Jodi Arias trial: Court sees naked pictures of her with Travis Alexander
Jodi Arias sobs as court sees sexually explicit photos of her with ex-boyfriend hours before he was stabbed and shot to death
- Arias, 32, accused of stabbing ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander 'because he wanted to date another woman'
- She claims she killed him in self defense after an 'abusive' relationship
- Photograph 'was accidentally taken while she dragged his body and shows blood running down his neck'
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Jodi Arias hid her face and wept today as the court was shown sexually explicit photos of her with ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander just hours before he was brutally murdered.
Detective Michael Melendez told the Phoenix court on Monday that he had recovered the deleted pictures from the victim's camera.
Arias shielded her face with her hair and touched her eyes with a tissue as the prosecution showed jurors naked photographs of the pair taken around 1.45pm on June 4, 2008.
Several hours later, at 5.30pm, a series of photographs show 30-year-old Alexander in the shower with the water running. The images appeared to have been taken by someone else.
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Focused: Jodi Arias, pictured in court today, watches a police officer give information about photos allegedly deleted from her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander's camera
Hidden: Arias shielded her face as the sexual nature of the pictures were discussed in court by the prosecution
VIDEO Sexual nature of photos embarrass Jodi as they are discussed in court
Around 45 seconds later, according to the picture's time stamp, jurors were shown a photograph of the bathroom ceiling that appeared to have been taken unintentionally when the camera dropped.
Less than a minute later, a grisly photograph was taken which apparently depicts the back of Alexander's head with his arm raised as blood trickles down his neck.
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ShareIt is alleged that it was mistakenly taken as Arias dragged her ex-lover's body through his Mesa home after stabbing him 27 times.
A large dark obstruction in the foreground of the picture is a leg in sweatpants, the jury in Maricopa County, Arizona heard.
The prosecution claims that the picture was taken as Arias flew into a rage after learning her ex-boyfriend wanted to date someone else.
Intimate: A police detective found these deleted images on Alexander's camera
Seedy: The images from the camera were time-stamped as June 4, 2008
Detective Melendez told the court that although pictures had been deleted from the camera, they remained on the hard drive.
Earlier in the day, the jury watched police interrogation tapes of Arias as she denied over and over again that she had stolen a handgun and used it to kill her ex-boyfriend.
Arias repeatedly told authorities that she had never seen the gun and did not know her grandparents kept one at their home in Yreka, California until it had been stolen.
The .25-caliber gun went missing a week before Alexander was killed, during a break-in at the home Arias shared with her grandparents.
Police told the court today that the burglary appeared 'odd' because only one gun was stolen out of four and piles of coins had not been taken.
Caught: An image apparently shows the back of Travis Alexander's head with his arm raised as blood trickles down his neck. A leg in the foreground obstructs most of the image
Prosecutors have claimed that Arias repeatedly stabbed Alexander in his shower before dragging him to his bedroom and slicing his throat.
She then allegedly took him back to the bathroom to shoot him in the head. Two friends found his body in the shower on June 9, 2008, five days after he was killed.
Defense attorneys say the trickling blood in the image is from Arias shooting Alexander in the head in self-defense, HLN reported. The prosecution alleges he was already dead when this wound was inflicted.
Investigators found the grisly image on Alexander's camera, which had been thrown in the washing machine and put through a washing cycle with blood-soaked towels and clothes after his murder.
'Obsessed': Arias, 32, allegedly stabbed Travis Alexander, pictured, 27 times and shot him in the head
It is just one of many photographs shown by prosecutors in the murder trial of the 32-year-old photographer accused of killing her one-time boyfriend, a Mormon motivational speaker.
In the opening days of the trial last week, the jury also saw blood-splattered scenes inside his home, as well as blood stains in his bedroom carpet.
They were also shown images of his horrifying wounds, including defensive wounds across his hands, and a neck wound so deep as she sliced his neck that it hit the bone.
Arias wiped away tears as the Maricopa County medical examiner said Alexander 'may have' already been dead when she shot him in the head - a key detail that could make way for the death penalty.
If she did shoot Alexander after he was already dead it could qualify as a 'heinous and depraved' murder, which would more likely send her to death row in Arizona.
Mess: Prosecutors said it appeared as if someone had tried to wipe the blood away after the murder
Blood-soaked: Another image shows blood stains on the carpet near his bathroom in his bedroom
Blood soaked: Another image shows pools of blood. Some has been soaked up into a box in the closet
Yet the medical examiner said he could not be fully certain Alexander was already dead from blood loss as the body was already decomposing when it was found five days after the killing.
With the delicate brain tissue also decomposing, he could not determine a bullet track through the skull or how much hemorrhaging had occurred, which would signal whether Alexander was still alive.
While at first denying that she had even seen him that day, Arias now admits to killing him but says she did so in self defense after he had been abusive and possessive throughout their relationship.
Other images on the camera show the pair, whom had kept up a sexual relationship since breaking up after five months of dating in 2007, in sexually explicit poses on the day of his murder.
On Thursday, the prosecution attempted to paint Arias as a serial liar by playing segments of interviews with police and on Inside Edition where she protested her innocence.
Scene: A pool of blood is seen in the bedroom; the prosecution is alleging this is where she slit his throat
Evidence: Another image apparently shows marks along the wall where Alexander's body was dragged
In the program, she claims she saw two men attack him, adding: 'No jury will convict me. Mark my words.'
The portrayal builds on that suggested on Wednesday when another former flame, Ryan Burns, revealed Arias had lied about cuts to her hands when she arrived at his home 24 hours later.
Burns testified on Wednesday that he had exchanged long emails and phone calls with Arias after they met at a business conference in the spring of 2008.
He invited her to his home in West Jordan, Utah in June 2008 - and she arrived a day later than planned, telling Burns she had got lost, driven the wrong way and slept in her car for a while, he said.
In fact, she had spent the previous day with Alexander, eventually murdering him out of 'self defense', she claims.
New love: On Wednesday, Ryan Burns, left, testified that Arias visited him at his Utah home 24 hours after she killed Alexander - but she never mentioned the killing, despite claiming it was out of self defense
Happier times: She met Travis Alexander, a Mormon and motivational speaker, at a Las Vegas conference
Yet when she visited Burns the day after the murder, she never once mentioned the ordeal she had supposedly been through the previous day, he said in court. They kissed and joked, he said.
When she arrived at his home, Burns noticed that she had bandaged hands, but she told him she had sustained the cuts after breaking a glass at her job at a Margaritaville, he said.
But Det. Nathan Mendes, who worked at the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office, said there was no Margaritaville in the county where she lived with her grandparents at the time.
Burns added that he did not know Arias was still seeing Alexander when the two began talking and making plans to visit each other, ABC News reported.
Prosecutors also exposed other lies told by Arias after playing interviews with Mesa detective Esteban Flores in which she said she last talked to Alexander on Tuesday night, June 3, 2008.
'Last photo': Among the images on the camera was this one showing Travis in the shower before his death
Possessive: The jury was shown a picture of Arias in a t-shirt Alexander made reading 'Travis Alexander's'
She claimed she had been in Los Angeles and was about to go to Utah.
'It was brief though, 10 o'clock maybe,' she said. 'I'd say 10 p.m. or 9 - 9:30. I was calling people because I was bored on the road. He was nice and cordial, but kind of acting like he had hurt feelings.
'I may have called him Wednesday, from the road, and I sent him a couple of text messages, and a couple of pictures," she said, though Alexander didn't pick up because he had a full voice mailbox.
'That's unusual. He deletes all of his messages. I didn't want to be obsessive about it because we're not together anymore and I didn't like to call too much.'
She added that she was shocked to learn of Alexander's death from one of his friends, and thought it must be a mistake.
Alexander was found dead in his home in suburban Mesa on June 9, 2008 by two friends who went to check on him after he had been out of contact for days.
Arias originally claimed she had not seen Alexander the day of his murder, before claiming she had seen two men kill him, before eventually saying that she killed him out of self defense.
The couple had met at a work conference in Las Vegas in September 2006 and began speaking on the phone every day. Court records show they exchanged as many as 82,000 emails.
They started dating in February 2007 and, because Alexander was a Mormon, Arias chose to be baptized into the church. But they broke up in June 2007, with Arias telling police jealousy on both sides was to blame.
VIDEO: Does image show Jodi Arias killing Travis Alexander?
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