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

manner. Of note, however, sheets and blankets had been stripped from the bed and removed from the room, although it couldn’t be determined by whom or why. The hallway between the bedroom and master bathroom had blood smears and one latent bloody palm print, which would be cut from the wall and analyzed later at the crime lab.
    With the preliminary assessment of the crime scene complete, Detective Flores turned his attention to the friends or housemates who had been present when the body was discovered—Mimi Hall, Michelle Lowery, Dallin Forrest, Zachary Billings, Amanda McBrien, Enrique Cortez, and Karl Hiatt. After being ruled out as suspects, they might be able to provide information about other people who knew Travis and maybe had a grudge or a score to settle. The fact that the other two boarders were not only unharmed, but had actually been living several days in the same house as their dead landlord, allegedly without knowing it, seemed to suggest that Travis had been a very specific target. Among Travis’s friends, there was a lot of buzz about Jodi Arias, a vindictive ex-girlfriend who lived in California. She would need to be located, but at the moment, the six at hand all agreed to go to the Mesa police station to be interviewed.
    Flores chose to speak with Mimi Hall first, as she had been the first on the scene and was Travis’s intended guest for the trip to Cancún. She told the investigator that she had met Travis a year earlier in a singles ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, although the two had only been getting to know each other better in the past few months. She thought Travis may have had a romantic interest in her, but she had told him that she wanted the relationship to be platonic and would understand if he wanted to replace her with someone else on the business trip to Mexico. Travis had declined, promising he would respect her boundaries. She reported she hadn’t seen him in church on Sunday and had been trying to call him for days before she finally went to his residence.
    When asked about Travis’s roommates, Mimi didn’t know much. Zach had been there a few months but frequently stayed with his girlfriend, while Enrique had moved in only a couple of weeks earlier. Both were from the church, but she didn’t know them well enough to provide an assessment of their personalities. When asked about Jodi Arias, she had to rely on hearsay, but there had certainly been a lot of chatter about Jodi: she was a “stalker ex-girlfriend”; Jodi would crawl through Napoleon’s doggie door to get inside when she wasn’t invited; after the two broke up, Jodi had stolen some pages from a journal Travis kept, something he had been hoping to turn into a memoir. Mimi was aware that Travis had talked to Jodi as recently as the previous week to confront her about hacking into his Facebook account. In Mimi’s opinion, even though she had never met her, Jodi’s obsession with Travis was concerning.
    “I was worried because he had told me about an ex-girlfriend who had done some psychotic obsessive things to him and his friends,” she said. She told Flores she even had her sister on the line when she went to the house in case something was seriously wrong. “I was actually afraid that the girl might be there,” she told the detective.
    The next person interviewed was Zachary Billings, one of Travis’s two tenants. Zach had met Travis a couple of years earlier when Zach had been on a Mormon mission in Arizona in 2006 and had come to Travis’s home to talk to one of his roommates. More than a year later Zach was back in Arizona and looking for a place to live. In January 2008, Zach had moved into Travis’s house as a boarder.
    Though the likelihood of Zach’s being the killer was slim—who would live in the same house as his victim for that many days without trying to get rid of the body?—he could have easily seen or heard something that might prove critical. It was almost four in