Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias

by Velez-Mitchell, Jane

  “No,” Flores replied.

  As for the rope, Nurmi wanted to bolster his co-counsel Jennifer Willmott’s claim during her opening remarks that Travis liked to tie Jodi up. Flores told Nurmi that police had recovered short “pieces of fabric rope” from the master bedroom and on the stairs leading to the bedroom, but he described them as tassels and pieces of fabric, and added that no ropes had been found at the house.

  Shifting gears, Nurmi grilled Flores about email exchanges between Jodi and Travis that had already been entered into evidence by the prosecution and had derogatory sexual terms in them. “Do you recall her saying he [Travis] had said several mean things to her?” Nurmi wanted to know.

  “Yes,” Flores responded, his voice monotone, his face expressionless.

  “Do you remember an email from Mr. Alexander referring to Miss Arias as a three-hole wonder?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “As a slut?”

  “Yes,” said the detective.

  “As a whore?” Nurmi asked. There was another affirmative.

  There was a shock value to those words as they rippled through the courtroom. Nurmi must have sensed the impact they had, because he would go on to repeat those three terms many, many times during the course of the trial to the point where it became something of a here we go again joke to the reporters covering the case.

  This first usage, however, showed just how much of this trial would be about the X-rated texts and instant messages between Jodi and Travis; as it turned out, each side had plenty of vulgar quotes to choose from in order to make their points. On re-cross, the prosecutor had Flores read from the very same instant message exchange that Nurmi had used. With each word enunciated equally, in the style of a grade schooler, Flores read Travis’s words, “I think I was little more than a dildo with a heartbeat to you.” Using this powerful counterpoint, Martinez demonstrated that Travis felt sexually exploited by Jodi and “used” for sexual purposes in the same way that Jodi accused him of using her.

  Martinez then tried to convince the jury that Jodi was lying when she said Travis tied her up to his sleigh bed with rope. The prosecutor showed Flores the photos of the purported rope, which Nurmi had hinted was a remnant of their bondage games. Flores said the item looked more like “a small thread.” Martinez then showed him Exhibit 63, a photo of Travis’s bedroom. The detective identified throw pillows on a loveseat against the wall. The large, square dark brown pillows were bordered with an inch of gold-colored fringe. The prosecutor then returned to the photo Nurmi had used, which was a bunch of these fibers. He offered up that Nurmi’s “rope” was nothing but decorative pillow tassels. Flores was excused for the time being. He would be recalled to testify a number of times about many other aspects of his investigation.

  Heather Conner’s testimony revisited the crime scene by way of crime-scene photos and disturbing evidence found there, including Travis’s undergarments, a T-shirt, and a bleach-stained towel found in the washing machine. It began with Juan Martinez putting up pictures of various rooms in Travis’s house, and Conner elaborating on anything relevant. The guided tour of the home ended in the master bathroom. The photos that ended the day were of a blood-spattered sink that looked like something out of a slasher movie, a bullet casing that had landed in a pool of blood on the floor near the sink, and another large blood stain on the carpet at the entrance to the bedroom from the hallway leading to the bathroom. The Alexander family was one more time visibly traumatized. Jodi, watching the photos displayed on her own monitor in front of her on the defense table, hid her face in her hand.

  Day three of the prosecution’s case had Heather Conner back on the stand. Prosecutor Martinez used the crime-scene technician to conduct a blood-soaked tour. Every bloody photo introduced as evidence popped up simultaneously on several large screens scattered around the courtroom, enhancing the horror of the image and provoking a visceral response in the gallery. He asked her to elaborate on the blood on the bathroom walls, the pool of blood on the carpet, and items of clothing. The Alexander family in the front rows of the public gallery appeared shaken, but stoic. Also a latent print expert, Conner discussed her conclusions about the bloody left palm print Jodi left on the hallway wall, which contained a mixture of Travis’s and Jodi’s DNA. The photo of Jodi’s palm and fingers, etched in blood, was also projected on the monitors for the jury to see. The pictures were hard to look at, but what made them truly difficult was the story they told—a story of how Travis bled and stumbled to his final breath.

  However, none of the crime scene photos were as horrifying and disturbing as the ones about to be displayed during the testimony of Dr. Kevin Horn, the Maricopa County Medical Examiner. He had performed the autopsy eight days after Travis died, though, at the time, no one knew his exact date of death. An abhorrent, ghastly autopsy photo of Travis’s face, which, like the rest of his body, was bloated and beginning to mummify, was projected on the screen for the jurors, who winced at the image. Travis’s teeth were visible and his now dark lips had receded. Jodi’s head immediately went to her hands, where they remained until the photo went away. It was Dr. Horn’s opinion that Travis had fought for his life, and the cuts on the palms of his hands looked like classic defensive wounds. The official cause of death was loss of blood, but Dr. Horn had the opinion that one of the knife wounds was primarily responsible, in that it hastened his death. The gunshot would have killed him, too, had he not already been mortally wounded.

  The scenario Dr. Horn painted was brutal and hard to listen to. He said that the deep, aggressive stab wound to the chest entered Travis’s body between his third and fourth ribs and penetrated three and a half inches deep near the base of his heart, cutting a major vein that supplies blood to the heart. He didn’t die immediately, though, because he had time to move around and raise his hands.

  Then came perhaps the most shocking visual of the trial. Stifled gasps were heard as prosecutor Juan Martinez posted what became known as the “neck” photo. “Oh my god,” one reporter texted, “she didn’t just stab him, she cut him open.” In the photo revealing Travis’s neck, he appeared almost decapitated; his head was tilted back making it seem as though a big half moon chunk of his flesh and muscle was missing from right beneath his chin, the gap stretching ear to ear, six inches across and straight back to his spine. It was as if he had been sawed almost in half. This revolting image had suddenly appeared larger than life on multiple screens, as prosecutor Martinez asked the medical examiner to describe the injury. It was around this time that some of Travis’s sisters jumped up and ran from the courtroom in tears.

  The medical examiner explained that the fatal neck cut would have been enough to render Travis unconscious within seconds, so traumatic an injury was it in terms of blood loss. Still, many in the gallery wondered how long it took Jodi to produce that cut. It severed the carotid artery, his airway, and other major vessels in Travis’s throat. If Travis’s neck were slashed while he was still alive, as Horn was suggesting, this would be the “act of extreme cruelty” that made Jodi a strong candidate for the death penalty. In Horn’s opinion, the third fatal wound was the gunshot to the forehead, although it was certainly unnecessary to make sure he was dead. He was dead. The gunshot wound showed no signs of bleeding, which was why Horn thought it was postmortem, though it was hard to say with certainty as Travis’s brain was so decomposed.

  On cross, Jennifer Willmott tried to refocus the rattled courtroom on the state’s most intriguing evidence photo, the one that Juan Martinez described as capturing the killing in progress. This murky photo was much less graphic and required some description to give context to the dark, muddled image. The prosecution had tagged the vertical light blue stripe on the left half of the photo as being Jodi’s pant leg. Travis lay at her feet. Willmott’s goal was to minimize the cruelty of the assault. She suggested that blood coming from Travis’s right shoulder was from the gunshot wound. His head appeared to be raised which, she implied, could indicate that
he was not yet incapacitated and was able to raise it himself.

  On redirect, Horn countered that the blood on Travis’s shoulder was more consistent with a slashed throat. Horn insisted the shot to the head was last, and likely a gratuitous shot. Had Travis been shot first, Horn believed he never would have been able to move around the bathroom, and, more important, that there would have been no defensive wounds. This issue of the order of the wounds would become an issue throughout the case, with the defense arguing Jodi shot Travis first in self-defense when he lunged at her, while prosecutors said that Jodi ambushed Travis with a stab to the chest, only shooting him at the very end, after he was already dead.

  On day four, Ryan Burns took the stand. Ryan was a Mormon and an associate of Pre-Paid Legal, two things he had in common with Travis and Jodi. He was also a potential love interest of Jodi’s. They had met at the PPL convention in Oklahoma City in April 2008, soon after Jodi had moved out of Mesa and back to Yreka. They had spent the next few weeks talking on the phone three to five times a week. Toward the end of May, the two planned that she visit his home in West Jordan, Utah, when she was in Salt Lake City in early June. They wanted to see where the relationship might go, beginning with the PPL event on June 5, 2008. Ryan was handsome, with the chest of a linebacker and well dressed. In a certain way, he looked like Travis, as they both had a clean-cut, all-American style.

  Juan Martinez began with questions about the timeline for Jodi’s early June road trip. Ryan had expected Jodi in Utah on Wednesday, June 4; however, she did not arrive at his home in West Jordan until midmorning the following day. She told him she had gotten lost and pulled off the road to sleep. He also said she was no longer a blonde, as she had been when he met her in Oklahoma. She was now a brunette. He noticed that she had bandages on a couple of her fingers and asked her about them. She said she had cut herself on a broken glass while bartending at a Margaritaville restaurant in Yreka.

  Ryan said after Jodi got there, the two drove to a PPL luncheon meeting. They went in separate cars, and, en route, Jodi was pulled over by the police and given a warning for having a rear license plate affixed upside down. Jodi later told the group at lunch that some kids were playing with her license plates when she had come out of a Maverick restaurant on her trip to Utah. As for her demeanor at lunch, she appeared totally normal. After the luncheon, he and Jodi went back to his house, where they started fooling around. “Every time we started kissing, it got a little more escalated,” Ryan recalled. “She seemed to be in the moment. It didn’t feel awkward.” Not lost on anyone was the fact that Jodi had made out with this man a day after having sex with and then killing Travis. After the kissing session, they went to a PPL business briefing at 7 P.M. for an hour. They then met a group of friends for dinner at a local Chili’s.

  Martinez wanted to know how Jodi was behaving at the restaurant. “She was fine, laughing like any other person,” Ryan recalled. “Never once did I feel like anything was wrong.”

  After the meal, the two went back to Ryan’s house to nap. “The second we woke up we were kissing. She got on top of me pretty aggressively; she was right on top of me,” he said. He said the interaction went no further than kissing and mild fondling. Nothing got too carried away, as Ryan did not want either one of them to have regrets later. Jodi left sometime after midnight that very night. She told Ryan she needed to be in Yreka for work the next day. Of course, Ryan didn’t know that Jodi had quit her job during the last week of May and was already going to be a day late in returning the rental car.

  On cross-examination, Kirk Nurmi needed to minimize the mountain of evidence of premeditation Martinez was presenting. He asked Ryan about a phone conversation between Jodi and him on the Tuesday before they had planned to meet. Nurmi steered his questioning toward the fact that Jodi had told Ryan she was still in Los Angeles on June 3, and that she would be arriving in Utah the following day. Had she set out on the trip with a plan to kill Travis, she would definitely have fine-tuned her cover story to tell Ryan that she wouldn’t arrive in Utah until Thursday the fifth. At least that was the defense argument. It may not have been a strong point, but Nurmi’s eye was on the end game: saving Jodi from the death chamber. The defense attorney moved into another area as he began what would be a relentless attack throughout the trial on Travis’s character. He asked Ryan if he knew much about Travis being a flirt.

  “Mr. Burns, you made a statement with Detective Flores that you heard Jodi shouldn’t date Travis because he was a ladies’ man,” Nurmi asked during a time when the jury had been excused.

  “Travis had a reputation for being a ‘fun flirt,’ ” Ryan replied. “He was flirtatious.”

  In the testimony, Nurmi asked Ryan if he knew about the sexual relationship between Jodi and Travis in spite of Travis’s religious belief. “She told me she didn’t want me to say anything to anyone about it . . . said they went a lot further than they should have . . . She didn’t say they were having sex . . . but at one point, I did ask, and I found out they had had sex together.”

  “During those conversations, did she ever badmouth Travis?”

  Ryan said Jodi did talk about him cheating and being unfaithful. “She felt he wasn’t being honest with her. Besides trust issues, she said he inspired her and he was a great guy.”

  To counter the implication that it was always Jodi who was sexually aggressive, Nurmi produced emails Ryan and Jodi had exchanged. In them, there were no come-ons from Jodi, and it was clear that Ryan was the one pursuing her. Jodi did, however, call Ryan “hottie biscotti” in some of those exchanges. After several hours on the stand and a few questions from jurors, Ryan was dismissed.

  The prosecution case over the next several days included testimony from Nathan Mendes, a former detective with the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office in Yreka, California; Police Officer Kevin Friedman from the Yreka Police Department; and Michael Galieti, a former police officer in West Jordan, Utah. Detective Mendes testified that there was no restaurant named Margaritaville in Yreka, undermining Jodi’s assertion that she had cut her fingers bartending there. He also had Jodi under surveillance the evening of July 14, 2008, and noted she appeared to be packing as if to leave her grandparents’ home. Officer Friedman said he was the investigator for the theft of the gun taken from Jodi’s grandparents’ gun cabinet a few days before the murder. “I thought it was odd that the suspects did not take a large amount of loose change lying in plain sight and other firearms that were stored in the gun cabinet,” Friedman testified.

  Officer Galieti testified that he had stopped Jodi Arias on June 5, 2008, because the license plate of her white Ford Focus was attached upside down. “My friends must be playing a joke on me,” Galieti recalled Jodi saying. Her demeanor was “pleasant and a little surprised.” He said he gave her a warning, but no ticket. The upside-down license plate would become the closest thing to a running gag in the case as Jodi would offer bizarre explanations for how it ended up that way, suggesting skateboarders armed with screwdrivers were responsible. One theory was that she had intentionally turned it upside down in order to avoid easy detection. The more likely scenario is that she removed both plates once she arrived in Travis’s neighborhood so no one could easily trace the car. Then, in her haste to leave after killing him, she mistakenly attached the rear plate upside down. Jodi’s later explanation, however, provoked snickers in the courtroom.

  Ralphael Colombo, the owner of the Budget rent-a-car franchise in Redding, California, also testified for the prosecution. He said on June 2, 2008, when Jodi rented the car, she refused the red one first offered her, saying she didn’t want a loud color, preferring the white one. He also added a key point for the state. Jodi had rented the vehicle as a blonde, but returned it as a brunette. He said during the post-trip inventory, the car was missing its floor mats, and there were what appeared to be Kool-Aid stains on the front and rear seats. Colombo told the jury that Jodi had said she needed the car for some short trips in the area. He was surprise
d that the odometer had logged 2,834 miles and asked her about it. “I decided to take a longer trip,” she explained. She also returned the car a day later than the original agreement, which listed a return date and time of June 6, 2008 at 8:15 A.M.

  Jody Citizen, a custodian of records for Verizon, was called to testify about phone calls between Jodi and Travis between May 31 and June 15, 2008. He would not discuss the content of the calls, just what the phone records showed. Some of the corresponding voice mails, however, would soon be played for the jury through the next witness. In total, Jodi had called Travis fourteen times, and he had called her twice. Ten of Jodi’s fourteen calls were made before his death, and four were made after. Travis’s two calls to Jodi were made in the early morning of June 2, the day she left Yreka.

  Jurors got a chance to view the call logs. Jodi had called Travis three times in one minute alone between 1:08 to 1:09 P.M. on June 2. She called him again at 3:21 P.M. for five seconds; at 4:03 P.M. for 298 seconds; and at 5:28 P.M. for 168 seconds. The next day, June 3, she started calling again at a little after noon for seventeen seconds, then again at 1:51 P.M. for 170 seconds, at 8:16 P.M. for 129 seconds and at 8:34 P.M. for 49 seconds.

  On June 4, Jodi’s first call to Travis’s cell phone, forwarded to his voice mail, was made at 11:37 P.M. and lasted thirty-one seconds. Jodi had killed him several hours earlier, so she was clearly working on an alibi track. Eleven minutes later, at 11:48 P.M., she called again for 269 seconds, approximately three minutes. The last call that day came in just before midnight, at 11:53 P.M., and lasted 961 seconds or sixteen minutes. The maximum length of a voice mail message is five minutes, suggesting the sixteen-minute call was actually Jodi listening to Travis’s phone messages. Oddly, there was one final call made by Jodi to Travis’s phone at 9:20 P.M. on June 14, five days after his body was found, that went straight to voice mail.