Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (45 page)

While Martinez would say that this argument between Jodi and Travis was the spark that triggered Jodi’s murder plot, the speculation about blackmail would not come up at trial. Martinez and his trusty detective had likely toyed with the blackmail scenario as a possibility, among others, but Juan Martinez would never be able to argue it in any kind of formal setting. Nevertheless, the prosecutor had other tricks up his sleeve.

O
n cross-examination, Martinez dove into battle. He took direct aim at a keynote address LaViolette had given a couple of years earlier titled “Was Snow White a Battered Woman?” It sure sounded like LaViolette was making the claim that the fairy tale character was a victim of domestic violence. LaViolette defended her keynote by repeatedly telling Martinez that it was just a catchy title. Martinez basically accused LaViolette of being able to take any woman’s relationship and call her a battered woman, insisting she twisted the facts to fit the ends and had a totally one-sided view of the case. At one time during a heated exchange, LaViolette didn’t answer the question, but instead responded with a question for Martinez:

“Mr. Martinez, are you angry with me?”

The question drew laughter from the gallery but, at that moment, it was as though LaViolette was no longer a witness but rather a therapist assessing the angry man before her. Another time, when she felt particularly badgered, she told him that if he were a member of her group therapy, she would give him a “time-out.” The judge admonished her for her disrespect of the court.

One of the battles between Martinez and LaViolette was over her unwillingness to concede that Travis was a stalking victim. She disagreed with Martinez’s claim that Travis was afraid of Jodi, maintaining that his actions were not those of a person in fear for his life. In fact, she noted that he had continued to communicate with Jodi right up until the time of his murder. “People usually try to stay away from their stalkers,” she said.

Martinez, however, pointed to an email Travis had sent to a female friend on May 19, 2008, in which he expressed “extreme fear” of Jodi, although she was living one thousand miles away in northern California. LaViolette pointed out that Travis had not sought a restraining order or filed a police report or tried to relocate to distance himself from Jodi. In fact, he was still communicating with Jodi after the May 19 email was sent. Martinez believed that LaViolette was not objective, that she came to her conclusion and then made the facts fit them, rather than vice versa.

Indeed, there was national debate as to whether her testimony was so one-sided that it strained credulity, yet she didn’t waver even when the public outcry against her became threatening. LaViolette was being attacked in the court of public opinion. Victims of physical and domestic abuse were outraged at her advocacy for Jodi, someone with a weak case at best, and probably a completely fabricated one. LaViolette had accepted the word of what many had concluded was a pathological liar with a motive to deceive and had made glaring mistakes in her sifting of facts. An all-out cyber war erupted against LaViolette, with people posting angry comments on blogs, and encouraging each other to trash a book she had co-authored,
It Could Happen to Anyone: Why Battered Women Stay,
which was flooded with poorly rated online book reviews. The outrage and threats were overwhelming. An afternoon court session was cancelled suddenly when the witness was unable to appear. It was later confirmed that she had been taken to the hospital, with her condition rumored to be heart palpitations and anxiety attacks. In part, the well-organized campaign against her may have played a role. Her telephone number had been posted publicly and people were encouraged to go to her website to “Show your disgust with LaViolette.” Petitions circulated to have her removed from a director position and guest speaking engagements. As LaViolette testified about Travis’s character assassination of Jodi, her own character was under assault outside the courtroom. The angry mob mentality was over the top and became a story in itself with an editorial in the Huffington Post titled “The Mobbing of Alyce LaViolette,” which decried the “wholesale demonization of Ms. LaViolette.”

Of course, jurors knew nothing about the angry mob. Their questions for her came directly from the testimony in front of them. They had one hundred and fifty-nine of them, many of them asking the same kinds of things Martinez was asking. Why was LaViolette so willing to believe everything Jodi said? And why hadn’t she fielded any opinions from the other side?

To rebut the defense’s mental health experts, the state introduced testimony from psychologist Janeen DeMarte. Considerably younger and less experienced than Dr. Samuels and LaViolette, she nonetheless came across as confident and knowledgeable. DeMarte concluded that Jodi suffered from borderline personality disorder, equating her behavior to that of an immature teenager disposed to angry outburts and blaming others for her anger and hostility. DeMarte testified that during the twelve hours she spent interviewing Jodi, she had exhibited seven out of the nine symptoms of borderline personality disorder—suicidal thoughts, a sense of emptiness, a fear of abandonment, a lack of identity, a tendency toward unstable relationships, rapidly changing emotions and inappropriate and intense anger. She pointed to some of Jodi’s behaviors as evidence of a borderline personality disorder: moving to Mesa
after
she and Travis had broken up, spying on Travis and reading emails, idealizing men she dated, and changing herself to fit in with the people around her, in this case joining the Mormon Church. To highlight Jodi’s anger outbursts, DeMarte pointed to an email Jodi sent to Travis on February 14, 2007, in which she wrote that she had kicked doors and smashed things.

“People with this personality experience hostility, agressiveness, but they’re not displaying it necessarily,” DeMarte testified. “When they feel wronged, they have these violent outbursts. These individuals externalize blame.” She also described flaws in defense expert Richard Samuels’s psychological testing. One glaring error, which Martinez himself had raised, was that Samuels had concluded Jodi had PTSD in 2010 when she was still maintaining the two-intruder theory. DeMarte did not believe Jodi suffered from dissociative amnesia.

The final expert to testify was called by the defense to refute DeMarte’s testimony. Robert Geffner, a neuropsychologist, said Jodi’s psychological test results did not suggest a personality disorder as DeMarte had opined, but instead all of the test results supported anxiety problems or issues caused by trauma. He said he could not diagnose Jodi because he didn’t have the full picture. However, he was willing to hypothesize.

In rebuttal to the defense case, Travis’s ex-girlfriend Deanna Reid was among the witnesses called by the prosecution. It was the twenty-third of April when she took the stand, more than four months into the case. She described her relationship with Travis as always loving and respectful, never abusive. On cross-examination, defense attorney Nurmi asked Deanna whether she had a sexual relationship with Travis.

Deanna clearly looked uncomfortable as she truthfully answered. “Yes, well into our relationship, after we moved to Arizona.”

Their sexual relationship lasted about a year. They ceased when they visited their respective bishops to confess and seek guidance. Nurmi ask Deanna a litany of embarrassing questions about Travis that he surely knew the answer to. But it was strategic—to emphasize once again what Travis had said about or to Jodi: “Did he ever use phrases with you like ‘you’re the ultimate slut in bed’?”

“No,” Reid answered.

“Did he ever talk to you about blowing enormous loads every time?” Nurmi had a text message from Travis to Jodi: “U put me on another planet. You are the ultimate slut in bed. No wonder I blow enormous loads every time.”

Deanna was becoming noticeably uncomfortable. “No,” she said.

Nurmi wasn’t done. “Did he ever ejaculate in your face?”

“No,” said Deanna.

“Did he ever call you a whore, a slut, a three-holed wonder?”

“No.”

“Did he ever tell you how he wanted to tie you to a tree, and quote, put it in your ass?”

“No.”

“Did he ever tell you the way you moan is like a twelve-year-old girl having her first orgasm?”

“No.”

“Did he ever tell you about wanting to cork the pot of a little girl?”

Deanna answered all in the negative.

Martinez jumped to the floor. His questions were not about sex, but abuse. “Did he ever call you names?” he asked Deanna with animated hands.

“No, he did not,” Deanna answered.

“Did he ever strike you or physically advance on you? Or inflict any physical violence on you?” Martinez concluded.

“No, never,” said Deanna. With that, Judge Stephens recessed court for the day.

CHAPTER 22

CLOSING ARGUMENTS

A
s hard as it was to believe, the closing arguments were finally at hand. Thousands of questions had been asked in fifty-four days of testimony. There had been twenty prosecution witnesses, eleven defense witnesses, nine rebuttal witnesses (although three had previously testified in the state’s case in chief), one surrebuttal witness, and two sur-surrebuttal witnesses (one was a recalled witness). The grand total: thirty-eight witnesses. More than six hundred exhibits had been presented. The jurors themselves had asked hundreds of questions, many exhibiting skepticism about the testimony of certain witnesses, primarily Jodi and her experts. However, no matter how seasoned the trial attorney or court watcher, it was impossible to predict what a jury would do. The verdict in the Casey Anthony trial had left the legal community befuddled and the public outraged. It appeared this panel sitting in judgment of Jodi Arias had adhered to the judge’s instruction to pay attention to the testimony and avoid all news about it outside the courtroom.

The jurors and the worldwide audience were saturated with testimony about sex and lies; abuse and lies; the Law of Chastity and lies;
The Book of Mormon
and lies; and the story of the murder itself. The spectacle had been five years in the making and had so far lasted four months, a little short of the five months Travis and Jodi had officially dated. As the trial was coming to a close, Maricopa County officials confirmed that the cost to the taxpayers of Jodi’s defense was approximately $1.6 million, a figure that was expected to rise.

It was widely known that Jodi could be executed for killing Travis. The prosecution made the decision to seek the death penalty within two months of Jodi’s extradition to Arizona in early September 2008. Jodi’s hope for acquittal was remote; her second-best shot, second-degree murder, had slim-to-none odds, while manslaughter also seemed a long shot. A conviction for premeditated first-degree murder was the prediction. If so, the trial would then move forward to the next phase, the aggravation phase. If the jury also unanimously concluded that an aggravating circumstance was proven, namely that the killing was especially cruel, then there would be a final phase to the trial where the jury would decide if Jodi lives or dies by lethal injection.

Given that the evidence of Jodi’s premeditation was overwhelming and that the defense had failed to drive holes in the state’s case, the focus shifted to speculation about whether there would be jurors who connected with Jodi and would at least spare her life. After all, they’d spent a lot of time with her face to face and, while their questions showed they didn’t buy her act, their familiarity with the defendant could make it harder to vote to kill her.

It was Juan Martinez’s job as prosecutor to make sure that, as the jury went into the deliberation room, they felt no such sympathy for a killer. That was the goal of his closing argument, and as always, he began with passion and graphic precision.

“This individual, the defendant, Jodi Ann Arias, killed Travis Alexander. And even after stabbing him over and over again, and even after slashing his throat from ear to ear, and then even after taking a gun and shooting him in the face, she will not let him rest in peace. But now instead of a gun, instead of a knife, she uses lies.”

The lies of Jodi Arias would be a theme of the closing argument, lest there was a juror left who might have been suckered by a Jodi “story” of abuse. “She uses these lies in court when she testified to stage the scene for you, just like she staged the scene for the police after she killed Mr. Alexander.”

Next, Martinez brought in Jodi’s crafty, almost cruel use of the media after the killing. “This woman, who would stage the scene, has even attempted to stage the scene through the use of the media. She has courted the media. She has gone on national television . . . has also attempted, or gone out in search of, the limelight. She has signed a manifesto, just in case she becomes famous. And to top it all off, she has indicated that she is innocent and that no jury will convict her, that none of you will convict her . . . Well, she is an individual, as you have seen, who has craved the limelight. So it seems that it is only fitting that . . . she now bask in a different kind of light, the light of truth.”