Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias

by Velez-Mitchell, Jane

  Amy pressed her on key issues. “Why did you say you wanted the death penalty and then change your mind?”

  Jodi replied, “My cousin convinced me. The way she said it. She said regardless of what happens, there’s still a lot of hope and a lot of things that can be done and don’t do that to your mom.”

  Amy went on, “Samantha Alexander said, ‘We will never get those images of our brother’s neck being slit out of our minds.’ How have you gotten it out of your mind?”

  “It is not out of my mind, but mostly I avoid looking at it, but it is there and I’ve seen it.” Amy Murphy said, after talking to Jodi one on one, she came away convinced that she was insane. Amy felt Jodi absolutely knew right from wrong but was, otherwise, seriously off.

  After four days of deliberation, the jury failed to reach a unanimous decision as to whether Jodi should get the death penalty or a sentence of life in prison. In light of the deadlock, Judge Stephens declared a mistrial in the penalty phase of deliberations. A new trial, with a new jury, was scheduled to begin later in the summer, for sentencing purposes only. It appeared the drama would continue. We were all prepared for press conferences following the penalty phase but, because it was a deadlock, again no one talked. It was still considered a pending case.

  After Jodi’s penalty phase was declared a mistrial, it was revealed that the majority of jurors had voted to put Jodi to death. The vote was eight in favor, four opposed, but unanimity was required. Jurors did begin to speak out, however. Jury foreman William Zervakos, juror #18, gave several interviews, including an expansive one with HLN affiliate KTVK in Phoenix. He said he was one of the four jurors who voted against the death penalty, saying there were multiple mitigating factors, among them Jodi’s age, the fact that she had no criminal record, and her “dysfunctional” family. During an appearance on Good Morning America, the day after Judge Stephens declared a mistrial in the death penalty phase, Zervakos voiced his opinion. “All of the testimony that I listened to, and that I actually heard as well as read, I do believe he verbally abused her,” he stated. “There was just too much evidence, that . . . you know, again not an excuse. And believe me, I’m not painting Jodi Arias a sympathetic figure.”

  Zervakos made it clear that Travis “didn’t deserve to die.” “I’m not blaming the dead guy,” he said. “What she [Jodi] did was horrific, and she’s got to pay for it. And she is going to . . . But Jodi is a human being. Our jurisprudence system is based on ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ And this girl was crucified in the court of public opinion. We didn’t know that, of course, until after the fact.” In return for his candor, this foreman also found himself on the receiving end of death threats as the line between free speech and harassment melted in a cyber world where anonymous bullies let loose without fear.

  Jodi’s fate will yet be decided by a jury of her peers, exactly according to the rules of justice we have come to cherish, saints and sinners alike.

  The absolute, fiery passion outsiders had for the capital murder trial of Jodi Arias was manifesting not just at the courthouse but around the country. Networks covering the trial saw their ratings skyrocket. People in large cities and small towns were fixated on the trial’s daily developments whether it was a witness blunder, Jodi’s demeanor and hairstyle, or Martinez’s latest rock star status. Social media exploded with opinions about all of the players, from the victim to the attorneys to each and every witness. Every juror, though known only by number and never shown on camera, was subjected to a character judgment. Opinions about the defendant were explosive and overwhelmingly negative, though she did have a following. It seemed females, especially, saw in Jodi something that was loathsome at the core, something wicked and evil. Many women who were true victims of domestic violence were deeply offended by her allegations.

  Buzzwords from the testimony took their places in our conversations: “three-hole wonder”; “dirty little secret”; “Snow White was a battered woman,” “hottie biscotti.” Everyone had an opinion and purported to know what really happened because somehow they were better witnesses and better judges of the truth than the people testifying for either side. From the spectators’ point of view, at times, The State v. Jodi Ann Arias was part soap opera, part circus, the other part gladiator spectacle. The trial had elements everyone could relate to and some that appealed to the voyeur in us: conflicts with religion, chastity, and secrets; kinky sex and lies; passion, obsession, jealousy, cheating, violence, and the ultimate crime of murder. Travis was murdered viciously in cold blood, killed three times over. Jodi Arias may spend the rest of her natural life in prison. However, as of this publication, she has not yet been sentenced, so she could be put to death long before she dies of natural causes. She still has the right to appeal, a process that will surely add years to any conclusion. Travis never realized his dream of “Being Better,” his philosophy of constant improvement until he reached the top expressed in his blog. And Jodi? She threw away her life while robbing the world of Travis’s. At least Jodi will never have the chance to murder, slaughter, or butcher again.

  EPILOGUE

  The trial of Jodi Arias was an absolute phenomenon. In terms of the television viewing audience, it ranked with the trials of O.J. Simpson and Casey Anthony. In those other two cases, however, the verdicts delivered were the opposite of what the public was expecting, and the calls for justice were left deeply unsatisfied. With Jodi, the verdict was both predicted and categorically hailed. Of course, a lot of things were different in this case. For one, Jodi had confessed to the killing, even though it had taken her two years to get to that point, and even then she tried to spin it.

  Two years was longer than the murderess had even known Travis Alexander. She had met him on September 13, 2006, and he died a brutal death by her hand on June 4, 2008, three months shy of two years. Not including the aggravation phase and the death penalty phase, the trial lasted four months and a week, from January 2 through May 8, 2013. That was two weeks shy of the length of time the two had officially dated, which by Jodi’s account began on February 2, 2007, and ended with a phone call on June 29 of that same year. Deliberations in the punishment phase of the trial lasted fifteen hours, the amount of time it would have taken for Jodi to drive from Yreka to Mesa, had she driven nonstop. Depending on when she arrived at Travis’s home, she may have been there almost exactly fifteen hours. In that time Jodi managed a few hours for sleep, sex, and still more sex; a few minutes for taking nude photographs of Travis in the shower; a few long, savage minutes for the murder itself, complete with more than two dozen knife wounds, the near decapitation, plus the gratuitous gunshot to the face; and a period of time for stuffing Travis’s body into the shower, cleaning up some of the enormous amounts of blood, putting clothing, towels, and the camera through the wash cycle of Travis’s washing machine, and heading out of town in her rental car, into the twilight over the Arizona desert.

  For the trial, tens of thousands of people tuned in to watch it, either the live stream or the evening recaps on those television networks that featured the proceedings. HLN saw record ratings for its gavel to gavel coverage, as well as its nightly analysis and debates. People could not get enough. Even at the courthouse itself, crime junkies were such regulars there that they became known by nicknames. There was “Cane Lady,” and her friend Michaelann who said her father had been murdered in a knife attack and who identified with Travis’s plight. One young man made a rather large painting of Jodi Arias surrounded by her lawyers, the prosecutor, and key witnesses and stood outside the courthouse showing off the canvas.

  As much as people hated Jodi Arias, they were also intrigued about who she really was. During her eighteen days on the stand, everyone had their own chance to size her up. Jodi was already loathed in the court of public opinion even before she took the stand on February 4, 2013, and by almost all accounts, her “performance” during her testimony was just that. She appeared at turns smug, unrepentant, mendacious, self-serving, and even combative. She s
eemed willing and even eager to assassinate the character of the man she claimed to have loved without hesitation, accusing him of heinous acts like pedophilia and physical abuse. That she had murdered Travis once was horrific enough, but to attack him again in this way, under oath and in front of his whole family, was despicable.

  As everyone has tried to understand Jodi, so, too, has the psychological world, and the opinions from the professionals reveal fascinating insights into the mind of Jodi Arias, perhaps shedding light on why she acted the way she did. Dr. Drew Pinsky, host of HLN’s Dr. Drew on Call, has been an extremely valuable source of information on this topic. He is a board-certified internist, an addiction medicine specialist, and an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. Although he didn’t interview Jodi directly, he did have the good fortune of interviewing multiple psychologists and psychiatrists about Jodi, and he has also reviewed the testimony of psychologist Janeen DeMarte, who took the stand as a rebuttal witness for the prosecution. Based on all of the information Dr. Drew gathered, he has a pretty good idea of what was going on with Jodi, although there is acknowledgment of the difficulty of evaluating somebody without speaking to him or her directly.

  He agreed with other psychologists and psychiatrists in suggesting that Jodi has borderline personality disorder, which is what the prosecution maintained all along. About “borderlines,” Dr. Drew said it best when he generalized: “They lie, they manipulate. Their point of view begs no alternative. They really can’t see their role in what plays out in their life. They just can’t see it. That’s what personality disorders are. At its core: ‘It’s the world’s problem, not me. I’m justified in feeling the way I do, acting the way I do because of what the world is and what the world’s done to me.’ That’s what makes personality disorder so difficult, if not, some say, impossible to treat.”

  In today’s pop psychology world, people love to toss around diagnoses with abandon. But, says Dr. Drew, for borderline personality disorder, “there’s very specific criteria. And you need certain numbers of these criteria: chronic feelings of emptiness, chronic feelings of preoccupation about abandonment, dysfunctional, chaotic relationships, inability to have stability in their lives, lots of suicidal ideation, extreme mood lividity. It’s just a terribly unstable emotional landscape.” Borderlines are prone to fierce anger and irritability. Anyone who has studied this case can look at that criteria and say: it fits Jodi to a T.

  Also, by definition, borderlines seesaw between idealizing the object of their fascination and then devaluing them in the extreme. That is precisely what Jodi did with Travis. She put him on a pedestal, worshipping him socially and sexually and then—when he was unable to meet her insatiable demands—she demonized him in her mind. When she murdered Travis, she was knocking the pedestal over and smashing it into the ground.

  This in no way apologizes for Jodi’s behavior. As Dr. Drew and others have stressed, having a mental illness is not the same as being legally insane. Jodi understood right from wrong, as evidenced by her plotting and cover-ups. But, perhaps because she is a borderline, she felt justified to kill Travis not in self-defense because he was attacking her; he was not. Rather, because she felt wronged by him and felt entitled to exact revenge. She felt justified. And, some would say, she still feels justified, which is why she has shown no genuine remorse and can barely verbalize the word “sorry” in a sentence even when her own life depends on it.

  Dr. Drew spoke of Jodi’s “lifelong pattern of really not accepting responsibility for things, for having strange reactions, intense relationships. There was real chaos in [Jodi’s] life where she would go from job to job to job. And then, very significant, was how she conducted herself in her relationship with Travis Alexander.” Had she not been borderline she might have had the capacity to examine her relationship with Travis with at least a semblance of objectivity, see her part in the dysfunction and realize she was not a victim but a participant in an unhealthy situation. But Jodi never achieved that level of self-honesty or self-awareness. She was way too invested in playing the victim in the relationship and indeed engineered her own debasement by actively encouraging it, begging for ass poundings, going out of her way to be his maid, etc. She thoroughly enjoyed her pity party where she worked up her appetite for vengeance. With borderlines, relationship disillusion and bitterness are prefabricated and inevitable.

  According to Dr. Drew, it is unusual for borderlines to become raging murderers. “Borderlines don’t kill people, they typically kill themselves,” he said, adding many of his professional colleagues suspected Jodi also had “some components of psychopathy, some problem with the ability to empathize with others, very goal directed. She’s very cunning and when she really needs it, she can think about no one but herself, come what may. That, I think, is the part that the public reacts so fiercely to.” That’s a fancy way of saying she is likely also a psychopath. Her pathological lying also dovetails with psychopathic behavior, as the psychopath has absolutely no qualms about lying as a means to an end. Lying is child’s play compared to the even more malignant behaviors in their tool kit.

  Dr. Drew elaborated by saying that borderlines use a style of emotional regulation called “projective identification,” paraphrased to mean, “I have a horrible feeling inside of me, so horrible I can’t touch it, but I can inject that feeling into you.” Thus, borderlines are terribly manipulative. “They literally can make you feel what they don’t want to feel and then they manipulate you as a way of manipulating their (own) feelings.”

  As an example, Dr. Drew pointed to the interview Jodi gave minutes after she was found guilty of murder. She said she wanted the death penalty, saying the worst outcome for her would be spending the rest of her natural life in prison. She wasn’t a smoker, and longevity ran in her family, so a lifetime behind bars would be intolerably long, if nothing else. Besides, “I believe death is the ultimate freedom, so I’d rather have my freedom as soon as I can get it,” she said without hesitation to Troy Hayden of Phoenix’s KSAZ. Jodi was essentially goading the jurors to execute her. In that death wish statement, Dr. Drew sees the borderline’s projective identification, “She has a murderous rage, because we’ve all seen what her murderous rage can do. We know she has that. Her murderous rage she is now trying to put on the jury and tell the jury, ‘You need to kill me. And then you’ll be guilty of acting out my murderous rage.’ That’s how borderlines function. It’s projective identification.”

  In a way, Jodi also engaged in projective identification sexually with Travis, encouraging him to engage in sexual conduct that she later said made her feel degraded. She was the one who felt less than and even worthless, but she managed to manipulate him into acting it out through sexual role playing so she could blame him.

  With borderlines, dissociation becomes a common strategy as well. Jodi seemed dissociated from her own life, looking at her life as if it were a movie. There was a sense of unreality that allowed her to do hideous things and not really be in touch with the level of awfulness, or the hideousness of it. This is part and parcel of the emptiness and alienation that borderlines experience.

  And because that dissociation makes her life feel so movielike and unreal to her, Jodi has actually enjoyed her notoriety, as if she were starring in a movie role and not becoming a convict in real life. Journalist Amy Murphy, the television reporter for Phoenix’s ABC 15 TV who conducted a one-on-one interview with Jodi Arias following the verdict, observed, “In her sick twisted little mind it is (an ego trip) absolutely . . . I asked her that question. I said, ‘People think you’re really enjoying all this attention.’ And she goes, ‘No, not this kind of attention,’ but she thought about the answer long and hard. She’s enjoying it. There’s no doubt about it. She’s enjoying it.” Dissociation is what allows her to enjoy her infamy, which amounts to being famous for doing something hideous.

  One thing Amy noticed about Jodi that left her with a sen
se of wow, seriously mentally ill was her eyes, what Nancy Grace called Jodi’s “crazy eyes.” Amy was close enough to Jodi that she could see the pupils of her brown eyes, which may have been dilated. The large pupils, coupled with the fact that she didn’t blink very often, gave the sense of what people interpret as “crazy.”

  The reporter said she learned through her sources that Jodi was being medicated behind bars. She asked if the drugs were anti-depressants or anti-psychotic drugs, because that might explain Jodi’s ability to have remained so calm, with her cold, dazed look throughout the interview process. According to the source, “I can’t tell you what kind of drugs she is taking, but she is on meds for whatever it is she’s dealing with.” Amy wondered if Jodi had been medicated during her testimony, it being common knowledge that the defendant suffered from migraines. The source said that she got a daily vitamin, in addition to her daily migraine medication. Amy asked specifically about anti-depressants or anti-psychotics, and got a “yes” response. When she asked “which or both?” the source could not elaborate. There was speculation that Jodi’s lack of affect on the stand could have been due to medications.

  As for why the defense didn’t do much with Jodi’s mental illness, Amy was not sure. “If she’s indeed a sociopath and the defense knows this, they’re not going to bring that up in her defense. I think that they have downplayed the mental illness part of it for their own reasons, and who is to say if she’s bipolar. If she is, then she’s medicated, because nobody could sit on the stand and be that calm if they’re bipolar. If she’s a sociopath, that makes more sense. How can she lie through her smiles and keep her stories straight, thinking she’s smarter than everyone else and not feeling any remorse?”