Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias

by Velez-Mitchell, Jane

  When he started spitting at her, she ran down the bathroom hall into the master bedroom, and pivoted right, straight into his closet. She slammed the door, knowing she could run out the other end of the closet. Jodi could never really explain why she didn’t pivot left and out the door of his bedroom. Going that way, she could have fled down the stairs and diffused the situation or run out of the house. Instead, she stayed within the confines of the closet and master bathroom. She knew that he had a gun in there, and she stepped on a shelf to grab it from the top shelf. Nurmi got her to the most anticipated testimony of the trial. “What happened next?”

  “I grabbed the gun, and I ran out of the closet. He was chasing me to the middle of the bathroom; he kept running like a linebacker until he grabbed my waist. The gun went off; I didn’t mean to shoot him. It was just pointed at him, and went off. He lunged at me and we fell, really hard towards the wall. If he had been shot, nothing was different. I didn’t want him to get on top of me. I can’t get out of those holds. He’s grabbing at my clothes, screaming angry. He said, ‘I’ll fucking kill you, bitch.’ ” He was calling her names like “fucking idiot” and she was crying, but he was still trying to lunge at her even after he was shot in the head.

  How did he end up with multiple stab wounds and a slashed throat? The explanation everyone—jurors, the courtroom gallery, the television audience—had been hanging on for turned out to be no explanation at all. After she broke away again, she remembered “almost nothing.” As Jodi calmly explained to the jury, after shooting Travis there was a “huge gap” in her memory that lasted at least five hours.

  “Most of my next memory is driving in the desert,” she asserted to Nurmi. Between the gunshot and driving in the desert, she claimed her memory was essentially blank. She had no recollection of stabbing Travis over two dozen times or slashing his throat. She didn’t remember dragging him back to the shower. She had a vague recollection of putting a knife in the dishwasher but she couldn’t be sure it was a memory from that day. She couldn’t recall deleting incriminating images from the camera and putting it, along with Travis’s clothing, in the washing machine. She didn’t recall collecting the gun and the rope, and maybe the knife, to dispose of far from the house. Somehow, Jodi did all that without leaving a trace of the vicious killing anywhere in the house but the master bathroom suite and the washing machine, which she hoped had destroyed any incriminating evidence.

  Elaborating on this elusive answer, she explained that she was able to remember the “feeling,” but not the details. She said the feeling was “mortal terror.” She recalled recognizing that she wouldn’t be able to rewind the clock as she drove west in the desert, the sun in her eyes, the many stop lights, the sky getting darker. Somewhere, she threw the gun, but she didn’t remember precisely where.

  The anticlimax of her words was striking. After years of lies and alternating versions of events—not to mention weeks of testimony during which she had repeatedly vilified Travis’s character—this answer about the “huge gap” in her memory was impossible for many to swallow. It had the same air of convenience as her story of walking in on Travis masturbating and the photo of the small boy just happening to float to her feet. For a woman whose credibility had been stretched thin for years, this excuse that she simply didn’t remember what had happened felt more suspect than almost anything else she’d said. In many ways, this gap in her memory—what prosecutor Martinez would eventually call Jodi’s “fog”—became a metaphor for her entire persona and a lens through which all of her testimony could be scrutinized. The same woman who could remember the kind of latte she purchased at Starbucks years earlier somehow couldn’t recall sticking a knife into her lover’s chest or nearly decapitating him.

  Jodi said at some point before the Hoover Dam she realized that she had blood on her hands and clothes. She stopped driving and tried to clean herself up with some bottled water she had in the trunk. She knew that Travis was probably dead, but she had no clear memory of him being dead when she left. On fleeting occasions, she thought maybe it was all a nightmare. Driving in a daze, she finally got her bearings when she saw a sign: “Las Vegas, 100 miles.”

  Jodi said she knew her life was pretty much over. She couldn’t call 911 because she couldn’t imagine telling them what she had just done. She was scared of what would happen to her and her family. She was angry with herself and just wanted to die. Determined to carry on, she continued on to Utah, and her fifteen-hour visit with Ryan Burns and other friends before heading back to Yreka.

  When asked why she attended Travis’s memorial service in Mesa on June 16, Jodi explained: “I thought if I didn’t show up it would look suspicious. People knew we were close.” Through tears, Jodi explained that she had made a promise to Travis and it was important to her to keep it.

  “Why?” asked Nurmi.

  “He would have come to mine even if it was in Antarctica.”

  The night after the memorial service, Jodi said she lay in bed alone: “I felt like he was there. It helped me to know he was okay; that he was in a better place, that maybe he wasn’t mad at me anymore.”

  Kirk Nurmi brought his direct testimony home by asking Jodi to explain why she had created the alternate stories to Travis’s murder.

  First, Jodi was asked to explain why she told Inside Edition that no jury would ever convict her.

  “Those were the bitterest words I ever had to eat,” Jodi replied.

  “Why?”

  “You can’t convict a dead person. I planned to be dead long before a trial.”

  “Since his death was discovered, you told one version of events in which you weren’t there. In another version, intruders came into the home, killed Travis, and you escaped. Why did you then decide to tell us what really happened?”

  “Objection!’ rumbled Juan Martinez, offended by Nurmi’s reference to what “really happened” as though Jodi was being truthful on the stand.

  “Rephrase,” said Judge Stephens.

  Nurmi tried again. “Why did you then come forward with all these things you were hiding, Alexander’s sexual interest, the violence?”

  “It felt fraudulent from day one, especially when there were people who believed me. It wasn’t an overnight decision by any means,” Jodi answered. “I would rather have gone to the grave with it . . . By the time spring of 2010 rolled around, I confessed.”

  With that, Nurmi finished his direct questioning of this witness, and Judge Stephens summoned the attorneys yet again into her chambers.

  CHAPTER 20

  JUAN’S TURN

  It was on February 21, 2013, the twenty-first day of the trial, that Juan Martinez had his chance to go after Jodi. Everybody knew that his cross-examination was going to be confrontational and dramatic, offering none of the softball questions from defense attorney Kirk Nurmi’s direct. The bulldog was ready, and he had a lot to work with.

  Still, it wouldn’t be a slam dunk for Martinez. One area in which the defense had been successful was in humanizing Jodi. She had come off as intelligent and well-spoken. Then there was the issue of the sex tape, which seemed to be something of a split decision: It had certainly gotten headlines and supported Jodi’s claim that sex happened. However, it also proved that kinky sex had been mutually embraced. If Jodi was being debased by Travis, she seemed to be enjoying every second of it, which is not unusual. Entire industries are built around the concept of erotic humiliation, also known as dominance and submission or D&S, with the so-called subs enjoying the sexual roller coaster as much or more than their doms. Even if she was faking her enjoyment, that certainly didn’t justify Travis Alexander’s brutal death. In her testimony, Jodi tried to turn their sexual play into emotional and physical abuse. The sub wanted to be recast as a battered woman so she could claim self-defense.

  As a result, in the previous eight days, Jodi had also introduced four stories of physical abuse at the hands of Travis, along with the stories of their salacious sexual escapades. It was prosecutor
Martinez’s job to tear those down and expose them as lies. Like many parts of her testimony, there was no corroboration for her allegations. At least two friends testified they had seen Travis losing his temper, and he had snapped at Jodi on occasion, but that was a far cry from physical abuse. There were no witnesses to substantiate any physical abuse, no medical records to support the claims, no photographs, no calls to the police, and no disclosures to friends.

  As part of her campaign to cast Travis as the abuser during her direct testimony, Jodi had held up a crooked left ring finger for the jury to see, telling them that the day after she found Travis masturbating to the photo of the small boy in underwear, Travis broke her finger in a violent outburst. Jodi claimed that Travis, threatened by her discovery of his shameful secret, became increasingly hostile and violent toward her, to the point at which she had to kill him to defend herself. However, her story line was all over the map, with her tangle of lies repeatedly contradicting each other. While her defense attorney left those contradictions unaddressed, prosecutor Martinez couldn’t wait to get at them and rip apart the cocky self-assurance she exhibited while lying. The question was whether Jodi would be able to stay human in the eyes of the jury, and keep all her stories straight under Juan Martinez’s onslaught of tough questions.

  Taking the stand, Jodi looked extremely apprehensive, with her hair straight down and the glasses she wore on occasion perched on her nose. That day her clothes were particularly conservative: a black tailored jacket piped with white, worn over a white lace-trimmed shirt. Before everyone stood for the jury, she sat with her head down and her eyes closed, possibly praying, until finally sucking in an enormous amount of air and letting it out with a sigh. With the reminder Jodi was still under oath, Mr. Martinez went right for the jugular, straight out of the box, on a very personal level.

  He showed her a photo of her sister and her, dated May 2008.

  “[It’s] a picture of your dumb sister, Angela, isn’t it?”

  “She’s my sister, but she’s not dumb.”

  “You tape-recorded a conversation on May 10, 2008, where you said, ‘I honestly think she’s a little bit dumb.’ ”

  “I called her dumb and stupid.”

  “Did I ask you that, ma’am? I’m not asking you if you love her. I’m asking if you indicated it.”

  The conversation Martinez was referring to came straight from the casual, nonsexual part of the sex tape recording. Martinez was throwing her off her game. Surely, Jodi didn’t anticipate this question. If she denied saying it, she’d be lying since it was on the recording. But, with her family sitting right there in the courtroom, it was tough to have to admit she’d called her sister dumb. Perhaps Martinez was establishing that Jodi said things that she didn’t mean. He was setting the stage to prove that this witness either lied about absolutely everything or betrayed everyone who loved her—or both.

  Martinez operated at high speed almost all the time. He was hot tempered, which was quite a contrast to Jodi’s cool and calm delivery. Sometimes, his aggression seemed unnecessary, so well-established were the points he was trying to make, but his tactics were actually brilliant. He started big, Jodi was not truthful. He would take no time to get to Jodi was a person with a very selective memory. She couldn’t remember at what point she thought Travis must be dead, she couldn’t even remember the murder; yet, minutiae about other arguably irrelevant events were exaggeratedly accurate. Martinez also skillfully managed to bring up Jodi’s licentiousness by emphasizing that she was lying on top of Ryan Burns kissing him within hours of slaughtering Travis.

  Jodi didn’t seem to mind fighting back. The two went at it over her convenient memory lapses.

  “Problems with your memory, is it a recent vintage?” Martinez asked.

  Jodi sidestepped. “Define recent.”

  Martinez replied with sarcasm, “I don‘t know, since you started testifying . . . If it benefits you, you have a memory issue?” Then he added a question, his voice rising. “What factors influence your having a memory problem?”

  “Usually when men like you are screaming at me or grilling me or someone like Travis doing the same,” Jodi shot back.

  Getting sassy with the prosecutor was most likely not a great idea. One TV producer in the gallery expressed what many felt when she said, “Speaking as a human being, not a journalist, I wanted to slap her. Why was she talking to him like that?” But Jodi’s mission was to make at least one person on the jury take her side, and exploiting the prosecution’s consistently aggressive style and barking tone was one way to achieve that. Their sparring became absurd. If Martinez asked: “Did you like it?” Jodi responded, “What do you mean by ‘like it’?” Spending time challenging the prosecutor on word nuances came off as arrogant, but most likely, she was hoping that it would make him look like a bully.

  Just as the defense had the sex tape in its arsenal, the prosecution had a weapon of its own: Jodi Arias’s journals. Jodi had been faithfully journaling for years. Her private feelings for Travis were written in her own hand, so there was no reason to believe these entries were anything but truthful. After all, they were supposedly written from the heart, for no one else’s eyes . . . until now. Martinez took only a few minutes into his cross-examination to raise one of those journal entries. He used it not only to demonstrate Jodi’s boundless affection for Travis, but also to undermine her various accusations against her lover, among them that he was a pedophile and had assaulted her, injuring her finger.

  She had written in her journal on January 20, 2008, but the next entry wasn’t until January 24. In between those dates, on January 21, she had supposedly caught Travis masturbating to the photo of the boy, and then the next day, January 22, she said Travis had broken her finger. Yet her January 24 entry began with “I haven’t written because there has been nothing noteworthy to report.”

  “Did you write about significant things?” Martinez asked Jodi, coming from a point of reference as to when she had hurt her finger.

  “Some things . . .”

  “You knew you could write anything because it would stay private?”

  “No.”

  “Take a look at the first five or six lines,” Martinez growled, opening up the journal, which had been entered into evidence as Exhibit 242. “You wrote that?”

  After a sidebar, he continued. “ ‘I guess it’s a good thing nobody reads this because I love Travis Alexander more than can be.’ You confronted him because you loved him and you didn’t want to let him go?”

  By pointing out the date, Martinez managed to completely undermine Jodi’s story of the angry, raging, finger-breaking Travis that very day. Jodi would go on to testify that she never wrote anything negative in her journals about Travis because of her belief in the Law of Attraction, which urged that one think positive thoughts.

  With the deftness of a furtive welterweight, Martinez rapidly fired questions, taking aim at Jodi’s sex life with Travis and using the sex tape to show Jodi was more than a willing participant. For days on end, Jodi had been insisting she was degraded and humiliated by the amount and types of sex acts, and made to feel “like a used piece of toilet paper.” The inordinate amount of time Martinez used to get to Jodi’s diary entry about “the Pop Rocks and the Tootsie Pops” was painful, but eventually the point was made that Jodi had written that she enjoyed the experience.

  The interchange between Martinez and Jodi was fascinating to watch. It was hard to know exactly how well the prosecutor was scoring with every juror. Sometimes his point was so belabored that it was easy to forget the original focus. Jodi didn’t mind toying with Martinez, either. She sometimes seemed to enjoy trying to help him with an excruciatingly precise question by being even more exact, such as deciding if journal entries in the same color ink meant it was the same entry carried forward to the next page. She’d flip back and forth, back and forth, deciding if she agreed. Several times, a few one line zingers added levity to a moment, allowing Martinez a moment to pause from
his ceaseless pacing.

  When the day had begun, Jodi had been ready for the fight, feeling empowered; after all, she had been observing Martinez in action since January 2 and knew how he operated. However, as the afternoon wore on, she sometimes lost the flat affect that had been her façade throughout her eight days with Nurmi. She was definitely showing signs of losing control, as instances of smirking, contempt, and smug, feigned delight filtered through her composure.

  Both sides had time to regroup over the weekend. Court resumed right after noon on Monday, February 25. Jodi continued to wear black, this time a completely black, scoop-neck, long-sleeved top. The day began by dissecting Jodi’s statements to Detective Flores on the day of her arrest on July 15, 2008. Prosecutor Martinez’s questions bounced around from past to present to past again, rarely going in a linear fashion. It’s a technique used by law enforcement to trip up habitual liars. Within a few questions, the now familiar sparring between the two resumed. Martinez began rolling the interrogation footage, and everyone present could see and hear the detective say: “A lot of details in this case have not been released to the public. Details known only by us and people who did it. One of the reasons I’m here, I think you can help us.” Jodi’s response to that was, “I’d like to help you in any way I can.” Martinez pushed the pause button before addressing Jodi.

  “Not true, is it?” he snapped.

  “Depends on what ‘help’ means,” Jodi replied, indicating she was no more willing to surrender a single answer this day than she had on Friday. It was certainly going to be another long afternoon in court. With truth, lies, and consequences on the line, Martinez asked Jodi which lies were true.