BACKGROUND ON CASE:
By Michael Kiefer
The Arizona Republic
Jodi Arias admits that she killed her off-and-on boyfriend and secret lover, Travis Alexander, 30, who was found dead in his Mesa home in June 2008, slumped in the shower with his throat slit and a bullet in his head.
Arias, 32, goes on trial Wednesday, and it will play out as a made-for-TV drama: Prosecutors will paint a picture of an attractive but jealous woman who brutally murdered a successful man who was allegedly trying to break ties with her. But he was not trying so hard as to stop inviting her to his home for sex, judging from the suggestive photos found at the scene, which memorialize a tryst that continued until minutes before his death.
Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Juan Martinez, a prosecutor known for his gamesmanship, will ask the jury to sentence Arias to death.
Attorneys for Arias will claim that Alexander was abusive and that she killed him in self-defense.
The trial will be broadcast live on national television, and TV commentators are expected to paint the case as a parable of good and evil: the devout Mormon motivational speaker cut down by the stalker ex-girlfriend who is so vain, she put on makeup and smiled for the cameras in jailhouse interviews after the murder.
Arias’ defense attorneys, Kirk Nurmi and Jennifer Willmott, and their predecessors have been battling with Martinez to disclose electronic evidence gathered by police investigators. The court record is a litany of their motions for disclosure and Martinez’s objections. He repeatedly said he had already turned over the requested information, only to be ordered by the judge to produce e-mails, texts, photos, social-media posts and computer records that portray Alexander in a less-than-favorable light. How many of them are admitted into evidence at trial remains to be seen.
The facts of the case are also subject to change. As recently as Dec. 4, less than a week before jury selection began, Martinez stunned the defense team in open court when he announced a new theory of how the crime unfolded that contradicted everything said in the nearly four years it took to get the case to trial.
According to court records, including writings by the judge, Arias’ account and a sworn deposition by the Mesa police detective who investigated the case, Arias first shot Alexander in the head with a gun she probably stole from her grandfather. It was a non-fatal wound that limited his ability to fight back as she stabbed him 27 times and slit his throat.
But in a court hearing on Dec. 4, Martinez said that Arias first stabbed and killed Alexander and then fired a bullet into his dead body, a scenario that, if true, would paint the murder as cold and calculated and not as the kind of sudden passion that could lead to a second-degree murder conviction.
Nothing in Alexander’s autopsy reports suggests whether he was shot first or stabbed first, and the detective based his account on the blood spatter and other elements of the crime scene.
Both sides will lay out their cases when opening arguments begin Wednesday.
