Jodi Arias' murder of Travis Alexander became one of the biggest media frenzies caused by
a non-celebrity crime. This is the messed up truth about Jodi Arias.
With crimes of passion, things tend to start out fine before they become awful, and this
certainly seems to have been the case with Travis Alexander and Jodi Arias. Per the Huffington
Post, the pair's romance was very much of the whirlwind variety. Arias and Alexander
met by chance during a conference trip to Las Vegas in September 2006, and as ABC News
reports, they were immediately joined at the hip. By February next year, they were dating.
Over the course of their relationship, the pair were reportedly in near-constant connection,
to the tune of daily phone calls and around 82,000 emails.
"We got to know each other through hours and hours of phone conversations. We just discovered
a lot of common interests and grew close."
Travis Alexander might have been happy in his relationship with Jodi Arias at first,
but as ABC News tells us, it didn't take long for his friends to start getting a bad feeling
about his new girlfriend. Though they initially thought that the pair's relationship was "cute"
and that Arias was quite charming, they soon noticed a scary, possessive side to her.
"I mean, she was jealous of all of his friends, especially his friends that were female."
Arias was also reportedly eavesdropping on conversations, spying on Alexander's communications
with other people, and exhibiting stalker-like traits.
Over time, Alexander's circle of friends started to voice their concerns about Arias to him.
"I said, 'Travis, I'm afraid we're going to find you chopped up in her freezer."
As ABC News tells us, Jodi Arias was quite smitten with Travis Alexander. One of Alexander's
friends said:
"She was really excited about the relationship. She loved how funny he was, how much fun they
would have together. Travis loved to take adventures and do different things."
Likewise, Alexander reportedly saw Arias as his future wife ... at least initially. However,
the pair faced a number of hurdles. Arias lived in California, while Alexander was based
in Arizona. More pressingly, there was the matter of Alexander's religion. As a devout
and active Mormon, he started feeling guilty about his premarital relationship with Arias.
It didn't take long for Arias to convert to Mormonism, but that ultimately failed to save
the relationship. They finally broke up in late June 2007, and according to the Caylee
Daily, Arias herself has stated that the breakup was caused by "trust issues." Though Alexander
ended the relationship, Arias was far from done with him.
Jodi Arias was not happy when Travis Alexander broke up with her. According to Steven Chermak
and Frankie Y. Bailey's book Crimes of the Centuries, she allegedly became very, very
obsessed with him, to the point that she "hacked" his social media and email. ABC News reports
that she was also in the habit of randomly turning up at his house after moving into
the area. She'd enter his home unannounced through the garage door, and there are reports
that she even crawled in through the pet door.
"It was very much a mutual thing, huhuh."
Things got even stranger when Alexander started a new relationship, and someone started terrorizing
his new girlfriend with anonymous threats and by stalking her home. Alexander's tires
were also slashed two times. The man's inner circle suspected that Arias was behind all
this, though she denied it.
"There was a rage in her eyes."
In April 2008, she finally left Mesa and returned to her native California, which seemed to
be terrific news for him.
Everything up to this point had been all sorts of ominous, but things got truly terrifying
on June 4, 2008. Per the Caylee Daily, that was the day Travis Alexander was murdered
in his own home. The killer had been horrifyingly thorough.
Alexander's body was found in the shower of his house several days after the crime, at
which point it was too decomposed to determine whether the bullet wound was post-mortem or
not. The prime suspect, on the other hand, was easier to determine. It didn't take long
for the people who knew Alexander and Arias to figure out who the most likely culprit
was. Arias was arrested on July 15.
As the Caylee Daily notes, Jodi Arias was arrested at her grandparents' home in California.
Curiously enough, the very same place soon became pretty interesting to the authorities,
according to the Chicago Tribune. In May 2008, a number of items had been stolen from the
home, and one of them happened to be a .25-caliber gun. Two guesses as to what kind of weapon
was used to shoot Travis Alexander.
The handgun used in the murder was never found, and even after Arias confessed to killing
Alexander, she claimed that she'd used his own gun against him. Still, the fact that
she had access to an extremely similar handgun that had disappeared well before the crime
made the prosecution suspect that she'd been planning to kill Alexander well before doing
the deed. The fact that she appeared to have been extremely secretive about a trip to Arizona
around the time of the murder supported this line of thinking.
As the CBC reports, the Jodi Arias murder trial was a lengthy one that involved an amazing
amount of twists and turns. This stemmed from the racy nature of Alexander and Arias' relationship
and correspondence, as well as the gruesomeness of the crime and Arias' willingness to stand
in the spotlight. It probably didn't exactly hurt that she kept things fresh by changing
her story, either.
Arias went public with a story about "two masked intruders" who had killed Alexander.
She wasn't afraid to recite this horror movie tale in interviews with high-profile programs
like Inside Edition, while maintaining her own innocence.
"I know that I'm innocent, God knows I'm innocent, Travis knows I'm innocent."
She stuck to her guns for no less than two years, though, and as the Huffington Post
notes, the story got pretty wild at times. Here's how she detailed her own miraculous
escape from one of the supposed killers, who she claimed was pointing a gun at her:
"He pulled the trigger. And nothing happened with the gun. And so I just grabbed my purse,
which was on the floor at that point, and I ran down the stairs and out of there and
I left [Travis] there ... I pushed past him — and his gun. And I just didn't look back."
After Jodi Arias first argued that she had no idea what had happened to Travis Alexander
and then moved on to a story where she was with him when two intruders attacked, she
introduced a third version of the events in August 2011.
As the Chicago Tribune reports, this version of the story stated that Alexander flew into
a rage after she dropped a camera. Per Radar Online, Arias also claimed that Alexander
had been violent toward her in the past, stating that he had beaten, kicked, and abused her.
Arias' younger sister, Angela, backed up this story in social media, while also refuting
the previous ones, writing:
"[Jodi] was not under oath when she spoke on TV and yes, she lied. But, it was because
she was so in love with that man she did not want people to know what a monster he really
was."
One of the strangest pieces of evidence in Jodi Arias' trial was the camera that, according
to ABC News, was recovered from the murder scene. The investigators found the device
in the washing machine, and as the Arizona Republic reported, it was extremely damaged
by water. However, this apparent attempt to wash away the evidence proved fruitless when
the police were able to recover a number of pictures from its memory card, complete with
a June 4, 2008, timestamp.
Arias tried to incorporate the images in her story about masked intruders attacking Alexander
as she was taking the pictures, but the authorities found this less than plausible.
How weird was Jodi Arias' trial? As the CBC tells us, it was such a massive circus that
at one point, seats to the court proceedings were selling for as much as $200, and people
were actually camping outside the courthouse in an attempt to make sure they got in. The
media embraced Arias soon after the crime came to light, and as such, the sordid details
of the murder became extremely popular with the public.
As such, when the trial finally started in January 2013, everyone was in feeding frenzy
mode. The most popular part of the trial was arguably the 18 days Arias herself spent testifying,
during which she went through her intimate relationship with the victim in great detail.
The public got the details to their hearts' content, as the media went all-out in their
coverage, and aspects of the case made the rounds on social media. As a result, even
prosecutor Juan Martinez became a bit of a celebrity.
As a prime example of the kind of devotion that the media had to the Jodi Arias case,
look no further than HLN. According to the CBC, the network was so interested in the
Arias trial that it assigned some of its biggest stars exclusively to it. They also started
a new show called HLN After Dark, which was largely about chewing the facts of the Jodi
Arias case in minute detail — complete with fake juries and reenactments.
"That is a fast, furious fight. And the camera drops. And the camera is dropped."
HLN's general manager and executive vice president Scot Safon had an answer ready about the channel's
investment in the case. He said:
"We knew the characters involved like Jodi and Travis were interesting young people,
in love theoretically, and it went dramatically bad. A crime story like this that goes to
trial, it's never just about the story itself. You get to know the people involved."
Jodi Arias' trial may have been a strange carnival borne out of a horrible crime, but
fortunately, even the most tragic circus eventually leaves town. As CNN reports, in April 2015,
Arias was sentenced to life in prison, with zero possibility for parole. As with everything
about the case, the road to this conclusion was a bumpy one with many strange twists and
turns. Arias had already been found guilty in May 2013, but the jury couldn't decide
whether she should be sentenced to death or not. In October 2014, the exact same thing
happened to a second jury. As such, Arias dodged capital punishment, and her sentencing
was left to a judge.
Before the sentence was read, Arias spoke of her actions with regret, saying:
"To this day I can't believe that I was capable of doing something that terrible. I'm truly
disgusted and repulsed with myself. I'm horrified because of what I did, and I wish there was
some way I could take it back."
Per CNN, however, this didn't stop her from filing an appeal, accusing the prosecutor
of overt hostility and quoting the overwhelming publicity of the case. The Arizona court of
Appeals proved unsympathetic to her arguments.
"We are adjourned."
The murder of Travis Alexander and the subsequent trial of Jodi Arias received vast nationwide
attention, and as the CBC reports, Arias herself became a well-known figure as a result. She
was able to turn her fame into profit by selling prison-made artwork online. She also became
Twitter famous, thanks to an account that her friends kept on her behalf. As criminologist
Dr. Scott Bonn wrote in Psychology Today in 2015, Arias acquired the status of a "celebrity
monster" who had her fans, but also plenty of enthusiastic detractors. The latter crowd
could get so heated that a member of the second jury who refused to vote for giving Arias
the death sentence — and thus saved her from death row — received death threats
for her decision, and her personal information was leaked online.
Even years after the case was solved and Arias received her life sentence, her name carries
weight. In fact, as recently as July 2020, Entertainment Tonight reported on Jodi Arias:
Cellmate Secrets — a Lifetime special about Arias' former cellmates, who entered the Arias
media mix with a claim that she didn't kill Alexander alone.
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