Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias
By Jane Velez-Mitchell

The crime:

After a brief and torrid relationship, Travis Alexander broke up with his crazy girlfriend Jodi Arias. On June 4, 2008 she killed him, stabbing him 27 times and then shooting him in the head. After a highly publicized trial she was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The book:

I’ve talked before about how hard it is to predict what true-crime stories are going to grab hold of the public imagination and become media sensations. Though I think it’s largely forgotten now, the Jodi Arias case was huge at the time. Not a crime of the century, not by a long shot, but a crime of the month, roughly on the same level as the trials of Scott Peterson and Casey Anthony. But what was special about Jodi Arias? A spurned lover goes full Fatal Attraction and kills the guy who dumped her. Jane Velez-Mitchell, who covered the Arias trial for HLN, addresses this question midway through Exposed:

The public was intrigued with the murder, and the coverage in the media began to balloon. It had all the makings of a media sensation. According to the “National Data on Intimate Partner Violence” for the complete year 2007, there were more than two thousand “intimate homicides,” or homicides involving people who were either in or had been in an intimate relationship. In 25 percent of intimate murders in 2007 – more than five hundred in all – the victim was the male partner or ex-partner. What propelled the Jodi and Travis doomed relationship into such a disproportionate headline grabber, beyond the “ex-girlfriend murders ex-boyfriend” scenario? Travis and Jodie were a couple that appeared to be ideal – good-looking, smart, savvy, personable, sensible, religious – appealing in every way. Added to that was a relationship undercurrent that most of us can relate to on some level – insecurity, jealousy, flirting, and desire. Then add the forbidden love, the raunchy sex, the stalking, and the web of lies, with a twist of Mormonism, and the press could not resist. The fact that the murder was brutal, bloody, and partially documented in accidental photos added to the fascination of the red-hot story, and crime junkies could not get enough.

This all checks out but my guess is that it was the sexual angle (with a “twist of Mormonism”?) that drove most of the hype. Though I had to wonder just how “kinky” Travis and Jodi’s relationship really was. Velez-Mitchell plays up how “shocking” and “explicit” the details revealed at trial were, “while the audience blushed and the jurors squirmed,” but what was the reality? To me it all seemed pretty vanilla. Travis was an ass man, but while anal sex isn’t everyone’s thing, it’s pretty common. In the phone-sex recording he talks about tossing Jodi’s salad – an euphemism for anilingus popularized by the comedian Chris Rock, which Velez-Mitchell somehow tortures into “a slang reference that denotes anal sex delivered orally” – but I wasn’t sure if this was something he actually did. Nor is it clear if they ever engaged in even very light forms of bondage. There’s no limit to the public’s prurience, but is the average American so prudish that the mention of things like this makes them blush?

But the kinkiness, if that is what it was, was given a boost by Arias herself, who had an undeniable star power, at least as far as murderers go. Young and good-looking, she also liked playing to the spotlight, a desire for attention flagged by the prosecutor in his summation and which ended up doing her more harm than good. Given the case against her, she probably should not have taken the stand, and I wasn’t sure from the reporting presented here if this was something her lawyers tried to talk her out of. Was she a little bit proud of being declared, in Alexander’s words, a “prototype of sluttiness,” “the ultimate slut in bed,” and a “three-hole wonder”?

(I can’t resist an aside here on the history of the word “slut.” Today this has the meaning of a sexually voracious or promiscuous woman, but a hundred years ago it was commonly used to mean something quite different. In one of Agatha Christie’s novels a woman is referred to as being a total slut and it has no sexual connotations at all. It just means she doesn’t keep a clean house.)

But perhaps her decision to testify in her own defence was just another case of her not being very bright. This was an open-and-shut case, mainly due to Arias’s stupidity. Her (third) account of what happened was preposterous, and there were other times when she seems to have almost wanted to get caught. How did she even manage to take a picture of herself moving Alexander’s body? Velez-Mitchell says it was “probably by accident.” But even if it wasn’t by accident, how did she do it? Why was she still holding on to the camera as she was trying to lug Alexander’s body around? And why didn’t she just take the camera with her and dispose of it the same way she (successfully) did with the murder weapons? Why throw it in the laundry? Indeed, why even do a laundry?

Even her few attempts at thinking ahead backfired. The idea of filling up gas cans before she set out to drive from her place to Alexander’s so as not to leave a paper-trail of stations she’d filled up at along the way was a good one in principle. But the evidence of her taking the gas cans with her only went to proving premeditation, thus nailing her with murder in the first.

This was a timely book, so Arias hadn’t even been sentenced at the time of publication. All the same, I didn’t want it to be any longer. I think I’d had my fill of Arias by the end. But I thought Velez-Mitchell handled the material well. Author of a couple of previous books on addiction, I thought she was particularly insightful in accounting for Alexander’s fatal appetite for Arias.

Jodi elicited Travis’s reckless forbidden passion, which was what he craved about her. Unfortunately for her it was also what he loathed, as it came with more and more guilt each time. She was the vehicle of his moral corruption, and over time, the sexual fire sale that she offered him didn’t increase her value in his eyes – if anything, it brought her worth to an all-time low.

I don’t know if this is what was going on, but as psychological analysis I think it’s better than what we get in the epilogue, which offers a selection of hot takes from observers on what Arias’s problem was. I thought this only underlined how limited in usefulness such exercises are, as various labels like Borderline Personality Disorder (a really vague sort of catch-all), narcissism, psychopathy, or sociopathy, all get tried on. I thought the addiction model was probably a better fit. I mean, after breaking up Alexander apparently offered to hire Arias to clean his house, paying her $12.50 an hour for sixteen hours a week of work. That struck me as really strange, not to mention a bit cold. But maybe, as others indicated, she offered to clean the house for free, just as a way of staying close to Travis. Either way, it’s weird. When couples split up, they don’t stay together in this kind of relationship, and for good reason. It’s always best to make as clean a break as possible.

Noted in passing:

I wouldn’t call Dungeons & Dragons, at least in its classic form, a board game, but a tabletop role-playing game. There’s a difference.

It can be hard keeping slang straight. At one point Velez-Mitchell talks about how

Travis grew determined to get healthy and into great physical shape. He began an exercise regimen that consisted of long workout sessions and strenuous hikes and bicycle rides, while also eating more fruits and vegetables. He was even juicing and – after viewing a documentary on the horrors of factory farming – had cut back on meat.

What confused me here was the word “juicing.” I think it means that Alexander was using a juicing machine to whip up protein smoothies or some other supplement. However, “juicing” is also a term used to describe someone who is taking steroids for bodybuilding. They are said to be “on the juice.” This isn’t just something professional bodybuilders do, as I’ve known people as long ago as when I was in high school who were juicing in this sense. So a bit more information was needed here.

Takeaways:

Crazy in bed, crazy in the head.

True Crime Files