Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (30 page)

Jodi reenacted the alleged body slam that she said motivated her to kill Travis. (
AP Images
)

Prosecutor Juan Martinez led the powerful case against Jodi Arias. His fiery questioning often led to impassioned arguments between Martinez and the witness in question. (
AP Images
)

Throughout the trial, Jodi often appeared to be crying dramatically, but as the media and public noted, her tears were almost never visible. (
AP Images
)

Steven, Tanisha, and Samantha Alexander, Travis’s younger siblings, were visibly heartbroken throughout the trial. (
Courtesy of HLN
)

As she begged the jury for a chance at life in prison, Jodi fit in one final jab at her victim. Jodi held up the
SURVIVOR
T-shirt she claimed to have created to raise money for victims of domestic abuse. (
Courtesy of HLN
)

The Arias family appeared worn down while hearing Jodi’s explicit testimony throughout the trial. (
Courtesy of HLN
)

Crowds of media and supporters of murder victim Travis Alexander swamped the exterior of the Maricopa County courthouse while awaiting the verdict. (
Courtesy of Joe Conrad
)

Travis’s sisters reacted with a mixture of raw emotion and relief to Jodi Arias’s guilty verdict. (
Courtesy of HLN
)

PART II

CHAPTER 15

JODI’S TRIAL

I
t had taken four and a half years to get to this point, but the prosecution and the defense were ready. Because of the huge amount of publicity surrounding the trial, both sides were equally worried about being able to seat a fair jury. They began with a pool of three hundred and seventy five potential candidates, from which they needed only eighteen—twelve jurors and six alternates—who had heard so little about the case that they would have no opinion.

Veteran prosecutor Juan Martinez was used to high profile cases like this. He had never shied away from a challenge during his twenty-five years with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. In fact, he would be accompanied at the prosecution table by only Detective Flores; no attorney would assist him in handling the witnesses, something that one doesn’t typically see in a death penalty case. However, he was the exception, preferring to work alone. Determined, methodical, and highly aggressive in the courtroom, his bulldog style and unwillingness to plea bargain had made him public enemy number one among the local defense attorneys, who despised his relentlessness and tenacity. Not only did he avoid cutting deals, but he usually won anyway.

For such a huge personality, Martinez was small in stature—only five foot four—although when he took on a tough witness, he seemed infinitely taller. He came from very humble beginnings; his parents were Mexican farm workers who came to the United States when he was a young boy, settling in Victorville, California, just north of Los Angeles. Determined to make a better life for himself, Juan learned English and worked hard in school. His hard work paid off when he made it through Arizona State University and Arizona State University Law School. He was licensed to practice law in 1984 and joined the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office in 1988. In a short time, he made a name for himself in the legal community. For the last seventeen years, his focus had been prosecuting homicide cases.

The case he was now trying was not his first death penalty case involving a woman. Among the numerous capital cases that he had tried was that of Wendi Andriano, whom he’d sent to death row in 2004. In that case, Andriano had murdered her thirty-three-year-old cancer stricken, terminally ill husband Joseph Andriano. She had asked male friends of hers to pose as her husband so she could get life insurance on Joseph, then ordered poison to carry out her plot. On the morning of October 8, 2000, she started serving him capsules of sodium azide with his breakfast. Later, she beat him with a bar stool and stabbed him in the neck, then claimed self-defense. Martinez won the death penalty conviction in that case, based on cruelty.

Opposing Martinez on the defense side were Kirk Nurmi and Jennifer Willmott and, like Martinez, both were graduates of Arizona State University Law School. Jodi was unable to pay private attorneys, so both Nurmi and Willmott had been appointed by the court. Nurmi was a huge man with a very gentle voice, kind of the polar opposite of his opponent, Juan Martinez. He specialized in sex crimes and DUIs, but typically defended people accused of being the aggressor rather than the victim. His co-counsel, Jennifer Willmott, was a petite powerhouse prone to wearing well-tailored skirt suits and high heels. A career public defender, she had quickly established herself on the defense side of the law, joining the public defender’s office in 1995, the same year she graduated law school. Since then, she’d defended major felonies of all types, including death penalty cases, and was in private practice by the time she joined Arias’s defense team.