* * *
When the truth came out, there were those who would call Travis a hypocrite for breaking his vow of chastity. The reality, however, may be much less seedy.
Breaking sacred covenants is a most serious matter in the Mormon church. Unfortunately, it is something that happens among members of every congregation around the world. When this occurs, LDS members have a chance to repent and seek forgiveness.
While sex before marriage is forbidden in the Mormon religion, that standard is not always maintained in modern society. There are a small minority who ignore the covenants. Other, less devout Mormons may justify their behavior by loosely interpreting the Law of Chastity, engaging in sexual activity but excluding intercourse prior to marriage.
There are also some who incorrectly interpret the Law of Chastity as not to have sex with the woman they plan to marry in the temple prior to the wedding night. In other words, they may engage in intercourse prior to marriage with partners they are dating casually, but with their future husband or wife they maintain a chaste union. These faulty interpretations of the Law of Chastity are all condemned by the church.
It will never be known how Travis felt about breaking his sacred covenant. What is known, however, is that it was out of character for Travis. Close friends of Travis do not believe he took his vows lightly. Instead, they say he was just human—with human weaknesses and failings. It was likely that he continuously strove toward celibacy but was simply not infallible.
“Travis wasn’t perfect—none of us are—but he was a really incredible human being,” Chris Hughes said. “But when you know where he came from, how he grew up, you couldn’t help but admire him and be in continual awe of all that he accomplished in his short life.”
If Travis decided to repent for his mistakes he would have been required to admit his sexual indiscretions privately to his bishop, a leader of the ward or congregation.
In situations where grave transgressions have been made, the church has several protocols for disciplinary actions. Members who confess serious sins may lose leadership positions in the church, face disfellowship, or be excommunicated. In addition, their temple recommends may be revoked for a period of time. To be allowed inside the Mormon Temple, an LDS member must be “temple worthy,” which means they are in good standing and living by the covenants.
For a period of his life in 2004, Travis and Deanna both lost their temple recommends when they confessed to their respective bishops about their sexual indiscretions. After repenting they did not break the Law of Chastity again in their relationship and were eventually allowed back into the temple.
Years later in late 2007 or early 2008 Travis was once again banned from temple, according to his friends. Travis had told several people that he had “gone too far” with a woman, although many believed he had stopped short of actual intercourse. Travis had also mentioned being in a disciplinary council, which is convened to decide the consequences for any transgressions—including sexual relations.
Sometime later Travis’s temple recommend was reinstated, something that would only happen if he had repented for his mistakes. To Taylor Searle, this indicated that Travis had admitted his transgressions, had been forgiven, and was working to better himself.
“People make mistakes and get back on the path, choosing the right life,” Taylor said. “I believed he was working to get back on the right path.”
* * *
By the time he turned thirty, Travis would have a change of heart about marriage—deciding he was ready to find a wife. He would feel so strongly about starting a family, in fact, it would become his main priority.
But in the fall of 2006, he was content being a bachelor. During this period he would be drawn to a woman who was looking for a much deeper commitment.
Ultimately, their union would derail the course of his life.
In September 2006, Travis attended a Prepaid Legal conference in Las Vegas. Walking around the MGM Grand, he saw her—a gorgeous blonde with almond-shaped brown eyes, pouted lips, and a single dimple on her right cheek.
Like an arrow, Travis shot straight toward her, his gaze unflinching.
“Hi, I’m Travis,” he said, his hand outstretched.
The woman smiled, glancing up at Travis. She placed her hand in his. “I’m Jodi.”
CHAPTER 8
Three hundred and fifty miles north of Riverside—where Travis Alexander was born and raised—lies the scenic city of Salinas, California.
Located on the Central California coast, Salinas was a sunny suburb with a booming agriculture industry. Surrounded by fruit groves and vegetable patches, the city’s 150,000 residents lived in modest homes with grassy front yards.
Jodi Ann Arias was born in Salinas on July 9, 1980. She was the first child of Bill and Sandra Arias. Her birth would be followed by brothers, Carl and Joseph, and a sister, Angela. In addition, Jodi had an older half-sister, Julie, from her father’s prior marriage.
Jodi was a pretty child with a naturally tan complexion. She was of mixed heritage—her mother was Caucasian, her father Mexican American. A natural brunette, even as a toddler she wore her hair long with thick bangs.
Childhood photos show a happy girl with an impish grin. In one photo, Jodi was dressed in floral print overalls, her hair in pigtails tied with pink ribbons. She was being cradled in her father’s burly arms.
Jodi Arias would later testify about her own life story in court, describing her early upbringing as wholesome.
“Until about age seven it was a pretty ideal childhood,” Jodi said. “I have predominately positive memories.”
Her parents worked in the food service industry and, over the years, owned several restaurants across California. When Jodi was young, her mother worked as a server at the family diner. Later, Sandra became a dental assistant.
In Salinas, the family lived in a house at the end of a cul-de-sac, with a spacious backyard where Jodi and her brother Carl, who was two years younger, would climb trees and play with the other neighborhood children. She grew up roller-skating, riding bikes, and playing hopscotch and four square.
The family traveled frequently, often taking camping trips and visiting theme parks around California. Throughout her childhood, animals were a very central part of Jodi’s life. They owned many pets, including dogs, cats, fish, birds, and a pet rat.
Naturally soft-spoken, Jodi was described by family members as sweet and sensitive. She took piano lessons and played the flute. Early on, she was extraordinarily creative and showed a talent for art and enjoyed coloring and drawing.
“When I was younger I liked to color with Crayolas,” Jodi recalled. “I began to get into art … I would see art and it would fascinate me. I slowly began to practice doing that.”
While she was generally a bright child, when it came to academics, Jodi initially struggled and was held back in kindergarten. For the first three years of her education, she attended private school, eventually transferring to public school.
When Jodi was eleven, the family relocated to Santa Maria, a city about 150 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. There, Jodi completed middle school.
Three years later, they moved again to Yreka, a quaint community on the Oregon-California border with a population of less than eight thousand people. Nestled in the northernmost corner of the majestic Shasta Valley, Yreka boasted panoramic views of three mountain ranges. At the heart of the city was a historic district, featuring a well-preserved gold rush-era town.
The Arias family purchased a modest single-story house painted grayish blue with dark trim, at 1021 South Oregon Street. A chain-link fence surrounded the yard to the north and east of the residence, boxing in a backyard basketball court.
Jodi attended Yreka Union High School. Friends remember her as fairly intelligent, articulate, and vivacious. Others describe her as a quiet person who didn’t really open up to many people. In large groups, she was known to be shy and quiet.
Jodi would later say the frequent
moves were taxing on her early upbringing. Moving every few years to a new city made sustaining friendships difficult.
“I had a few friends, but I didn’t really make a lot of close friends. It just seemed like I was constantly making friends and then moving away,” Jodi recalled. “I had a large circle of friends but no one I was really close with.”
Throughout high school, Jodi studied Spanish, which was among her favorite classes. When she wasn’t in school, she worked part-time at her family’s diner.
As a teenager, Jodi’s talent for art blossomed. She began experimenting with oil paints and colored pencils. In art class, she quickly mastered all artistic mediums and was usually the first student to complete an assignment.
“She was very conscientious, very smart, very hard working, and very skillful,” said a former art teacher, Richard Rangel. “She was very quiet and always seemed more mature than the rest of the kids. She had a maturity about her that was noticeable.”
When Jodi was ten, she received her first camera, and developed a lifelong passion for photography. A lover of nature, Jodi often took pictures of the mountains surrounding Yreka, and was rarely seen without her camera.
But when it came to her art, Jodi didn’t find much support at home. While she was praised by classmates and art teachers, her parents were largely indifferent.
“They didn’t discourage me by any means, but they were lukewarm,” Jodi said. “They weren’t really moved by it. They never went out of their way to display it.”
* * *
While her childhood appeared normal, from a young age Jodi’s parents recognized there was something unusual about their daughter.
As a child Jodi was disobedient—defying her parents’ rules and often running away from home. But as she approached her teens, Jodi’s rebellion escalated toward emotional instability. She was prone to extreme irritability and bouts of anger, her moods shifting to an extent beyond that of a typical adolescent. When mad, she grew enraged; if sad, she became inconsolable and many times threatened suicide.
While Sandra Arias seemed aware her daughter’s behavior was dysfunctional, she wouldn’t truly understand the extent of Jodi’s issues until years later.
“Jodi has mental problems,” Sandra told a detective in 2008. “Jodi would freak out all the time. I had quite a few of her friends call me and tell me I needed to get her some help. In fact, I had one call me in the middle of the night and tell me I needed to get her some help.”
To control her misbehavior, Jodi’s parents became strict and sometimes used physical discipline. It began with spankings as a form of punishment, but as she got older, Jodi claimed it became increasingly brutal.
“My parents would spank or hit us as discipline. It seemed like at age seven, it started to get a little more intense,” Jodi said. “That’s the first year my dad started using a belt.”
Both her mother and father punished her and her siblings physically, according to Jodi. Large and imposing, with graying hair, Bill Arias practiced martial arts, frequented the gym, and could bench-press more than five hundred pounds. He used his strength to push his daughter into the furniture or walls.
Sandra Arias, a plump woman with a round face and wavy brown hair, carried a wooden kitchen spoon in her purse, which she used to whack Jodi and her siblings when they misbehaved, according to Jodi. When the spoon wasn’t available, Sandra would grab anything nearby to use as a weapon, at times leaving bruises and welts.
In her early teens, Jodi began responding to the discipline by inflicting violence on her parents. Sandra received the brunt of her daughter’s rage. She and Jodi argued constantly, and at times, Jodi would hit or slap her mom for no discernable reason.
When Jodi was fourteen, Bill and Sandra discovered something else disturbing: their daughter was using drugs. On the roof of their house they found marijuana plants growing out of Tupperware dishes. Alarmed, her father called the sheriff’s department. Following the discovery of the drugs, her parents searched her room for the first time.
To Bill, the incident seemed to spur a deep rift in their relationship. Jodi became distrusting and developed a habit of lying and hiding things from her parents.
“After that … something turned in her head,” Bill said in 2008. “We were nosy parents and we’re going to search everything that she had so she hid everything from us. She’s never been honest with us since then.”
As another form of punishment, they tried grounding their daughter, sending her to her room for weeks without television or the phone. In rebellion, Jodi snuck out of the house. On the night she moved from Santa Maria to Yreka, she was caught out of the house past curfew. The next morning, in anger, her father confronted her.
“My dad asked where I had been. I sat up and I was disoriented,” Jodi testified. “I didn’t give him a satisfactory answer, so he hit me across the face and I fell back down. And then he sat me back up and asked me again and I didn’t give him a satisfactory answer so he hit me again.”
While for Bill and Sandra the discipline was driven by concern, Jodi considered herself to be abused. She felt confused, betrayed, and grew bitter toward her parents. The contempt Jodi felt toward them would stay with her most of her adult life.
“As I got older it would really make me mad. I understood why I was being punished, but I was just mad at them all the time because it hurt,” Jodi said. “It put a strain on our relationship.”
CHAPTER 9
Jodi would grow from being a cute girl to a gorgeous woman. With high cheekbones, olive skin, and full lips, she was an exotic beauty with a coy smile and long dark hair. Her figure was slim but curvaceous. In her twenties, she would bleach her hair platinum blond. It appeared unnatural against her complexion, yet it somehow suited her.
Her striking good looks attracted a slew of male attention. When Jodi began dating in her mid-teens, like many young girls, her relationships with men became her primary interest.
Over the course of Jodi’s dating life, however, a disturbing pattern emerged. Jodi tended to lose herself in a relationship. Whoever she was dating at the time became her identity. While she had few friends, Jodi seemed to need a partner to complete her and was rarely without a man in her life.
Friends say she had a way of picking “bad boys,” and described her boyfriends as generally controlling.
“From a young age, she started picking guys that were just not the best choice for her,” said Tina Ross, a high school friend. “And she was such a beautiful girl.”
Jodi met her first boyfriend when she was just fifteen.
In the summer of 1995, Yreka hosted the State Fair, which Jodi attended with a few friends. In the crowds, she noticed a thin man with long, dark curly hair and deep-set brown eyes. He was dressed in the eighteenth-century Gothic style, in a black suit with a high-collared shirt. At the time, he was hobbling along on crutches.
“I remember seeing him walk by and I didn’t approach him, but I noticed him,” Jodi recalled. “He just seemed intriguing to me.”
Jodi wanted to talk to him but was too shy. Later that night, while her friends were on one of the rides, Jodi saw him again. He motioned for her to come talk to him.
“Would you like to ride with me?” he asked.
Jodi smiled. “Yeah, sure.”
They rode the Zipper together and chatted briefly. But that night they parted ways.
Months later, during her freshman year in the fall of 1995, Jodi was at the school’s football homecoming game when she saw him again. This time she mustered the courage to approach him.
Jodi learned the boy was an eighteen-year-old senior named Robert Juarez, who went by Bobby. Jodi gave Bobby her phone number, they began talking, and soon they were a couple.
Each day on her lunch break, Jodi would leave campus and meet Bobby at the nearby USA Gasoline station, which included an indoor arcade. Bobby would play video games and he and Jodi would hold hands.
A Goth with an interest in the occult, Bobby wa
s something of an oddity in the small California town. Early on, Jodi discovered he had some atypical beliefs.
“He had all sorts of wild ideas. He entertained the belief in vampires,” Jodi testified. “He thought let’s go to San Francisco and see if we can find some real vampires … so we could live together forever and be together forever.”
After only a few months of dating, Bobby grew very serious. But while Jodi initially liked the idea of spending her life with him, she eventually began to withdraw.
“At age fifteen, I thought the relationship was getting very intense. He was talking about being together forever,” she said. “I loved him, but I didn’t feel like I was in love with him.”
In early 1996, she called Bobby and broke up with him over the phone.
“He didn’t take it well,” Jodi testified. “I learned a few years later that he slit both of his wrists and tried to kill himself.”
Bobby was committed to a mental institution in Citrus Heights, north of Sacramento. He and Jodi didn’t speak for years.
* * *
In the summer of 1997, just before her seventeenth birthday, Jodi spent three weeks abroad in Costa Rica, as part of a student exchange program. For the trip, she stayed with a family who, coincidentally, also had the last name Arias. They had a daughter and two sons, the older of whom, Victor, was close in age to Jodi.
Jodi felt an attraction to Victor Arias, who was tall and muscular with short black hair and a strong jawline.
“We kind of clicked and got to know each other, and a romance sort of blossomed,” Jodi said. “It was my first experience with the warm fuzzies—someone that I felt I really cared for.”
When she returned to Yreka, her romance with Victor continued long-distance. They spent the summer exchanging flowery love letters, which he wrote in Spanish. Jodi wrote so often, the post office workers knew her by name.
Later that summer, Victor flew to Yreka and stayed with Jodi for two weeks. During the trip, he gave her a promise ring. But Victor was also jealous. He didn’t like the idea of Jodi talking to other men or associating with male friends.
Picture Perfect: The Jodi Arias Story: A Beautiful Photographer, Her Mormon Lover, and a Brutal Murder Page 6