Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias Read Free Page A

as thirty-year-old Travis Alexander, crumpled naked and lifeless on the floor of his shower stall. His body was well into the decomposition process, and although it was unclear how long he had been there, there was no doubt it had been at least a couple of days. Officers observed large amounts of blood beyond the shower as well, splattered around the floor, walls, and sink. Police observed a large laceration to the man’s throat, which appeared to cross from one ear to the other.
    A fairly hard-edged town with a violent crime rate above the national average in pretty much every category, the city of Mesa had seen its share of disturbing deaths. Twenty-five years earlier, in one of Maricopa County’s most heinous crimes ever, a transient by the name of Robert “Gypsy” Comer had murdered a man he had never met before at a campground near Apache Lake, then kidnapped a woman one campsite over and sexually assaulted her for twenty-four hours. He had been sentenced to death, and he was executed by lethal injection in May 2007.
    Unlike the Apache Lake crime, this new Mesa murder did not have the markings of a random crime, though at this early stage, nothing could be ruled out. Travis owned and occupied the house, but being single, he liked to rent out bedrooms to friends and roommates for the income. He currently had two boarders, Enrique Cortez and Zachary Billings, who told police it had been four or five days since they had last seen and spoken to him. However, they hadn’t suspected anything was wrong, because he had a trip planned to Cancún; they’d just assumed he had already left.
    It was the planned trip to Cancún that had prompted the search for Travis in the first place. Unable to reach him, Marie “Mimi” Hall, the friend Travis was supposed to be traveling with, had become increasingly concerned, especially since they were scheduled to leave in the morning. That evening, she’d gone to his house, knocked, and waited in vain. When no one came to the door, she went home and called her friend Michelle Lowery and Michelle’s boyfriend, Dallin Forrest. All three entered the house by using the keypad code at the garage. Mimi immediately detected a foul odor, something she initially blamed on Travis’s dog, Napoleon. Inside, they were surprised to find Zach and his girlfriend, Amanda McBrien, in Zach’s bedroom. They had not heard the doorbell. Now that they knew Travis was missing, Zach tried to turn the doorknob to his room, discovered it was locked, and went to retrieve the spare key to the master bedroom suite. As the door opened, a huge bloodstain could be seen on the carpet at the entryway to the hall leading to Travis’s en suite bathroom. The smell of death was undeniable. That was when all of them knew the search was not going to end well.
    I t was ten minutes to midnight when homicide detective and lead investigator for the case Esteban Flores arrived at the address. By then the residence had already been secured with yellow police tape, and a police guard was in place to monitor the comings and goings in the house.
    The scene in the bathroom was gruesome. By the blood spatter and smears on the walls, there definitely appeared to have been a struggle between the victim and the assailant. It was difficult to assess a cause of death because of the high number of wounds visible across the victim’s upper torso and head. The victim was hunched in a sitting position on the shower floor. The body looked like it had been rinsed off in the shower some time after death. A .25-mm bullet casing was carefully removed from atop caked blood on the floor near the sink, but the handgun it came from was nowhere to be found. Blood swabs, fingerprints, and hair samples were collected from the bathroom baseboards and floor.
    Nothing in Travis’s bedroom looked particularly out of place. His well-organized closets and drawers had not been disturbed, and there was no indication that the room had been entered in any forced