“Yes.”
“Did you hope he came to the same conclusion?”
“Yes.”
“Did you talk to him about starting off the relationship . . . wrong?”
“Yes,” said Lisa quietly.
“Did you feel that way because you thought you might have tempted him to kiss you?”
Lisa agreed, saying she thought it was too soon to be behaving that like.
“Did you talk to him about the fact that you were making out too long?”
“Yes.”
“By making out, what do you mean?”
“Kissing,” Lisa said with a small smile.
“Did you talk about how each time you made out, it progressively got worse?”
“Yes.”
“Did you talk to him about when you used to make out with him in the beginning, you didn’t think about sex?”
“Yes.”
“But, eventually, it would creep into your mind?”
“Yes.”
“Was that something you were not comfortable with?”
“Yes,” Lisa acknowledged.
Willmott asked if she thought sex was on Travis’s mind, too. Lisa replied affirmatively.
“Did you tell him that sometimes you thought he wanted you just for your body?”
“I did say that in the email,” Lisa said.
“And that your kisses didn’t mean anything to him?”
“I did say that in that email.”
“That you felt it was a way for him to let out sexual tension . . .”
“I did say that in the email,” she said with a deep swallow.
“. . . that he had so much of?”
Lisa was becoming a little embarrassed. “Again, I said that,” she said, subduing a crooked smile.
“Did that make you feel used and dirty?”
Lisa acknowledged that she had mentioned that in the email, and that if Travis truly cared for her, it wouldn’t have been about passion and lust.
“Do you remember that you told him that you had previously told him not to grab your butt?”
“Yes.”
“And especially not in public?”
“Yes.”
“But that he persisted in doing it?”
“Yes.” Lisa admitted that at the time, she felt Travis was not listening to her, acknowledging that she had asked Travis not to talk about sex so much, but he did anyway. She thought it made a man vulgar and unattractive to talk about sex as much as he did. She believed Travis was a virgin, and she told him that he’d get sex some day, but he just had to be patient.
Willmott pointed out in the email that Lisa had used the words “immature,” “insensitive,” and “selfish” when she was discussing Travis’s behavior. The same email still in evidence recalled a day trip the two took together to Sedona, where Lisa had complained that Travis was on the phone too much. He implied that she should be grateful. She also mentioned that he was being selfish when he wanted to have conversations with her late at night, and she was too tired to talk. Late night calls were the norm between Travis and Jodi but clearly Lisa, young and unaware of those calls, was unwilling to engage in a similar practice.
Nonetheless, Lisa said they got back together, mostly due to Travis’s persuasiveness and persistence. However, she called it off again, this time because she thought Travis was getting too serious about marriage. The third time they got back together was even more short-lived. “Strange things” had been happening and, by mid-February 2008, she didn’t want to continue the relationship, at least until Jodi was out of Travis’s life. Though the jury wasn’t allowed to hear the details, these bizarre occurrences included the tire slashings on two consecutive nights the previous December. Lisa suspected Jodi was behind the criminal mischief and was fed up. She also found out Travis was in touch with another past girlfriend, Deanna Reid.
To end her questioning, Willmott wanted to know how Lisa had felt after Travis’s death, when she learned he was not a virgin. She said she had been “shocked.”
At this point, Willmott turned the witness over to the prosecutor, and all hell broke loose. It began well enough. Martinez walked Lisa through her complaints about Travis that the defense had made into character issues, and Lisa agreed that many of them had been reversed after she had made Travis aware of her feelings. In her words, Travis had become more respectful, more attentive, and more gentlemanly after that. She even agreed with Martinez that many of those early complaints of hers about Travis being too sexual had been the product of complete naïveté on her part, as she knew very little about the biological process of arousal. In hindsight now, she seemed to feel silly that she had thought Travis’s erection had been from sick thinking, not human biology.
Martinez also pointed out that Travis sincerely wanted to marry Lisa, and at that point he was doing everything he could to be the man she would want to be with. It was Travis who was trying to conform to what Lisa wanted, not the other way around. After they got back together, Travis was the one who stopped anything even remotely sexual, from hugging to kissing, from going too far so that Lisa wouldn’t feel adversely affected. Even the third time they got back together, Lisa admitted that Travis never “foisted” himself on her.
“If he was kissing you, that was something that was welcome by you, right?” Mr. Martinez inquired.
“Correct,” Lisa agreed.
“If you were kissing him, that was something you wanted, right?”
“Correct,” Lisa said again.
“When you were in public, was it a situation where you would be glomming onto him, grabbing onto him, and hugging him?” Martinez asked, alluding to testimony where Jodi had been described as being overly sexual and inappropriate when out with Travis.
“No,” said Lisa, more comfortable now that she wasn’t undermining Travis. Martinez described the relationship with the analogy that they were like a couple of high schoolers, and Lisa embarrassedly agreed, also concurring that the email she had sent was along the lines of a “high-school maturity.”
“In retrospect, do you think some of the comments you made were a little unfair to him?”
“Yes,” Lisa nodded enthusiastically.
Martinez strode over to the prosecution table while rambling about what a proper relationship shouldn’t look like, selected a particular photo from underneath another upturned one, and started to carry it up to the projector. “Do you think, in regards to everything he did to you, and how you feel, and in the circumstances, do you think in your mind, it is appropriate to take a knife and slash somebody’s throat?” Martinez bellowed, slapping the photo down onto the machine. There were audible gasps and yelps in the courtroom at the unexpected grisly display.
“Objection!” barked Willmott, jumping to her feet as an autopsy photo of Travis’s face tilted slightly back, bloated, gray, exposing a gaping wound across the neck, came onto a humongous screen and multiple smaller ones visible throughout the courtroom, but meant for the jury. “Completely irrelevant!” she exclaimed. Nurmi joined Willmott in a standing objection as they stormed to the bench.
The damage had been done. As Judge Stephens called for an immediate sidebar, the courtroom went into meltdown. Lisa sat stunned, her hand across her mouth. Tanisha ran from the gallery, sobbing, followed at the heels by a male relative. Her sister, Samantha, threw her head down and folded her hands on top of her head in a desperate attempt to hide from the image. The man beside her leaned over her to shield and protect her. Jodi hid behind her hair, which she pulled entirely over her face as she, too, appeared to sob openly, pinching her nose on occasion. Her mother and aunt, while not crying, looked stunned. Other people in the gallery also fled for the hallway.
When order was restored, Judge Stephens admonished everybody in the courtroom that it was imperative to keep their emotions under control. Martinez continued with Lisa along a different line of question, acting as if no disturbance had been created by his ambush. Nurmi would later use Martinez’s s
tunt as the basis for one of myriad unsuccessful motions for a mistrial throughout the trial. He asked that the judge remove Travis’s family from the courtroom to the witness room, where they could watch the trial on a monitor, if there were further emotional outbursts.
The next two witnesses were Desiree and Dan Freeman, the sister and brother friends who had taken two trips with Jodi and Travis, one day trip to Sedona and the Grand Canyon, the other a three-day trip to Havasupai Falls in the Grand Canyon region. Desiree testified first. She said Travis became quite enraged at Jodi on one occasion when they were all together, and seemed “over the top.” She even used the word “shocked” when Jennifer Willmott asked her how she felt witnessing the confrontation.
Desiree’s brother was next. In 2010, Dan Freeman had actually been considered as a witness for the prosecution as well as the defense, and he had even stopped watching the news about this case in the event he was called. At the time, he was caught in the middle, as he regarded both Travis and Jodi as friends. On the stand, he tried to stay completely objective. He testified that he had seen Jodi and Travis fight on more than one occasion, but nothing extraordinary. He and his sister accompanied Travis and Jodi on the September 13–15, 2007, trip to Havasupai Falls that started out with a fight between Jodi and Travis at Travis’s house. Sometimes, he got the distinct feeling that Travis didn’t want to be alone with Jodi, lest he lose his willpower and do something sexual he’d regret later. Dan reinforced that Travis was cozier with Jodi when fewer people were around.
The prosecutor objected to some of the evidence from the defense’s next witness. Lonnie Dworkin, a computer forensics examiner who had examined various devices, including Travis’s and Jodi’s laptops, Jodi’s cell phone, and Jodi’s Canon camera. He recovered video and images from all the devices. Most important to Jennifer Willmott was a photo of an erect penis that Dworkin claimed he had recovered from Jodi’s hard drive. Because Dworkin had no idea whose genitalia it was, Martinez objected. Dworkin was allowed to testify about the photo but it wouldn’t be displayed in open court until later in the trial.
Dworkin also found thousands of photos from Jodi’s own personal Canon camera, including four that the defense deemed significant to the case. Three photos showed Jodi as a brunette with reddish blond streaks, date-stamped about a month before Travis was killed. The state was arguing that Jodi dyed her hair from blond to brunette between June 2, 2008, when she rented a car at Budget car rental in Redding, California, and June 4 when she killed Travis. This, said the state, was part of her planning and premeditation. But the defense was arguing, through these photos, that Jodi became a brunette at least a month before the killing. The fourth picture, curiously taken on July 12, 2008, just three days before her arrest, was of the gray “Travis Alexander’s” T-shirt and the pink “Travis” panties, a reminder of what the defense claimed was Travis’s possessive, controlling nature. The prosecution would counter that there was no evidence outside Jodi’s questionable word that the items in the photo were given to Jodi by Travis.
Defense expert Bryan Neumeister, a thirty-two-year veteran specialist in video and audio enhancement, was called to present a much-anticipated piece of evidence—a recording of a telephone call between two people. One voice, the clearer of the two, was identified as Jodi’s, and the second, a male voice, was Travis’s. With the requisite foundation requirements met allowing the recording to be played, this particular phone call would soon become the sex tape heard around the world.
CHAPTER 18
EIGHTEEN DAYS
Would she or wouldn’t she?
As the defense case progressed that became the question that hummed through the courthouse in speculative chatter. As each defense witness stepped down, the pulse of the reporters would rise. Would Jodi be next to take the stand?
The wild card in any criminal trial is whether a defendant will take the stand in his or her defense. A person charged with a crime has a right to remain silent from arrest through trial, and that silence cannot be used against her by the jury. But when self-defense is asserted, it almost always calls for a defendant to get on the stand and explain why the conduct in question was justified and, hence, not criminal. Jodi Arias was no exception.
From the outset of the trial, few people believed an outright acquittal was even remotely possible; however, Jodi could help her case if she could offer some explanation as to why the brutal slaying of Travis was not premeditated first-degree murder, and, perhaps more important, why she lied for two years before admitting she killed him. Beyond the sheer barbarity of it, the fact that she told three stories made her seem even more of a depraved monster than had she not waited two years to admit she killed him. By then, when her final claim, that she had acted in self-defense, bubbled up through the lies of the masked ninja story, it seemed not only desperate, but ludicrous.
Still, if, in spite of the past lies, Jodi could come across as sympathetic and believable on the stand, it could turn the tide in the case. Calling Jodi as a witness was risky, but it held the potential to reshape the trial and possibly avoid a conviction of first-degree murder, or at least the death penalty. Given the circumstances, either of those outcomes would have been a victory for the defense.
But of all the people to take the stand in any criminal case, the defendant has the most to lose and, thus, the greatest motive to lie—and Jodi was already an admitted liar. She had a lot to explain, and she needed to do it in a credible way. Everything about her would be scrutinized, from the content of her testimony to her demeanor and delivery. Jodi needed to make the jury believe it was she who was the victim. She would need to make a convincing argument that she had never planned to kill the love of her life, but rather had been the victim of her oversexed, two-timing boyfriend’s abuse. If only she could connect with a few jurors, or even one, who would actually believe her, then maybe her life would be spared. There was no question that it was a stretch of epic proportions and a gamble, but Nurmi and Willmott rolled the dice.
On Tuesday, February 4, right after the lunch hour, the defense wrapped up testimony from two computer forensic and audio/video witnesses. At about 2:00 P.M., the attorneys approached the bench to have a private discussion with the judge. Judge Stephens gave jurors a break and sent them out of the courtroom for just a few minutes. Sidebar conferences and juror breaks were quite common at the trial, so the spectators in the public gallery had no reason, on that basis alone, to suspect that something extraordinary was about to happen. Once the jurors were gone, Jodi, dressed in a black short-sleeved top and white slacks, briefly left the courtroom through the side door closest to her seat, accompanied by the uniformed bailiff, probably to use the restroom. She came back in through the same door a couple of minutes later and headed straight for the witness box, appearing to be in a state of anxious, yet controlled, composure.
In an instant, the hum in the courtroom ceased, as all eyes were trained on Jodi. The atmosphere was electric. Her decision to testify certainly made her the exception to the mega trial rule. When it came to the biggest trials of the era, from O. J. Simpson’s murder trial to Michael Jackson’s child molestation trial, and the murder trials of Scott Peterson and Casey Anthony, all had chosen not to take the stand in their own defense. Jodi’s moment had finally arrived.
Jodi’s hair was off her face, her frameless glasses not shielding the apprehension in her eyes. Her life was on the line and, by anyone’s admission, things were not looking good. Judge Stephens asked that the jury be returned to the courtroom, and Jodi Arias stood in the witness box to be sworn in.
It took no time for the testimony to stall. No sooner had Judge Stephens told Mr. Nurmi “You may proceed,” and he had delivered his first question, “Hey, Jodi, is this a position you ever expected to find yourself in?” than the word “Objection! Relevance!” stopped the answer cold. It was clear that Jodi was going to be the witness of the day for a long time to come.
Nurmi began again after a brief sidebar conference. He l
ooked directly at Jodi.
“Did you kill Travis Alexander on June 4, 2008?”
“Yes, I did,” Jodi answered.
“Why?”
“The simple answer is that he attacked me and I defended myself.”
That it was “the simple answer” was an understatement. The formidable task in front of Nurmi was to make it a believable answer. With that in mind, the defense attorney’s line of questioning went straight to Jodi’s childhood, the good and the bad parts of it. Jodi answered each question by rotating slightly toward the jury, looking from person to person on the panel as directly as she could. She recalled everything at home being close to ideal until about the age of seven, when her mother started spanking her with a wooden spoon. Jodi appeared to tear up at this memory, although no actual tears started to flow.
With that, and perhaps taking a page from Casey Anthony’s highly publicized bombshell acquittal, Jodi threw both of her parents completely under the bus. She talked about escalating violence in the home, and beatings that would leave welts on her. She said her father was as much a party to the behavior as her mother, often using a belt to inflict punishment. Once, after he shoved her during an argument, she fell into a doorpost and was briefly knocked unconscious. When she came to, her mother, also involved in the argument, told her father to be more careful. Jodi said she became so tired of the excessive discipline and physical abuse that she finally dropped out of high school after her junior year and moved out. Also similar to Casey Anthony’s case, the defendant’s mother, seated supportively but helplessly in the gallery, had to endure every moment of her daughter’s accusations. However, whereas Casey had let her lawyers do the character assassination for her, in this trial, Jodi was accusing her parents of abuse with her own words from her own lips, all while sitting mere feet from the mother she was lambasting. On occasion, Sandy Arias’s twin sister would help Jodi’s mother maintain her stoicism by holding her hand.
For eighteen consecutive court days, from February 4 to March 13, Jodi would return to the witness stand. After her first day on the stand, the judge ordered that the cameras in the courtroom could not shoot her walking to the stand. She wore a security device on one leg that was obscured by the loose-fitting slacks she always wore. Locked onto a knee, it would prevent her from running should she decide to make a fast move, and caused a slight limp, which could no longer be captured on camera.
Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias Page 25