Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (25 page)

Rachel’s place did not work out for very long. Jodi was only there for two and a half weeks when Rachel and her boyfriend eloped and needed the house back for the two of them. Jodi found her next accommodation from a church website called LDShousing.net. She found a room in a house in Gilbert, about ten minutes from Travis’s house but in a different LDS ward. Jodi insisted separate wards were exactly what she had in mind, not wanting to be obligated to run into her ex if they weren’t getting along. She didn’t want to have him treat her poorly or outright ignore her in front of their mutual friends.

Travis didn’t want Jodi in his ward, either, but for different reasons. He was already in the process of moving on. In July 2007, not even two weeks after the official breakup with Jodi, he was dating a fellow church member by the name of Lisa Andrews. Lisa was exactly the kind of nice Mormon girl that Travis was convinced he wanted. At only nineteen, she wasn’t in quite the same hurry to get married that Travis was, but it didn’t take long for him to raise the topic of marriage. Lisa told him she was in no way ready to make such a commitment. Once again, Travis was in his all-too-typical dilemma: the one who wanted him was waving her arms madly and screaming “marry me,” while he was offering up his devotion to someone who was probably going to say no.

Meanwhile, Jodi was settling into Mesa life. She got a job at a P. F. Chang’s restaurant, and according to Jodi, when Travis offered to pay her to clean his house, she accepted, needing the supplemental income. He was going to pay her $12.50 an hour for sixteen hours a week, giving her an additional $200 weekly. It is unclear if Travis ever paid Jodi, as some of his friends said that it was Jodi who had offered to clean his house for free. One of his friends recalled how on one occasion Travis told him that no matter what Travis did, he couldn’t get rid of Jodi, explaining how she’d even offered to clean his house for free just to be around him. Another friend, Sky Hughes, said Travis was often too busy to see Jodi, which was why she offered to clean—just to be near him.

Regardless of whose idea it was, her cleaning at the house gave the two of them a way to be together legitimately but clandestinely, and they took advantage of the situation often, according to Jodi. Unfortunately, giving Jodi access to his house meant Travis was able to keep his addiction to his guilty pleasure full-blown. The pusher was right there serving him his drug on a silver platter.

It was going to be hard for either one to move on when they were completely enmeshed in each other’s business and watching each other’s every move. Clancy Talbot was on an out-of-town PPL group trip with Travis around the time that Jodi moved to Mesa. “Every time we’d come back into cell phone service his phone would just go off. And you could tell by the look on his face he was frustrated and it was her. She was calling and texting and texting,” she said.

But, when the PPL excursion ended and he got back to Mesa, the sexual feeding frenzy started again and continued for months. Now that the two were in the same town for the first time, the situation couldn’t have been messier. It almost became impossible to tell what the dynamics were. For all intents and purposes, each one was using the other at will, be it sexually or manipulatively, and the energy between them was becoming more and more toxic. On one hand, Travis seemed to be having Jodi fulfill his wildest sexual fantasies, and she in turn would later interpret that as her being “used like a doormat.” On the other, her own behavior could easily be seen as manipulative—going to bed with Travis to remind him that sexually, it couldn’t get better than her, so he’d best marry her. Therefore, she was the one selling herself short for self-serving purposes, no matter how she might describe herself later as the passive player in their sex games. It was always a possibility that Jodi enjoyed the taboo sex more than she was ever willing to admit, their kinky games supercharging her sexual pleasure. A straight shooter would say they were both using each other.

Collateral damage in all this was Travis’s relationship with Lisa Andrews. In fact, part of Travis’s inability to resist Jodi’s body was rooted in the fact that Lisa and Jodi could not have been more different from each other sexually. Lisa was a strong adherent to the Law of Chastity, and she struggled with Travis’s apparent lack of commitment to leading a chaste life. Already, she was having Mormon guilt about kissing Travis to the point where he had an erection. She was so naïve about the situation inside his pants, she assumed it was something he could control, not an act of nature. She also thought it was somewhat her fault that she had not done enough to keep his thoughts clean.

It was a difficult situation for Travis. He was torn between the path of chastity with Lisa and the lingering temptation of Jodi. On at least one occasion, Travis spoke to his friend Taylor Searle about it.

“What should I do?” Travis asked Taylor one day. “Should I keep dating Jodi or should I light-speed go pursue someone like Lisa? Jodi is hot, and she is what I want if I’m pursuing my physical desires, or should I give all that up and go date the little Mormon girl and have something that has a possible future?”

According to Taylor, Travis was super-attracted to Jodi, but he didn’t think his physical attraction to her was enough to make her an appropriate choice for a wife. Once again, the importance of Travis’s age came up. “The reason Travis was asking the question was because he was approaching the age of thirty, which is kind of the significant age in a young Mormon’s life, where he all of a sudden feels old, and realizes that he hasn’t gotten married yet. So, he was approaching that age and realized that he needed to stop being a playboy who just dated a whole bunch of girls without an eye to the future,” Taylor said. Travis raised his dilemma several times with Taylor, showing just how aware and preoccupied Travis was about the trajectory of his relationship with Jodi. He was torn between dating Jodi, who represented his old life, or dating someone like Lisa, who represented the direction in which he wanted to go.

Unable to sever ties with his past, that September Travis and Jodi went to Havasupai Falls in Arizona, another region of stunning natural beauty near the Grand Canyon. They went with Dan and Desiree Freeman, the brother-and-sister team they had traveled with that past spring. This trip was also not without uncomfortable arguments, at least at the outset. In one antagonistic confrontation, Jodi had filled a backpack with ten pounds’ worth of beauty products, everything from lotions to hand sanitizer. Travis and Dan wanted to make it lighter, and as they started taking items out of the bag, Jodi began crying and ran upstairs, with Travis close at her heels. Dan described how the two barely talked to each other at the start of the trip, although within a half hour everyone was joking and happy again.

Of course, lost in all this was the fact that Travis was still dating Lisa. Finally, later that month, Lisa decided that she’d had enough. For a while Travis’s communications with other women had been concerning her, as it seemed either Jodi, Deanna, or both were always trying to get in touch with him. What made it worse, though, was that Travis was always responding. The behavior made her very uncomfortable. However, when Lisa learned from one of Travis’s former roommates that he had been cheating on her with Jodi, she knew enough was enough, ending things with him less than twenty-four hours after hearing about his infidelities. Lisa had been under the impression the two were exclusive, but Jodi made sure that didn’t happen.

A prevailing question might be, why didn’t Jodi just walk away? She was a young lady with incredible tenacity, always managing to scramble out of dire circumstances and land on her feet. She was funny, smart, and extremely attractive. She was stylish and easygoing. She was artistic, creative, and clever, and yet she had her sights on one man only. She had been a monogamous person. She didn’t have a track record for being a classic black widow, going after rich men to secure their wealth for herself and discarding them in the process. According to Jodi, she didn’t want to completely abandon the relationship with Travis, despite how he treated her, because she loved him. However reasonable it would have been to move on and find someone else, she held on to her fantasy that he was her prince, even though he didn’t know it yet. Eventually, it got to the point of being delusional.

By mid-fall, the reality of Jodi’s place in Travis’s life had grown impossible for her to ignore. In October, she and Travis traveled to a balloon festival in New Mexico together, but instead of the trip being a sign of Travis’s renewed interest in Jodi, it was merely a precursor to Travis getting back together with Lisa a couple of weeks later. As it turned out, Travis worked his charm, calling and texting Lisa to ask her for another chance, trying to convince her that things between him and Jodi were over. Travis and Lisa began dating again, breaking up once more a few weeks before Christmas. This time the breakup was not because of Jodi, but because Lisa felt that Travis was getting too serious for her. Like their previous breakup, though, it did not last long, and soon Travis and Lisa were back together.

And all the while, Jodi was poking around, making sure Lisa knew that he still had the hots for his ex. She’d come over after a shift at P. F. Chang’s bearing to-go containers of the restaurant’s honey chicken, claiming she knew it was a favorite of Travis’s roommate. One night in January 2008, as she entered the house with her carry-out, there was Travis standing in the kitchen with Lisa. Jodi turned around and ran out the door, but at least she had interfered with their evening together.

As Travis tried to pull away from Jodi emotionally, these unannounced drop-ins became Jodi’s signature—and they weren’t always through the front door. According to some of Travis’s friends, if the front door was locked, she’d come in through his doggie door and sleep on a couch or even jump into his bed naked.

Still, his text messages with Jodi during this time make it clear that, despite his renewed relationship with Lisa, he continued to talk with Jodi about sex. That very month Jodi sent this text to Travis: “Ahhh!! I fell asleep! But to answer your question, yes I want to grind you. And I want to be LOUD. And I want to give you a nice, warm ‘mouth hug’ too. :)” About a month after walking in on Travis and Lisa in the kitchen, in February 2008 Jodi sent Travis a raunchy text message, saying, “Maybe u could give my ass a much-needed pounding,” apparently inviting him to engage in anal sex with her, the very anal sex she would later paint as degrading.

Finally, later in February 2008, Lisa broke off the relationship with Travis for a third and final time. Unlike the previous breakups, this one was more mutual, with both of them acknowledging that there were problems. For one thing, Lisa again thought he was getting too serious about his marriage agenda. Although he had worked for months on issues that upset her—she had blamed him for getting erections during their make-out sessions, she didn’t want him to grab her butt in public, and she wanted him to be more supportive of her aspiration to be a teacher—there were still issues, namely, Jodi Arias and his lingering relationship with her.

In Travis’s final months with Lisa, Jodi had become a huge problem, and she seemed to be growing more and more unhinged. Travis and Lisa had been in Barnes & Noble one afternoon, and the next day Lisa received an email from an unknown sender that referred to them being in that store. It was clear from the content of the email that the person had been watching them. Travis told Taylor he was sure it had been Jodi. “She must have been outside in the parking lot watching us through the window,” Travis reported. He also told Taylor that Jodi had stolen some of his journals from his bedroom. There were no other suspects. For years, he had been keeping journals devotedly, chronicling his journey through life. He hoped to publish them in a self-help memoir titled
Raising You.
The pages that were missing were the dates of his relationship with Jodi. Lisa was not exempt from Jodi’s relentless stalking. Someone had hacked into her Facebook and email accounts, and Travis was sure it had been Jodi.

Then, also in December, there was vandalism against Travis’s car when his tires were slashed. Even more strange was the fact that, the next day, Jodi called him nonchalantly on his cell phone, and when he told her about his four tires being slashed, she came right over to pick him up for the trip to the mechanic, sort of like the arsonist phoning in about the fire. When Travis’s car was ready, Jodi followed him on the freeway only to watch him get off at Lisa Andrews’s exit again. Jodi then had the audacity to call him on his phone, saying that she had seen him get off at the “wrong” exit. That night the doorbell rang and the tires had been sliced, again. Travis and Lisa had tried off and on for a year, and their relationship had reached its natural conclusion. At least for the time being, it appeared that Jodi was victorious—Travis Alexander was hers.

I
f Jodi thought Travis would come running back to her after he broke up with Lisa, she was quite mistaken. He may still have had sex with her, but now his more “innocent” affections moved to Marie “Mimi” Hall. She was foxy and brunette, “smoking hot,” he told a friend, and she had confidence that the younger women in the Desert Ridge ward lacked. His friend Taylor said Travis was infatuated with Mimi. “He’d never really even talked to her more than once, but for some reason, he was super-drawn to her, and he really wanted to pursue her.” Taylor cited Bambi when he said his friend was so lovestruck, he was “twitterpated,” weak in his knees at first glance. “He just had a crush on her right away. He saw pursuing Mimi as pretty much his way of starting over, getting over the Jodi baggage.”

Meanwhile, the Jodi baggage was still in the front hall. He was having sex with her, but he had never been more emotionally distant. The sex was becoming more and more outrageous, according to Jodi. Travis was even making a long list of sexual fantasies he wanted to fulfill with her. For him, however, the sex was where the relationship began and ended. The whole thing was so poisonous, it was
almost
lethal.