At that, the jury was brought in and seated, and exhibit 428, the audio recording, was placed into evidence. The tape had been recorded by Jodi on May 10, after she had moved away from Arizona back to Yreka, less than a month before she killed Travis. She claimed that he had asked her to record it for him, but the prosecution believed that Jodi had recorded it surreptitiously. If Travis had wanted to record it, he would have recorded it himself on his cell phone. Travis was in Mesa, although from the conversation, it appeared that he was planning a trip to northern California to see Jodi sometime that early summer. The two were talking very amicably. Only if one knew what was coming would there be any clue to Travis’s setting the mood. “Why don’t we just talk for a little bit? About happy things and getting normalized for a minute, and then we’ll see where it takes us.”
“We’ll see where it takes us. I like that. I like the get happy and get normalized part,” Jodi responded, most chipper.
There was light talk about travel dates and upcoming PPL events. Jodi wasn’t sure she could afford to travel to Washington, D.C., although she wanted to try. They both thought the upcoming event in Palm Desert wouldn’t be worth it—too hot, too much drinking, too many soulless people. Lots of laughs and jokes were exchanged. Finally, Jodi managed to introduce something sexual, talking about something that had happened at Team Freedom.
“I think you grabbed my ass in front of [someone] in Vegas,” Jodi said. “I love it when you grab my butt, but you only do it when you’re trying to prove a point.”
“You can’t say I don’t know how to work that booty,” replied Travis.
“It kind of screams for attention, it sticks out,” said Jodi. “You’re an A plus.”
“I’m not the tossed salad type, but I would do that to you,” Travis blurted out, using a slang reference that denotes anal sex delivered orally, although it’s possible he may have gotten his terms mixed up.
The mood was well on its way, as they complimented each other’s past performances and—it would seem—his abilities and enthusiasm when it came to performing oral sex on her.
“You’ve chomped. Gone to town. All-you-can-eat salad bar,” squealed Jodi.
“I went to town on it for forty-five minutes!” Travis said in agreement.
Jodi loved the memory. “Most incredible stamina I’ve ever dreamed.”
“We’ve had two to three hours sessions any time—it’s because I pace myself,” Travis recalled.
“I don’t mind receiving while you’re doing the giving,” was Jodi’s response.
“I like you to play any role. If you handle me, I’ll handle you,” quipped Travis.
“I like being handled,” said Jodi. “I will totally handle you.”
Jodi sat in the witness box with her head in her hand appearing, at times, to cry. It was always possible that she was acting, but she may also have been crumbling from the humiliation of it all, actually feeling sexually sentimental, or some combination thereof. She, as well as everyone else, was hearing the voice of Travis as if he were in the room with them. Many people in the gallery were openly weeping. As for the reporters who were, by trade, trained to keep their emotions in check, some were still distinctly uncomfortable. They were being forced to eavesdrop and become voyeurs to intimacies that are almost never to be shared, especially not with a whole nation. The fact that this conversation was being broadcast on television, with a delay to accommodate any need to bleep profanities, was kind of mind-blowing. This courtroom was truly opening bedroom doors. So much for that old saying that nobody ever knows what goes on behind them. Then again, it’s the nature of trials to reveal secrets.
On the audiotape, Travis and Jodi had gotten off the sex track a little, but they were soon back in the moment. They tried to recall the time they had both been “injected with aphrodisiacs.”
Jodi began by “trying to think of an example. I just pull you on the bed and start. I fell asleep and you woke me up by pulling down my shorts and licking my pussy. That was hot. I would have been content just sleeping with you, but you had another agenda.”
“There are not many guys who would just do that,” he told her.
“I don’t know the ratio, but I get the feeling there aren’t a lot of Mormon guys like that,” said Jodi. “I would like to marry someone who’d like to be freaky . . . I have plenty of blossom time left.”
Travis seemed to like where this was going as much as Jodi. “I’m going to tie you to a tree and put it in your ass.”
“That is so debasing, I like it,” Jodi replied.
“. . . tie your arms around a tree, blindfold you.”
“Oh, my gosh, you’re full of ideas. We’ve gotten way creative in the past,” Jodi urged. “I’m game with everything you come up with. You’re quite the source.”
“I didn’t like the Pop Rocks as much as the Tootsie Pops,” Travis recalled. Jodi said she had liked the bathtub, candles, and braids, and Travis agreed wholeheartedly about the braids.
“I want you to ride my face like a horse,” he continued, “. . . in that bath, hot.”
“When we are in that bath together, you are amazing. You make me feel like a goddess, so sexy, so hot. Oh gosh.”
Things were heating up. “You are hot,” Travis complimented her. “Seriously, baby. Start touching yourself.”
“I am already.”
“I just started.”
“Imagine my hands giving you a hand job,” Jodi said.
“Before I met you, I never jacked off. Once a month, every few weeks. Since you left, every day.”
“Are you serious?” Jodi gushed.
“Fucking you . . .” Travis grunted.
“I wish you were here. We’d shut and lock the door, have a big fuck fest. You need to cum, I mean come here,” she teased.
“I can’t wait to jizz on your face,” was the response.
“Yeah, definitely,” said Jodi in reply to that idea, adding how much she loves having intercourse with Travis.
“You make me so horny, I think about sex with you every day. How it feels to have your cock deep inside me.”
“Is it wrong that we started fucking?” Travis whispered.
“If it’s wrong, I don’t want to be right!”
“Jodi, oh, JODI!”
There was talk of “jizz” and “cream pies,” and “jerking off”; lots of compliments directed at Jodi about being the “prototype of hotness,” the “super woman.” Finally, there were the climax moans, which for others might have been enough. But, true to the stamina each had already complimented the other about, they kept the sex going.
He said, “That was hot, like a twelve-year-old girl having her first orgasm.”
“You make me feel so dirty,” she responded, her voice dripping with pleasure. And, in an apparent reference to how Travis kissed her nipples, “I like how you suck on them like lollipops.”
Travis requested an update, “Still touching yourself?”
“I am,” she responded. “I like the way your dick feels. It’s nice how you’re smooth. I like putting my lips all over it. I really, really, really wanna suck your dick right now.” Jodi’s attitude on the audio tape was a really, really, really far cry from her testimony, where she repeatedly insinuated that she was a reluctant sex partner being pressured into oral sex.
Travis moved on to talking about “outfits.” She thought clever role-playing would be that he busts her for being nude in public, and he gets to redeem himself. At one point, Jodi had to break away from the call, thinking she heard somebody outside her room, but she was back in stride in no time. More “dick,” more “face sitting,” some “horny toad,” and a little “titty fucking” was sprinkled into the next few thoughts. By now, things were coming to their second climax, and sounded as such. Jodi would claim on the stand that she faked the orgasms heard on the tape that would live in legal infamy as one of the more pornographic bits of evidence ever admitted in a high-profile trial. Her explanation was that she
needed two hands to reach climax and couldn’t because she was holding the cell phone. Was she faking or wasn’t she became a hot topic on social media. If she was faking it, there was a sense that she missed her calling; she should have gone to Hollywood and become an actress.
“Oh, yeah, huge! I just jizzed like fifteen pumps!” Travis exclaimed. Jodi had earlier received her superwoman compliment and she wanted to make kind remarks in return. “You are like superhuman, I hope you know.”
Sprinkled throughout all of this was chatter about pictures and “a porn star thing” and camera angles; how his “dick” would be in focus but everything else blurry; how Jodi would sit on Travis’s face and be the point of view of that scene. They both participated in this discussion and it seemed pretty clear that this was a story line for the purposes of achieving orgasm as opposed to an actual preproduction meeting.
A little minor sex talk ensued, when Jodi told Travis to go get cleaned up. Less than a minute later, they were back to ordinary small talk. They talked about movies, especially superhero movies. Travis wasn’t a Spiderman fan, but X-Men was good, and Batman was okay. They talked about Vermont, Johnny Cash, and the Grateful Dead, considered by Travis to be one of the most amazing bands of all time. They talked again about the Washington, D.C., trip. Joking around together, they even hummed what sounded like a couple of bars of the national anthem, messing around with the lyrics. Finally, they sent each other off to bed with a cheerful good night.
When the audiotape was over, Judge Stephens announced to the court that there would be a very well-deserved break. There was an air of exhaustion and sensory overload; nobody could say anything that would top what had just been heard. It was as if a hand grenade had been tossed into the trial, and the spectators were left somewhat dazed and disoriented. Reporters struggled to put it into context, and it was unclear how all the dirty talk would impact the trial. Where some saw a home run for the defense that painted Travis as sexually obsessed; others felt it might actually benefit the prosecution because it revealed Jodi as an active, willing, and eager participant herself.
Perhaps most significant, there was the issue of why this had even happened in the first place. Why would Jodi record the most private of sexual intimacies? Speculation immediately coalesced around the theory that Jodi was creating a blackmail tape, a tape that she could threaten to play for those who thought Travis was chaste, a tape that she could dangle in front of Travis as a threat to use if Travis didn’t change his mind and take her, Jodi, to Cancún, instead of Mimi Hall. Taking this speculation a step further, it was easy to see how the tape could have been the real cause of the argument she and Travis had sixteen days later, on May 26, when Travis angrily wrote to Jodi that she had betrayed him and was evil. It certainly made sense to those who’d been following the case, especially since Travis never revealed exactly why he was so upset with Jodi. When he had talked to his friend Taylor Searle the day after the fight, he had made it seem that Jodi’s Facebook hacking was beyond acceptable, and that was the reason for the fight. However, Jodi had done that before. But if she had held the phone sex tape over his head in some threatening fashion, that would have made him livid. After all, if you’re being blackmailed you are not going to mention the thing that someone is using to blackmail you.
In a desperate attempt to help police solve the case, Sky Hughes studied the contents of the May 26 text/IM fight and was struck by something Jodi said in response to Travis’s fury at having been mysteriously betrayed. “There’s something there where she says, ‘I’ll call my attorney.’ Something in there like that.” Could it have been that Travis told her she was breaking the law by taping him without his knowledge given that Jodi was calling from California, which is a two-party consent state, meaning both parties on either end of the call must consent to be recorded? Is that why Jodi responded that she would call a lawyer? It’s interesting that Jodi also fails to mention—despite the considerable length of the argument—exactly what they are fighting about, which would also make sense if she was blackmailing him with the sex tape.
Beyond the headlines of the graphic sex tape, there was something deeper that troubled people, the haunting echo of Travis’s voice. As the tape had played, Travis seemed to come to life in that courtroom. Unsettling as the tape was, it wasn’t just about him revealing his darker impulses. It also showed him as a real person—not just a ghost—who loved to joke and laugh and even sing. When the recording ended so did the mirage. Travis would not be coming back.
The afternoon was taken with Nurmi reviewing and dissecting the contents of the tape. Pretty much any line that had been uttered was pulled out and gone over for context, for timing, and for interpretation. There could be no denying this was a critical piece of evidence for his client. The prosecution had painted Jodi as a lying, conniving sex vixen and femme fatale. Here was proof that there had been sex, lots of it, and very consensual. If nothing else, she wasn’t lying about every single thing.
It took two more days for Jodi to describe the days leading up to her killing Travis. However, the climax of her testimony was when she described the minutes she and Travis were in the master bathroom on June 4, 2008—the minutes it took her to kill him. This is how she described it:
She arrived in Mesa in the wee hours of June 4, 2008. Travis was awake, waiting for her, as he supposedly knew she was coming. She entered the house through the side door, her usual entry point, bringing her small piece of luggage, backpack, purse, and laptop with her. Jodi described how she leaned against the door frame at the office entrance and watched him watching music videos, his dog, Napoleon, by his side, who failed to bark at Jodi’s arrival. Travis, apparently, didn’t know she was standing there for thirty seconds or so.
Jodi was exhausted from the drive. The two went upstairs to sleep. This was the first they had seen each of other in two months, since Jodi’s move to Yreka. By the early afternoon on June 4, they were having sex. Jodi told the jury that they decided to try a little bondage, and Travis tied Jodi up with some decorative rope. Travis, she testified, unrolled the long rope from the bedroom to the bathroom. He cut an appropriate length and left a kitchen knife either on the night stand or in the bathroom.
Jodi had provided conflicting details when recounting this story to expert witnesses who interviewed her at the jail in preparation for trial. These details would wreak havoc on her credibility. At trial, she explained that Travis draped the rope around the sleigh bed’s headboard and wrapped loose nooses around her wrists, but she had previously told an expert that her ankles were also bound.
She was naked; he was wearing his temple garments, which he discarded right before giving her oral sex. She wanted him to shave his pubic area before she reciprocated, so the bondage role-playing stopped, and they had more traditional sex. In breaks from sex, the photos were taken. Because Travis liked Jodi in braids, she wore her hair that way for the naked photo shoot. The sex went on for hours.
As Jodi told it on the stand, they were in his downstairs office at around 4:00 P.M. Jodi had brought a CD of photos from trips they took together and wanted to show them to Travis, but the CD didn’t operate. It was scratched or had a virus. Whatever the cause, it frustrated and annoyed Travis. She was hanging with Napoleon on the floor, but Travis was getting angry. Everything about his body language changed. Jodi testified that he threw the CD against the wall.
Napoleon left, which was typical Napoleon behavior; he didn’t like it when Travis got mad. Jodi tried to calm Travis down by rubbing his back. The next thing she knew, he rotated her around, leaned her over his desk, and applied his whole body weight to her. Trapped underneath him, she went along with him, hoping to calm him down. They were both wearing clothes, but Jodi claimed Travis pulled down her pants and, after a few thrusts, ejaculated on her back. Jodi said that she wasn’t angry about it, as it had seemed to do the trick.
The two hung out for a while more, then Travis went upstairs to shower. Travis had just lost forty pounds, so even t
hough he wasn’t one who loved having his picture taken, he was up for some photographs of himself that day. For a few months, Jodi had been aware of his pending trip to Cancún. She knew that she wasn’t his guest and, according to her, she was fine with that. She thought taking a few pictures of his new body would make him happy.
The day’s evidence ended on that cliffhanger, but it had been another extremely long day. It was six thirty in the evening, and Judge Stephens dismissed the jurors until ten thirty the next morning. The next morning did not find anyone looking particularly refreshed. By now, even Jodi’s outfits were being recycled through the jury box. She was still mixing up hairstyles, whether or not she was wearing glasses, but everything else seemed the same, same likely staged remorse, same head hanging in the same manner as the day before, and arguably the same fake tears.
Nurmi picked up his questioning where the previous day ended, reminding Jodi that she and Travis were about to engage in a photo shoot. Jodi said they selected the shower because of the water effect. They were also going to use Travis’s new camera, as hers was already packed. He was the model, but she picked the poses. What she testified to from this point forward is the following story that prosecutors would later argue was a complete fabrication. She told jurors she was squatting on the floor a few feet from Travis. He was seated in the shower. She leaned toward him and reached into the shower to show him some photos, but the camera slipped out of her hands and hit the tile floor of the shower.
Travis flipped out, screaming that a five-year-old could handle a camera better than she. He then stepped out of the shower and body slammed her on the tile. Her story was already suspicious. Back in April, Jodi had blown the engine on Travis’s BMW, and it didn’t upset him nearly as much as the camera dropping apparently did. It seemed incongruous that a dropped camera would make him as maniacal as Jodi described. In her telling, though, this explosive reaction was just the beginning.
Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias Page 27