The Forged Letters
1. The 2 letters ’s mother tried to peddle to the National Enquirer:
Nov. 27, 2006. Wants her to wear boys’ briefs so he can “tear them off;” for her to wear a shirt of his with cuff links so he can see his initials when she gives him oral sex.
(The shirt thing is ’s fantasy, which she texted TA about after she left Mesa, during an exchange about MySpace photos, iirc).
March 2, 2008. Admits that he hit her once in the face. Wants to marry her to erase deviant thoughts.
(Reality: that’s the day he told her to get the frick out of Yreka, and probably told her he needed to focus on marrying someone else—Mimi).
2. Excerpt from Shannon Hogan’s book: (IMO, to be taken with a grain of salt; lots of inaccuracies in her book).
Matt McCartney attended several of the open hearings on pedo letters in 2010 -2011. “He testified that the letters were real and written by Travis. I have been careful not to say MM forged anything. I have only said he was involved in getting them to her attorneys. “JM told MM that he if he testified at trial “he would have him up on perjury charges before his feet hit the ground.”
3. JM on letters: They were second generation copies. Misdeeds described too specifically. Written on unlined notebook paper. None had creases (so couldn’t have been sent in an envelope).
“(Kreitl’s opinion that they were forgeries) bolstered my belief that they were created for the sole purpose of bolstering her self-defense claim. “ Conviction. Pg. 154.
4. Nurmi says in his book that he thinks the forged them, JM says in his book that it is most likely the forged them.
5. Sheriff Joe’s folks couldn’t determine how the index cards the used to practice forgery were smuggled into jail. Neither Nurmi or JM could figure out how the had the forged letters smuggled out of Estrella.
6. The was allowed to keep trial related documents in her cell, so could have had copies of his journal and the handwritten note he sent her in April 2008, at her insistence.
7. Second generation copy. A copy of a copy. The letters were sent to Nurmi as PDF files. Does a print out of a file count as a copy of a copy? Or, could second generation refer to a letter being cut and pasted from copies of TA’s journal, for example, then photocopied?
In any case, someone other than the had to have been involved if the letters were copied even just once, given she didn’t have access to a copier while in Estrella.
8. Deborah Maran’s take on the letters, in one of her always stellar analyses: March 27. 2015. Arias and minion. On letters.
http://jodiariastrialtruth.blogspot.com/2015/03/aria-is-worse-than-some-thought.html
9. Nurmi wrote that the insisted on the ninja story from the time he came on (August 2009) through her testing and first evaluation by Dr. Samuels (December-January 2010), but that knowing the ninjas were a lie, during the same time he was laying the groundwork for another defense.
Nurmi hired Dr. Karp as a DV expert, which suggests that by the first week of February, 2010, when Karp interviewed/tested the , Nurmi and the had dropped the ninjas and taken up the lie of self-defense.
I agree with JM that the forged (with assistance) the letters after she realized she was going to have to admit that she, not the ninjas, killed Travis.
The manufactured emails while Travis was still alive, altered/added entries to previous journals and lied wholesale in journal entries from March 2008 on, and recorded Travis for whatever devious reasons.
IMO, the online record she created in April-May 2008 was largely about “proving” that Travis was still interested in her, including sexually. She continued with that theme after she she killed him, but also added backstory lies about her superior morality/spirituality, and of trying to move on, but being unable to because TA wouldn’t let her go.
She had several weeks, even after her June phone interviews with Flores, to concoct and write whatever lies she wanted to in her journals, including about physical abuse or hints about pedo. She didn’t.
And, IIRC, she never mentioned or hinted at abuse while being interrogated by Flores in Yreka. Abuse by TA was first suggested by the female detective who interrogated her, and ’s first allegations of abuse by TA were levelled after those interrogations, in the letters written and sent to TA’s family while she sat in jail, awaited extradition to Arizona.
After all, it was the very fact she hadn’t invented the lie of physical abuse before being arrested that forced the to use the ridiculous Law of Attraction excuse at trial to account for the fact she never wrote about abuse in her journals.
10. The forgeries were sent to Nurmi in April, 2010. The lied to Karp in February 2010 about being abused, and brought up the pedo lie for the first time, attaching it to the date of January 21.
The forged pedo letter was dated January 21, 2007. That date was most likely a mistake by the forger (s). In early April 2010, though, the texts the DT had were limited to those Mesa LE had retrieved from his phone sent /received over the short period before and after his murder, and the State had not yet turned over any of TA’s emails or info on his SM accounts.
The assigned dates to the 10 letters she wrote without being able to corroborate her lies with the timeline/chronology the online records would have provided.
The lied to Karp, with impunity, about when and why her finger was broken. Her lie about pedo on January 21 might well have also been excluded during the guilt phase had she not insisted on assigning that date to the forged pedo letter.