Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story

by Brian Skoloff,, Josh Hoffner

  “She was fine, she was laughing about simple little things like any other person. I never once felt like anything was wrong during the day,” Burns told jurors.

  After dinner, the two went back to Burns’ home and napped. When they awoke, things again heated up.

  “She got on top of me pretty aggressively and we were kissing. She was right on top of me,” Burns said, explaining how the encounter soon cooled down just like earlier in the day.

  He told jurors Jodi left his home at about 1 a.m. to head back to California.

  After his testimony, Burns appeared on cable network HLN for an interview with Nancy Grace, explaining how “very awkward” the entire saga has been.

  “It’s hard to believe you’re this close to something so dramatic,” Burns said. “I really didn’t think she could have possibly done it.”

  Burns went on to describe how he spoke with Jodi on the phone just hours after she had killed Travis while she headed to Utah to see him.

  “For that whole hour,” he told Grace, “we talked about simple things, giggling about just little jokes, just like normal conversation you would think, obviously very abnormal in retrospect.

  “She seemed just like the Jodi that I’d been talking to for five or six weeks the entire 14 hours that she was with me the day after Travis died.”

  Jodi’s lies, and the stories she weaved in the days and months after killing Travis, were becoming the crux of the prosecution case against her. These weren’t the actions of a woman who had just killed a man in self-defense, the prosecutor would explain.

  This woman was a murderer, clear and simple.

  Jurors would later hear from Maricopa County Medical Examiner Dr. Kevin Horn, who explained the severity of Travis’ wounds and the ferociousness of the attack.

  Horn described gashes on Travis’ hands and feet, clearly defensive wounds as he tried to fight off his attacker, and how it was extremely unlikely that Travis would have been able to do much at all after the gunshot wound to the head. This testimony clearly contradicted Jodi’s story that she shot him first but he kept coming after her, knocking the gun from her hand and forcing her to resort to the stabbing to save her own life.

  Jurors heard a phone message Jodi left Travis just hours after the killing as she began to meticulously plan her alibi to avoid suspicion and cover her tracks.

  “My phone died so I wasn’t able to get back to anybody,” Jodi explained on the call, adding that she wouldn’t be able to make it to Travis’ home for a visit on her road trip.

  Jurors also were repeatedly reminded of her lies to Flores and others upon her arrest in California just about a month after the killing.

  She sobbed as police questioned her, but stuck to her story that she wasn’t involved — even after being shown the pictures that put her at the scene on the day he died.

  The July 15 videotaped interrogation was played for jurors as Detective Flores grilled the defendant, explaining that all the evidence pointed to her involvement. She insisted she didn’t kill him.

  “You shot him in the head, then you got a knife and you stabbed him,” Flores told her. “Jodi, tell me the truth, please.”

  “I did not kill Travis,” Jodi replied.

  Then she said something odd, something that puzzled even the veteran police detective.

  She explained that if she were to have killed him, she couldn’t have stabbed him. It would have been too cruel.

  “I don’t think I could stab him. I think I would have to shoot him until he was dead if that were my intentions,” Jodi told the detective. “If I had it in me to kill him, the least I could have done was make it as humane as possible.”

  Flores confronted Jodi with the photographs, specifically an unintentional shot of Jodi’s leg and a portion of Travis’ bloodied body.

  “It’s your foot, Jodi. These are your pants,” Flores told her.

  “This is his bathroom. That is not my foot,” Jodi replied.

  And she continued with the lies even though at this point, police had everything they needed to prove Jodi was there when Travis died, even that Jodi must have been the one who killed him.

  Martinez showed jurors the gruesome photos of Travis’ bloated body, and pictures taken by police at his home of her handprint and footprints in blood.

  Jodi sat at the defense table, visibly shaken by the reality of what was occurring. She couldn’t bear to look at the pictures. She covered her face. She looked away. It was just too much for her to relive.

  She had a similar reaction when the infamous phone sex recording from May 2008 was played for the jury.

  Jodi’s defense attorneys were preparing to portray her as a love-struck emotional basket case who only begrudgingly agreed to participate in so many raunchy sex acts to please Travis, to make him happy, and to calm his constant rage toward her.

  Martinez was clearly working to paint a picture of a woman who was as much into the sex as Travis was, even instigating it often, introducing lubricant into their relationship as Jodi complained the anal sex grew painful.

  He displayed text messages between Jodi and Travis exchanged about three months before his death.

  “Maybe u could give my ass a much-needed pounding,” Jodi wrote. “I want to fuck you like a dirty, horny little school girl.”

  The case against her grew even stronger with every day of testimony, every raunchy photograph, every recording and text message, and every lie Jodi told police, friends and family before eventually settling on self-defense.

  The prosecution’s final witness before resting its case on Jan. 17, 2013, was a female friend of Jodi who had dinner with her 24 hours after Travis was killed.

  “She was acting like Jodi, the same Jodi I always talk to,” Leslie Udy testified, adding she had been friends with Jodi for about two years at that time.

  Udy told jurors she had a long talk that night with Jodi, who called Travis her best friend.

  “She said that they weren’t together anymore, which I kind of already knew,” Udy said.

  But Jodi told her she and Travis would “always be friends.”

  Days later, Udy said Jodi called her in tears to tell her the news of Travis’ death. Jodi acted shocked. Distraught. Confused. Again, she pondered, who could have done this?

  “She couldn’t imagine why someone could do something like that to Travis, that he was such a wonderful person and why would anybody do that to him,” Udy told jurors.

  Martinez was done — for now. His point was made. Jodi is a liar. She lied from the start, and was still lying now.

  Chapter 20

  The Body

  “CAUSE OF DEATH: Sharp force trauma of neck and torso. MANNER: Homicide.” —Autopsy report for Travis Alexander.

  Travis’ body was a mess. His brain had turned to mush after about five days decomposing in his shower.

  The Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s report would describe the wounds in precise detail. During the trial, Martinez showed the photos of Travis’ mutilated corpse over and over to jurors, emphasizing the sheer brutality of the attack Jodi delivered upon him. He needed the jury to see the wounds, to imagine what it would have been like to suffer such trauma, such pain, such anguish as the life left his body.

  Travis’ family would sob and look away. Jodi, too, couldn’t bear to see the pictures. Each time they were displayed on a large screen in the courtroom, she looked down, sobbing, tears dripping down her cheeks.

  Stab wounds to the head, to the neck, chest, stomach, shoulders, back, and feet, nearly 30 in all, including five on his hands, presumably as he fought furiously to defend himself. He also had a single gunshot wound above his right eyebrow.

  His throat had been slit from ear to ear.

  Jodi claimed she shot Travis first, but he didn’t die, and kept coming after her, forcing her to fend him off with the knife. While she couldn’t recall actually stabbing him, blaming her memory loss on the trauma of the attack, she conceded she must have done it.

>   Part of the prosecution case would come down to the order in which the attack occurred. Prosecutors said it was clear she stabbed him first repeatedly in a blitz assault, and after he was likely already dead, she then shot him in the head. They needed to convince the jury that this happened since it would clearly counter her self-defense claim.

  Why would she need to shoot him after he was no longer a threat, after he was bleeding all over and near death, if not already dead?

  It was a crucial fact in the case that prosecutors needed to prove in order to help secure a first-degree murder conviction and the death penalty.

  Dr. Kevin Horn, who performed the autopsy, testified the gunshot wound would have likely rendered Travis unconscious and unable to defend himself.

  “Again because of the injury to the brain, the information processing part of the brain would have rendered him unable to raise his hands to offer any sort of purposeful action or to verbalize anything,” Horn said.

  Horn’s testimony would be a tough obstacle for the defense to overcome, as he said there was no way Travis could have continued to fight after being shot in the head, as Jodi claims.

  “If the bullet wound was the first wound that was received by Mr. Alexander, would it have been immediately incapacitating?” Martinez asked him.

  “Yes,” Horn replied.

  “And why would it have been incapacitating?” Martinez continued.

  “Because of brain injury,” Horn said.

  A juror query for Horn would sum up his testimony, and obviously later send the panel into deliberations with some serious questions.

  “Can you explain why you think Travis was still alive when his throat was cut?”

  “Because of the large amount of hemorrhage into the soft tissue around the throat wound,” Horn replied. “That requires a beating heart.”

  Chapter 21

  Jodi Takes the Stand

  “They’re probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I’m not even going to swat that fly. … They’ll see and they’ll know, and they’ll say, “Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly.” —‘Psycho’

  Jodi’s defense attorneys began presenting their case Jan. 29, 2013. It went on for nearly 2 1/2 months, delving deep into Jodi’s life, with witness after witness describing her as a gentle soul, an unassuming woman who was in search of herself.

  Their task was daunting. Here is a defendant who had admitted to lying, to creating an alibi to avoid suspicion and arrest, who lied repeatedly about her involvement, who fled the scene of the killing without calling police, without ever checking to see if Travis could be saved.

  The self-defense claim, too, would be an enormous challenge. At the heart of it all was convincing jurors that Travis was a violent man, an abusive womanizer who had attacked Jodi at least four times in the past, kicking her in the ribs, breaking her finger and once even choking her into unconsciousness.

  The problem was that no evidence or testimony supported her claims. She never called police to report the abuse. She never took photographs to document her injuries — something one would think an aspiring photographer would do without even thinking about it. And she never even wrote about any of the abuse in her detailed diaries.

  She would later explain it was because of her belief in the law of attraction, a notion made popular by the movie, “The Secret.” The idea was simple — only put out to the world the sort of energy you want in return. Talking, writing or even thinking negatively only begets more negativity. Jodi insisted she lived by this rule.

  But the lack of documentation of Travis’ abuse would haunt the defense. Their only hope was to portray Jodi as the victim, Travis as the perpetrator.

  Their case would rest largely on demonizing Travis and portraying him as a liar and a cheat who used Jodi to fulfill his raunchy fantasies, berated her publicly and privately, beat her when things didn’t go his way, and ultimately, tried to attack her one last time on the day of his death.

  The defense tactic throughout the case was clear — introduce the jury to Jodi, give them the opportunity to get to know her, through multiple witnesses and eventually, through her own words during 18 days on the witness stand.

  It was not an unsurprising approach. The case against Jodi was damning. At the very least, defense attorneys hoped that if the jury did convict her of first-degree murder, they would spare her life after coming to know the gentle person she was deep inside.

  And with that, the case went in slow motion, and continued that way for weeks, one day dragging into another as reporters and spectators grew bored with the seemingly never-ending tale of Jodi’s life.

  The first defense witness talked mostly about his business mentoring relationship with Jodi through PrePaid Legal, and described her as feminine but conservative.

  Next up was ex-boyfriend Daryl Brewer, who told jurors how Jodi had become more involved with the Mormon church after meeting Travis. Brewer also explained that he never saw Jodi become violent or jealous toward other women in his life. But he described her as sexually aggressive — something that did not work in the defense favor — and said she once took a nude picture of him in the shower.

  An ex-girlfriend of Travis later testified that he cheated on her with Jodi and lied to her about being a virgin, which played right into the defense case that Travis was just out for sex. However, the same woman said Travis had never been physically or emotionally abusive to her.

  Another friend of Travis told jurors about their involvement in the Mormon faith, and again repeated claims that Travis had portrayed himself to be a virgin.

  Another dilemma for the defense was the gun — the very weapon she acknowledged disposing of somewhere in the desert as she fled the scene of the killing, and the very same caliber used to shoot Travis.

  How could it could such a coincidence that Travis was shot with a .25 caliber pistol, and the same caliber was stolen from the Northern California home of Jodi’s grandparents — where she had been staying — just a week before the killing?

  The defense never even tried to explain away the gun. Jodi simply denied that she took it, and insisted that she shot Travis with his own gun that he kept in his closet — coincidentally, a .25 caliber pistol. But again, there was a problem. There was no evidence, no spare bullets, no holster, no gun box, nothing at Travis’ home to prove he ever even owned the weapon.

  And no one testified throughout the trial that Travis owned a gun. No one. Not a shred of evidence. But the defense stuck with this story.

  At the time, pundits, trial watchers and lawyers following the case everywhere thought surely the defense would have a better explanation. Nancy Grace railed about the case every night, condemning Jodi as a murderer.

  Jodi had admitted to lying so many times in the past, blaming it on fear and shame, that one more lie couldn’t have made a difference. She could have easily acknowledged she took the gun, if only for self-defense against a man she claimed had been abusing her. But she didn’t.

  The story of Jodi’s entire defense would largely rest on her words, her accounts, her assertions. Sure, the text messages, the phone recordings, the emails, all showed that Travis was clearly not the man he presented himself to be publicly. He was a Mormon. He was looking for a good wife of faith, but he also liked the sex with Jodi. There was just no question about it. Travis’ own words proved it.

  But just who was the sexual aggressor in the relationship always remained unclear.

  And for the jury to make the leap to self-defense, they would have to believe that not only was Travis very much into sex with as many women as he could get into bed — and some pretty kinky sex at that —but that he was a physically violent man toward women. None of his past girlfriends or acquaintances described him as such a person.

  A defense expert testified that Jodi suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and amnesia, explaining why Jodi couldn’t recall much from the day she killed Travis.

  Another expert told jurors Jo
di was indeed abused by Travis and suffered from battered woman’s syndrome. Enter the prosecution expert who later countered it all, saying Jodi suffered from none of the diagnoses and instead had borderline personality disorder, a severe mental illness marked by unstable moods in behavior and relationships that can lead to brief psychotic episodes.

  These dueling expert witnesses would become crucial to the defense case aimed at saving Jodi’s life.

  But the key to it all was for jurors to hear directly from Jodi herself. In many death penalty trials, the defendant never takes the stand. It creates too many chances for an aggressive prosecutor to poke holes in their stories, and catch the person off guard, creating a “Perry Mason”-style gotcha moment that could clinch the case for a conviction.

  In the U.S. justice system, defendant’s are innocent until proven guilty, meaning it’s not the job of defense attorneys to prove their client didn’t commit the crime. Prosecutors must prove that they did.

  Defense lawyers merely have to create enough confusion in the prosecution case to raise reasonable doubt.

  And that’s exactly what Jodi had hoped to do for herself.

  ***

  “Ms. Arias, you may come forward and take a seat please,” the judge said to stunned whispers in the gallery.

  Jodi got up from the defense table and walked gingerly across the courtroom to the witness stand. She was dressed in a black shirt and khaki pants. Her stringy bangs were combed straight down over her forehead, almost touching her glasses. She looked homely. Bland. Childish. Innocent.

  In their haste to get her to the stand before the jury entered the room, court officials forgot to swear her in. Defense attorneys had requested she be seated before the panel was present so jurors couldn’t see her electronic ankle bracelet placed on her by authorities each time she leaves jail for trial.

  Now the formality.

  “The defense calls Jodi Arias,” said her attorney, Kirk Nurmi.