Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

The Jodi Arias Trial (Part 1)

On June 2, between 1:00 am and 3:00 am, Arias called Alexander four times but did not appear to get through to him since the longest of the calls was seventeen seconds. After 3:00 am, Alexander called Arias twice, the first time for eighteen minutes, and the second time for 41 minutes. At 4:03 am, Arias called Alexander back, and the call lasted two minutes, 48 seconds. Neither these calls nor their transcripts were presented in Arias' trial. At 5:39 am, Arias set out to drive south to rent a car for a long trip to Utah, as stated in evidence by a gasoline purchase at Shell Food Mart in Yreka. On June 2, at 8:04 am, Arias rented a car at Budget Rent a Car in Redding, California. She indicated she would return the car to Budget in Redding. Arias visited friends in southern California on her way to Utah for a PPL work conference and to meet with Ryan Burns, a PPL co-worker. By late evening on June 3, Arias apparently set out for Salt Lake City.

Alexander missed an important conference call on the evening of June 4. The following day, Arias met up with Burns in the Salt Lake City suburb of West Jordan, Utah, and attended business meetings for the conference. Burns later said he noticed Arias' formerly blonde hair was now dark brown, and she had cuts on her hands. On June 6, she left Salt Lake City and drove west towards California. She called Alexander several times and left several voicemail messages for him. She also accessed his cell phone voice mail system. When Arias returned the car on June 7, it had been driven about 2,800 miles (4,500 km). The rental clerk testified that the car was missing its floor mats and had red stains on its front and rear seats. It could not be verified that the car had floor mats when Arias picked it up and any stains could not be verified since the car was cleaned before the police could examine it.

On June 9, having been unable to reach Alexander, a concerned group of friends went to his home. His roommates had not seen him for several days, but they believed he was out of town and thus did not think anything was amiss. After finding a key to Alexander's master bedroom, his friends entered and found large pools of blood in the hallway to the master bathroom, where his body was discovered in the shower. In the 9-1-1 call (not heard by the jury), the dispatcher asked if Alexander had been suicidal or if anyone was angry enough to hurt him. Alexander's friends specifically mentioned Arias as a possible suspect, stating that Alexander had said she was stalking him, accessing his Facebook account, and slashing his car's tires.

While searching Alexander's home, police found his recently purchased digital camera damaged in the washing machine. Police were able to recover deleted images showing Arias and Alexander in sexually suggestive poses, taken at approximately 1:40 pm on June 4. The final photograph of Alexander alive, showing him in the shower, was taken at 5:29 pm that day. Photos were taken moments later show an individual believed to be Alexander "profusely bleeding" on the bathroom floor. A bloody palm print was discovered along the wall in the bathroom hallway; it contained DNA from both Arias and Alexander.

On July 9, 2008, Arias's 28th birthday, she was indicted by a grand jury in Maricopa County, Arizona, for the first-degree murder of Alexander. She was arrested at her home later the same day and extradited to Arizona on September 5. Arias pleaded not guilty on September 11. During this time, she gave several different accounts about her involvement in Alexander's death. She originally told police that she had not been in Mesa on the day of the murder and had last seen Alexander in March 2008. Arias later told police that two intruders had broken into Alexander's home, murdering him and attacking her. Two years after her arrest, Arias told police that she killed Alexander in self-defense, claiming that she had been a victim of domestic violence.

Pre-trial

On April 6, 2009, a motion to reconsider the defendant's motion to disqualify the Maricopa County District Attorney's Office was denied. On May 18, the court ordered Arias to submit to IQ and competency testing. Later, in January 2011, a defense filing detailed the efforts to which Arias' attorneys went to obtain text messages and emails. The prosecution initially told the defense attorneys that there were no available text messages sent or received by Alexander, and then was ordered to turn over several hundred such messages. Mesa police detective Esteban Flores told defense attorneys that there was nothing "out of the ordinary" among Alexander's emails; about 8,000 were turned over to the defense in June 2009.