Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias by Jane Velez-Mitchell Read Free Book Online

Jodi’s view of her rapport with Travis. “How would you describe your relationship with him?” he asked.
    Jodi seemed to be forthcoming. “We dated for like five months. And we broke up, and we continued to see each other for quite a bit. You know? Right up until I moved,” Jodi said, referring to her recent return to California.
    “When did you guys break up?”
    “We officially broke up June 29 of last year. But we . . . even though we broke up and decided to remain friends . . . I feel embarrassed talking about this but it was . . . but it wasn’t boyfriend and girlfriend . . . it was more like kind of buddies . . . you know what I mean?”
    “You guys were not like romantically together at any time?”
    “We were intimate, but I wouldn’t say romantic as far as relationship goes. We were in no way headed toward marriage.” Jodi answered the questions with a frankness that bordered on detachment.
    “When you say intimate, does that include like a sexual relationship with him?”
    “Yeah, it does.”
    “Kind of embarrassing to talk about . . . ?”
    “Yeah. And if you could keep it kind of confidential? It’s really looked down upon in that church, I mean, I’m telling you this to help you in any way I can.”
    Raised in both the Catholic and Mormon churches, Flores had knowledge about how the Mormon church would have viewed this relationship. In many ways, Detective Flores was the exact opposite of the hard-drinking, smoking, raunchy detective that Hollywood scriptwriters love to create. He’d been married to the same woman for more than two decades and had five children with her. A homebody who loved to cook for his kids, Flores chose to identify with the Mormon church when he married his wife, who was also Mormon. He knew plenty about the religion, including the rules that Jodi and Travis were breaking by being intimate.
    Now that Flores had Jodi admitting she and Travis had been lovers, he was in a better position to get her to reveal other crucial details. “I appreciate it,” he said, using the classic technique of seeming to befriend the person being investigated. The detective moved the conversation along, looking to map out a timeline. “So you moved back to California a couple of months ago.”
    Jodi guessed that she had moved back on April 10.
    “Did you stop by his house to say goodbye to him?”
    “Oh, yes,” Jodi replied. “I was completely moved out of my house, and I stayed at his house for about a week. I practically lived there. I spent the night there several times a week when I lived there. I came over and I cleaned his house a lot. He paid me a little bit to keep his house nice and clean. Sort of like a housekeeper.”
    The detective asked if Jodi had ever met any of Travis’s roommates, to which she replied that he’d had several. One guy who had been there moved to Utah, she thought, and one had moved to Phoenix. She said that she and his current roommate Zach, a returned Mormon missionary, had “sort of connected” because they communicated by instant messaging. She claimed not to know if he still lived at the house, and Flores confirmed that he did.
    Flores used the opening to expand on the profile of the renter. “What do you think about Zach . . . what was his relationship with your ex-boyfriend?”
    “He seemed like a nice guy when I first met him,” Jodi stated. She explained that she had met both Zach and his girlfriend at the house.
    With the Mormon religion on the table, Jodi talked about Travis’s position on substances. Mormons don’t drink alcohol and don’t use tobacco, drugs, coffee, or tea, she stated. “He was just super strict on that,” she told Flores, referring to Travis. “He wouldn’t even take Excedrin for headaches because it had caffeine. I’m a little less strict on that . . .”
    “There are a lot of Diet Cokes in the fridge,” Flores commented.
    “Yeah, they’re not Travis’s,” Jodi responded. “I can