Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias

by Velez-Mitchell, Jane

  The gruesome crime photos and autopsy shots of Travis, the beloved friend and brother, a man of optimism and hope, a spiritual man who could fill a room with his smile, were displayed one more time, accentuating the horror all over again. Martinez talked about the gas cans being the ultimate symbol of the defendant and her stories; the gas cans were the vessels, the gas was the lies. “What the state is asking you, the jury, to do is to not leave this courtroom filled with the stench of gasoline on your hands,” he declared in his powerfully poetic close. “The state is asking you that you return a verdict of guilty and that you return a verdict of guilty as to first-degree murder, not only as premeditated murder, but also as to felony murder; for no other reason than it’s your duty and the facts and the law support it.”

  On the morning of May 3, 2013, Judge Sherry Stephens called on Kirk Nurmi to begin the closing argument for the defense. After rising for the jury, Jodi looked ready. As she had been on so many occasions before, she was dressed in black, a black cardigan-style sweater set. She looked relaxed, happy, and resigned, brushing off a random wrinkle on her sleeve and organizing her notebooks on the table in front of her. The media circus outside the courthouse, having grown exponentially since the beginning of closing arguments, could be forgotten in the relative quiet of Judge Stephens’s well-controlled, well-behaved courtroom.

  “Fear. Love. Sex. Lies. Dirty little secrets,” Mr. Nurmi began, pacing slowly and using his hands to stress each uttered word, deliberately putting a pregnant pause between each subject.

  “These aspects of the human condition may not be universal,” he continued, trying to be dramatic, “but each one of these aspects of the human condition played a prominent role in the relationship that Jodi Arias shared with Travis Alexander. And because these aspects of the human condition played such a prominent role in this relationship, it makes sense that the evidence you’ve heard, starting on January 2, is a tale of fear, love, sex, lies, and dirty little secrets.”

  Nurmi really had his work cut out for him. No matter where he took his argument from here, the best he could do was somehow mitigate some of the state’s evidence that had room for interpretation.

  “Now ladies and gentlemen, one of the other things you were told at the beginning of this trial was that ultimately your job would be to determine one thing . . . what happened. You are the finder of fact.” He brought out the time-stamped photos from the fatal bathroom photo shoot as a memory aide, though it’s doubtful anyone on the jury needed to be reminded. “What happened in the minutes of time between what we see here, June 4, 2008, 5:29 and 20 seconds and . . . what we see in exhibit 162—Mr. Alexander’s body being drug [sic] across the bathroom floor at 5:32 and 16 seconds. What happened in those three minutes is ultimately what you are to decide.”

  Nurmi needed to attack the state’s position that Jodi had planned Travis’s murder long before she left Yreka for Mesa. The prosecution had woven together a compelling argument that the steps Jodi took between May 26, the date of the derogatory text message/IM exchange, and June 4, the day of his death, had been in anticipation of murdering Travis. Nurmi had a different explanation. He zeroed in on those critical two to three minutes in the bathroom by repeating Jodi’s mantra. Travis overreacted when she dropped his camera, he body slammed her, chased her, lunged and threatened to kill her, leaving her fearing for her own life.

  Nurmi took the time to elaborate on fear, not just Jodi’s fear of Travis at various points in their relationship, but the fear the jury might have in delivering an unpopular verdict. As the trial dragged on, the rhetoric in the court of public opinion had turned increasingly rageful, with certain hard-core trial watchers directing their fury at those few individuals who’d come out in support of the defendant. Alyce LaViolette had allegedly been threatened for being on Jodi’s side. Nurmi wanted to assure jurors that it was their duty to do the right thing, even if the right verdict is perceived to be unpopular.

  “It occurred to me . . . that you might have some fear,” he told the panel in solidarity. “You’ve been listening to evidence for more than twelve weeks now, since January second. . . . You may fear how your verdict will be received by those who love Travis Alexander, by those who love Jodi Arias or by the world at large . . .” After pausing dramatically, he continued. “You are not to be guided by sympathy, or prejudice or fear, but instead, by your personal belief. And rest assured, each and every one of you are here because all the parties involved believe that you are the type of people that would have the courage of your convictions to stand by your personal belief, against whatever pressures you may feel. You are asked to put that fear aside and look at the evidence.” He tried to dismiss parts of the testimony that had become overtly laughable or were attacks directly aimed at his star expert witness, Alyce LaViolette. “Before we talk about the evidence and what this case is about, I think it’s important to talk about what this case is not about. It’s not about Snow White, it’s not even about any of the seven dwarfs; it’s not about bad haircuts and it’s not about the sexual orientation of any of the witnesses.”

  Nurmi had more important arguments to make. Jodi was despised by so many that he needed to deal with her unlikeability, especially in case jurors felt the same way. Even Jodi couldn’t suppress her laughter at Nurmi’s next statement. “It’s not even about whether or not you like Jodi Arias,” he said of his client with a straight face. “Nine days out of ten, I don’t like Jodi Arias!”

  “Objection!” bellowed Martinez.

  Agreeing with the prosecutor, Judge Stephens asked the jury to disregard the last statement. The fact that Jodi beamed when her own attorney said he mostly didn’t like her showed just how much she thrived on attention, good or bad. It was a telling reaction that spoke to why she stayed with Travis despite her complaints against him. She craved attention in any form.

  Mr. Nurmi was struggling to explain why Jodi would drive so many hours and a thousand miles to an abusive ex-boyfriend’s house to kill him in self-defense. He emphasized that Jodi had moved away from Mesa, that she didn’t want to be around him anymore, and in her journals, she had talked about how a cloud had lifted. “Point of fact is, she moved away. This girl who’s supposedly obsessed, moved away.” He talked about the sex tape recorded on May 10, which completely undermined the assertion that Travis had been fearful of Jodi. Nurmi pointed to the May 26 text message exchange, where Travis called Jodi a “whore, slut and three-hole wonder,” concluding Travis was the one who needed to be feared, not vice versa.

  Nurmi tried to offer innocent explanations for many of the details the state gave as evidence of premeditation. If she had planned on covertly killing Travis, why would she have been so dumb as to stage a burglary of her grandfather’s gun, when she could have taken it at any time? If she wanted to be so covert about her plot, why would she leave a trail of evidence, from the car rental to the gas charges that were put on her debit card? If she was on a covert mission, why would she stop and see two former boyfriends on her way to slaughter a third? “You don’t stop anywhere; you don’t visit any people; there’s no witnesses, you go in there clean and you do your business, right? Does she do that? Oh no, she didn’t. It doesn’t make any sense. What does she do? She stops in Monterey, California. And what does she do in Monterey, California? She visits two former boyfriends. This crazy woman that can’t let it go has friendships with two of her former boyfriends,” Nurmi argued vehemently.

  Still, Nurmi was willing to concede the prosecutor’s first point in his closing argument—that Jodi was a liar. “If Jodi Arias were accused of the crime of lying, I could not stand before you and say she’s not guilty of that crime. But nowhere in your jury instructions are you asked to convict Jodi Arias of lying. There is no verdict form that you will have that says . . . is Jodi Arias guilty of the crime of lying? Well, of course not, that’s not the crime she’s being charged with,” Nurmi declared.

  To Nurmi, Jodi’s behavior was inconsistent with a premeditated killin
g. Who would spend an entire day in bed with someone they had every intention of killing, he wanted to know. In his opinion, that was the most absurd thinking of it all. “The question arises under this theory that the state has perpetrated to you: They’re in bed together sleeping. She’s got the gun. She’s got the knife. He’s asleep! What better opportunity would somebody need? He’s asleep. You put the gun to his head and you do it. You put the knife to his throat and you do it. No better time than when he’s asleep.”

  In what was perhaps his strongest argument, he went after the state’s evidence that Travis was afraid of Jodi. “We’re supposed to believe that he’s so scared of her, right? He’s afraid of her. So my goodness, how could she just walk right in the house and then sleep with him, sleep in the bed, and then take pictures—he’s so scared of her he’s taking naked pictures of her in his bed! That is a new level of being scared.” Of course, Travis’s friends would counter that Travis had become sexually addicted to Jodi and when offered his drug of choice could not resist, powerlessness being the definition of addiction.

  Nurmi displayed a photo of Travis that shows him standing in the shower, his back to the camera, as he’s being photographed by Jodi, minutes before his death. Emphatically, Nurmi pointed out how easy it would have been for Jodi to take out Travis then and there, had that been her intention. “She’s waiting for a moment in time to strike. She’s waiting to kill Mr. Alexander. If there’s a moment in time, this is it. This right here is it! There he is. He’s worn out, he’s naked, and his back’s to her. His eyes are right against the wall. He wouldn’t have seen it coming . . . She could have shot him right there if that was her plan.”

  Nurmi concluded that it just didn’t comport with the facts that Jodi premeditated the killing. He highlighted some of the testimony from his deflated expert witnesses, who had opined that Jodi had been abused by Travis, physically and emotionally. He revisited evidence that Jodi was moving on with her life, having signed up with an LDS dating service in the Yreka area, and having become interested in Ryan Burns. He concluded that whatever happened in those final three minutes of Travis’s life, when everything went from peaceful and calm to an unfathomable blood bath, had to have been because someone snapped. “What this evidence shows is that either what happened is that Jodi Arias defended herself and didn’t know when to stop, or she gave in to a sudden heat of passion . . . Ultimately, if Miss Arias is guilty of any crime at all, it is the crime of manslaughter and nothing more.” Many legal pundits wondered why he hadn’t made that far more saleable snapping in the heat of passion argument from the get-go instead of throwing it into the wash at the last possible moment.

  Mr. Martinez had the last word. “When the law is on your side, you argue the law; when the facts are on your side, you argue the facts; but when nothing is on your side, you just argue. And that’s what you had,” he said of his opponent’s two-and-a-half hour summation. Martinez painstakingly rebutted every specific point Nurmi had made, in the end bringing it back to Travis’s home. Martinez even questioned whether Travis really knew she was arriving in the early morning hours of June 4, 2008, raising the possibility that Jodi had arrived, uninvited, with a plan.

  “She wanted him. She couldn’t let him go. Even from Yreka, she couldn’t let him go. There’s never an indication that he said that, or he requested her to come there. Those were her words, and she kept saying them over and over like a mantra. And so on that date, when she finally got there she came ready to go. And by ready to go, I mean she brought over the weapons and she spent some time with him, and then when he was in the shower, he was no match for her. And she took care of business and you know how she took care of business . . .

  “I am asking you to return a verdict of first-degree murder, not only of premeditated murder but also of felony murder. Not because it’s an emotional decision that I want you to reach . . . or an argument just for its own sake, but because in this case, Travis Victor Alexander was slaughtered by this woman.”

  “Objection, improper argument,” sighed Nurmi.

  When the objection was overruled, Martinez brought it home. “She slashed his throat, she stabbed him in the heart, and then she shot him in the face, and all of that thinking about it in advance,” he said with a voice hoarse, raspy, and quieter than usual. Martinez lifted his white Styrofoam cup of water and a few papers, and returned to his seat.

  Mr. Martinez had ended the guilt phase of his prosecution of Jodi Arias.

  CHAPTER 23

  MOMENT OF TRUTH

  On the afternoon of Friday, May 3, 2013, at the end of all closing arguments, Judge Sherry Stephens gave the jury her final instructions before deliberations. She had already given them detailed instructions at the start of the closings about the crimes and key definitions of legal terms, admonishing them not to be “swayed by sympathy” and to “consider all the evidence in light of reason, common sense, and experience.”

  Remarkably, the jury was still fairly intact. In the four months of The State of Arizona v. Jodi Ann Arias, the panel had lost only three of its members. The first to go had been Juror #5, who had left in tears in April. She had been described as observant and a copious note taker, but she had been excused after Jodi’s lawyers accused her of misconduct and requested a mistrial. Even though the mistrial request was denied, the juror was gone. To the surprise of many, Juror #5 returned to the courtroom as a spectator a few days later. She had given a few innocuous statements to reporters who knocked on her door in the days following her dismissal, but within a few days and on the advice of an attorney, she declined to speak to reporters about the case, proving just how mesmerizing the case had become.

  Juror #11, the twentysomething Hispanic man in the back row who never seemed to take notes, had been the next to go. He had been sick with a hacking cough for a few days, and in an abundance of caution, the judge had excused him. She didn’t want the rest of the panel getting sick and delaying the trial further.

  Only a week before the deliberations were about to get under way, the jury lost a third panelist when Juror #8 was excused on April 25 due to a DUI arrest the prior weekend. That left nine men and six women to hear the judge’s charge.

  Judge Stephens had instructed the panel on the elements of first-degree murder and the lesser-included crimes they could consider. Jodi was charged with one count of first-degree murder under two theories: “premeditated” and “felony murder,” which is causing the death of someone during the course of another felony. The crime of first-degree murder/premeditated required proof of four scenarios, though the most relevant was that Jodi intentionally caused the death of Travis Alexander.

  The difference between first-degree and second-degree murder was premeditation. Second-degree murder was an intentional killing that did not require premeditation by the defendant. The presumptive sentence for second-degree murder was sixteen years, but the judge could go up or down by six years, so the range in Jodi’s case was ten to twenty-two years. Given that she’d already been behind bars for almost five years awaiting this moment, if she got murder two she could—hypothetically—be out in five years with credit for time already served, a prospect that horrified Travis’s family and friends.

  The defense had requested that jurors also be allowed to consider an even lower form of homicide—“manslaughter,” by sudden quarrel or heat of passion, which carried a presumptive sentence of ten and a half years. As with second-degree murder, the judge would have discretion in sentencing. She could go down to seven years or up to twenty-one. Again, Jodi would get credit for the nearly five years she had already served.

  Once jurors had heard their final instructions, two women and one man from the panel were randomly selected as alternates. That left eight men and four women in the final panel to deliberate Jodi’s fate.

  Deliberations began around 3:40 P.M. that Friday and lasted for fifty minutes before jurors were dismissed for the weekend. They returned on Monday, May 6, to begin their first full day in the jury deli
beration room. A crowd had begun to form outside the Maricopa County courthouse. Camera crews, producers, and reporters were converging on the courthouse steps mingling with the supporters of Travis Alexander, who were also huge fans of prosecutor Martinez, everyone anxious to be there when the verdict was finally read.

  Inside, Jodi was confined to a holding cell in the bowels of the courthouse, where she waited for word on her fate. There was no TV or phone, and she was not given anything to write with, which meant no doodling or journaling during her confinement there. Her meals were served to her in the “tank,” and only her attorneys were allowed to see her.

  Attorneys from both sides had returned to their respective offices, and would be summoned to the courthouse if the jury had a question or a verdict. Nurmi did not have an office downtown, but Willmott’s office was only five minutes from the courthouse. Martinez’s office was in a building across the street, about a block away. Many of the other critical parties, including family members on either side, were scattered in residences or hotels ready to come in for a juror question or when word hit that a verdict had been reached.

  Monday, May 6, saw no verdict, nor did Tuesday, May 7. The tension was palpable in the fifth-floor hallway of the courthouse, where reporters and others involved in the case would hang out, hovering near the doors to the courtroom where the verdict would ultimately be announced. With every passing hour, it became exponentially more nerve-racking. Outside under the beating Arizona sun, the gathering crowd was getting antsy, journalists interviewing one another as deadlines came and went. The reporters had really gotten to know the most colorful trial watchers, including the woman known as “Cane Lady.” Earlier in the trial she had asked prosecutor Juan Martinez to autograph her cane and he graciously agreed, only to have the defense accuse him of misconduct. As the jury deliberated five floors up, Cane Lady sat in the hot sun, the center of a cluster of fervent pro-prosecution citizens who were nervous but confident the jury would see it their way.