Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (22 page)

The flyer from Travis’ memorial service that Arias kept in her bedroom.

The receipt from the Walmart in Salinas showing that Arias bought a third gas can for her trip to Arizona.

The 3" x 5" card confiscated by intelligence officers during a search of Jodi Arias’ cell at the Maricopa County Jail.

Jodi Arias smiles in her booking photo at the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office on July 15, 2008.

Mesa Police Detective Michael Melendez, who recovered the photographs from the memory card of the camera found in the washing machine.

Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Detective Nathan Mendes, the lead investigator assisting the Mesa Police Department in the execution of the search warrant on Arias’ home.

Mesa Police Detective Esteban Flores, who was the case agent in the investigation, and his fifteen-year-old son Tony, who was killed in a zip line accident during Arias’ second trial. Detective Flores continued to participate in the trial even after the tragic death of his son.

Jodi Arias looking at the family of Travis Alexander as the jury is seated during the aggravation phase of the trial on May 15, 2013.
(AP Photo/ The Arizona Republic, David Wallace, Pool)

Returning to the prosecution table after one of the many bench conferences with Judge Stephens.
(AP Photo
/ The Arizona Republic,
Rob Schumacher, File)

T
rial strategy isn’t a matter of simply calling a witness to the stand, asking questions, and showing pictures to the jury—it’s about making difficult decisions regarding who will be called as a witness and what evidence to present, along with the order in which each will be introduced. Choosing when to present a piece of evidence to a jury is almost more important than the evidence itself, as the timing can affect the way a jury may treat it. Introducing a fact too soon can cause them to miss its importance, while introducing it too late runs the risk of having jurors disregard it, as their minds may already be made up. This is the fine line I had to walk in the Jodi Arias case.

The trial had already been rescheduled a number of times before the judge set a firm date of December 10, 2012, for the start of jury selection. I’d been preparing for this since my walk-through of the crime scene on June 10, 2008. Preparation isn’t something that I do all at once, but rather it’s a gradual and ongoing process, as I refine my thinking about each witness and decide the best approach to maximize the impact of their testimony.

In this case, my most important decision was deciding when I was going to introduce the information that Arias had utilized three gas cans to hide her trip into Arizona. Prosecutors are trained to present their most compelling evidence as part of their opening remarks, as a way to signal to the jury the most significant aspects of their case. Under normal circumstances, I would have included the information about the gas
cans in my opening statement and made it a part of my case in chief. But I did not want to give Arias time to formulate a story explaining why it was necessary for her to take three gas cans on her trip. My plan was to wait until the opportune time to reveal that I knew of their existence. That would be when the defense was presenting its case and called Darryl Brewer to the stand.

Arizona law does not limit cross-examination of a witness to questions about issues raised during the direct examination. Once the defense called Brewer to testify, my intention on cross-examination was to have him confirm that he lent Arias the two five-gallon gas cans for use during her trip. Having this information come from Brewer would make it harder for Arias to deny that she had made the request and that she had told Brewer her intended destination was Mesa.

This approach was extremely risky. I was relying on defense counsel to call a witness, but there was always a chance that they would choose not to have Brewer testify, even though his name was on their witness list. He was merely an ex-boyfriend who had lived with Arias and could only speak about how well she got along with him and his young son, which didn’t make him crucial to Arias’ self-defense claim.

To ensure that defense counsel, and Jodi Arias herself, did not know of my desire to have Brewer take the stand, I went out of my way to appear uninterested in him as a witness. Just as defense counsel has the right to interview all potential witnesses to be called by the prosecution, I have the same right with any of the defense’s potential witnesses. I made a conscious decision not to request an interview with Brewer prior to trial, although I conducted interviews with every other person on the defense’s list of potential witnesses.

If the defense ultimately decided not to call Brewer, I knew I could still raise the issue of the gas cans in my cross-examination of Jodi Arias, but relying on that as a backup strategy was even riskier. Without Brewer’s testimony framing
the story, it would be easy for her to deny borrowing them, leaving me worse off than if I had never broached the subject. My decision would be further complicated if I then wanted to call Brewer as a witness to rebut her denial. Brewer lived in California, and the subpoena power of an Arizona court to compel his appearance as a witness extends only as far as the state border. I could request that a California court order him to travel to Arizona and give testimony, but that would take time. There would be no way to guarantee that he would be forced to appear pursuant to an out of state court order before the trial ended. And even if I could get Arias to admit that she bought a gas can at the Walmart in Salinas by showing her the receipt, that admission alone would prove nothing, because one five-gallon can of gasoline was not enough to get her through Arizona without stopping and filling up.

There was another drawback to my strategy, which was that the defense could choose to call Brewer
after
calling Arias. Usually defendants taking the stand in their defense go on last, but that isn’t always the case. My strategy regarding the gas cans would be more powerful if Brewer testified before Arias. If the order were reversed and Arias went on before Brewer, I’d be forced to ask her about the gas cans first, which would not be as impactful as having Brewer lay out a story that she could not refute.

Hoping the defense would call Brewer to the stand before Arias was a gamble, but it was one I was willing to take, because it was my best chance of showing Arias had planned the trip to Mesa thereby exposing her self-defense claim as a sham.

Another decision I needed to make was when to introduce the three “attempts” Arias made to contact Travis
after
she killed him. Their existence had already been disclosed to defense counsel, and while presumably Arias was aware of them, she didn’t know when I was going to use them.

Because I anticipated that Arias was going to testify in her own defense, I decided that asking her about the text, voice
message, and e-mail on cross-examination would be much more powerful than introducing them during the presentation of my case. Waiting until Arias was on the stand to ask about these three communications would force her to explain why she sent them if she knew that Travis was already dead.

The other important decision I had to make was how forcefully I would approach Arias when she took the stand. Long before the trial started, I had decided that I was going to question her aggressively if she made good on her promise to
48 Hours
that she would testify. From my close viewing of Arias’ interviews with Detective Flores, I’d seen what could happen if she was given space to get comfortable. In the span of two interviews with him, she’d told two different stories about Travis’ murder. If that weren’t reason enough to be cautious, the forgery of the “Bob White” letters was a strong indication of the lengths that she would go if unchecked. I could not afford to give her any room to believe she could manipulate the truth on the stand by taking advantage of an easy-going questioning style.

Even when backed into a corner, she still seemed comfortable, so my intent was to keep her off balance and under pressure. I knew from experience that there are a couple of ways to do this—one comes from the pace of the questions, the other from the tone of voice. I’d planned to use both.

Although the use of this aggressive approach would make it harder for Arias to come up with answers on the spot and keep them consistent with the many stories she had told, there was also the chance that this style could backfire with the jury. Arias’ position was that she had been victimized by Travis, so a harsh approach could be seen as another instance of a man in her life mistreating her. But, in the end, I had no doubt that my approach was the right one, and under the circumstances, it was a risk I had to take.

Arizona is one of the few states that permits jurors to submit questions in writing, which may be asked of a witness after the
lawyers have completed their questioning. The procedure for asking jurors’ questions differs in that the judge is the person who reads the questions to the witness. After the judge finishes reading the questions, the party calling the witness may follow up on issues raised by the jurors’ questions. The opposing party is then afforded the last opportunity to question the witness which is significant because the final thing the jury will hear will be answers to the opposing counsel’s questions.

This meant that when Arias testified, as I anticipated she would, I would have the last word, potentially providing me the opportunity to have the third gas can issue be the last thing the jury would hear discussed with Arias before she left the witness stand.

With the presentation of my case, my aim was to keep the jury’s attention focused on the horrific nature of the killing. This would be a challenge because the defendant was a woman, some would even think she was attractive, and juries historically associate brutality as endemic to a man. So, I needed to have them look past the stereotype and just consider the evidence.

Similarly, I wanted the jury to see beyond Travis’ faults, to make them focus on what she had done to him, not on the way he had spoken and written to her. I was not going to hide that he was human and had his shortcomings, but I wasn’t going to linger on them either. If I was not careful, and became too focused on protecting Travis’ character, I might turn the trial into a rehabilitative exercise, rather than proving that Arias had planned and carried out his murder. While it would have been easy to try to focus on Travis’ Mormon faith, his work history at PPL, or his relative youth, none of those things were what this case was about. It was about a scorned woman who exacted revenge for Travis’ failure to choose her.

But taking his life had not been enough. She was now claim
ing he was a pedophile, alleging that she had walked in on him on January 21, 2008, while he was masturbating to pictures of young children. She recounted that the pictures were on the bed while Travis was touching himself. Arias’ uncorroborated accusation that Travis was a pedophile appeared to be gratuitous character assassination that raised the already inflammatory tone of her defense to a higher level. According to her, he had always been verbally abusive, but after she caught him that day, he became physically abusive as well.

Arias described three occasions when she claimed that Travis had struck her. She said the first occurred in October 2007 when they were arguing and he pushed her down on the ground to prevent her from leaving the bedroom. The second supposedly happened at Travis’ house, where he threw her down on the floor and kicked her, breaking a finger on her left hand. The last incidence of alleged violence was when he struck her while she was staying at his house immediately before her move to Yreka. According to Arias, he threw her down on the ground, got on top of her, and choked her until she passed out.

The introduction of these latest allegations smacked of desperation because she now apparently realized there was nothing other than her word to support her self defense claim that he had attacked her. But I was not going to be anticipatory in my presentation in an attempt to discredit these claims as part of my case and would instead wait until cross examination to dispute these allegations while Arias was on the witness stand.

Proving the first-degree murder charge required that I show that Arias was the one who killed Travis and that she had premeditated his killing, and the place to start was by showing what had happened in the master bedroom suite on June 4, 2008. I had a choice of whom I was going to call to set the crime scene, which involved explaining to the jury the date, time, and circumstances under which Travis’ body was found.
This is usually done through the testimony of either a police officer who had responded to the emergency call or detectives responding to the scene, but I wanted to start my presentation of evidence with a more impactful witness.

I could have called Travis’ roommate Zachary Billings to offer testimony about his role in the discovery of his friend’s body, but I wanted a broader picture painted through my first witness and instead chose to call Mimi Hall. Mimi was a Mormon woman and Travis’ friend, someone he had dated for a brief time. She was also the person he had invited to accompany him on a trip to Cancún, Mexico, which appeared to be the motive that spurred Arias to kill Travis. He had never asked Arias to go with him on that trip, and she had tried to act as if not being chosen to accompany him hadn’t bothered her, to the point that she had gone to the other extreme of telling Detective Flores that she was planning to ask Travis if she could stay at his house during the time he was in Mexico.

Mimi Hall would be able to describe the circumstances that led her to Travis’ house the night his body was eventually found. She was also knowledgeable about the Mormon religion and would discuss aspects of the faith, including the prohibition against premarital sex, which applies equally to all members regardless of gender.

Continuing the crime scene story would be witnesses from the Mesa Police Department, because they had carried out the investigation and could speak to the specifics of how Travis was killed. Officer Sterling Williams was the first officer on the scene and would describe the signs of decomposition he observed on the body when he found it. His observations would support the notion that the killing had occurred days before the body was discovered.

Of course, I would also call Detective Flores to testify. He was the lead investigator in the case, who was familiar with every aspect of the investigation. He kept track of the roles of
other officers involved in the case, submitted items for testing, such as DNA and fingerprint analysis, and would sit next to me at the prosecution table throughout the trial. His time on the stand was going to be broken down into segments rather than having him complete his testimony in one sitting. I planned to call him to provide testimony about such things as Arias’ in-person and telephone statements to him over the course of the investigation, her appearance on
Inside Edition,
and details about Arias’ arrest and the search of Travis’ home. I would not be presenting all of her statements at one time, as I had found that video or audio statements played one right after the other have a tendency to run together and be confusing to the jury, which could lessen their impact.

The other reason for truncating Flores’ appearances on the witness stand was that he could fill gaps of time that normally occur during trial because of witness-scheduling conflicts. Juries do not appreciate when their time is wasted waiting for a witness to appear, or when the court day ends early because the next witness is not available until the next day. As case agent, Detective Flores would be present in court and available to testify at a moment’s notice, so it wouldn’t be an inconvenience or waste of time for him, and there would be no dead time for the jury.