JODI Arias’ attractive, butter-wouldn’t-melt looks instantly caught Travis Alexander’s eye and they embarked on a promising love story.
But, looks are deceiving – and their romance would have a gruesome, tragic conclusion just two years later.
Jodi, who was 28 at the time, attended a Prepaid Legal Services convention in LA in 2006, where she met salesman Travis, then 29.
He was instantly besotted and they went on a date.
“She’s beautiful. She’s friendly, has long, blonde hair. Cute figure. She was very sweet,” Alexander’s friend Sky Lovingier Hughes said, according to ABC News.
‘Girl he wants to marry’
“During the dinner, they just talked the whole time. She seemed to like him as much as he liked her… the next morning, he tells me that he’s found his wife and this is the girl that he wants to marry.”
Despite living 600 miles apart – Travis in Mesa, Arizona, Jodi in California- the romance quickly blossomed.
But while Travis saw the relationship as being casual, Jodi took it far more seriously – and, her jealous, possessive behaviour soon began to cause alarm.
Sky recalls: “I started seeing things that were just disturbing. I said, ‘Travis, I’m afraid we’re gonna find you chopped up in her freezer.’
“From very early on, she was completely obsessed with him.”
Jodi would sneak into Travis’ house via his doggy door and get into bed with him while he was sleeping.
She’d also turn up to parties she knew he’d be at, even though she wasn’t invited.
During the course of their relationship, the pair exchanged a staggering 82,000 emails.
Sky recalls once being at Travis’ house with her husband Chris, and sensing that Jodi was nearby.
“All of a sudden I got this cold feeling over me and I knew she was outside the door… I mouthed to them and pointed at the door and I said, ‘She’s out there,’” Sky explained.
While Travis didn’t believe her, he opened the door to find Jodi in the hallway. Sky described her face as being “filled with evil”.
Jodi and Travis officially broke it off in late 2007, but they continued to text and see each other sporadically.
The pair had initially planned to go on a Mexico trip together in June 2008, but after friends warned Travis that Jodi’s behaviour wasn’t right, he decided to call it off and began dating someone else.
Then, tragically, on June 9, 2008, after struggling to get hold of him, Travis’ friends found him dead in the shower.
He had been stabbed 27 times. His killer had also cut his throat and shot him in the head.
Authorities alleged that once Jodi had learned about the other woman, she embarked on a horror plot to murder him.
Jodi denied being at Travis’ house but numerous things linked her to the scene – including a bloody handprint on the bathroom floor that contained her DNA.
On the day of the murder, Jodi was also due to go on a road trip with her new love interest Ryan Burns – but she failed to answer his calls and turned up a day late with her blonde hair mysteriously dyed brown and bandages covering her bloody hands.
When questioned, she explained she’d cut them while bartending.
Police went on to discover a damaged camera in the washing machine at Travis’ house and were able to recover its memory card.
Despite trying to destroy the evidence, police discovered sexually explicit pictures of Jodi and Travis that had been taken in the early afternoon on June 4, 2008.
The court heard how the pair had passionate sex before Travis jumped in the shower.
Several pictures taken by Jodi showed Travis showering. In one final image, Travis looks directly into the camera. Moments later Jodi put down the camera and attacked.
In the frenzied next few minutes Jodi stabbed Travis 27 times as he staggered out of the shower to the bathroom sink and then into the adjoining bedroom. She then cut his throat, almost decapitating him, before a final gunshot wound to the forehead killed him.
What Jodi did not prepare for was the fact that the camera didn’t stop snapping pictures when she threw it to the floor.
The camera caught images timestamped at 5:30pm showing Travis on the shower floor bleeding to death.
It would take five days before his body was discovered when friends came to check on him in the house.
The hallway to the bathroom was also smeared with blood, police later found that it was a mix of both Jodi and Travis’ blood as Travis struggled to escape.
Police arrested Jodi and after hours of interrogation she finally admitted to being with Travis on the day of his murder – but she refused to admit she was the one who had killed him.
Her confidence in her lies was betrayed by her smiling in her first mugshot taken on the day if her arrest.
Jodi claimed she was taking photographs of him in the shower when the pair were attacked by two masked intruders — a man and a woman — who were bent on killing Travis.
Jodi said that one of the masked intruders had told her to leave and threatened to kill her family if she ever mentioned the incident to anyone, nobody but Jodi has ever been charged with Travis’ murder.
The 2013 trial captivated America. During the trial, Jodi changed her story yet again to say she had killed Travis in self-defence as he was abusive, but the jury didn’t buy it and found her guilty of first-degree murder.
Jodi was sentenced to life imprisonment with the chance of parole after 25 years in Perryville prison, Arizona.
Prior to Jodi’s sentencing, she expressed remorse, telling the court: “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.”
But, even behind bars, Jodi still courts controversy.
She has used her infamy to sell her artwork from jail, some of which has been valued at £1,800 a piece.
Jodi wrote to her brother from prison, her Instagram bio says, asking him to sell her works on eBay, which helped her with her “commissary expenses”.
She added: “I often felt hungry in jail, and my family could do little to financially support me, an adult who should have been feeding herself.”
The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry, where Jodi is incarcerated, told The New York Post that while it is aware of Arias’ art venture, it isn’t illegal.
Jodi attempted to appeal her case in 2018 but the courts declined it in 2020, but she has gone on to appeal her case again this year, a decision has not yet been made.
