Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story (3 page)

Jodi says she tried calling 911 during one fight, but Bobby snatched the phone from her hand and hung up. The 911 operator called back, but Bobby made up an excuse that his girlfriend was trying to program 911 into the speed dial and it was an accident.

She ended the relationship with her young love, and said she later learned he was so distraught that he had slit his wrists to attempt suicide. Jodi later reconnected with him after a man she met at her father’s restaurant told her that the second coming of Jesus Christ would happen sometime in late 1997.

She rushed to warn Bobby about the impending Rapture.

She soon fell in love again — this time with Matt McCartney, Bobby’s one-time roommate.

Matt was living in Medford, Ore., just up the freeway from Yreka. She was drawn to his chivalrous nature around a girl he apparently met on the Internet, and as the flame died out between her and Bobby, she now had a new love interest.

Jodi got a job at an Applebee’s and she and Matt later worked in the service industry in the picturesque Crater Lake National Park area, a popular spot for tourists and skiers. They lived together for a while and got in minor fights over things like dirty dishes and messes left around the house.

The small fights eventually led them to take a breather from living together, and she took a job in nearby Ashland while he stayed on at Crater Lake.

Jodi said the relationship ended after she caught him cheating with a Romanian co-worker named Bianca. After hearing about the rumored affair, Jodi left early from her restaurant shift and drove the hour and a half from Ashland to Crater Lake to confront Bianca.

A friend let her into the dormitories where seasonal workers stay while working at Crater Lake. She and Bianca sat on the two beds in the room and talked about it, in what Jodi described as an hour and a half, tearful chat. She then tracked down Matt, confronted him about the affair, and the relationship was over.

This version of events is Jodi’s alone. Matt has not spoken publicly about their relationship. But even in her version of events, she was willing to make the drive to physically confront a woman she suspected of cheating with her lover. Her obsessive nature was already becoming obvious.

Jodi then found out about a sweet gig at an elite boutique resort in Big Sur, Calif., called the Ventana Inn and Spa.

The Ventana Inn – tucked away off the famed Pacific Coast Highway amid lush tree-covered hills and dramatic cliffs dropping into the deep blue ocean _ can safely be described as one of the most picturesque hotels in America, and it doesn’t come cheap. Rooms routinely exceed $600 a night.

She began working there in the fall of 2001. It was at Ventana that she met Darryl Brewer.

At the time, Jodi was 21 and Darryl was 41 and recently divorced. Not only was he 20 years her senior, he was her boss. He had a young child who was closer in age to Jodi than she was to Darryl.

Still, she developed a crush on him. She didn’t mind the thought of dating an older man whom she saw as a George Clooney-type with his salt-and-pepper hair. They became closer the longer they worked together as Jodi waited the tables of wealthy guests and later transferred to wedding planning and coordination in the summer of 2002. The wedding gig was an exciting one for Jodi as she got to immerse herself in the inner-workings of planning the biggest night of couples’ lives. Time and again, she saw people who had found their own eternal loves. Jodi wanted that more than anything.

Darryl left his position as food and beverage manager and became a member of the wait staff. Finally, he was no longer her boss. The relationship was on.

The pair traveled to the Bay Area where they went on sightseeing trips and attended football games to see their favorite team - the San Francisco 49ers. Jodi is a big 49ers fan, and they had fun seeing Terrell Owens and their other favorite players in action. They talked about their future together, with Darryl warning that he wasn’t interested in marriage.

The two fell in love.

The sex was good, too. They experimented with anal _ another oddity that would emerge again and again throughout Jodi’s murder trial.

Always the amateur photographer, Jodi took provocative pictures of Darryl in the nude and in the shower. She took pictures of Darryl shaving, when he slept, on all sorts of other occasions. She liked to take pictures of Travis, too.

Jodi eventually left Ventana and went to work as a waitress and bartender in nearby Monterrey. The real estate boom that marked the 2000s was surging, and Jodi wanted to become an investor to capitalize on the soaring white-hot market. She says she took classes at Monterrey Peninsula College and learned about real estate.

By the summer of 2005, she and Darryl were ready for a change of scenery, so they moved south to Palm Desert, Calif., a city known for its punishing summertime heat and more comfortable winter climate that draws thousands of snowbirds every year. Also, Darryl’s ex-wife was moving to the area at the same time, so it made sense to be in Palm Desert for when he visitation rights with his son.

Jodi and Darryl bought a house together where little Jack would visit. Jodi and Jack grew closer, and she was a stepmother of sorts to the little boy. On one Father’s Day, Jodi put her art skills to use by giving her lover a drawn family picture as a gift.

They bought a three-bedroom home with a swimming pool in June 2005, despite the fact that their finances were shaky, to say the least. Darryl didn’t have a job at the time, and Jodi was working at a local California Pizza Kitchen and later took on a second restaurant job. Jodi had more than $10,000 in savings earlier in her relationship with Darryl, but she burned through it by the end of their time together.

She was paying half the mortgage, and had a new expense when she traveled to the San Diego area to get breast implants.

Then little Jack’s mother suddenly decided to relocate to the Monterrey area - more than nine hours away - prompting them to re-evaluate their decision to move to southern California. Darryl began looking for work in Monterrey, and the relationship seemed to crumble day by day in the summer of 2006.

Darryl started noticing changes in Jodi around this time. She quit paying household bills, her behavior became strange. She ran up credit card debt and had trouble paying her half of the mortgage, now $2,800 a month.

She became more spiritual and started spending time with Mormon missionaries. Young Mormon men who were total strangers to Darryl were suddenly in his living room holding prayer sessions. Jodi scolded Darryl when he cursed.

They quit having sex. Jodi was saving herself for her husband, she said. They broke up, Darryl moved away, and the house went into foreclosure.

But it wasn’t all bleak for Jodi. She had three new things in her life that brought her excitement: the Mormon church, a company called Prepaid Legal, and a man named Travis Victor Alexander.

Chapter 4

“I’m Travis Alexander”

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

The question was posed to Jodi from a 20-something co-worker at a California Pizza Kitchen.

“Real estate,” Jodi replied. “What about you?”

Retirement, he said. The co-worker had what he considered a get-rich-quick scheme through a company called Prepaid Legal. He gave her a magazine and DVD about the company, and Jodi paid it no mind. She tossed the materials aside in a storage closet and forgot about them.

Months later - as things were falling apart with Darryl in 2006 - Jodi was cleaning out the closet and stumbled upon the Prepaid Legal discs. She watched and became intrigued by the concept.

The technical term for the company’s structure is “multi-level marketing.” The best comparison is Amway. Generations of Americans are familiar with the aggressive sales tactics of Amway workers, who sign up sales people for the product and ask them do the same to draw in other prospective clients. Prepaid Legal had a similar structure for its sales force, and Travis was one of its rising stars.

Jodi’s first big introduction to the company was on a trip to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in September 2006 for a Prepaid Legal convention that attracted thousands of people from all over the U.S. and Canada.

She carpooled to the event from California with two other Prepaid Legal devotees. After a couple days of chilling by the pool and meeting new people, Jodi and her friends had dinner at the Rainforest Cafe.

They settled up their check and were waiting outside the restaurant when Jodi saw a man from the corner of her eye. They exchanged looks.

His brisk walk and confidence stood out amid the crowds of people, the cacophony of slot machines and the smell of stale cigarette smoke.

This guy is going somewhere, literally and figuratively, she thought. She was a little taken aback when he extended his hand to introduce himself.

“I’m Travis Alexander.”

They immediately had a connection, and Travis gave Jodi his undivided attention as they walked through the casino and chatted. After exchanging some small talk and tidbits about Prepaid Legal, Travis invited her to an executive banquet that night.

He was an executive director at the time, entitling him to exclusive tickets to the event that Jodi could not have gotten given her newbie status in the organization.

The affair was intoxicating to her. She was no stranger to high-end dinners, but for most of her life, she was the one serving the meals, not receiving them.

On top of that, the discussion of wealth was a little dizzying for Jodi. To succeed at Prepaid Legal, you needed to be an aggressive salesperson — always closing, the mantra goes - and the company wasn’t shy about heaping honors on the most successful employees.

If you make $100,000 in a year, you get a ring. Pull in $250,000 and you get a diamond embedded in the ring. A half-million dollars and you get two diamonds.

It was a fun weekend for Jodi as she was introduced to a guy who clearly was into her. She and Travis talked about his love of Ultimate Fighting Challenge and the San Francisco 49ers. Even though Travis grew up in Southern California, where the San Diego Chargers and the Raiders were popular, he rooted for San Francisco because Steve Young was the star quarterback. Young is a Mormon who starred at BYU and is actually a descendant of Brigham Young.

They parted ways after the weekend but made sure to exchange numbers to meet up again, even though Jodi was still living with Brewer in what she said was a platonic arrangement. They talked on the phone for hours on end in the month or so that followed, then decided to meet up in Ehrenburg, Ariz., along the California-Arizona border, to see each other in person. Travis was living in Mesa at the time, and Jodi was still in California, so Ehrenburg was a good meeting point.

They went to a movie in nearby Blythe, Calif., watched game shows on the TV in their hotel room and had dinner at Sizzler.

They also hooked up for the first time.

They started kissing from the minute they walked into the hotel room. It escalated to grinding on each other fully clothed - what Jodi called the “Provo push,” a maneuver that gets its name from the predominantly Mormon city in Utah that is home to BYU. The faith discourages sexual intimacy of any sort out of wedlock.

At this point, Travis was already trying to get Jodi to join the Mormon church, even sending missionaries to her house in Palm Desert.

By the end of the weekend, their intimacy had escalated far beyond just rubbing their bodies together. They performed oral sex on each other. They had breakfast at a truck stop restaurant and went home to their respective cities.

Jodi claimed at her trial that she felt used by Travis during the weekend, “like a prostitute.” But at the same time, she could have just written Travis and the whole weekend off as a silly, passion-filled mistake. Of course, she didn’t.

She called him Saturday when she was driving home. No answer. She called him again Sunday. No answer. She sent text messages on Monday. Travis was starting to see another side of Jodi, an obsessive one that would rear its head again.

Chapter 5

The Mormon Courtship

“No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” —Nathaniel Hawthorne.

An overlooked fact about the relationship between Jodi and Travis is that they knew each other only for 21 months. They met in September 2006, and he was dead by June 2008.

The relationship between Jodi and Travis can essentially be broken up into three acts. The first was the initial courtship that included an introduction to the Mormon church and Prepaid Legal. That lasted from September 2006 until February 2007.

The second act was Travis and Jodi as boyfriend-girlfriend, a period that covered five months, from February 2007 until late June 2007.

The final act — reminiscent of a Shakespearean tragedy — was the breakup period, during which they continued to see each other for sexual trysts. It ended on that fateful, violent June 4, 2008, day in Travis’ bathroom.

Each facet of their relationship was intriguing in its own way, but the Mormon saga was especially fascinating. The story is a clash between the chaste values of the Mormon church and the innate sexual desires of a couple finding it increasingly difficult to resist each other.

Travis began talking up the Mormon church to Jodi almost immediately after they met at the Prepaid Legal event in Las Vegas. As they began their months-long courtship through a series of phone calls, text messages and hotel hookups, Travis slowly began convincing Jodi that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the right religion for her. She considered herself an Evangelical Christian growing up, but was drawn to the church — never mind the fact that at the time she was unmarried and living with Darryl Brewer, loved Starbucks and was performing oral sex on Travis. All three would be considered violations of church doctrine _ no living with a person of the opposite sex out of wedlock, no caffeine and certainly no sex of any kind.