Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (26 page)

In early March, Travis invited Mimi out on a date. He was thrilled when she accepted. Two dates later, however, Mimi said she wouldn’t mind being friends, but there was no romantic interest on her part. Travis still pursued her anyway, even though she never really reciprocated or showed interest back. He said they started doing nonsexual things together. They started a movie watchers’ club, where they and a few others from the church would watch an old movie and then talk about it, like a book club for movies. Travis was disappointed that the relationship had turned platonic, but he was not completely deterred. He may have even been motivated by the fact that Mimi had started seeing someone else, and he loved the challenge of besting a rival to win her over. Dating Mimi would mean he and Jodi could finally be through. Mimi seemed to have the combination of sex appeal and sensibility that he had been searching for. And, being in her late twenties, she was age-appropriate. He had put up with Jodi’s antics for the nine months she had been in Mesa, from the tire slashing to the inappropriate phone calls, to her possessiveness and outright stalking. He was done with her stealing his stuff and cornering his female interests.

Luckily for him, Jodi had decided she was leaving town to go back to Yreka, and not a moment too soon. Jodi’s mental state was deteriorating. At one point, a friend who cared about her had phoned her mother to let her know he thought Jodi needed help. Sandy Arias also worried about her daughter’s nomadic lifestyle and seesawing mood swings. Her daughter would call the house in a great mood, and she and Sandy would chat for a while, but after the call ended, Jodi would unexpectedly call again minutes later, this time crying hysterically. The fast-changing tenor of her calls both confused and upset her mother. Sandy didn’t understand what was happening with her daughter and became increasingly anxious, especially after several of Jodi’s friends began calling the house, pleading with Sandy to get her daughter some help. Whatever concern the Ariases may have had about Jodi, pundits have debated why her parents didn’t try to get her into treatment. Perhaps it was because they were old-fashioned and knew little of mental illness and interventions. They may have also felt a sense of shame that their promising, beautiful, now adult daughter seemed to be in a downward spiral. Whatever the case, her parents watched helplessly as Jodi became more and more uncontrollable. With not much coaxing, Jodi had agreed to move to California to live with her maternal grandparents.

At the news, Taylor said, Travis was jumping for joy. “It was like a big burden was lifted off his shoulders, where he felt like he could actually move on with his life and not have to deal with her,” he said. Despite Travis’s euphoria, the drug was still in him. Taylor recalled in the midst of his excitement he was still talking to Jodi. “We were driving in his car, and Jodi called him, and he answered it, and he was talking to her. I said, ‘Why are you talking to her? I thought you were done with her.’ He says, ‘I’m done with her, but she really needed help with something, so I’m helping her out.’ He just couldn’t
not
help somebody, was the feeling I got, like he was in need of saving somebody. He talked to her even though he wanted nothing to do with her, because he didn’t want her to be in trouble.”

Two weeks before Jodi moved, Sky invited Travis to Murrieta to spend time with Chris and her. He didn’t go, saying to Sky something along the lines of “She’s leaving town in two weeks; everything will be fine.” Soon, it was “She’s leaving in one week. I know this is bad; I know she’s bad for me.” Sky was concerned that Travis had messed up. “Travis was in turmoil over his relationship. He wanted it to end. He wanted Jodi to move home. But, at the same time, he’s a guy. Sex is fun, and when a good looking girl comes over at three in the morning and jumps on you naked and starts rubbing all over you, stuff’s going to happen . . . She ensnared and controlled him with sex.” His friends worried that when he detoxed from Jodi, he might be in a bad place, and they were there for him.

By this point, Jodi was willing to leave her stuff behind in Mesa and just get herself out of there, but her father talked her into renting a U-Haul and bringing everything with her. Travis sold her his car with the generous offer of letting her make nominal payments of $100 a month to him on a monthly schedule, according to Jodi. He was already getting rid of it and replacing it with a Toyota Prius, proactively supporting his newfound environmentalism. Jodi packed her boxes into the U-Haul and hitched the BMW to the back end. Off she drove, behind the wheel of her rented truck only to make it about twenty miles before she blew the transmission on the car she was pulling behind her. She had been towing it in first gear and hadn’t raised the two front tires off the ground, so the car was ruined. What a way to go out.

With Jodi gone, Travis thought a lot of his problems had gone with her. He had qualified for an all-expense-paid trip for two to Cancún, Mexico, based on his PPL sales. The winners were going to make the trip the first week of June, and Travis invited Mimi to be his guest. Taylor remembered Travis’s excitement when Mimi agreed to go. “He texted me and he’s like, ‘I just called up Mimi and said, “Hey, I know we’re just friends and all, but do you want to go to Cancún?” She said, ‘Sure.’ He’s like, ‘I’m so stoked. It’s going to be awesome.’ ” Mimi had to be sure Travis understood it was going to be platonic. She liked the arrangements, where she and Travis would be staying in separate rooms. The flight was scheduled for Tuesday, June 10, Phoenix to Cancún direct.

There has been some discussion that Travis initially invited Jodi to be his guest on the trip and then took her off. One friend said that Travis may have been asking around about how to make a change on an airline ticket for the Mexico trip and he suspected Jodi’s name was being changed to Mimi’s. But Taylor Searle said he didn’t believe that Jodi’s name had ever gotten as far as the ticket, even if the two had talked about taking the trip together. In his opinion, “Travis doesn’t want to pick anyone from his past, and Mimi is the only thing he has on his plate for the future. She was pretty much the only answer.” If Jodi had been invited initially, she had now been officially replaced.

Travis took the two months before the trip to really work on himself. He met with his bishop to try to get himself temple-worthy again. The bishop knew about the sexual behavior with Jodi, so Travis was working on rectifying that. Some of Travis’s friends said Jodi had taken it upon herself to confess for both of them about their violating the Law of Chastity. Others said Travis himself had gone to confess. Either way, Travis was embarrassed and ashamed that his Temple Recommend had been pulled once again. He especially didn’t want Mimi to find out.

On church days, Mormon men carry what they call a “temple bag” with them. In it they keep a shirt and tie and other temple garments, which they change into before entering the sacred hall. He wanted Mimi to think that he was temple-worthy, so he invited everyone, including Mimi, to come back to his house after a particular service. According to Taylor, Travis’s plan was to leave his temple bag on the kitchen counter, where he knew Mimi would then see it. He could then say, “I was about to go out to the door to the temple with you guys, but I was too late.” Taylor said he staged it to hide his shame. Travis desperately wanted to get back in good standing with his faith.

On his new self-improvement campaign, Travis went to the gym regularly and was proud of his weight loss and bodybuilding. He was putting his guilt and his unchaste life behind him. “This year will be the best year of my life,” he affirmed in a blog post that April. “This is the year that will eclipse all others. I will earn more, learn more, travel more, serve more, love more, give more and be more than all the other years of my life combined.”

In late April 2008, as Travis was celebrating his new self and his metamorphosis, he sent Jodi a text message that showed his detox from his drug of choice was not going as well as he was projecting.

“I am at a night club right now and it helped me to come to the conclusion that you are one of the prettiest girls on the planet,” he wrote. The very next day, he texted her: “Send me a naughty picture.”

They were a thousand miles apart, but by the sound of his own comments, he was in need of a binge. On May 2, Travis sent Jodi this text: “There’s not a day where I haven’t dreamt about driving my shaft long and hard into you,” he wrote. “You are the ultimate slut in bed . . . you’ll rejoice in being a whore, whose sole purpose in life is to please me any way I desire.”

But their dirty pillow talk was not limited to texts and emails. In the early morning hours of May 10, 2008, Jodi and Travis had one of their signature late-night phone calls. Like other late-night calls they’d supposedly had, this one was explicit in nature—a phone sex session between them in which each climaxes—but this time something was different. This time Jodi recorded all the words and sounds of their intimate discussion. While Jodi would go on to claim that Travis was aware of the taping, there was no proof anywhere on the tape itself that this was the case. For Travis, his behavior on the call did not betray any hint of the self-consciousness that one would expect from such an outwardly modest man; indeed his words on the call were as uninhibited as his text messages. It was unclear why after months of sexual discussion between them this call would be singled out, why this call would be the one to remember. Even harder to discern was Jodi’s true motivation for recording this conversation. And yet, its larger significance was immediately apparent: now no one could deny just how sexually involved they’d been. Jodi held the proof of the explicit nature of their relationship in the form of Travis’s voice. That tape was her “Monica Lewinsky blue dress,” the smoking gun that documented some of the acts that had occurred between them. After listening to the charged language from both of them, no one could ever doubt the extent of their sexual relationship.

Perhaps it was that call she was thinking about on Saturday, May 10, when she wrote the final entry on her blog: “I cannot ignore that there is an ever-present yearning and desire that pulses within me. It throbs for gratification and fulfillment,” she wrote in a very long entry filled with flowery passionate language.

It was unclear what Travis’s interpretation of that was or if he believed it to be for another man. Either way, on the same day Travis was angrily texting Jodi with cryptic comments that hinted of jealousy and resentment: “Why don’t you have him come and f—k you in the woods, I can only imagine you are so worried about me reading. You are paranoid because you have no respect for people’s privacy and you dare insult me of all people . . . Through your actions you hate more than love by denying me a human right of privacy countless times. You have a lot of freaking nerve. We are all not like you in that aspect.” The volatility was hitting the upper ranges of the relationship Richter scale.

Ten days later, Travis posted his last blog entry, “Why I Want to Marry a Gold Digger.” The blog talked about how he used to love being single, but now he wanted to find an “eternal companion.” He wasn’t using the term “gold digger” in a stereotypical sense, but in a metaphorical sense. “I want someone to love me for the Gold that is within me and is willing to dig with me to extract it,” he wrote. He continued with great reflection. “I did a little soul searching and realized that I was lonely . . . I realized it was time to adjust my priorities and date with marriage in mind . . . This type of dating to me is like a very long job interview and can be exponentially more mentally taxing. Desperately trying to find out if my date has an axe murderer penned up inside of her, knowing she is wondering the same about me.”

Ultimately, sexual phone calls and text messages could not pave over the unmovable issues between them. As May progressed, Travis became increasingly frustrated with Jodi’s behavior. On Monday, May 26, Jodi and Travis got into a nasty fight. The following day, Travis called Taylor to tell him about the confrontation with Jodi the night before. He had been on Facebook and had gotten bounced off, a sign that someone else had logged on with his name. He was livid. He logged back on, and there was Jodi. She had hacked in again, but this time he caught her red-handed. “Did you just log in?” he wanted to know. Travis got her to admit it and started unloading on her. “You are the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he wrote. He also told her that her grandparents would be ashamed of her. Taylor let him go on. When he settled down, Taylor took a deep breath.

“That’s brutal,” Taylor said. “You just let her have it. Aren’t you afraid that she’s going to try to hurt you or something?” Travis said she got the message to stay away from him, and it was over. While he’d told at least one friend he was really afraid of her, others said Travis didn’t think Jodi could actually, physically hurt him, especially now that she lived so far away.

U
nfortunately, Travis Alexander was wrong. He was wrong about Jodi Arias, wrong about what she was capable of, but mostly he was wrong about just how deep her obsession with him had taken hold.

Much mystery remains about the lives of Travis and Jodi during the first few days of June 2008, but some facts are indisputable. On June 2, Jodi packed an overnight bag with some clothes, a cell phone and charger, and most likely the .25-caliber pistol she had allegedly stolen from her grandfather. She put it all into the car she had rented in Yreka. She drove south to Monterey to borrow two gas cans from her ex, Darryl Brewer, then set off for Mesa via Pasadena. Having the gas cans with her meant that she could get through the state of Arizona without having to stop for gas, but more important, it meant that there would be no evidence of her journey popping up at a gas station. There would be no receipt from an Arizona gas station or security camera footage of her standing by a pump. Along with the gas cans, she calculated an alibi story, which would allow her to go to Mesa and still arrive in Salt Lake City without being suspicious.

At about 4:30
A
.
M
. on June 4, she rolled up in front of Travis’s house. Based on the evidence recovered at the scene, the two spent several hours together, much of it in bed. The photographs from the camera in the washing machine show Jodi and Travis quite relaxed and very naked for much of the day. However, just after 5:30
P
.
M
. something changed. Suddenly Travis was on the receiving end of twenty-nine stabs and slashes and a gunshot to the head. Jodi had killed him, and while the extraordinary overkill and excess of the crime pointed to a killer harboring extreme personal rage, the question that remained was why.