Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (3 page)

Although Andrews believed it was Arias who sent it, she had no definitive proof.

Andrews also told police about an incident that had happened in February of 2008. She and Travis were at his house that evening when someone knocked on the front door. When they answered the door, there was no one there. They stepped outside to look around and still didn’t see anybody, so they went back inside. The next day, they discovered that the tires on Travis’ BMW had been slashed. They initially thought it was just a random act, until they heard the same knock on the front door the next night and found that Travis’ tires had been slashed for a second time.

Travis called police that afternoon to report the second tire
slashing. But after waiting for four hours for officers to respond, he left because he couldn’t wait any longer.

I’d only been back at the office for a bit when Flores called me with another update. Apparently in the hours after Travis’ body was discovered, Arias had made a number of phone calls to others in addition to the initial call she had made to police asking to speak to a detective. Arias started calling Travis’ friends and according to them, Arias let them know she was just calling to find out what was happening. Police had encouraged one of the friends, Zachary Billings, who was standing outside of the house when his phone rang, not to answer her call. Apparently when her calls to other mutual acquaintances went unanswered, Arias called police for a second time.

“This time,” Detective Flores said, “she was insistent, almost demanding to speak with the investigating officer.” This message spoke of impatience, as she indicated that she was still waiting for detectives to return her call. Arias’ earlier call asking to speak with an investigator had not struck either of us as particularly unusual. She was an ex-girlfriend who appeared to still care for Travis. As far as police knew, she had moved to Yreka, California, a couple of months earlier and hadn’t returned for a visit, and they figured she probably didn’t have any useful information. On the other hand, she might be able to provide a viable lead, so it was important to return her call.

“As soon as I call her, I’ll get back to you with an update, but I’ll hold off until I’m back at the station so that I can get the conversation on tape,” Flores told me.

It was after 4:00
P.M
. when I heard from him again. He told me he had returned Arias’ call earlier that afternoon at 2:35
P.M
., and found she was very cool and composed during their conversation. As he recapped the call, I found myself increasingly curious to hear it for myself, so I asked the detective to bring a copy of the forty-one-minute, fourteen-second audio
recording of their conversation to my office, because I wanted to hear Arias’ voice.

My first impression in listening to the call was that Arias genuinely seemed to want to help Detective Flores and sounded especially engaging as the conversation progressed.

“Well, I just wanted to offer any assistance that I might have,” she began in a soft, even tone. “I was a really good friend of Travis’. I don’t know a lot of anything . . .”

“What have you heard so far?” Flores asked her.

“I heard that he was—that he passed away, and that, um, it was, I, I don’t know. I heard all kinds of rumors. I heard there was a lot of blood. I heard that, um, his roommate found him or his friend found him or, people were, I just, I’m sorry, it’s all, I’m, I’m just upset . . .”

“Okay.”

“I heard that, uh, he, he, nobody’s been able to get ahold of him for almost a week, which, and that was about the last time I spoke to him, too.”

“Okay,” the detective said again, allowing Arias to fumble over her words. I knew he was purposely holding back information so he could see what it was she knew, as well as determine a possible motive for her call.

“Uh, which is actually why I thought I—my friend said I should call you anyway and let you know the last time I talked to him.”

“Yeah, absolutely,” Flores said, continuing the conversation. “Any help we can get from anybody who had any kind of contact with him, uh, any phone contact . . .”

“I used to talk to him quite regularly,” Arias volunteered. “Um, I used to live there. I live in Northern California now. Um, but after I moved, I moved a few months ago, and after I moved we kept in touch very regularly, and, um, kinda fell back a little bit, but it got down to a couple times a week. But I hadn’t heard from him. I—I—I talked to him on Tuesday night.”

“Okay,” Flores acknowledged, continuing to offer no details.

“Um, I looked at my phone records on, on the, on the Internet to check and, uh, so I definitely talked to him Tuesday night,” Arias said, referring to the night of June 3.

That she had taken the time to check her phone records before speaking to police caught my interest. It seemed unusual that she would have this information at the ready in support of an alibi especially since police had not even attempted to question her yet.

Flores’ tone remained steady. “Okay, so, and that was Tuesday night? Do you remember about what time?”

“Uh, I think it was, I wanna say, like, a quarter after nine. But I think—it was some time between eight and ten. But I know it wasn’t as late as ten. Probably between eight thirty and nine thirty more so, to narrow it down.”

Her failure to give a time also struck me as odd since the phone records she had supposedly reviewed include the time a call is made.

“Okay, and, uh, what did you guys talk about?”

“Um, it was brief,” Arias recounted. “He—I was—um—I was driving out to Utah, and, you know, he was like, ‘Are you gonna come out and see me?’ And I’m like, ‘No.’ And, you know—he’s—he’s supposed to make a trip up here, um, at the end of the month because he—we—um—this thing we are doing, it’s called, um—there’s a book called
1,000 Places to See Before You Die.
”

I remembered seeing that book on Travis’ nightstand when I visited the crime scene, so I was curious to hear what Arias had to say about it.

“. . . It’s been featured on the Travel Channel and all that,” she continued, her voice animated. “And we sorta got into that last year where we were starting to see all these different places on the list. And we thought, you know, one thousand places is a lot of places, but why not? That would be a fun goal. So we each kind of have that goal.”

Arias’ claim that she and Travis were intending to travel together later in the month also struck me as strange, because I knew Travis’ friends had painted her as a kind of a stalker ex-girlfriend, so it didn’t make sense that they would be making plans to go away together.

“Was that trip already scheduled, or is it just something you guys talked about?” Flores asked.

Arias stumbled over her answer. “Um, it was—it was—wasn’t officially, like, dated. That’s—I had been trying to reach him, so I could solidify my own schedule, because I was planning on making a trip down there . . . um, yeah. But, uh, it was supposed to happen in May and then, um, supposed to happen last week, and that didn’t work out, so he was gonna leave for Cancún today and, um, and then he said as soon as he gets back from Cancún, he was gonna make the trip.”

I could hear in the detective’s voice that he was taking notes as he moved the conversation back to the subject of Travis’ death. “Did he have any issues with anybody here in town? Any enemies, anybody that wanted to do him harm?”

“You know,” Arias replied, “he got his tires slashed—it was last year. Um, he was, he—he said he was worried about that. Um, and I was worried about that. He never locked his doors. And I told him—I would tell him, ‘Lock your doors.’ And he’d be like, ‘You’re not my mom.’ You know.”

By now, Flores had already been told about the tire-slashing incident and knew that all of Travis’ friends were pointing to Arias as the culprit, although he didn’t let on what he knew. Instead, he asked her about her relationship with Travis. “How would you describe your relationship with him?”

From Arias’ tone, which was upbeat and positive, it appeared she liked talking about this topic. “We dated for like five months,” she recounted. “And we broke up and we continued, actually, to see each other for quite a bit . . . right up until I moved.

“. . . We officially broke up June 29 of last year. . . . Even
though we broke up, and we were no longer boyfriend and girlfriend, we decided to remain friends. But—you know, I—I kinda feel embarrassed talking about this, but it was more like—it was more than friends, but it wasn’t boyfriend and girlfriend. It was more like kinda buddies. Do you know what I mean?”

“Okay . . . so you guys were not like, uh, romantically, uh, together at any time of . . .”

“We—we were intimate, um, but I wouldn’t say romantic as far as the relationship goes,” Arias responded in a matter-of-fact tone. “We were in no way headed toward marriage, uh, or talking about anything like that. We hung out probably . . . sometimes.”

“Now, you say intimate,” Flores repeated, in an attempt to verify what he had just been told. “Does—does that include, like, a sexual relationship with him?”

“Yeah, it does.” Arias’ confirmation added an interesting wrinkle to the story, one that would continue to unfold as the investigation into Travis’ death continued. “If you could keep it confidential for now,” Arias asked, implying a concern with protecting Travis’ reputation. “Because I know that it’s—you know—he’s Mormon and it’s . . . seriously looked down upon in—in our church and—I mean, I just—I’m telling you this to be helpful in any way I can,” she explained.

When asked about the last time she saw Travis, Arias maintained that it was in early April. She couldn’t remember for sure, but claimed it was sometime between April 7 and 10, when she left Mesa to return home to Yreka, California.

“Did you stop by the house, uh, when you rented the U-Haul, to say good-bye to him?” Flores asked.

“Oh yeah, in fact, um, I was, I was almost completely moved out of my house for about a week afterward, and I just stayed at his house the whole time. I mean, I practically lived there even when I was there. I spent—I spent the night there several times a week while I lived there. Um, I came over and cleaned his house a lot. He—he sorta—he paid me a little bit
every month to keep his house clean and nice . . . sorta like a housekeeper.”

“But, you haven’t physically been here since you left?”

“Since I moved, no, I haven’t,” Arias said before launching into a lengthy explanation about her intention of staying at Travis’ house while he was away in Cancún. She claimed that Travis’ house was always open to her, as long as she gave him a heads-up.

“I was gonna go this week, actually, while he [Travis] was in Cancún and stay at his house. But I just—it’s not in the budget.”

“Okay, was that something that you guys had scheduled, that you were gonna come down and stay at his house when he was gone?”

“Yeah—or no—actually. Not—that’s what I e-mailed him about last week ’cause it was kinda last minute,” Arias claimed. “’Cause I was gonna go—I’m looking at a calendar here. I was gonna go not this week but the next week and then he was gonna come up here that following week, which was the Fourth of July. And, um, I know it sounds kinda weird. We’re all like travelers . . . And I figured, you know, it would be a good idea if I—I would have a place to stay. His house is open all the time to friends. I mean—anybody in his business or anybody that comes to visit, he gives up his bed. He’ll sleep on the couch. He let them have the whole room. Um, so it just didn’t seem he—he said that the door is always open, so I would have felt totally okay just showing up and staying at his house and eating his frozen dinners, et cetera, et cetera. And he would have been fine with that, too. And I just, you know, he said, ‘Just always give me a heads up.’ So, I—I asked him, you know, ‘Let me know if that’s cool. If not, I’ll make other arrangements.’ And I never heard back.”

Something about Arias’ tone and the way she stumbled over her words raised my suspicions. Her answers included too
many details, all designed to paint an idyllic picture of their post-breakup relationship, which was clearly at odds with what others were saying.

“And, when was that e-mail sent out?” Flores asked.

“Uh, just a few days ago. I’m in front of my computer, so I can check right now for you,” Arias told him. “. . . Um, let’s see, I sent one on June 7, ‘Haven’t heard back from you.’”

That he was likely already dead when this e-mail was sent was not lost on me.

“He got a little bit upset when I said I wasn’t driving out to see him,” she pronounced, suddenly moving the conversation in a darker direction. “But he—he gets upset real easily. Um—I don’t know. He just—he likes to hang it over me a little bit and we kinda guilt each other sometimes.”

“So you guys still had a fairly decent relationship as friends?”

“We did . . .”

“’Cause the people that we talked to, uh, said that you guys, uh, that your relationship was kinda rocky and—uh—it got a little—it got a little crazy at times . . .”

Arias did not miss a beat in responding. “Um, what happened was when I—I broke up with Travis around last year—because—it was all really dumb. It was a bunch of drama. I, uh, had the suspicion that he was cheating on me and so I—I looked in his phone and found out, and I found all these text messages and, like, it just all blew up and it was, like, we realized we couldn’t trust each other, so, I mean, we broke up at that point. But we were still—we were still attracted to each other and we still loved each other. So, it wasn’t the best thing, but we still hung out all the time together.”

Detective Flores kept the conversation moving with questions about the furnishings and bedding in Travis’ bedroom, which Arias answered in great detail. I found her somewhat chatty for someone talking to a police officer about the death of an ex-boyfriend. When asked how she learned of Travis’
death, she put forth the name of a mutual friend, Daniel Freeman. “I met him last year with his sister when we all took a trip out to the Grand Canyon and to Sedona,” she offered.

“So he called you last night and told you what happened?”

“Yeah, yeah, he did. He didn’t have a lot of information.”