It's about 1:30 p.m., and the afternoon recess in the Jodi Arias trial has ended.
Arias is back on the stand, having testified this morning about how she shot Travis Alexander on June 4, 2008, then drove to Utah to meet a guy she liked. She spent a few hours with him, made out, tried to "act normal" after what she claims was a self-defense slaying, then went home to Yreka, California. She didn't tell anyone what had happened.
She admits she was trying to hide her tracks. Yesterday, she testified that she wanted to put off for as long as possible whatever consequences would come from her actions.
See also: Jodi Arias Live Blog: Arias Describes How She Killed Travis Alexander in 2008
Nurmi asks here what day she was supposed to go to work. She says that Friday at 4 or so. After taking back the rental car, she went to her grandma's house, changed, and went to work.
As far as she knew, no one knew about Alexander's death, she testifies.
She assumed she'd be caught and "was definitely fearing it."
On June 10, six days after the murder, Arias called a couple of people. She called a Mormon bishop who knew Alexander, and he told her that Travis was dead.
Kirk Nurmi, her lawyer, asks her how she reacted.
"I doubled over and started sobbing really hard," she says. "I was hoping the whole thing wasn't real."
She goes on, sobbing: "I didn't know how his friends had found him, and what everyone was going through."
"...I didn't know what to think. It was a disaster." She hung with Bishop Layton. Nurmi asks her what happened next.
"I was scared. I thought I'd probably get arrested, the next day or whatever," she answers.
Nurmi asks her if this was when she decided to kill herself or move to Monterrey, California. She says she decided to move a few days later.
Later that afternoon, apparently still on the 10th, a friend of hers -- Leslie Udy -- encouraged her to call Mesa police detective Esteban Flores. She also had her own reasons to call him, she says: It would look less suspicious, she figured, if she called him rather than wait for him to call her.
She says she was too scared to tell him what had happened.
"I just couldn't imagine admitting to something like that -- imagine doing something like that," she says.
Arias called Detective Flores several times after that, in part hoping to find out what he knew about the slaying and how much time she might have before she was arrested.
1:53 p.m.
Weird: Arias has several reasons for buying a 9mm in Yreka after killing Alexander. She wanted to be a "responsible gun owner." She was contemplating suicide. And she had planned to camping and panning for gold with some guys, and wanted a gun (ironically) because she "no longer felt safe around guys."
1:55 p.m.
Arias says she went to Alexander's memorial service because if she didn't, it would "look suspicious."
Tearfully, she explains that Alexander "would have come to mine."
Nurmi, playing devil's advocate, reminds her that he supposedly told her he was going to kill her, and that she'd feared for his life because of him.
She says that, at heart, he wasn't that sort of a person. (This is helping her defense?)
Later, at the Freemans house, after the service, she felt like Alexander "was there."
The experience "helped me to know that he was okay, and that he was in a better place. And that maybe he wasn't mad anymore," she sobs.
2:09 p.m.
Discussing her second thoughts, she mentions again how Alexander was "raging" over the gun went off and shot him. But, as she said earlier today, she wasn't even sure the bullet had hit him at that time. Just now, she claims that she didn't know Alexander had been shot until Detective Flores told her.
2:29 p.m. -- Just had some computer difficulties, but managed to tweet some stuff.
Arias is explaining why she didn't want to tell the truth to the detective. She didn't want to "throw him under the bus" by starting to say negative things about him now.
"I didn't see what benefit it would be to talk about any of those things," she says. "It would just cause more pain."
She considered Alexander to be a friend, so she wanted to portray it that way to Detective Flores.
She again says she saw no "benefit" to telling the "truth" about Alexander, meaning his alleged violence and sexual quirks.
After her July 15 arrest, she made a decision to kill herself. She consumed a whole bottle of Advil while behind bars, and got under her blankets with a razor when everyone went to sleep.
"I never did it, obviously -- still here," she says, adding that she was "pissed" at herself and she "just wanted to be done."
She was hoping to kill herself by July 28, Alexander's birthday. But she continued to chicken out.
2:38 p.m.
The media contacted her, and she remembers getting a call from Jonathan Leach of CBS News. Though her "first instinct was, 'absolutely not,' she changed her mind and decided to talk to 48 Hours.
"I didn't tell my family about these phantom intruders" and figured they'd hear about it sometime, so she "wanted to present a different picture of herself."
Here is the link to her 2008 interview with 48 Hours about the "phantom intruders." What's really amazing in this broadcast, in retrospect, is Arias' ability to relate fiction as truth. Her story in 2008 wasn't believable, but she tells it as convincingly as the self-defense story she's telling now.
Arias says she wanted the world to see her as a normal person.
This is the same woman who asked to get her make-up as cops led her out the door in her July 2008 arrest.
"I just wanted to get on there (TV) and show people that I wasn't angry, I didn't hate him, it wasn't anything like that," she says.
She also felt that since she'd told that story to Detective Flores, she should "stick with it."
"So, I stuck with it for a long time."
Lawyer Nurmi asks her why she told 48 Hours that her childhood was "almost ideal."
Arias, speaking directly to jury as is her style, says she remembers one or two negative things up until age 7. She had her brother, had her pets, had fun at school.
Arias admits she was asked in the TV interview whether she'd ever been physically abused by Alexander. She says she downplayed it.
"I didn't want people to know the level of violence that our relationship had reached," she says.
(As we recall, she changed her story after being confronted with evidence that no one else had been in the home at the time of the murder. In other words, she didn't seem to mind smearing the victim once her concocted story was shown to be false.)
She's explaining why she didn't want to "get into detail" about the truth. "It was embarrassing," she adds.
("Embarrassing" is an interesting emotion to have after shooting and stabbing her boyfriend.)
Arias admits she figured Alexander's angry emails would be found eventually. This is one of several times today that Arias has indicated she thought very hard about the evidence she expected to be reviewed by police.
She admits she wanted to "remain consistent' with what she had told Detective Flores and had no intention to admit involvement.
Judge Stevens just called the afternoon recess. Testimony to resume at 3:30 p.m.
Check back in a few for more action...
3:21 p.m. Court back in session.
Defense attorney Nurmi says she told "others" about her sexual relationship with Alexander. The first person she told was a personal friend named Aaron.
Nurmi asks her if once Alexander had "passed," she felt more comfortable about talking about those things.
Funny way to put it: "passed."
Now she's talking about her interview with Inside Edition in 2008, in which she stated the infamous words, "No jury will convict me" for murdering Alexander. As has previously been brought out in this trial, Arias now says she was referring to her being dead of suicide before any trial, not that she was going to beat a murder charge.
3:32 p.m.
Arias says it felt "wrong" that people believed her intruder story.
"I realized at this point that even if I told the truth, that they would still be there, and they wouldn't walk away," she says.
"By the time 2010 rolled around, I confessed," she says. She told what she could remember, and that the intruder story was "BS."
3:34 p.m. After days of testimony, Nurmi says he has no more questions for Arias.
Judge Stephens dismisses the jury from the courtroom, and dismisses Arias.
Stephens says she'll be handling an attorney matter for the rest of the afternoon, so that's it for today.
