pretty sneaky. You go up there, and his roommates didn’t even know you were there.”

  Jodi said Travis was awake and watching YouTube videos when she got there. She had great memory of the details: “It wasn’t anything profane or bad or vulgar. It was just like people dancing, but they had boxes of foil on their head. It was weird, like robotic.” Her memory of other events from that night became increasingly odd as a timeline unfolded.

  “What went wrong?” Detective Flores asked, looking for Jodi’s snapping point. “Did he say something to you? Were you angry about something? What was it?” He referred to the photos with Travis alive, which had no indications of tension between Jodi and Travis. “The last one we have is him sitting in the shower. And that’s when I think it happened. He was sitting down, looking up at you. What did you do? What happened, Jodi?”

  Jodi’s anxiety kicked in, now that she was fully back in the reality that she was the only suspect. She started vigorously pulling her hair between her fingers as she stared at the wall high above the detective’s head.

  “You have to tell me,” the detective continued, pausing long enough to not seem impatient. Jodi put her head into her hands and began to cry. Flores brought up the possibility that there was premeditation, based on her bringing a gun to the house. “I don’t believe you planned it, but then I don’t understand why you took a gun with you,” he said quietly but deliberately.

  “I didn’t,” answered Jodi, just as deliberately.

  “Where was that gun from then? Where did you get it? If you didn’t take it, did he have one in the house? Did you get it there in Arizona?”

  Jodi maintained that the weapon wasn’t hers. “I didn’t ever have it actually in my possession,” she said barely audibly.

  “Then who had it?” asked Flores. The detective was probably hoping that Jodi would see that her story didn’t make sense. After the question was asked, Jodi sat there silently. It was a long, pregnant pause. Finally, with almost timidity, she said she was going to come clean.

  “I didn’t tell you . . . I can tell you everything I know or I remember . . .”

  “What happened after that last picture was taken?” the detective pressed. “If you want me to believe that somebody else was there, you have to show me.”

  The fabrication started slowly, with a cryptic “I didn’t actually see it. I heard it first.” But it picked up energy as it went along. Jodi said she hadn’t been able to talk about the “real” perps initially because they had threatened to hurt her family. She had to improvise the story as she went. She showed either remarkably quick thinking, or painfully amateur floundering, depending on your perspective, as she spilled her on-the-spot story to the detective. She said she was present when the murder occurred, but didn’t actually see it with her own eyes, so she didn’t know what the intruders had done at first. She asked to look at the pictures from the crime scene, presumably to help her memory, but more probably to help her craft her story. Her request was denied.

  As she elaborated, her story grew stranger, with her trying to justify her reluctance to talk. “They know where I live. Or they know where my parents are. I don’t know if they know where my grandparents are, but they got my address, they know where my family is.” It was remarkable how quickly she covered every possible address in Yreka, in case the invaders had put out a carte blanche “take no prisoners” when it came to their threat to do harm to her family.

  “You’re saying someone followed you all the way to Arizona from here?” Detective Flores asked incredulously.

  “No, I don’t think . . . I think I was an element of surprise for them.”

  “So they didn’t expect you?”

  Jodi was definitely faltering, but she carried forth. She said they argued about if they wanted to kill her or not. “For what reason?” Detective Flores asked in apparent shock over the outrageousness of her story. Jodi answered with a theatrical flair, “Because I’m a witness.”

  “A witness of what?” Flores pressed.

  “Him, of Travis . . . but I didn’t really witness it. I didn’t see much,” Jodi sighed.

  She didn’t know why they had wanted to get rid of Travis. She didn’t recognize them, so she didn’t know if they were local.

  Detective Flores couldn’t hold back. “You need to make this believable, because to me it’s not believable right now,” he interjected. “I am listening, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. People don’t just go in somewhere and kill someone for no reason and let a witness go. That just doesn’t happen.” He needed the details.

  Jodi played with her hair a bit, pulling it behind her head and combing it with her fingers. Eventually she pulled her feet back up onto the seat of the chair, with her knees bent. “They were white Americans from what I could tell. They had . . . ummm . . . wummm . . . what do you call those things? Beanies, but they cover your whole face. They have holes for your nose, mouth, and eyes . . . Ski masks! They were black, or dark blue or something.”

  At this point, she took the story back to the few hours before the murder. Jodi said she and Travis had sex a couple of times in the afternoon, once in his bed and once in his office; they fussed with his computer, trying to figure out a virus that was creating problems on his hard drive; they fed Napoleon; and then Travis went upstairs to shower and shave. Jodi said she had begun taking pictures of him shaving for his Myspace page, even though he was a rather reluctant model at first. Jodi says, that fateful afternoon, she convinced a hesitant Travis to pose in the shower so she could take some photos based on a Calvin Klein ad that she admired. That was when all hell broke loose.

  Jodi tried to describe the events of the murder. Travis was inside the shower stall, and she was crouched down outside the door snapping the pictures of him. Suddenly she heard a loud ring and Travis began screaming, and then she thought she got knocked out, but only briefly. She next saw two people near Travis, while he was holding his head. Because “he was on all fours” Jodi rested her head on his back and was begging him to tell her if he was okay. He told her to go get help, but the two masked intruders were still there.

  “One was a guy, and one was a girl. I couldn’t tell that at first. But I could just see one was a girl, and I assumed the other was a guy because of their build and their voices. I don’t remember what they were wearing . . . like maybe jeans . . . One was in all black, and one was in jeans.”

  “Did they say anything?” Flores asked. “What words did you hear?”

  Jodi said the girl wanted to kill her, but the guy just wanted to finish off Travis. She said Travis was screaming the whole time, but not like a girl, more like he was in pain because he had been shot. Mortally wounded, he was lying on the floor of the shower, not writhing, just screaming in agony.

  The male came after her next. She used the crime scene photos Detective Flores displayed for her to indicate with her finger where the action took place, and her pointer finger went to Travis’s bedroom closet, where the male confronted her. “He stopped me and he didn’t touch me. He just held the gun to my head and was like ‘You don’t go anywhere.’ He told me to stay there and not to move.” She was helpless to contact 911—Travis’s phone was downstairs, and hers was dead.

  Jodi still wanted to save Travis. In the face of extreme danger, she sprang from the closet and jumped the female assailant, who was slightly taller than Jodi. She had been hovering over Travis, and Jodi pushed her aside. “Travis was bleeding everywhere because he had been shot at this time . . . He wasn’t talking, but I could tell he was breathing.”

  Flores wanted to know who was armed. Jodi wasn’t sure. “I thought she was the one with the gun. Maybe she had the gun. He had the gun. Maybe there were two guns. I don’t know.” She maintained that the female was Travis’s shooter, but everything was fast and muddled, as she had been knocked out herself that brief amount of time. W
hen the assailants left the room, she tried to stand Travis up, but he was weakening. They came back to find her supporting him and trying to help him walk, and there was a brief discussion between them about killing her as well. “They had an argument back and forth, and she wanted to kill me and he didn’t. He said, ‘That’s not what we’re here for . . .’ It was obvious they were there for [Travis].”

  A small struggle ensued, but Jodi was not a fighter by nature. “I’m not a person who knows about self-defense. I took some classes eight years ago, but I’ve never been consistent with it . . . I just knew I had to hold on to her hand because she had a knife.” After the struggle, the pair decided to spare Jodi her life. They told her not to move as the man rifled through her purse. His last act before making her flee the house was removing the small amount of cash she had in her wallet. That was when he found her car registration, and the story came full circle. “You must be that bitch from California!” The threat to do her family bodily harm if she ever told what happened to Travis was real now that the killers had her registration and her home address. They told her to leave, which she was reluctant to do with Travis still alive. But they were in control, and she left.

  Detective Flores wondered if Jodi had seen any cars outside, or thought of going to a neighbor’s. “I was really scared; I was freaked out of my mind,” she told him without emotion. He asked her if she had been injured, and she showed him some healed slice wounds on her left fingers. He questioned her again about who might have wanted to hurt Travis.

  In the end, he told her he didn’t believe her. “I came in here hoping you would tell me the truth, and this is not the truth, Jodi,” he sighed. “This does not make any sense, to have two people come in, first two white males and later you change it—”

  “No, I don’t think I ever said white males,” Jodi interrupted.

  “Yes, you did.”

  “When?”

  “At the beginning of this story, and then you change it to ‘Oh, one was female.’ That doesn’t make any sense to me.” He also suggested that the scenario of letting Jodi go was absurd. “The fact that they left you alive and let you go? That never happens. Why would anyone do that? Why would somebody risk the chance of getting caught and just let you run out the front door while they’re upstairs in his house, knowing you could just run across the street and tell somebody? It just doesn’t make sense.” He didn’t show particular exasperation as he discounted the masked intruder story. “There is a reason that you did this, and you just refuse to tell me why. Maybe because you are just cold and calculated . . .”