“He wanted me to come live down there and start a family,” Jodi said. “I couldn’t see myself moving to Costa Rica and having that kind of life.”
By October 1997, Jodi ended her relationship with Victor Arias.
* * *
From an early age, Jodi explored spirituality and religion. She grew up believing in Christ, but rarely attended church. She considered herself a nondenominational Christian, but when it came to religion she was easily influenced.
When Jodi was seventeen, she worked part-time in her family’s restaurant. One of the regulars was an old man who always carried his Bible and quoted scripture. Many times, he told Jodi he had deciphered the puzzles of the Bible and had predicted the second coming of Christ would occur on September 23, 1997.
“I was kind of naive and I believed him,” Jodi said.
Faced with a religious quandary, Jodi’s thoughts drifted back to Bobby Juarez. During their relationship he hadn’t been religious. To Jodi, it was important for Bobby to be told about the possible rapture.
The first two times she called him, Bobby hung up on her. Eventually, he called her back and Jodi explained the reason for her call.
“I reached out to him for spiritual reasons,” Jodi said. “I felt kind of silly, explaining to him why I was calling him. I kind of expected him to laugh at me, but it was important to me.”
After she informed him of the old man’s prediction, Bobby thanked her and, over the next few weeks, they rekindled their friendship.
Around the time Jodi ended her relationship with Victor Arias, her feelings for Bobby returned.
“I had begun to develop feelings for him right before Christmas,” she said. “He had feelings for me too, so we decided to give things another try at that point.”
By early 1998, Jodi and Bobby’s relationship became romantic. Then twenty, Bobby was still an eccentric with unusual beliefs.
“I was still drawn to that. And part of that was fascinating to me,” Jodi said. “I thought he was beautiful on the inside and out.”
Bobby lived with his adopted grandparents, who were in their seventies, in a dilapidated house in the neighboring town of Montague. The Juarez family home was dirty, with boxes of junk cluttering the living room. Cigarette tar coated the walls; the linoleum tiles peeled from the floor.
As Jodi grew closer with Bobby, she spent more time away from home, distancing herself from her parents. From Jodi’s perspective, Bill and Sandra were negative, judgmental, and abusive. Jodi began to grow weary of their rules and physical discipline.
One night, during a heated argument Jodi had with her mom and dad, Bill pushed her into the doorframe, briefly knocking her unconscious, Jodi testified. Following that incident, Jodi began making secret plans to move out.
At the time she was working as a hostess at a diner called Grandma’s House. Her parents’ restaurant had since closed and her dad had given her boxes of plates and silverware for when she was on her own. Slowly, Jodi began packing her possessions into boxes and taking them to Bobby’s house to store in his shed.
In April 1998, Jodi’s parents were called by the school after she skipped a class. Driving around Yreka, Bill found his daughter in a parking lot off campus. Incensed, he grounded her for three months, until she turned eighteen.
Unable to fathom being grounded for such a long time, and anxious to be on her own, Jodi decided to move in with Bobby.
That night she stayed up late, packing her belongings and loading them in her car. At 7 A.M. her mom woke up and asked her what she was doing.
“Nothing,” Jodi said, as she grabbed her cat and left the house for good.
For the next year Jodi lived with Bobby and his grandparents in the tiny house in Montague.
After Jodi’s abrupt departure, her parents grew increasingly troubled by their daughter’s behavior.
“After she left the house she just kind of got a little strange,” Bill told the police in 2008. “She was really friendly sometimes, she’d call and be real sweet. Ten minutes later she’d call in a rage and just screaming.”
Her fits were so erratic that her mom was often concerned Jodi would try and hurt herself or commit suicide. After one conversation with his daughter, Bill confronted Jodi about his suspicion of her mental problems.
“She called me and started yelling, and I said, you know, ‘Have you ever thought of yourself as being bipolar?’” Bill said in 2008. “Oh my God,” she cried hysterically and then she called back and I hung up on her and she called up and kept calling and kept calling and kept calling until I could tell her, ‘No, I’m just kidding.’”
Jodi would later claim that she suffered from depression and low self-esteem, beginning in her teenage years. Her issues seeped into her adult life, although she largely hid her emotional instability from others out of concern about how she would be perceived. Jodi’s public persona was something she deeply valued and it was important for her to be viewed as “calm and collected,” she wrote in her journals.
In her relationships with men Jodi would occasionally “scream and vent,” but for the most part suppressed her emotions. When upset, as the anxiety inside her grew, she would tremble in anger. Later, she would privately unleash her fury, Jodi confessed in an e-mail to a friend.
“My anger is very destructive,” Jodi wrote. “I’ve kicked holes in walls, kicked down doors, smashed windows, broken things.”
* * *
After moving in with Bobby, Jodi was forced to support herself financially. Because Bobby didn’t have a job, she began working full-time, stopped attending classes, and completed her junior year with mostly failing grades. She decided not to return for her senior year.
“Toward the end of the year I just let it all fall apart,” Jodi said.
In August 1998, she found work as a waitress at Denny’s. For a while she also worked part-time busing tables at a restaurant called the Purple Plum.
For a while her relationship with Bobby was good. Months after she moved in, Bobby’s grandparents relocated to a nursing home. When Jodi switched to the graveyard shift at Denny’s, she and Bobby began sleeping during the day and staying up all night.
But unbeknownst to Jodi, while she spent nights at work, Bobby was chatting with a woman he met through a party line. In the late 1990s, before chat rooms, 900 numbers provided a forum for people from around the world to converse. Bobby became addicted to the party line and formed a relationship with a woman in Louisiana. He sent her romantic e-mails and they spoke every day by phone.
Jodi knew about the woman but was under the impression that she and Bobby were just friends. But when her boyfriend became distant, Jodi grew concerned and decided to investigate by reading his e-mail. For Jodi, this would develop into a pattern. In her relationships if she became jealous or suspicious of cheating she would pry into her boyfriend’s private correspondence for information.
One day, before her shift at Denny’s, Jodi secretly logged onto Bobby’s Hotmail account and discovered the love letters.
“I clicked the back button to see what was really going on with her because I had suspicions,” Jodi said. “I found a whole bunch of love letters that he was writing her.”
Jodi was heartbroken.
“I was not well, emotionally. It didn’t make me feel good. He was very loving and poetic with this person, and I could tell he had real feelings for her,” she said. “I felt jealous a little bit. My heart was pounding. I guess I felt very deceived.”
After calling in sick to work, Jodi printed out the letters and confronted Bobby. He apologized, begged her to forgive him, and swore he would never again stray.
Eventually, Bobby convinced Jodi to stay, but their relationship was never the same. Perhaps partially due to Jodi’s issues with anger, their union became tumultuous. Over the next few months they argued frequently and broke up numerous times.
“I was advised over and over to get away from him because it was not healthy,” Jodi said. “But my heart still
cared for him.”
Once during an argument in early 1999, Bobby became violent, Jodi testified. As the fight escalated, Bobby grabbed her and placed her in a stranglehold. Jodi fell to her knees, gasping for air. After a few seconds, he let her go.
“I said something to the effect that my family would be very upset if they found out what you just did,” Jodi testified. “He began to describe in detail how he would kill each member of my family. He knew a lot about my family so these were all very personalized details about how they would die.”
Jodi snatched the phone and dialed 911. Bobby grabbed her arm, nearly breaking it. Prying the phone out of her hand, he screamed at Jodi, “Shut up!” When the operator called back, Bobby explained it as a misdial.
After the fight, Jodi moved in with her grandparents in Yreka. They lived at 352 Pine in a small home painted white with blue trim, just a mile from her parents’ house. Jodi was close with her grandparents Carlton and Caroline Allen, and especially with her grandma, whom everyone called Wilma.
Despite the physical abuse, Jodi continued to talk to Bobby. She rationalized that it was a one-time incident and that he had never been violent in the past. But Jodi knew she had to get away. In 1999, she took a week-long vacation to Costa Rica to clear her head.
“I spent a lot of time just reflecting and healing from that. I felt in a lot better place by the time I got back,” she said. “I needed to just remove myself from the situation so I could allow my heart to move on a little. So that break from him had helped me a lot.”
By the time she returned, Jodi had created some much needed space between her and Bobby. They continued on and off for the next few months until Bobby moved to Medford, a large Oregon metropolis, about fifty miles north of Yreka.
In Oregon, Bobby found work and rented an apartment with a man named Matt McCartney. Tall and trim, Matt was handsome with dark blond hair.
Through Bobby, Jodi became friends with Matt and his family. After she and Bobby separated for the final time, Jodi and Matt became a couple.
“Matt and I began to hang out more and we developed feelings for each other,” Jodi said. “We became romantic, and then we were boyfriend and girlfriend.”
In early 2000, Jodi moved to Medford and she and Matt rented a one-bedroom apartment together. Jodi worked as a server at an Applebee’s restaurant; Matt was a manager for a Subway sandwich shop.
With Matt, Jodi felt she had found a healthy relationship.
“I see that period of my life as one of the best times in my life,” she said. “He treated me very well. He was very kind, he was very respectful … I was in love with him.”
Like Bobby, he also had a fascination with the occult, only Matt’s interest was more spiritual. When she first met him, Matt had several books on Wicca, a modern pagan religion that involves the practice of magic. Matt explained to Jodi that he had been turned off from the Christian religion and was on a spiritual journey.
Although she never belonged to a witch coven or cast spells, Jodi felt a fleeting attraction to Wicca’s spiritual basis in nature. For Wiccans there is no written creed that the orthodox must adhere to, nor do they build stone temples or churches in which they worship. They practice their rituals outdoors: in parks, gardens, forests, yards, or hillsides.
Moreover, Jodi liked the Wiccan belief in karma. The Wiccan creed is: “What ye send out, comes back to thee.” To a witch, there is no sin and therefore no need for forgiveness or salvation. Instead they believe an individual’s actions in life will come back to them three-fold. If a person harms another, they must be willing to accept the karmic consequences.
Jodi’s interest in Wicca was brief. With Bobby, she studied various spiritual beliefs including Hinduism and Buddhism. Periodically, the couple attended new age seminars in subjects like transcendental meditation.
“Our relationship took a lot of spiritual turns and twists,” she said. “We sort of explored together, and opened up to other beliefs.”
In the summer of 2000, Jodi and Matt both found seasonal work at a lodge in Crater Lake, Oregon. Located in the southcentral region of Oregon, Crater Lake was a national park with a deep caldera, famous for its clear blue water. For the next few months Jodi and Matt worked and lived at the lodge in the staff quarters.
At the end of the season they returned to Medford, where Jodi resumed working at Applebee’s.
By the spring of 2001, however, Jodi and Matt began to argue more frequently. That summer he returned to Crater Lake to work at the lodge, and Jodi stayed behind. Each weekend Matt would drive down from Crater Lake to spend time with Jodi. But over the next several weeks, she began to feel he was withdrawing. At Matt’s father’s house, she discovered photos of him with another young woman. She suspected he was cheating.
“I felt we were distancing,” she said.
In September 2001, while working her shift at Applebee’s, Jodi walked past a table and two people stopped her.
“You’re Jodi, right?” one of them asked.
They told her they worked with Matt in Crater Lake and had driven down to reveal a secret: Matt was seeing another woman. Jodi was crushed.
“I was reeling,” Jodi said. “Of all the boyfriends I had I would have expected him to not be the one to have cheated on me. He was very loyal. I trusted him completely.”
Leaving work, Jodi went home, changed her clothes, and made the hour-and-a-half drive to Crater Lake.
“I decided I wanted to find out if it was true,” she said. “I didn’t want to continue in the relationship if that was the case.”
When she arrived at the lodge, a friend directed her to the cottage where the woman was staying. Jodi knocked on the door of the cabin and confronted the woman—a pretty brunette from Romania named Bianca.
Bianca informed Jodi she had been seeing Matt for weeks. She had been under the impression that Matt and Jodi were no longer a couple.
Jodi was devastated. Because it was too late to drive, she stayed the night in a friend’s cabin. At sunrise, she drove back to Medford and found Matt at his father’s house.
“I confronted Matt and he confirmed it. At that point he was honest about it,” she said. “And basically our relationship was over. It was kind of sad.”
CHAPTER 10
Following her breakup with Matt McCartney, Jodi Arias decided to move away from Oregon. Every street in Medford reminded her of Matt; each place they used to visit brought back fond memories.
“I wanted to leave the area because Matt and I had a lot of experiences, mostly all good, in that whole southern Oregon area,” Jodi said. “Every street that I drove, it was sentimental.”
Through a friend, Jodi learned about a job opportunity in Big Sur, a tourist destination on California’s central coast where the Santa Lucia Mountains rose from the Pacific Ocean. Nestled in the mountains above the sea was a ritzy, four-star resort called the Ventana Inn and Spa.
In the fall of 2001, at the age of twenty-one, Jodi drove to Big Sur and applied for a server job at the resort’s restaurant. She was hired by the food and beverage manager—a man named Darryl Brewer—who would become her direct supervisor.
Around this time, she resumed speaking to Matt.
“Our feelings were tender. And it was just a sticky situation. He was really ashamed of his behavior,” Jodi said. “Eventually we began to talk again.”
When she told Matt about the job at the Ventana, he also sought out employment there and was hired as well.
Because the staff quarters were occupied at the time, for the first few weeks of their employment, Jodi and Matt shared a tent at the lodge’s campground. During that time they had sex one more time.
“There were blurred boundaries because we were familiar with each other and comfortable with each other,” she said. “I considered it platonic. I still had some feelings for him, but we were not really together and we were just friends.”
As an adult, Jodi didn’t have many friends, but Matt would remain one of the
few people close to her throughout her life.
A few weeks after they were hired, Jodi and Matt were transferred into staff housing. For the next three and a half years, Jodi worked and lived at the Ventana Inn. It was one of the best jobs of her life.
In the summer of 2002, after the staff wedding coordinator died suddenly from pancreatic cancer, Jodi temporarily worked in the position, assisting brides and grooms in the planning of their nuptials.
Over the course of her employment, Jodi worked closely with Darryl Brewer. Twenty years her senior, Darryl was a recent divorcee and single father with a son named Jack. Darryl was athletic with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and sharp features.
Despite their age difference, Jodi began to develop feelings for Darryl. But because he was her direct supervisor, the hotel’s rules forbade them from dating.
“I began to develop a crush on him,” Jodi said, “but he was my boss so I didn’t let that on.”
In the fall of 2002, after Darryl resigned from his management position, they began dating. Jodi was twenty-two; he was forty-two.
“He was older but attractive, and we had a lot of similar interests,” she said. “I think he was more concerned about the age gap than I was, because he was concerned about how people may view him for dating someone so young.”
To celebrate stepping down from his position, Darryl and Jodi went on a trip to San Francisco, where they toured the city and attended a 49ers game. That night, they had sex for the first time.
“We began to spend a little more time together and became intimate and fell in love,” Darryl testified in court. “It was a happy relationship.”
For the next year they lived in separate quarters in staff housing at the resort. A year later, when Darryl moved to Monterey, about thirty miles away, their relationship continued.
As they grew closer, Darryl introduced Jodi to his son. Jodi and Jack got along well, and she became like a big sister.
But as their relationship progressed, Jodi discovered a few aspects of Darryl’s personality she found disconcerting. Darryl was a smoker and an admitted alcoholic, although he later stopped drinking. And because he had just gone through a nasty divorce, he had no interest in remarrying or having more kids. He told Jodi he liked her, and was attracted to her, but didn’t see himself remarrying.
Picture Perfect: The Jodi Arias Story: A Beautiful Photographer, Her Mormon Lover, and a Brutal Murder Page 7