Jodi sighed. “I can explain the blood and the hair. I used to bathe Napoleon all the time.”
Flores interrupted. “This is over. This is absolutely over. You need to tell me the truth.”
“The truth is I didn’t hurt Travis,” Jodi said.
Flores confronted her about the .25 caliber pistol, stolen from her grandparents’ house one week before the murder. “You reported a gun stolen—a .25 auto. That just happens to be the same caliber as the weapon used to kill him.”
“A .25 auto was used to kill Travis?”
“Yeah, along with multiple stab wounds,” Flores said bluntly.
Jodi appeared to sob, burying her head in her hands.
Flores reclined in his chair, flipping through his file folder. “Have you ever shot that .25 auto?”
Jodi wiped her cheeks. “No. I’ve never seen it. My grandpa said it looks like a toy gun. I don’t know what a .25 looks like.”
“We’re just playing games here. The gun was in your possession,” he said. “When did you report it stolen?”
“I didn’t even know that there were guns until my grandparents reported it stolen.”
Changing the direction of the conversation, Flores discussed the crime scene and the condition of Travis’s remains.
“If you want I can show you the pictures of him,” Flores said. “Do you want to see the pictures of him?”
“Part of me does and part of me doesn’t,” Jodi said softly. “There’s a morbid curiosity. I want to know how he died.”
Repeatedly, Flores urged Jodi to explain her motive for killing Travis. Jodi admitted that she knew Travis’s friends had been pointing to her as a suspect, casting her in a “bad light.”
“This isn’t about saving your reputation. It’s about saving your life,” Flores said.
“If I’m found guilty I don’t have a life.” Jodi threw up her hands. “I’m not guilty. I didn’t hurt Travis. If I hurt Travis, if I killed Travis, I would beg for the death penalty.”
The evidence didn’t lie, Flores pressed. The photos proved Jodi was at the scene. “There are pictures of you in his bed with pigtails.”
“Pigtails?” she asked with a tone of incredulity.
“It’s you. It’s obvious,” Flores said. “Do you want to see the pictures? Would that change your mind?”
Jodi continued to claim she had no motive for the killing.
“Let’s say for a second I did it,” she said. “I wouldn’t even say I was jealous—if anyone, Travis was jealous.”
“They know he was jealous. But they think that you were absolutely obsessed. Obsessed is the word that they used,” Flores said, referring to comments from Travis’s friends. “That’s the word I’ve heard from everybody. Fatal Attraction—I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that.”
Flores asked her to come clean and reveal her motive. “I don’t have answers of why it happened.”
“There’s nothing that could link me there,” Jodi said.
For a minute Jodi was silent. Attempting a different tactic, Flores brought up Jodi’s parents.
“I need you to think about what you’re doing. I think your mom and your dad deserve the truth—because they’re going to be asking,” he said. “It’s so important that you tell me why this occurred, what was going through your mind, what caused you to do this.”
Flores stood up from his chair and left the room to retrieve a case file containing photos from the investigation. “I’ll let you think about this.”
As he walked away Jodi pleaded, “Detective, I’m not a murderer.”
Alone, Jodi stared vacantly at the wall, not moving an inch. After nearly a minute she brought her hands to her face, wiped her eyes, and massaged her forehead. She leaned back, lifting her pelvis out of the chair and stretching into a backbend. She then flopped forward and rested her head on the table.
Minutes later, Flores reentered the room.
“What kind of gun is that?” Jodi nodded at the weapon holstered on Flores’s hip. “Just curious.”
“It’s a Glock.”
“I just bought a gun,” Jodi said.
“We probably found it by now.”
“Probably.” She smirked. “I was taking it somewhere.”
Flores flipped through a folder of photos, showing Jodi several images of Travis’s house.
“If Travis were here today he would tell you that it wasn’t me,” Jodi insisted.
“My job is to speak for Travis right now.” Flores looked her firmly in the eyes. “And everything Travis is telling me is that Jodi did this to me.”
Thumbing through the folder, Flores stopped at a photo of Travis in the shower. “Remember him?”
“Yeah,” Jodi said softly, gazing at the picture. Flores turned to the image of Travis sprawled on his bed naked.
“Travis would never go for that.” Jodi shook her head.
Flores presented Jodi with a picture of herself naked on the bed, her hair braided in pigtails. Out of respect, he covered the photo from her face down with a piece of paper.
“That’s you,” Flores said. “All of you.”
Jodi sat up out of her chair and lifted a corner of the paper, exposing her own naked body. “That looks like me.”
“Let’s just say I’ve seen all of you. And I’ve seen all of Travis,” Flores said. “The one that sticks in my mind of Travis is on the autopsy table.”
Flores turned to one of the last photos recovered from the camera.
“That’s just one of the photos that were taken by accident.” Flores pointed to the image of the back of Travis’s head, with a socked foot in the foreground. “That’s your foot, Jodi. Those are your pants. That’s Travis.”
“This is his bathroom,” Jodi said. “That’s not my foot.”
Flores spoke about the crime scene and how Travis looked after decomposing for five days in the shower. “Couldn’t even recognize him, he’d been there so long.”
Flores turned to a picture of a bloody palm print on the hallway wall. Jodi claimed she had no cuts that could have left blood. She pointed at scars on her arms, saying they were caused by her cat. Flores dismissed her claims as irrelevant.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that you did this—none,” Flores said. “So you can go until you’re blue in the face and tell me you weren’t there and you had nothing to do with it. I won’t believe you. Because Travis is telling me you did this to him.”
“There’s no reason for it,” Jodi said. “There’s no reason why. There’s no reason I would ever want to hurt him.… He never raped me.”
Jodi dropped her head and began to cry.
“You have something to tell me.… I know you’re afraid,” Flores said. “Unfortunately, you’re going to have to face the consequences.”
“If I did that, I’d be fully ready to face the consequences,” she said. “I’m all for the Ten Commandments—thou shall not kill.”
Slowly and patiently, Flores continued to prod Jodi into admitting to a motive.
“There’s no evidence to show that anybody else did this but you, you were the only one,” he said. “Why won’t you admit to it?”
“I just can’t. I didn’t kill Travis. I just didn’t. I did not take his life,” she said.
When Jodi last spoke to Travis, she said he urged her to come to Arizona, but she had refused. She said she felt guilty because she wasn’t there when he was killed. “I don’t think I had anything directly to do with it, but I feel responsible, somewhat, for it. I feel that if I would have gone there that I could have done something.”
“But you were there, Jodi,” Flores said, exasperated.
Again Jodi declared her innocence. The photos on the camera could have come from an old memory card, she said. Her blood and hair had likely been left in the house from when she had stayed there.
“Is that how you want to leave this?” Flores asked. “These farfetched excuses—about why your blood is there, why your hair is there, why you
r palm print is there, why those pictures were there?”
Jodi sat in silence as Flores reiterated the seriousness of the situation. “This is absolutely some of the best evidence I’ve ever had on a case. And I’ve convicted a few people on less than this.”
“So I’m as good as done, right?” Jodi said. “With that evidence.”
“Yeah,” Flores nodded. “I’m begging you to at least come clean and tell me why. I don’t want to leave here today not knowing, because it’s going to follow me forever.”
“I wish that I had answers. I’m sorry,” she cried. “There’s just no reason. There’s just no reason.”
“There’s never a good reason why someone dies like this.”
Jodi dropped her face in her hands, sobbing. “How many times was Travis stabbed?”
“More than I want to remember,” Flores said. “Do you have anything else you want to tell me? I know this thing must be weighing on you pretty heavy.… I think you’re feeling the reality in the moment now.”
Jodi said she wasn’t crying over guilt or remorse—she was lamenting all she would be losing if locked away in prison, and all that Travis had lost.
“I’m just feeling all the things I’m potentially going to miss out on with my family,” she wept. “And I think of all the things Travis’s family is going to miss out on with Travis. And it’s not fair.”
Flores made it clear—Jodi needed to face the gravity of the charges against her. “You are facing first-degree murder charges. And you are going to be booked in a jail. And eventually you will be brought back to Arizona and you will stand trial. That’s the reality. And once you realize that, I think you’ll be better for it.”
But Jodi still seemed disconnected from the reality of the situation—expressing concern about the publicity her arrest would receive. “This is a really trivial question, and it’s going to reveal how shallow I am, but before they book me can I clean myself up a little bit?”
Following the four-hour interrogation, Flores left the room. Quickly, Jodi composed herself, sat back in her chair, and ran her fingers through her hair. “Goodness,” she whispered.
She turned her head, pulled her knees into her chest, and sighed. Glancing up at the ceiling, she chuckled. In the third person, she admonished herself for not doing her makeup.
“You should have at least done your makeup, Jodi. Gosh,” she muttered.
As she waited for Flores to return, Jodi sang softly to herself, “Here with Me,” by Dido.
“It might change my memory,” she sang.
Then, she stepped over to the wall barefoot, flipped upside down, and did a handstand for nearly thirty seconds.
Minutes later an officer entered through the side door and directed Jodi to the corner of the room.
“Stop right there,” the officer said. “Put your hands behind you back.”
The handcuffs were slapped on Jodi, the clink of the metal resonating off the walls of the interrogation room.
* * *
That night Jodi was booked on charges of first-degree murder. She was fingerprinted, her clothes exchanged for a bright orange jumpsuit.
Even as she was being booked, Jodi seemed acutely aware that her arrest would make headlines. And it was important to her to look attractive in her mug shot. “I knew it would be all over the Internet,” she said in a 2008 interview.
As she posed for the picture, Jodi titled her head and grinned as if she were being photographed for the high school yearbook.
Once she was locked in her cell, Jodi had a chance to call her parents. While she whispered on the pay phone, another inmate overheard her side of the conversation.
“What comes up when you Google my name?” Jodi asked.
CHAPTER 30
Dressed in a baggy orange jumpsuit, Jodi pulled her knees to her chest, perched in her chair inside the interrogation room at the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department. It was July 16, 2008—one day after her arrest—and Jodi had agreed once again to speak with Detective Flores.
A night in jail seemed to have an effect on her. She appeared anxious and uncomfortable, speaking in a stilted tone.
“I feel really powerless in here,” she said, staring vacantly at the wall. “Do you know what my family is doing today?”
“I don’t know. I know they’re worried about you,” Flores said. “Everyone’s just in limbo right now.”
Jodi hugged herself tighter. She told Flores she was ready to reveal the truth. “I can tell you everything that I know, that I remember.”
“Okay, what do you remember?” Flores asked.
When she first set out on her road trip, Jodi said she had no plans to see Travis. Weeks prior, she and Travis had discussed getting together. But when Travis canceled their rendezvous, she made other plans.
A few hours after arriving in Los Angeles, Jodi called Travis and he urged her to come see him. At first, she declined. Minutes later she called him back and told him, “I’m coming to Arizona.”
“Really?” Travis asked. “What changed your mind?”
“Because I missed you,” Jodi said.
Despite the fact that she was expected in Utah the next day, Jodi turned her car east and headed toward Mesa. It was a four-hundred-mile detour.
“So he knew you were coming?” Flores asked Jodi. “He expected you?”
Jodi nodded her head and whispered, “Yeah.”
At around 4 A.M.—six and a half hours later—she arrived at Travis’s Mesa home and quietly let herself inside. Travis was in his office, watching a YouTube video on his computer. Jodi asked about Travis’s roommates and was told they were asleep upstairs.
In the interrogation room, Jodi explained to Flores that she never encountered Travis’s roommates that day.
“You were pretty sneaky,” Flores said. “You go up there and the roommates didn’t even know you were there.”
“I did that many, many, many nights.”
Exhausted from her trip, Jodi and Travis went upstairs and fell asleep in his bed. Jodi was still sleeping when Travis woke at dawn and briefly encountered his roommates downstairs. Travis then crawled into bed next to Jodi, and fell back to sleep.
When they both woke again around 1 P.M., the roommates were gone. Travis and Jodi had sex in his bed. Afterward, Travis retrieved his new digital camera from his loft.
Jodi sprawled nude on his bed, posing for the camera, as Travis snapped a picture. Jodi spread her legs, and he snapped another. Jodi took the camera and turned it toward Travis, taking two pictures of him in bed.
“We also made a video,” Jodi told Flores. “He deleted it. It was on the camera.”
“Videos are hard to get once they’re erased,” Flores said. “Pictures are different.”
That afternoon they went downstairs. Travis began cleaning the house, moving the bar stools onto the couch. With her, Jodi had brought several CDs of photos from their many trips. In his office, Travis tried to download the pictures on his laptop, but due to a virus it wouldn’t work.
“For some reason that was frustrating for both of us because he couldn’t look at the pictures,” Jodi said.
Instead, they had sex for a second time in his downstairs office. Around 5 P.M. Travis and Jodi went back upstairs. Jodi suggested another photo shoot, but Travis was reluctant.
“I asked if I could take pictures of him in the shower. He was like, ‘No,’” Jodi told Flores. “He was very private about the shower.”
“I’m surprised he allowed you to take pictures of him in the shower,” Flores said.
Jodi convinced Travis it would look cool with the water droplets frozen in the images, like a Calvin Klein ad. Although he wasn’t keen on the idea, Travis agreed.
At 5:22 P.M., he stepped into the shower. At first, he was uncomfortable.
“He’s standing there and he’s like, ‘I feel gay.’” Jodi giggled, as if recalling the memory.
“The first few photos he didn’t look like he was too comfortable. Obviously
what you were saying to him made him more comfortable,” Flores said. “What went wrong? Did he say something to you? Were you angry about something?”
In the interrogation room, Jodi paused, her face flush with emotion.
“What happened after that?” Flores prodded. “What went wrong?”
“I don’t know what exactly happened after that.” Jodi put her hand over her mouth and wept.
“What happened, Jodi? We’ve come this far,” Flores said. “Did you plan on doing that the whole time?”
“No,” she whispered.
Jodi laid her face in her palms.
“Jodi, please,” Flores pleaded.
“I can’t,” she cried.
“Why not?” Flores asked. “Are you protecting someone else? Why would someone else do this?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“He was sitting down, looking up at you. What did you do?… Did you plan on doing that the whole time?”
“No,” Jodi said softly.
“You need to just let the answers come out,” Flores pressed.
Slowly, Jodi began to discuss Travis’s final moments. She directed Travis as he posed for the camera, showing off his physique. For the last two photos Travis was seated in the shower stall. Kneeling beside him, she browsed through the images.
Suddenly, a loud bang exploded in the bathroom, smacking against the walls. Before she could make sense of the blast, a violent jolt knocked her to the floor. She was lying next to the bathtub, across from the shower. The camera had slid across the tile. On the shower floor, Travis was bleeding.
“He was kneeling down in the shower and I don’t really know what happened, but I think he was shot,” Jodi said. “He was holding his head.… Travis was bleeding everywhere.”
Shaken and bewildered, she said she tried to orient herself. She looked up and saw two tall strangers standing in the bathroom. They were wearing ski masks, gloves, and long-sleeve black shirts. One was wearing black pants, the other jeans. The man was holding a gun.
“I turn around and there are two people there. One was a guy, one was a girl,” Jodi told Flores. “Travis was screaming the whole time. He wasn’t screaming like a girl. He was screaming like he was in pain.”
Picture Perfect: The Jodi Arias Story: A Beautiful Photographer, Her Mormon Lover, and a Brutal Murder Page 25