On 9th June 2008 in Mesa, Arizona, a small group of worried friends unlocked Travis Alexander’s private suite only to be hit by a wave of an unmistakable, overpowering odor that left them gagging in horror.
They grew concerned after Travis failed to pick up his new love interest, Mimi Hall, for a trip to Cancun, Mexico, and informed his roommate, Zack Billings. The friends also stressed that all calls to Travis’ phone went directly to voicemail.
At their four-bedroom house, Zack fought panic as he gingerly stepped into Travis’ side of the house, where the stench seemed most concentrated. The others followed while covering their noses.
There were dried patches of blood on the floor, and they carefully stepped around them. Zack rounded the corner towards the bathroom and suddenly stopped after glimpsing Travis’ crouched body in the shower.
The pale skin and the concentration of the smell were enough for him to know Travis was dead. Zack immediately called 911 and asked officers to come to their home at 11428 E. Queensborough Avenue.
He had no way of knowing the call would launch a murder case whose sexually lurid details and exceptional violence would transfix the whole country.
Almost immediately, police narrowed the list of suspects and focused on one: Jodi Arias, Travis’s former girlfriend. When the group discovered Travis’s body, they told Mesa police about his obsessive ex-girlfriend, explaining that Jodi had been stalking him, slashing his tires, and even hacking his accounts.
Travis Alexander and Jodi Arias
Travis Alexander was born to Pamela Elizabeth and Gary David Alexander in Riverside, California, on July 28, 1977. He had seven siblings, including three brothers and four sisters.
Because their childhood was defined by severe neglect and abuse from drug-addicted parents, Travis stepped into a paternal, protective role very early on. When Travis was 8, his paternal grandmother, Norma Jean Preston Alexander, took him and his siblings to live with her.
She then introduced the children to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Travis later became a confident, inspiring salesman for ‘Pre-Paid Legal Services Inc.’ and a motivational speaker.
According to a Happy Scribe transcript covering ABC News’ 20/20 special titled “Gone in a Flash,” Travis’ brother Steven reiterated that, “Travis always had tons of friends and tons of people that always wanted to be around him because he was a great guy.“
Jodi Ann Arias was born to Sandra and William Arias in Salinas, California, on July 9, 1980. She was the firstborn of two children, and her younger brother, Carl, would become Jodi’s closest playmate.
Though her early childhood was supposedly almost ideal, Jodi became increasingly violent around the age of seven. She later attributed this to severe parental abuse, but these claims were heavily disputed.
After failing to complete 11th grade at Yreka High School in California, she moved in with a boyfriend at age 17. Jodi later relocated to Palm Desert, California, where she began working for Pre-paid Legal Services Inc. as an independent associate to help pay the bills.
In September 2006, Pre-paid Legal Services Inc. held a convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. Travis was already an executive at the firm, so he traveled from Arizona, while Jodi flew in from Palm Desert, California, to attend.
A mutual friend introduced the two at the convention, and they quickly hit it off. Jodi also ended her relationship days after meeting Travis.
Behind closed doors, Jodi and Travis’s relationship quickly became intimate. It was a secret passion that directly defied the strict tenets of Travis’s Mormon faith, which explicitly forbade premarital sex.
Filled with guilt, Travis began to speak to Jodi about Mormon rules regarding the consumption of alcohol, caffeine, and illegal substances in an attempt to convert her. She agreed to be baptized into the Mormon Church on November 26, 2006.
By February, 2007, both Travis and Jodi regarded themselves as a couple in a long-distance romantic relationship. They also began to regularly travel between California and Arizona to see each other and go on assorted trips.
Evidence of them at tourist hotspots was frequently posted on Jodi’s ‘MySpace’ page. Despite the blossoming romance, however, Travis’ friends noted that Jodi was becoming increasingly possessive of Travis.
One friend, Clancy Talbot, would later reveal to ABC News that Jodi “just had to sit right by him. She didn’t appreciate when he was talking to another female. She didn’t like the fact that there was anyone who didn’t know that they were together. She wanted to make that clear.”
Sky Lovingier Hughes, another friend of Travis, also witnessed Jodi’s oddly possessive behavior around Travis. She reiterated that Jodi and Travis’ intense long-distance relationship had been toxic right from the start.
Sky told ABC News that she once told Travis, “I’m afraid we’re gonna find you chopped up in her freezer. From very early on, Jodi was completely obsessed with him.“
Travis appeared to be mildly amused by his friends’ growing concern about Jodi’s overly-touchy and possessive behavior toward him. Sky would later recount how Travis’ friends came together to stage an intervention weeks before Jodi murdered him.
According to ABC News, Sky recounted how they were telling Travis about all the things they were scared about for him, “All of a sudden I got this cold feeling over me, and I knew she was outside our door. … I mouthed to them and pointed at the door, and I said, ‘She’s out there.'”
She then quietly told him she instinctively knew Jodi was standing right outside.
Travis, who thought his friends were exaggerating, went to the door and yanked it open, hoping to prove them wrong. He was startled when he saw Jodi standing quietly behind the door.
Sky confirmed that Jodi did not apologize, flee in embarrassment, or even confront Travis and demand to know why she hadn’t been invited to this impromptu meeting of his friends.
Instead, Jodi just stared at Travis, giving them a look of pure evil. After this incident, Travis began to seriously reflect on his friends’ concerns.
On June 29, 2007, he told his friends that he and Jodi had officially broken up. This announcement was followed by Jodi’s abrupt decision to relocate to Mesa, Arizona. Travis told his friends that within days of the break-up, Jodi began showing up at his home unannounced.
Sky disclosed that after they broke up, Jodi would sometimes sneak into Travis’ house through the garage door, and she knew its secret code. At times, she would even painstakingly crawl through the ‘doggy door.’
Travis embarrassedly admitted to his friends that while these attempts to rekindle the long-distance relationship often made him angry with Jodi, sometimes both of them would engage in sexual intimacy after she broke into his house yet again.
Criminal attorney Linda Kenny Baden later told CBS News, “He really didn’t know and probably didn’t care, because … you’re young. You’re having sex. The way Jodi made it very easy for him. And he didn’t realize that he had this rattlesnake by the neck. Whatever he did fed into her craziness, fed into her insanity, fed — her desire that she wanted him, and she wanted to control him, and she wanted to have a life with him,” Baden explained. “…it was the perfect storm that something had to happen.”
Travis also admitted that he still answered Jodi’s texts and phone calls, though he had broken up with her. That made his friends presume that he had settled on an ‘off-again, on-again’ relationship with his ex-girlfriend.
Jodi’s Activities After Relocating to California
Jodi kept randomly breaking into her ex-boyfriend’s house from June 2007, when they officially broke up, until April 2008.
In April, Travis finally persuaded Jodi to return to California, and she went to live in Yreka with her grandparents. However, phone records later showed that Travis continued receiving intimate texts and phone calls from Jodi.
Jodi’s return to California left Travis’ friends feeling relieved. Hughes told Oxygen, “He said, ‘I’m getting, I’m getting my life back. Like, this is a whole new start. She’s gone.”
Travis had a work trip to Cancun, Mexico, scheduled for early June, 2008. He then told Jodi he wouldn’t be taking her to Cancun, but a woman named Mimi. Police investigators would later theorize that it was this announcement that triggered a murderous rage in Jodi.
On May 28, 2008, Jodi’s grandparents’ Yreka residence was burglarized. The stolen items included $30, a .25 caliber pistol, a DVD player, and a small stereo. The gun was never recovered.
On June 2, 2008, Jodi chartered a white Ford Focus from Redding’s ‘Budget Rent a Car’, saying she wanted to conduct some local errands.
She drove to Monterey, California, to visit her ex-boyfriend, Darryl Brewer. Using the excuse that she needed extra fuel security for a long drive, she asked Brewer to lend her two red five-gallon gas cans.
The next morning, she stopped at a Walmart in Salinas, California, and bought a third five-gallon gas can. With 15 gallons of extra storage sitting in the rental car, Jodi arrived at an ARCO gas station on the evening of June 3.
To avoid raising red flags with a single transaction, she fragmented the purchases. First, she used a debit Mastercard to buy 8.3 gallons of gasoline. That was followed by a cash purchase of another 9.5 gallons.
Between June 4 and June 9, Jodi called Travis countless times and left numerous voicemail messages.
When Jodi returned the vehicle on June 7, though, Budget Rent a Car personnel determined it had been driven approximately 2,800 miles. The vehicle also had stains on the rear and front seats, and its floor mats were missing.
Discovery of Travis’ Corpse
On June 7, Travis’ friends noticed that he had not spoken to any of them or exchanged messages for the past few days. Some of his work friends awaiting his arrival in Cancun also confirmed that he had not arrived there for the business conference and was not replying to messages.
When they arrived at the Mesa residence, police officers determined that Travis had been killed in the shower and had been decomposing for days.
There were smudges of blood on the sink and bathroom walls, and a pool of blood on the shower floor. Police also spotted a bloody fingerprint on the wall adjacent to the bathroom’s entrance.
Initial searches on the premises revealed a spent .25 caliber round next to a sink.
Detective Esteban Flores would later tell CBS News, “The majority of the crime scene seemed to be inside the master bedroom suite and the master bathroom. There are obvious signs of blood on the carpet. As you go in further — we found other signs of … maybe a struggle or something in the hallway, leading into the master bathroom,” He explained. “And once you go inside the bathroom is when you can see the body of Travis in the shower.”
The autopsy proved that Travis was murdered sometime on 4th June 2008, 5 days before his body was discovered. Dr. Kevin Horn ruled the cause of death as sharp force trauma to the neck and torso.
The Police Investigation into Travis’ Murder
Police officers’ interest was centered on Jodi as Travis’ friends kept referring to how she stalked him right before he was murdered. After bringing her in for questioning, Jodi volunteered her fingerprints and saliva samples before investigators asked for them.
Investigators discovered a digital camera that had been run through the washing machine in a desperate attempt to destroy evidence. Though the images had been erased, forensic technicians successfully used the water-logged memory card to recover the deleted photos.
The images depicted sexual poses of Travis and Jodi at 1.40 pm on June 4. There were more pictures at 5.29 pm on the same day, showing Travis sprawled in a pool of blood on his shower floor.
This proved that Jodi lied to the police, as she initially told them that she had last seen Travis in April. The palm print retrieved from the wall next to Travis’ bathroom entrance also contained Jodi and Travis’ DNA.
Ryan Burns, Jodi’s co-worker, also revealed that she had bandages around her hands after June 4. He added that she also changed her hair color.
The evidence was significant, and Mesa police officially arrested Jodi on 8th July 2008. When queried about her whereabouts on June 4, 2008, Jodi explained that she traveled to Utah to meet someone she was interested in.
She allegedly got lost on the way and reached Utah much later than she had intended. When police officers informed her that her DNA from her volunteered saliva sample matched that of a bloody handprint found on the victim’s bathroom wall, she changed her story.
She explained to officers that she and Travis were actually attacked by two strangers who were masked. Jodi claimed that the gangsters opted to kill Travis but let her live.
She stressed that she opted not to speak of the attack for fear that the strangers would track her down and kill her.
When she learned that Mesa’s police officers were able to retrieve sexually explicit photos of her and Travis from the digital camera’s memory card, and also saw images of Travis lying in a pool of blood, Jodi changed her story again.
Jodi alleged that she actually killed Travis in self-defense after he attacked her because he was angry that she absentmindedly dropped the camera when taking the sexually explicit photos of both of them.
The Trial of Jodi Arias
In September 2008, Jodi Arias was formally arraigned and entered a plea of not guilty to first-degree murder charges.
In September, Jodi was arraigned and entered a not-guilty plea. She underwent competency and psychological tests before facing first-degree murder charges. The trial started in early 2013 and had widespread media coverage.
Lead prosecutor Juan Martinez detailed a meticulous plot of a fatal attraction and extreme jealousy by Jodi Arias. In an unprecedented move, Jodi took the witness stand in her own defense, answering 200 questions curated by jurors over 18 days.
The defense maintained that Travis initiated the fight, body-slammed Jodi and chased her. In so doing, it was a choice between her life and his.
After four days of deliberations, the jury found Jodi Arias guilty of first-degree premeditated murder. The same jury that convicted Jodi entered the penalty phase to decide between the death penalty and life in prison.
The jury was deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of death, which forced the Maricopa County Superior Court judge Sherry Stephens to declare a mistrial for the penalty phase. Another jury was impaneled in 2015 to determine a sentence. They were also deadlocked in the same manner.
Under Arizona law, because a second jury could not reach a unanimous verdict, the death penalty was removed as an option, and the final sentencing decision fell to the judge.
Judge Stephens formally sentenced Jodi to life in prison without the possibility of parole in April 2015. At the sentencing, Reuters reported Stephens comments saying, “The defendant did not render aid to the victim … (and) destroyed evidence at the crime scene. The defendant went to great lengths to conceal her involvement. The court finds the mitigation presented is not sufficiently substantial to call for leniency and that a natural life sentence is appropriate.”
At the final sentencing, according to KTAR News, Jodi’s final statement read, “I do remember the moment when the knife went into Travis’ throat, and he was still conscious. The most important thing I want to say is I’m sorry for the enormous amount of pain I caused to the people that knew Travis.“
Victim Impact and Familial Loss
During the penalty phase of the trial, Travis’s siblings provided victim impact statements detailing how the crime had fractured their lives. Steven Alexander also testified that he suffered from depression, ulcers, and nightmares about a killer coming after his family.
During an interview with CNN News, he said, “I thought my brother was bulletproof. I thought he was stronger than anything; he couldn’t be cut down or knocked down… He was unbreakable. Who on earth would want to do this to him?”
Samantha Alexander, who had been a police officer for more than ten years, stated that the graphic crime scene photos of her brother’s slit throat were more horrific than anything she had ever seen in her career in law enforcement.
The family also suffered tragedy during the proceedings. Their grandmother, who had stepped in to raise Travis and his siblings, saw her health decline rapidly due to the grief of the murder. She ultimately passed away in 2012 before the trial and verdict.
After the final sentencing, the judge also ordered Jodi to pay $32,000 in restitution to the Alexander family to help cover their travel and lodging during the trials. In the years following the case, the Travis family has focused on protecting Alexander’s legacy and keeping his motivational philosophy alive.
Jodi Arias is currently incarcerated at the Arizona State Prison Complex, and she will likely be there for the rest of her natural life.
For other true crime stories involving murders, check out our pieces on Janet Chandler and Maddie Clifton.
For additional case documentation, including graphic autopsy images of Travis Alexander, visit the external page here; viewer discretion is strongly advised.
