Jodi Arias crawled through her ex's doggy door. Months later, he was dead.

Travis Alexander first met the beautiful, blonde Jodi Arias at a business conference in Las Vegas in September 2006 and fell fast.

He lived in Mesa, Arizona and she in California, but despite the distance between them, a romance blossomed.

It was an intense, sexually charged on-again, off-again relationship — and it soon turned troubling, according to journalist Briana Whitney.

"There was a neediness [from Jodi], that turned into almost stalking," Whitney, who revisited the case last year for the podcast True Crime Arizona, told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations.

"She would show up in his kitchen when he was with other girls, she would crawl into his doggy door…into his bed naked. She'd come to parties she wasn't invited to."

Listen to Briana Whitney discuss the case of Jodi Arias. Post continues below.

His friends noticed too.

There was something off about Jodi's behaviour, so they encouraged Travis to move on.

In June 2008, he was planning to do just that.

He was taking another girl with him to a work conference in Cancun, Mexico. Months earlier, in May, he'd had a huge fight with Jodi and told her he was no longer interested.

For a time, Jodi appeared to be moving on as well. She headed off on a road trip in early June to meet a former colleague and potential love interest, Ryan, in Utah.

Jodi Arias. Image: Facebook.

But she turned up a day late, telling Ryan she'd gotten lost and had missed his many calls checking up on her.

When he asked about the bandages on her hands, she told him she'd cut herself on glass while bartending.

He couldn't help but notice she'd dyed her hair brown, too.

But she carried on their date as normal, so he didn't think anything of it.

The murder.

When Travis didn't turn up in Cancun, his friends came looking for him. They discovered his body in his bedroom ensuite five days after his murder.

He'd been stabbed as many as 29 times, had his throat slit and was shot once in the forehead.

Pretty quickly, police found a damaged camera in a washing machine that revealed the truth.

Pictures of Jodi and Travis in various stages of undress were taken in the early afternoon on June 4, 2008. Then, some accidental photos taken from the dropped camera and timestamped 5:30pm showed Travis on the bathroom floor, bleeding.

Travis Alexander was murdered in June, 2008. Image: ABC News.

Alongside the camera, a bloody palm print also placed Jodi firmly at the scene.

At first, she tried to claim she was never there. Then, Jodi spun a story about two intruders who killed Travis.

Finally, she admitted to murder in self-defence.

As the story hit media headlines, the interest was enormous, with the trial in 2013 described at the time as the "Super Bowl of court."

A large part of the interest came from the fact the suspected killer was happy to do media interviews.

"She gets arrested for first-degree murder, and immediately starts doing jailhouse interviews, which we don't typically get from defendants. I mean, defence lawyers never want their defendants to do interviews before a trial, because you could compromise the case, and what they say could be used in the trial against them. But she's like, 'nope, I'm doing it'," Whitney said.

Whitney revisited the case in 2025 for her documentary, Obsessed: Unravelling Jodi Arias. The journalist claimed that from the very start of the police interviews, Jodi displayed concerning behaviour.

"When he [the detective] leaves the room, Jodi goes to some other level, where she is singing multiple songs and one of them has the lyric 'I didn't hear you breathe. I wonder how you're still here," she said.

"Then she's also singing Christmas carols, and laughing to herself, and then she, at one point, gets up and does a headstand on the wall."

Watch Jodi's police interview. Post continues below.

While the defence attempted to paint Travis as being emotionally abusive and described Jodi as fearing for her life, she was found guilty of murder.

Jodi escaped the death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison.

"Even if you want to say that she was abused. It's really hard to convince a jury or anybody with a sound frame of mind that self-defence was 27 stab wounds and a shot to the head…that's a very vicious, horrific murder," Whitney said.

As the sentence was handed down, Travis' loved ones claimed that Jodi turned to them and said, "he was alive when I slit his throat."

Whitney still can't reconcile why she would've made that comment.

"That's an evil comment. It's an evil person, an evil act," she said.

Jodi Arias in court in 2013. Image: AP/Mark Henle

After dissecting the psychology of Jodi as part of her documentary, Whitney concluded, "she has such a strong personality disorder and a strong sense of narcissism that I think she convinced herself that this was the best plan and that if he's going to reject me, then I'll be the last person he's going to be with."

"I don't think she's capable, because of her personality disorder, of seeing the true reality of the situation," she added.

"That makes her a really, really scary person in a different way than people might think.

"She's incredibly smart, she's incredibly manipulative and highly, highly intelligent, but couldn't get out of her own way on a personality side of things."

Jodi's fight for a new trial.

In 2026, almost two decades after Travis' murder, Jodi is in the middle of another appeal.

Both the prosecutor and her defence attorney were disbarred in the years after her trial.

"[Jodi] says that evidence was destroyed or gotten rid of by the prosecutor and the lead detective, and that her constitutional rights were violated," Whitney said.

While the now 45-year-old is hoping for a new trial, Whitney doubts her bid for freedom will be successful.

"It's hard to prove that what happened during the trial and right after would have changed the outcome of her conviction," she said.

"Given what happened…given that she admitted to killing him. The likelihood of her getting out is slim to none."

Feature image: YouTube/Obsessed: Unravelling Jodi Arias.