Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story

by Brian Skoloff,, Josh Hoffner

  As it turns out, the tip was bogus and Dustin had nothing to do with the slaying. But police had to follow the tip and dozens of others regardless.

  As Mesa cops awaited forensic results, Flores, the lead detective, kept in close contact with Jodi. The circumstantial evidence clearly pointed to her, but they wanted iron-clad proof.

  Almost everyone who knew Travis was convinced who did it. No doubt. It had to be Jodi.

  They had been creeped out by her bizarre behavior at various times and heard the stories from Travis about Jodi’s stalking.

  One friend even told police that Jodi had been “acting very ‘Fatal Attraction’” lately, referring to the film starring Glenn Close as an obsessed mistress whose heightening obsession with a married man ends in murder.

  “There’s an old saying that, if someone is just not acting right, look into it,” Flores would later say.

  The detective began piecing together clues as Jodi tried to put the pieces of her own life back together.

  She tried to resume her activities in Yreka, but it wasn’t easy because she had to carry on the outward appearance of a mourner while simultaneously dealing the psychological trauma of knowing she had just killed the love of her life, the man she thought she’d marry someday. She cried for days.

  She went to work at a Mexican restaurant in Yreka. She updated her MySpace page to say she “missed Travis. See you soon, my friend, but not soon enough,” while also posting a photo gallery of her trips and time with him. As she flew back to California from Arizona after attending Travis’ memorial service, she flirted with the guy sitting next to her on the plane and got his number, calling him after getting home.

  She even wrote letters of condolence to Travis’ family and sent a bouquet of white irises to Travis’ beloved grandmother, Norma Sarvey, who raised him and inspired him so much.

  “Travis always told me he liked the name Iris for a girl…If I ever have a son I’ll name him Alexander,” she wrote in her diary.

  On the whole, Jodi did quite well handling the situation and moving on, or at least making it look that way.

  Her mother said the death of Travis brought her and Jodi closer, and she was finally starting to see positive changes in her daughter.

  Maybe there was a silver lining to all of this, her mother thought.

  “Just this last couple weeks since Travis’ death has been the best relations that we’ve had in our whole life,” Sandy Arias would later say during questioning by police. “Maybe this death has made her see that life is short and you can’t be that way. And it’s changing her.”

  At the same time, Jodi was also playing the role of sleuth. She would call Flores to get updates on the investigation and offer up stories that puzzled him.

  She would leave him casual voicemails on his mobile phone.

  “Hi Detective Flores, this is Jodi Arias calling in regard to Travis Alexander,” she said in one message. “It’s Saturday, not exactly sure what time, maybe you’re off. I hope you’re enjoying your day off. If you could give me a call back, my phone number is 831-402-1909.”

  As she was leaving her message, forensic experts were analyzing the evidence. On June 26, the reports came back: The bloody palm print on the wall was Jodi’s. One week later, on July 3, the DNA samples taken from the scene matched up to Jodi.

  A few weeks earlier, Jodi and Travis’ other friends voluntarily provided police saliva samples for DNA comparisons.

  Flores shared his findings with the Maricopa County Attorney’s office, and prosecutors presented the case to a grand jury.

  The panel indicted Jodi on July 9, 2008, the same day she celebrated her 28th birthday. It was now time to take Jodi into custody.

  Jodi was at her grandparents’ three-bedroom house when Mesa police Department joined by deputies with the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department showed up and slapped the cuffs on her.

  Jodi was under arrest.

  Chapter 13

  “I Don’t Even Hurt Spiders”

  “I think you’re not grasping the reality of the situation.” —Detective Rachel Blaney of the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department

  The date was July 15, 2008. It was the culmination of the most tumultuous period of Jodi’s life.

  In the span of 45 days, she had killed her lover in gruesome fashion, skipped town, hooked up with a new guy, mourned the loss of Alexander, even sent his family condolence cards.

  Now she was in a nondescript interrogation room in Yreka. Most people are nervous in this situation, rattled by the mere sight of handcuffs on their wrists, fearful about their life being shattered once the authorities figure out what they did.

  But Jodi seemed to have different coping mechanisms. She tried small talk with a female officer, asking where she was from Arizona. Then she complained about the temperature in the room. It’s too cold, she said. She wondered where her purse was.

  Here she was, locked up for what could be an eternity, and Jodi begged Flores for a sweater and inquired about her handbag.

  “Any way you can turn the heat up in here or like, do you have a sweater I can borrow or something?” she asked Flores.

  “I don’t have any sweaters,” he shot back.

  They had a few back-and-forths that were fairly routine for police interrogations, and then Flores laid down the gauntlet.

  “Everybody is saying, I don’t understand what happened to Travis. I don’t know who killed him. But you need to look at Jodi. And sometimes the simplest answers are the correct ones. And that’s one of the reasons I started looking at you a little bit closer and over the last month or so I’ve gotten into Travis’ lives, talked to all his friends, his family. I got a really good understanding of who he is now. And I got a very good understanding of your relationship with him. And I’m just putting two and two together … and it kind of matches.”

  Whatever Jodi had told herself in the month since Alexander’s death, it surely set in at this time that she was in trouble.

  It wasn’t the kind of interrogation you see on a TV drama where a defendant is standoffish, gives quick, one-word answers and demands for a lawyer to be present.

  Jodi rambled on in long answers as detectives tried to sort out the truth. Jodi talked at length about her relationship with Travis, their beliefs in the Mormon faith, his desire to meet a nice Mormon girl, and her supposed adherence to the Ten Commandments. She tried to make sense of her relationship with Travis for Flores.

  But what Flores really needed and wanted was a confession. It is one of the building blocks of a strong case, as important as finding the murder weapon, a strong motive, and physical evidence connecting the suspect to the crime. Police had all the physical evidence they needed by this point, and seemed to have motive figured out: jealousy. The murder weapon was a mystery, although the break-in at her grandparents’ house provided ample circumstantial evidence.

  So for two days, Flores and other officers threw everything they could at Jodi, alternating between good cop, bad cop and father confessor. On the first day, Flores started off by questioning her gently, but slowly lost his patience as Jodi’s responses meandered.

  “He liked you, he loved you. He wanted to be with you but he was reluctant to make a commitment first off. And he truly didn’t think that you were marriage material,” Flores said. “And I don’t know why not. I mean, I see you, you’re a wonderful girl. You’re struggling, you’re trying to make your way through life and I don’t see why you guys couldn’t have made it, you know?”

  “I think we just, we have very different philosophies,” Jodi said.

  Finally, Flores had enough. It was time to throw his trump card down on the table.

  “What if I could show you proof you were there?” Flores asked.

  “How?” Jodi said.

  “Would that change your mind?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “You need to be honest with me Jodi.”

  “I was not at Travis’ house.”

 
“You were at Travis’ house and you guys had a sexual encounter which there’s pictures. And I know you know there’s pictures because I have them. I will show them to you, OK? So, what I’m asking you is for you to be honest with me. I know you were there.”

  “Are you sure those pictures aren’t from another time?” Jodi asked.

  “Positive.”

  She continued to insist that she was not there, despite Flores saying he had reams of evidence proving otherwise.

  “Jodi, this is over. This is absolutely over. You need to tell me the truth,” Flores said.

  “Listen, the truth is I did not hurt Travis.”

  She kept lying, even going so far to offer up this bold statement: “Listen, if I’m found guilty, I don’t have a life. I’m not guilty. I didn’t hurt Travis. If I hurt Travis, I would beg for the death penalty.”

  “I don’t even hurt spiders,” she added.

  Flores decided to increase the pressure on Jodi by telling her that he was going to bring pictures showing what happened. Before he left, he offered a parting shot: “Tell me exactly what happened because, you know what, I think your mom and your dad really deserve the truth. They’re gonna be asking. … What was going through your mind and what caused you do to this. It happened. And I can prove it happened and there’s no doubt in my mind, and there is absolutely no doubt in anybody’s mind who is investigating this that you were there and that you did this. But I’ll let you think about that OK? And I’m gonna go look for some pictures … and I’ll be right back.”

  “Detective, I’m not a murderer,” Jodi insisted.

  Flores wrapped up the conversation by explaining the process for defendants in her situation, including bail hearings, extradition to Arizona, and limited contact with family.

  He pushed a few more times to get her to confess, but she didn’t bite. Jodi asked about whether Travis’ family or the public knew she had been arrested. Then came an odd request.

  “This is a really trivial question and it’s gonna reveal how shallow I am. But before they book me, can I clean myself up a little bit?” Jodi asked.

  She asked to go the bathroom, and Flores said yes — but handcuffs are staying on.

  “Do you know I’m not, like, violent, or am gonna run. It’s Yreka.”

  Flores left the room, but kept the video surveillance camera on as Jodi stayed there by herself with nothing but a water bottle and her thoughts.

  Usually in these situations, criminal suspects will shrug, sigh, mope and express other outward expressions of anger over their predicament.

  Jodi was still worried about her appearance. Still handcuffed, Jodi got on the floor, dropped her head and pulled it back swiftly to bring her hair back.

  “You could have at least done your makeup,” she said aloud to herself. “Gosh.”

  Later, she broke into song. She belted out a verse from a Dido ballad called “Here With Me.”

  “I didn’t hear you breathe/I wonder how I am still here. And I don’t want to move a thing/it might change my memory.”

  She shuffled her water bottle to the left and right on the table in front of her, then picked at the label.

  “And I won’t go. And I can’t hide. And I can’t breathe until you’re resting here with me.”

  Later, a completely different song choice: “O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining.”

  She chuckled to herself and continued with the song. “He knows our needs, hear the angel voices. … O night when Christ was born.”

  She then cried.

  At another point, she raised her arms and placed her hands behind her head and stretched her torso. She inspected a trash can. Then she went to the wall, placed her head on the floor, and did a headstand.

  Jodi was later booked into the system and spent her first night in jail, but detectives took another crack at her crumbling story the next day. Now wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and handcuffs and still alone in the room, Jodi added to the soundtrack of her incarceration, this time the Bette Midler favorite, “The Rose.”

  “Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snow, lies the seed.”

  Flores sent in another investigator to work on Jodi, and the good cop, bad cop game elevated. Detective Rachel Blaney of the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department entered the room and unlocked the handcuffs to make Jodi more comfortable, noting that “these types of cuffs aren’t the most comfortable.”

  “Do you think they’re really designed for comfort?” Jodi asked.

  “They’re not. OK, you’re not going to give us any problems being out of the cuffs. You really don’t look like the type that would.”

  Blaney then took a soothing, almost mother-like tone in her voice as she calmly pressed Jodi.

  “I don’t think you’re the type of person that can sit there during your trial and see Travis’ family sitting over there and continue to make that lie in yourself without it tearing you up,” she said.

  “I don’t think I could either,” she said.

  Blaney continued to pry, but gently, with the focus on Jodi’s character, not the heinous killing.

  “You’re not our typical suspect. You come from a good home, you’re a bright girl. There’s no question in my mind or any of the other investigators’ minds that you were the person that took Travis’ life. But what I need to know or what I’d like to know is … whether you’re a cold-blooded, cold-hearted murderer who slaughtered this guy or are you somebody that got caught up in circumstances and things got out of control. Because I think that’s what happened honestly.”

  It was stellar detective work on the part of Blaney. She was warming up the suspect, trying to get Jodi to open up. But really, Blaney just wanted her to confess and make it easier to lock her up for the rest of her life.

  “Anybody could be capable of harming another person. It’s in our nature. … Most people suppress that,” Blaney said. “What I generally see are the cold-hearted ruthless types. What I don’t see very often, Jodi, are people like yourself that are intelligent and spiritual and caring and so I tend to believe that it was an … incidental circumstance, if you will.”

  Jodi was more closed down than the previous day, barely saying anything in response to Blaney’s kinder, gentler approach. She cried when Blaney mentioned Travis’ family, and Jodi noted how fond her slain lover was of his brothers and sisters.

  “I can only imagine that keeping all of this in is tearing you apart inside. It’s not hard to tell that, you know. You have portrayed yourself as being very strong, but you can see it in your eyes, Jodi,” Blaney said.

  “I fall apart when people aren’t looking,” Jodi said.

  “Just because I’m a cop doesn’t mean that I don’t care, you know, about humanity and people. I’m not sitting here judging you. I’m trying to help you out. Trying to give you a chance to make things right,” she said.

  She then offered a preview of the harsh reality that was to come with her headline-grabbing murder trial.

  “When this goes to trial, the media’s there. It’s not kept a secret. Do you want to be out there like O.J. Simpson …? You know, nobody respected him aftewards, even though he maintained his innocence?”

  Blaney told Jodi that this would certainly be big news soon.

  “Do you want to be portrayed as that cold blooded, cold-hearted murderer because the media loves that?” Blaney told her.

  Jodi responded in a soft voice: “You know of course I don’t want to be portrayed as a cold-blooded murderer.”

  Blaney went on: “This is kind of a pause, you know, before things start getting heavy. This is an opportunity to help yourself out. When the jury looks at it, those are the things they are going to be mulling around in their mind when they decide what type of sentence to hand out or when they make a recommendation to the judge. Those are the sorts of things that turn a jury, and juries can sometimes be fickle, but I’ve never seen a case with so much concrete hard evidence.”

  Jodi still wouldn
’t admit to the killing, and in fact, most of her answers took a different tack as she talked about how she would be portrayed in the media. Jodi asked about what would happen to her possessions, including a camera and a couple hundred bucks in cash that she was carrying when arrested.

  She asked about her journals and told Blaney where authorities could find them — in her fireproof safe. She broke down in tears as she told Blaney that she shot a wedding for a couple named Brian and Katie the weekend before and that their wedding photos were still on her camera. She said she was happy with how the photos turned out as she worked her magic with photo-editing software.

  “That’s the only thing they have to remember the day,” Jodi said.

  “I think you’re not grasping the reality of the situation,” Blaney said, “and hearing what your concerns are, you should be concerned for yourself right now.”

  They went back and forth for the next 20 minutes or so as Blaney’s patience grew thinner with each lie and Jodi’s behavior became more bizarre. Blaney left the room for a few minutes, and Jodi responded by sitting down on the floor, cowering under the table.

  Blaney returned and tried to put more pressure on Jodi, seeing Jodi’s apparent fear as a chance to get her when she was at her weakest.

  “I’m at the end of my rope,” Blaney said, now changing her tactics. “And what I’m hearing is somebody who doesn’t give a crap about what happened. I’m hearing somebody who is worried about money, your appearance, everything about you. I don’t hear anything about Travis, unless you’re specifically asked.”

  Blaney gave Jodi countless opportunities to unleash her self-defense claim, practically putting the words in her mouth as she attempted to get a confession. “Was he roughing you up and you just couldn’t take it?” she suggested. “Was he being violent on his part?”

  She made some references to their relationship being rocky and how Travis was violent with her and left her bruised. But she didn’t go into the kind of painstaking detail that she did during her trial as she brought out the claim that she killed Travis because he was abusive.