A woman denied murdering her ex-boyfriend for two years before admitting that she had killed him – but insisted that she had shot him in self defence
An ordinary-looking photo of a man taking a shower at his home proved to be the last time he was seen alive.
On June 4, 2008 30-year-old Travis Alexander was taking a shower at his home in Mesa, Arizona when his girlfriend Jodi Arias snapped a photo of him.
As accounts of the horrific crime resurface on Reddit, that spine-chilling final photo of Travis is a disturbing sight. One user wrote: “ The look on his face in that last photo honestly creeps me out.
“It doesn’t look like a normal shower pic at all… there’s something in his eyes that feels off, almost like he knew something bad was about to happen. Gives me chills every time I see it”
Arias dropped the camera less than two minutes after taking Travis’s picture, and as it fell it snapped another image, showing him lying prone and bloodied on the floor.
Seven years after his death, at the end of a court case that captivated America, Arias was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Arias had tried to convince the jury that she had killed Travis in self-defence, but tell-tale clues revealed that she had planned to murder him days before.
Prosecutor Juan Martinez pointed out that Arias had prepared for the long drive from her grandparents’ home in Yreka, California, by stocking up on fuel. She explained: “I started to take a look at some of the receipts that were taken during an execution of a search warrant on her house, and I saw there was a receipt for a five-gallon gas can.
“So now I knew that I had three five-gallon gas cans – [a total of] 15 gallons,” Martinez said on US TV’s Dr. Phil show.
He added that Arias had also dyed her hair, removed the number-plates from her car, and – most tellingly – stolen the .25-caliber pistol from her grandparents.
At her trial, Maricopa County medical examiner Kevin Horn testified that Arias had stabbed and slashed her victim with such violence that a wound to his head had caused bone fragments to chip away from his skull. His throat had also been cut so deeply that the knife almost reached his spinal cord.
Horn added that Arias had fired a single bullet through Travis’s brain, almost certainly after he was already dead. Showing a series of post-mortem photos to the jury at her trial, Horn explained that the slash across Travis’s throat would have been enough to kill him: “The jugular vein and carotid artery are both cut,” he said.
“[The cut] goes all the way back to the spine, three or four inches,” Horn said. “It doesn’t go through the spinal cord, but it cuts all the soft tissue and structure in front of the neck. He’s going to lose consciousness within seconds and die a few minutes later.”
While defence attorneys insisted that Travis had been a “sexual deviant” who brutalised and terrorised Arias, the prosecution successfully proved that Arias had stalked Travis after their relationship broke up and he began dating other women.
The couple had dated for a few months after meeting at a conference in Las Vegas in 2007, but they continued some kind of sexual relationship after their breakup.
After the murder, Arias called Travis’s phone and left friendly voicemails in hope of establishing an alibi. When questioned by police, she initially suggested that he might have been attacked in a home invasion.
But two years after her arrest, she changed her story, admitting that she had killed him – but insisted that it was in self-defence. She claimed that Travis had lost his temper after she had dropped his camera during a sex session.
He rushed at her “like a linebacker” she told detectives, and she’d shot him in a panic. Arias added that she had no recollection of picking up a knife at all.
The sensational trial, which saw massive crowds gather outside the courthouse, was punctuated with shocking revelations from the couple’s text messages and graphic recollections from Arias about their adventurous sex life. She insisted it was instigated by Travis, saying: “It was often mutual. I didn’t feel like a prostitute during, just after.”