Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story Read online

  She attended Yreka Union High School for three years, with Spanish and art being her favorite classes. She liked Spanish so much that she took a study abroad trip to Costa Rica.

  The relationship between Jodi and her parents was strained. She’d act up and get scolded like many adolescents. In 8th grade, her parents caught her growing marijuana at the house. They called the cops, and Jodi always resented them for it.

  Jodi claimed during her trial that her parents were abusive, giving her spankings with various objects, including a wooden spoon and belt, and shoving her into furniture, a door post and a piano in punishments that allegedly grew worse as she got older.

  She says her dad was a physically imposing man, claiming that he could once bench press an astounding 520 pounds. However, her abuse claims were not corroborated by anyone else, and it doesn’t appear any of it was ever reported to authorities. Jodi’s parents were never called to testify during the guilt phase of the trial and largely declined to comment throughout the proceedings.

  The relationship with her parents grew more tumultuous as time went on.

  The tipping point came when Jodi got caught skipping school at the end of her junior year, and her parents grounded her until her 18th birthday. It was to be a rigid grounding — no phone, no contact with friends, essentially confinement to her room until July.

  In the weeks prior, Jodi had already been plotting her escape as she fought more with her parents, quietly packing up and moving boxes to the home of an older guy she had fallen in love with. When the grounding came, Jodi moved out and later dropped out of high school.

  Jodi loved art from a young age. She was always drawing and painting pictures. Although she is often referred to in the media as an aspiring photographer, Jodi never really took those aspirations very far, other than a few wedding gigs. She loved shooting photos, yes, she shot thousands and thousands of them, but Jodi’s real profession was as a waitress.

  She worked at least 10 different restaurant jobs in the decade or so from her teenage years until she was arrested at the age of 28. The locations ran the gamut from a high-end luxury hotel to a Denny’s to a California Pizza Kitchen located in a mall. She tended bar, waited tables and became quite good at it, in fact.

  ***

  Jodi’s big foray into the professional world was at a company called Prepaid Legal Services.

  Prepaid Legal was founded in the 1970s by an Oklahoma businessman named Harland Stonecipher, who had trouble paying his legal bills after a bad car accident.

  He founded a company that allowed members to pay a monthly fee to get access to legal and other services. The company is now called Legal Shield, and it offers identity theft protection as one of its main services.

  The company made Stonecipher a multimillionaire - and enticed thousands of other Americans with the same tantalizing prospect.

  Prepaid Legal is similar to Amway in that it relies on an aggressive sales force to spread the message and recruit new salespeople to get rewarded financially.

  Jodi met Travis at a Prepaid Legal conference. Her life pretty much spiraled from that point forward.

  Jodi’s childhood seemed downright idyllic when compared to Travis’ upbringing. His mother was an addict, hooked on methamphetamine just as the drug was becoming the scourge of communities all across America.

  As a result, Travis and his siblings were subjected to all sorts of ills that no child should ever have to encounter. His father was addicted to drugs, too, but got clean before he died. Travis was always proud of his dad for turning his life around.

  Travis described in his blog how awful it was in their neighborhood in Riverside, Calif. Mom would be strung out for days, then she would come home and need to crash for several more days. Travis would attempt to wake her up, and he’d get beaten. “It hurt, but we got used to it,” he wrote.

  They also got used to not having much food around the house. Meth took priority over groceries, so Travis and his siblings would have to literally scrounge for crumbs.

  He remembers one day from his childhood when all he could find in the house to eat was a moldy piece of bread. The house was disgustingly filthy, too — so much that roaches infested the family’s surroundings.

  The cops showed up on a regular basis amid a series of domestic disturbances between his mother and father, including a time when mom emptied a handgun into dad’s car and another occasion where dad took an ax to mom’s belongings.

  “I have never heard in any movie, on any street corner, or amongst the vilest of men any string of words so offensive and hateful, said with such disgust as was the words that my mother said to my sisters and I,” Travis wrote in his blog.

  The family eventually got kicked out of the house, requiring them to move into a camper in his aunt’s backyard — leaving them crammed into the tiny space for about a year. He didn’t bathe much, and naturally got mocked at school for his filthy appearance.

  The camper was right next to a washing machine. The discharge wasn’t connected to any sewer system, so it dumped piles of wastewater right next to their ramshackle temporary home.

  Finally, Travis and his siblings got the hell out of there. They moved in with his grandmother when he was about 10 and never looked back. He had seven siblings in all; both his parents are now deceased.

  Grandmother Norma Sarvey took Travis under her wing, taught him how to be a man and introduced him to the Mormon faith. During the screaming matches with his mother, Travis would pray and come to believe that God was somehow looking out for him — if he could just get out of this mess.

  ***

  He was naturally drawn to religion after all he went through.

  Travis was baptized into the Mormon church, did a two-year missionary in Denver and eventually became a fun-loving, successful salesman and motivational speaker at Prepaid Legal.

  In the early 2000s he moved to Mesa - a perfect spot for a young Mormon man. The city is home to one of the largest Mormon populations in the country outside Utah.

  He became a fitness nut, obsessively counting calories and working out. He loved the sport of Mixed Martial Arts and was a big believer in environmentally friendly causes in the months before he died, buying a hybrid electric Toyota Prius.

  Colleagues at Prepaid Legal would cheer loudly when he walked to the stage at seminars, conferences and team meetings, encouraging them to sell, sell, sell. Only 5-foot-9 in height, he became a larger-than-life figure to some colleagues. His message was refreshing, his approach authentic. He once showed up with a 1980s heavy metal-style wig and a muscle shirt at a Prepaid Legal conference, leading a skit as a character named Eddie Snell from Alabama. As a Def Leppard tune blared, he danced around the front of the room and had the crowd on their feet, absolutely loving every bit of it. He was completely comfortable cutting it up on stage.

  The adversity of his youth shaped his adulthood and helped make him an optimist in every sense of the word. When life throws something bad your way, it’s not a stumbling block, he would say, it’s a stepping-stone!

  In a poignant blog post at the beginning of 2008, just months before his life would be cut tragically short, Travis outlined his big dreams and visions for the year ahead. It was vintage Travis: enthusiasm, confidence, ready to take on the world and make it a better place.

  “This Year will be the Best year of my life. 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. True other years now past have been at times magnificent but none like this. This is a year of metamorphosis, of growth and accomplishment that at previous was unimaginable.”

  He circled back to the “best year of his life” mantra in the final sentence of the blog post, right after offering this prediction: “I will find an eternal companion that enhances me exponentially and countless other goals that at one point I dare not even dream.”

  Less than two months later, he was dead.
r />   Chapter 3

  The Loves of Jodi’s Life

  “She’s come undone. She wanted truth but all she got was lies. Came the time to realize, and it was too late.” —The Guess Who

  Jodi had three loves in her life before she met Travis: Bobby Juarez, Matt McCartney and Darryl Brewer. Only Darryl would be called to testify at her trial.

  The relationships were all unusual and tormented in their own ways.

  She met Bobby Juarez at a carnival as a teenager. She was standing next to a ride called the Zipper when she noticed him, seduced by his long black hair and gothic attire that stood out on a sweltering summer day.

  It’s a fast ride in which occupants get strapped into a cage that spins around in circles as it hurtles through the air. That stomach-churning, terrifying, unpredictable ride was the beginning of Jodi’s turbulent romantic life.

  At the time, she was an impressionable 15-year-old, Bobby a skinny 18-year-old with no job who had all sorts of wild ideas and beliefs. He believed in vampires and wanted to travel to San Francisco to hunt them, an idea that intrigued Jodi, who was a big fan of Anne Rice books at the time. But the relationship was not without problems. At one point Bobby tried to strangle her, according to Jodi, and told her “how he would kill each member of my family.”

  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.