Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (21 page)

But it wasn’t just about Jodi’s good looks or her overtly sexual nature; Travis also found himself drawn in by Jodi’s neediness. Shaun Alexander saw shades of Travis’s difficult upbringing in his relationship with Jodi, explaining that “Travis felt a constant need to pay it forward to somebody. He really wanted to help everybody else.” As Shaun saw it, Travis himself had been rescued from his tough life, and so he in turn wanted to try to rescue Jodi from hers. She was a wounded bird that he was going to save—and she was attractive.

“She fit both bills,” Shaun said as he remembered Travis’s infatuation. “She was good-looking, but also somebody who’s damaged emotionally that he could help.”

This combination of vulnerability and sexuality proved exceptionally potent for Travis, and once they were together he struggled to determine where her neediness ended and her manipulation began.

O
ne person who was no longer blind to Jodi’s behavior was Sky Hughes. It had only been a few months since Sky had reached out to Travis on Jodi’s behalf, but already she was second-guessing her decision to help bring the two of them together. As Travis’s relationship with Jodi progressed, Sky as well as her husband Chris became concerned about Jodi Arias.

For one thing, Sky felt increasingly uncomfortable with what she saw as Jodi’s calculated attempts to make Travis jealous. Sky got the impression that Jodi wanted Travis to think that other men were pursuing her, so that Travis would know he had competition and commit to marrying her before she got away. Sky said one time, at a hotel, Jodi kept walking past an open door where a group of men were involved in a business meeting. “She goes down to where the door’s open, flips her hair, primps in front of the mirrors and walks back and she does it like a couple of times,” Sky recalled. “And I’m like ‘What’s she doing?’ This is bizarre. And she’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, that guy won’t leave me alone. I think he’s going to talk to me . . . If he talks to me, tell him I’m Travis Alexander’s girlfriend.’ So a guy comes out, talks to her, and she looks at me and I say, ‘Oh, she has a boyfriend.’ And, then after he leaves she says, ‘Why didn’t you tell him I am Travis Alexander’s girlfriend?’ Why would it matter? It was just really weird. She was so possessed . . . If he left the room, she would ask, ‘Where’s Travis? Where’s Travis? Where’d Travis go?’ It was disturbing.”

The more time Sky spent around Jodi, the more suspect she became of how Jodi conducted herself. During the first couple of months of their relationship, Travis and Jodi often used the Hugheses’ home for a rendezvous point, since it was somewhat convenient to each of them. In that time, Sky had plenty of opportunity to observe Jodi, and she’d grown concerned by the obsessive and downright strange behavior she’d witnessed.

Jodi seemed to be growing more and more suspicious of Travis and jealous of other women. On one occasion, Sky and Chris caught Jodi listening at the guest room door while Travis talked on the phone to Deanna. They had also found her lingering outside the bathroom, waiting for Travis to emerge. When they surprised her, she threw her hands up in the air and told them she was just about to knock. What really disturbed them, though, was Jodi’s admission that, not only had she found emails from other women to Travis, but she had taken the liberty of forwarding them to her own account, presumably so she could have more time to read and scrutinize them.

Finally, one night in April 2007, when Jodi and Travis were staying with them, Chris and Sky confronted Travis. That night Jodi was angry with Travis for not looking her in the eyes, so she announced she was going to bed early. At that point Chris and Sky told Travis they needed to talk.

“So, we’re upstairs talking for a long time,” Sky recounted. “And, I just got this cold, weird, yucky feeling like I was being watched. And I mouthed to Travis. ‘She’s out there, outside of our door.’ And Travis whispered, ‘No way.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, she’s out there.’ So, we changed the subject—I don’t know how long but not for very long—and then she knocks. And Travis goes to the door and opens it and Jodi says, ‘Is everything okay?’ and Travis says, ‘Oh yeah, we’re just talking about some things,’ and she says, ‘Is everything okay?’ and he says, ‘Yeah, it’s fine.’ And she says, ‘Are you going to bed anytime soon?’ and he says, ‘Yeah, I’ll come down and say good night before I go to bed.’ She said okay. So she went downstairs. Travis looks down. She goes in her room and shuts the door.”

Forty minutes later, Sky thought Jodi was eavesdropping again.

“She’s out there,” she repeated. When Travis ripped open the door, Jodi was standing there. “The look on her face and the feeling Chris and I got is something I’ve never had before or since,” said Sky. “It was like pure evil. And it’s not hindsight. Just the darkest, yuckiest, scariest feeling that I’ve ever had.”

Sky said that night she and her husband were actually frightened for their children. “Chris and I were talking and we’re like, ‘Do we need to get our kids, is she going to burn our house down?’ And we’re like, ‘How did we get in this situation where there is this girl in our house that we are afraid of?’ We don’t know, is she going to harm us? Is she going to harm our children? . . . And I said, ‘I don’t want her here. I don’t want her here ever again. We’re done with her. You need to tell Travis in the morning that she’s no longer welcome here.’ ”

While the discovery of Jodi’s eavesdropping was unsettling, Travis wasn’t as freaked out as Chris and Sky were, and their decision to ban Jodi from the house caught him off guard. According to Sky, when Chris finally told Travis why Jodi was no longer welcome at their home, Travis was quite upset. “He was really hurt,” Sky said. “He didn’t understand. He kept saying Jodi was a really sweet person, but he was totally duped by her. I told Travis, ‘You’re not seeing what we see. There’s something wrong with her.’ ”

Though they’d initially welcomed Jodi into their home, all of that goodwill was gone. Through small glimpses, Chris and Sky had come to see what Travis could not: that there was something unsettling and even frightening about Jodi’s behavior, something that could not be trusted. Travis respected both Sky’s and Chris’s opinions immensely, but now that Travis knew his friends disapproved of Jodi, his relationship with them was awkward for months afterward.

However, their words may not have fallen on deaf ears completely. Perhaps in part because of Sky and Chris’s intervention with Travis, two months later Jodi and Travis were done . . . but not really. Some would say their relationship just went underground.

CHAPTER 13

THE NINJAS

T
he following day, Jodi was brought back to the same interrogation room to resume the interview that had left Detective Flores so frustrated the day before. Jodi’s resolve to maintain her innocence, despite the overwhelming proof of her guilt, was not entirely unusual in this interrogation process. Often, the shock of being cornered and captured brings on denial, especially in someone like Jodi, who had assumed she was too clever to be caught. More time to think about it often leads to a softer stance and a willingness to talk the next day.

The cameras for the July 16 interview again began to roll with Jodi alone. This day, she was wearing a jail-issued orange jumpsuit, her brown hair hanging neatly down across the front of her shoulders. Although she looked comfortable and relaxed, seated with her cuffed hands resting in her lap, she occasionally showed signs of nerves, cracking her neck and rubbing her eyes. When no one else came into the room for several minutes, she began to sing the final verse of Bette Midler’s love song “The Rose.” “Just remember in the winter / Far beneath the bitter snows . . . Lies the seed that . . .” Her a cappella rendition trailed off as sounds of someone arriving could be heard in the hallway behind the closed door.

That day, Jodi’s first interviewer was Detective Rachel Blaney of the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office. Part of the hope was that a female officer might make Jodi more comfortable, especially in light of the sexual content of so much of this case. Blaney removed Jodi’s handcuffs, then spent the next several hours with her, trying to convince her that revealing her point of view at this early stage in the process could work in her favor later on. If Jodi remained unwilling to offer her version of what happened, then the portrait of her would be painted solely by the prosecution and would remain one-sided unless and until she decided to talk.

The clock ticked away with very little to no headway. Jodi seemed less inclined to engage with this female cop, perhaps thinking that the subtle flirtations she relied on with men would be wasted on her. Again and again, Blaney reminded Jodi that the explanation of what her breaking point was, of what made her snap, could potentially better her situation in the long run. Detective Blaney played off her vanity. “You appear to be a cold-blooded killer,” she reminded Jodi about the current state of affairs, “and the media is going to feed off of that. Do you want to be out there like O. J. Simpson? Because nobody felt sorry for him. Nobody respected him, even though he maintained his innocence.” Occasionally, Jodi appeared ready to talk, but then she’d clam up again. Her moments of emotion usually came when she was reminded that her family was part of this now, too, by virtue of her actions. At times, Jodi appeared to sob when she acknowledged the pain the Alexander family was in, although skeptics would say she was faking it.

“Grasping the reality of the situation” was what both Detective Blaney and Detective Flores had in mind for Jodi. But they were in for a surprise during the next part of the interview. When Detective Flores took over the questioning, what Jodi told him was far more ludicrous than what had come before. He came back to the table at Jodi’s request, as he had been in touch with Travis’s family as recently as that morning, and she wanted him to update her on their well-being.

The interview continued at its snail’s pace for what seemed like an eternity. Jodi’s posturing and body language was markedly different with Detective Flores than with her female interviewer, and she grew much more talkative and attentive with Flores. With Detective Blaney, she had mostly sat with her feet planted firmly on the floor. Now she often pulled her feet up to the seat of her chair and wrapped her arms around her knees, sitting the way you would if you were relaxing by a campfire.

Detective Flores knew what he was doing. He was trained to create an atmosphere of trust and ease, so Jodi didn’t stand much of a chance of manipulating him. There was nothing wrong with patience and pacing. The guilty party was across the table from him, so making her comfortable was more important than rushing her. He had been in this career long enough to know that most people accused of crimes, no matter how heinous, want to be liked and understood before they do much confessing. He allowed Jodi to ramble on about the beautiful things she remembered about Travis and their months together, and never suggested she speed it up. In fact, at times Jodi seemed so relaxed, it was as though she didn’t even realize she was under arrest for the murder of the man she was so fondly recalling.

Eventually, when the opportunity seemed best, Detective Flores turned the interview back to the crime scene. He began by asking her if Travis had known she was arriving that night, “So, he knew you were coming . . . he was expecting you?”

“I feel really powerless in here,” Jodi replied, a brutally honest statement in a sea of lies.

“You think his roommates were there? Were their cars there? You would have had to have seen their cars.” Jodi said the cars were a hard predictor of who was home, because sometimes the roommates used the garage, so when she rolled in around 3
A
.
M
., she didn’t pay much attention. (Perhaps by mistake, perhaps intentionally, Jodi had shaved one and a half hours off her road trip as she recounted the day. The evidence would later show that Jodi arrived at approximately 4:30
A
.
M
.) “That makes sense,” observed Flores. “You’re pretty sneaky. You go up there, and his roommates didn’t even know you were there.”

Jodi said Travis was awake and watching YouTube videos when she got there. She had great memory of the details: “It wasn’t anything profane or bad or vulgar. It was just like people dancing, but they had boxes of foil on their head. It was weird, like robotic.” Her memory of other events from that night became increasingly odd as a timeline unfolded.

“What went wrong?” Detective Flores asked, looking for Jodi’s snapping point. “Did he say something to you? Were you angry about something? What was it?” He referred to the photos with Travis alive, which had no indications of tension between Jodi and Travis. “The last one we have is him sitting in the shower. And that’s when I think it happened. He was sitting down, looking up at you. What did you do? What happened, Jodi?”

Jodi’s anxiety kicked in, now that she was fully back in the reality that she was the only suspect. She started vigorously pulling her hair between her fingers as she stared at the wall high above the detective’s head.

“You have to tell me,” the detective continued, pausing long enough to not seem impatient. Jodi put her head into her hands and began to cry. Flores brought up the possibility that there was premeditation, based on her bringing a gun to the house. “I don’t believe you planned it, but then I don’t understand why you took a gun with you,” he said quietly but deliberately.