BBM in Blue
Her lies don't make sense. If her phone was drowned in cocoa before she left Mesa, how was she able to text with Travis on April 4th?
Gus testified (Day 10) that he met JA in Pasadena between 10 am - 2 pm to give her the Helio because JA told him her phone was stolen (!!!). He remembers the time since he was there to pick up his kids from school in Pasadena.
But as of 3 pm on April 4, JA is still in Mesa.
This whole deal with Gus and Helio doesn't make sense to me. :gaah:
Gus, the killer, and the Helio.
Gus testimony: I gave her the Helio when I met with her in Pasadena, sometime between 10-2. I don’t remember what day, but I remember the time because I had to pick up my kids from school.
Killer testimony: I got the phone the day I left Arizona. The phone I had was a Motorola Razor. I put it in the cup holder, went to sleep in the truck. When I woke up realized (it had drowned in spilled hot chocolate)- it basically had soaked in hot chocolate all night, and didn’t work anymore.
“I met up with Gus in Southern CA. He had a free phone deal. And he let me have the Helio. I agreed to pay him for it. But, I don’t remember how that worked out. And so I had this phone, and when I was playing around with the features, realized it could record. I told Travis, we joked about recording “it, “ and then--we tried that.”
IMO, both Gus and the killer lied. The killer wrote in her journal about a Helio months before--it was near the top of a list of things she said she most wanted to have. She couldn't afford one. Enter Gus.
She had in the past fed Gus stories of Travis being mean to her. Gus testified that he offered to have her stay with him in Las Vegas for a few days in late February 2008 because she’d called him up and told him she and Travis were arguing (on that date—not true, a nasty manipulative lie; in fact Travis was expecting her to show up for a thank-you pizza dinner at a special restaurant, and she stood him up).
It’s entirely possible that the cocoa lie and fleeing from mean Travis is what she told Gus in order to manipulate him into giving her the Helio. She and Gus may have already arranged to meet up, because not even the lying liar could explain to Gus how she was calling him from a dead drowned phone. Perhaps they made arrangements when she saw Gus in person in Mesa days before she left. Or she drove to Pasadena entirely confident she could persuade him to give her the phone. Either way or another way.
What IS certain is that she didn’t drown her phone in cocoa overnight in the UHaul before she left Mesa, because as you said, she was sending maddening texts to Travis on April 4th. (She supposedly was sleeping with Travis at his house the whole week before she left, or for that night anyway, or for several nights anyway, depending on which version one doesn’t believe. Too many lies to keep straight).
Not to mention, the drowned Motorola was found under her bed after she was arrested. Who holds onto a chocolate crusted non-functioning cell phone?
The killer left Mesa around 4pm on April 4, and she didn’t drive straight to her sister’s house in Hollister, CA. She didn’t arrive in Hollister until sometime before 8pm on April 6, a minimum of 36 hours after she left Mesa. The total amount of driving time, Mesa to Pasadena, Pasadena to Hollister, is 12-14 hours at the most. What was she doing in between, and where was she?
What she was NOT doing was meeting Gus in Pasadena between 10AM-2PM on a weekday. April 4th was a Friday. She left sometime after 4PM, so couldn’t have met up with Gus that day, and the next day was Saturday April 5. Not a school day.
(ETA- perhaps Gus meant to say picking up his kids for a visit, which on some PPL calendars he appears to have done on Saturdays? If that's accurate, then she went off the grid sometime after 2pm at the latest, and reappeared the next day in Hollister. If not with Gus, theoretically, then perhaps with Matt, learning how to use that new recording feature?)
On Saturday, April 5th the killer, most unusually, did not text Travis at all, and less unusual, didn’t receive any texts from him. When they texted around 8pm on the 6th Travis seemed surprised to hear she still had such a long way to drive to reach Yreka.
One possible piece of business she was taking care of on April 5th was transferring her Motorola cell phone number to her new Helio phone service. According to the person on BK who compiled all the text messages, the killer only had ONE identifiable cell phone number between December 2007 and June 2008.
uke: