Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias (50 page)

Two years was longer than the murderess had even known Travis Alexander. She had met him on September 13, 2006, and he died a brutal death by her hand on June 4, 2008, three months shy of two years. Not including the aggravation phase and the death penalty phase, the trial lasted four months and a week, from January 2 through May 8, 2013. That was two weeks shy of the length of time the two had officially dated, which by Jodi’s account began on February 2, 2007, and ended with a phone call on June 29 of that same year. Deliberations in the punishment phase of the trial lasted fifteen hours, the amount of time it would have taken for Jodi to drive from Yreka to Mesa, had she driven nonstop. Depending on when she arrived at Travis’s home, she may have been there almost exactly fifteen hours. In that time Jodi managed a few hours for sleep, sex, and still more sex; a few minutes for taking nude photographs of Travis in the shower; a few long, savage minutes for the murder itself, complete with more than two dozen knife wounds, the near decapitation, plus the gratuitous gunshot to the face; and a period of time for stuffing Travis’s body into the shower, cleaning up some of the enormous amounts of blood, putting clothing, towels, and the camera through the wash cycle of Travis’s washing machine, and heading out of town in her rental car, into the twilight over the Arizona desert.

For the trial, tens of thousands of people tuned in to watch it, either the live stream or the evening recaps on those television networks that featured the proceedings. HLN saw record ratings for its gavel to gavel coverage, as well as its nightly analysis and debates. People could not get enough. Even at the courthouse itself, crime junkies were such regulars there that they became known by nicknames. There was “Cane Lady,” and her friend Michaelann who said her father had been murdered in a knife attack and who identified with Travis’s plight. One young man made a rather large painting of Jodi Arias surrounded by her lawyers, the prosecutor, and key witnesses and stood outside the courthouse showing off the canvas.

As much as people hated Jodi Arias, they were also intrigued about who she really was. During her eighteen days on the stand, everyone had their own chance to size her up. Jodi was already loathed in the court of public opinion even before she took the stand on February 4, 2013, and by almost all accounts, her “performance” during her testimony was just that. She appeared at turns smug, unrepentant, mendacious, self-serving, and even combative. She seemed willing and even eager to assassinate the character of the man she claimed to have loved without hesitation, accusing him of heinous acts like pedophilia and physical abuse. That she had murdered Travis once was horrific enough, but to attack him again in this way, under oath and in front of his whole family, was despicable.

As everyone has tried to understand Jodi, so, too, has the psychological world, and the opinions from the professionals reveal fascinating insights into the mind of Jodi Arias, perhaps shedding light on why she acted the way she did. Dr. Drew Pinsky, host of HLN’s
Dr. Drew on Call,
has been an extremely valuable source of information on this topic. He is a board-certified internist, an addiction medicine specialist, and an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. Although he didn’t interview Jodi directly, he did have the good fortune of interviewing multiple psychologists and psychiatrists about Jodi, and he has also reviewed the testimony of psychologist Janeen DeMarte, who took the stand as a rebuttal witness for the prosecution. Based on all of the information Dr. Drew gathered, he has a pretty good idea of what was going on with Jodi, although there is acknowledgment of the difficulty of evaluating somebody without speaking to him or her directly.

He agreed with other psychologists and psychiatrists in suggesting that Jodi has borderline personality disorder, which is what the prosecution maintained all along. About “borderlines,” Dr. Drew said it best when he generalized: “They lie, they manipulate. Their point of view begs no alternative. They really can’t see their role in what plays out in their life. They just can’t see it. That’s what personality disorders are. At its core: ‘It’s the world’s problem, not me. I’m justified in feeling the way I do, acting the way I do because of what the world is and what the world’s done to me.’ That’s what makes personality disorder so difficult, if not, some say, impossible to treat.”

In today’s pop psychology world, people love to toss around diagnoses with abandon. But, says Dr. Drew, for borderline personality disorder, “there’s very specific criteria. And you need certain numbers of these criteria: chronic feelings of emptiness, chronic feelings of preoccupation about abandonment, dysfunctional, chaotic relationships, inability to have stability in their lives, lots of suicidal ideation, extreme mood lividity. It’s just a terribly unstable emotional landscape.” Borderlines are prone to fierce anger and irritability. Anyone who has studied this case can look at that criteria and say: it fits Jodi to a T.

Also, by definition, borderlines seesaw between idealizing the object of their fascination and then devaluing them in the extreme. That is precisely what Jodi did with Travis. She put him on a pedestal, worshipping him socially and sexually and then—when he was unable to meet her insatiable demands—she demonized him in her mind. When she murdered Travis, she was knocking the pedestal over and smashing it into the ground.

This in no way apologizes for Jodi’s behavior. As Dr. Drew and others have stressed, having a mental illness is not the same as being legally insane. Jodi understood right from wrong, as evidenced by her plotting and cover-ups. But, perhaps because she is a borderline, she felt justified to kill Travis
not
in self-defense because he was attacking her; he was not. Rather, because she felt wronged by him and felt entitled to exact revenge. She felt justified. And, some would say, she still feels justified, which is why she has shown no genuine remorse and can barely verbalize the word “sorry” in a sentence even when her own life depends on it.

Dr. Drew spoke of Jodi’s “lifelong pattern of really not accepting responsibility for things, for having strange reactions, intense relationships. There was real chaos in [Jodi’s] life where she would go from job to job to job. And then, very significant, was how she conducted herself in her relationship with Travis Alexander.” Had she not been borderline she might have had the capacity to examine her relationship with Travis with at least a semblance of objectivity, see her part in the dysfunction and realize she was not a victim but a participant in an unhealthy situation. But Jodi never achieved that level of self-honesty or self-awareness. She was way too invested in playing the victim in the relationship and indeed engineered her own debasement by actively encouraging it, begging for ass poundings, going out of her way to be his maid, etc. She thoroughly enjoyed her pity party where she worked up her appetite for vengeance. With borderlines, relationship disillusion and bitterness are prefabricated and inevitable.

According to Dr. Drew, it is unusual for borderlines to become raging murderers. “Borderlines don’t kill people, they typically kill themselves,” he said, adding many of his professional colleagues suspected Jodi also had “some components of psychopathy, some problem with the ability to empathize with others, very goal directed. She’s very cunning and when she really needs it, she can think about no one but herself, come what may. That, I think, is the part that the public reacts so fiercely to.” That’s a fancy way of saying she is likely also a psychopath. Her pathological lying also dovetails with psychopathic behavior, as the psychopath has absolutely no qualms about lying as a means to an end. Lying is child’s play compared to the even more malignant behaviors in their tool kit.

Dr. Drew elaborated by saying that borderlines use a style of emotional regulation called “projective identification,” paraphrased to mean, “I have a horrible feeling inside of me, so horrible I can’t touch it, but I can inject that feeling into you.” Thus, borderlines are terribly manipulative. “They literally can make you feel what they don’t want to feel and then they manipulate you as a way of manipulating their (own) feelings.”

As an example, Dr. Drew pointed to the interview Jodi gave minutes after she was found guilty of murder. She said she wanted the death penalty, saying the worst outcome for her would be spending the rest of her natural life in prison. She wasn’t a smoker, and longevity ran in her family, so a lifetime behind bars would be intolerably long, if nothing else. Besides, “I believe death is the ultimate freedom, so I’d rather have my freedom as soon as I can get it,” she said without hesitation to Troy Hayden of Phoenix’s KSAZ. Jodi was essentially goading the jurors to execute her. In that death wish statement, Dr. Drew sees the borderline’s projective identification, “She has a murderous rage, because we’ve all seen what her murderous rage can do. We know she has that. Her murderous rage she is now trying to put on the jury and tell the jury, ‘You need to kill me. And then you’ll be guilty of acting out my murderous rage.’ That’s how borderlines function. It’s projective identification.”

In a way, Jodi also engaged in projective identification sexually with Travis, encouraging him to engage in sexual conduct that she later said made her feel degraded. She was the one who felt
less than
and even worthless, but she managed to manipulate him into acting it out through sexual role playing so she could blame him.

With borderlines, dissociation becomes a common strategy as well. Jodi seemed dissociated from her
own
life, looking at her life as if it were a movie. There was a sense of unreality that allowed her to do hideous things and not really be in touch with the level of awfulness, or the hideousness of it. This is part and parcel of the emptiness and alienation that borderlines experience.

And because that dissociation makes her life feel so movielike and unreal to her, Jodi has actually enjoyed her notoriety, as if she were starring in a movie role and not becoming a convict in real life. Journalist Amy Murphy, the television reporter for Phoenix’s ABC 15 TV who conducted a one-on-one interview with Jodi Arias following the verdict, observed, “In her sick twisted little mind it is (an ego trip) absolutely . . . I asked her that question. I said, ‘People think you’re really enjoying all this attention.’ And she goes, ‘No, not this kind of attention,’ but she thought about the answer long and hard. She’s enjoying it. There’s no doubt about it. She’s enjoying it.” Dissociation is what allows her to enjoy her infamy, which amounts to being famous for doing something hideous.

One thing Amy noticed about Jodi that left her with a sense of
wow, seriously mentally ill
was her eyes, what Nancy Grace called Jodi’s “crazy eyes.” Amy was close enough to Jodi that she could see the pupils of her brown eyes, which may have been dilated. The large pupils, coupled with the fact that she didn’t blink very often, gave the sense of what people interpret as “crazy.”

The reporter said she learned through her sources that Jodi was being medicated behind bars. She asked if the drugs were anti-depressants or anti-psychotic drugs, because that might explain Jodi’s ability to have remained so calm, with her cold, dazed look throughout the interview process. According to the source, “I can’t tell you what kind of drugs she is taking, but she is on meds for whatever it is she’s dealing with.” Amy wondered if Jodi had been medicated during her testimony, it being common knowledge that the defendant suffered from migraines. The source said that she got a daily vitamin, in addition to her daily migraine medication. Amy asked specifically about anti-depressants or anti-psychotics, and got a “yes” response. When she asked “which or both?” the source could not elaborate. There was speculation that Jodi’s lack of affect on the stand could have been due to medications.

As for why the defense didn’t do much with Jodi’s mental illness, Amy was not sure. “If she’s indeed a sociopath and the defense knows this, they’re not going to bring that up in her defense. I think that they have downplayed the mental illness part of it for their own reasons, and who is to say if she’s bipolar. If she is, then she’s medicated, because nobody could sit on the stand and be that calm if they’re bipolar. If she’s a sociopath, that makes more sense. How can she lie through her smiles and keep her stories straight, thinking she’s smarter than everyone else and not feeling any remorse?”

Given the many interviews she had done in her long career, Amy noticed she did not get an uneasy physical sensation from being in Jodi’s presence. She was even looking for an evil vibe, but said she didn’t get one from Jodi. “The vibe I got was a non-vibe,” she said, “no emotion, a vacancy of any emotion whatsoever. It didn’t matter what the questions were, she was going to stay calm and have an answer for it.” Amy found it extremely odd, but not innately insidious.

Other reporters had similar opinions. Another female reporter said she hadn’t been creeped out at all. In fact, she had wanted to get up and give Jodi a hug after the interview. A male reporter told Amy that he found something very captivating about Jodi and her soft-spoken manner. Amy summed it up by saying, “She’s like one of those pretty fish deep down in the ocean that you are somehow drawn to, but when you get close to them, you realize ‘Oh my god, they’re poisonous.’ ” She acknowledged Jodi’s looks were striking, even though she had made herself as unattractive as possible for court. She looked tiny and harmless, and it was easy to see how Travis would have been attracted to her. Jodi even seemed to flirt with her favorite reporter, the handsome Troy Hayden.

Amy came away from her own interview with Jodi convinced that the woman was out of her mind. That being said, she thought Jodi clearly could distinguish right from wrong, based on her extraordinary attempts to cover up her crime and create a phony alibi.

“I interpreted Jodi Arias as being much more seriously mentally ill than the defense ever let on,” said Amy after the session.