Foremanhood and Fatherhood -- Jodi Arias Case

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Celeb reporters Selin Darkalstanian and Jane Velez Mitchell cover the Jodi Arias trial 

photo by Camille Kimball

People have strong feelings about William Zervakos, the foreman of the Jodi Arias jury who first spoke out on Good Morning America, in what would be the pre-dawn hours in Arizona. right after the jury caused a mistrial in the penalty phase of the trial.

So many commenters have filled up my recent post about him that blogger is having a hard time keeping up and the page seems to fail to display some of the comments, even though I can see them in the administrative section. Even my own replies to people are having a hard time pushing through.

So people have strong feelings about the things that William Zervakos has been revealing about his thinking as he came to the decision to vote "deadlock" in the last phase of the trial. This vote forced Maricopa County to make the decision of whether to re-try the penalty phase with a new jury. It was an expensive decision and at this time it's a yes. So the County Attorney undoubtedly has some feelings about Zervakos, too.

But one of the people with the strongest feelings is Richard Zervakos, son to the jury foreman. He has written a blog post in defense of his father.

It is very honorable to defend one's father during a hailstorm of public criticism and I respect Zervakos fils for doing so. In fact, I want to tread carefully here because his sense of loyalty and love are good things and they are tender things.

But the jury foreman has made himself a public figure by going on one of the nation's biggest media venues at the earliest opportunity and continuing to grant interviews afterward. His son, Richard, has also made himself a public figure by jumping into the maelstrom amidst the backdrop of his own prodigious use of twitter, instagram, blogging and so forth. In his post about his father Richard even declares that he, the son, is a media whore.

So it's within all reasonable ethics to respond to him publicly myself.

Richard, the son, says that a trial "like this" comes along "once or twice in a generation." He wishes his dad could "decompress over cocktails" with the "one or two people per generation" who know what his dad is going through.

Once again, I find myself shaking my head, blowing a sigh through my teeth. How is it that so many can only remember one trial at a time? I guarantee you that the next big trial, which should bubble up in the next 10 minutes or so, will instantly become the "once or twice in a generation" trial that flabbergasts its assigned judge, incenses the defense attorneys, and "victimizes" interested third parties such as Zervakos and son.

The hit musical film Chicago puts a spotlight, quite a literal one, on this phenomenon. When her character first arrives in jail for the murder of her lover, Renee Zellwegger is awed by the famous inmate already there portrayed by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Soon, however, Zellwegger's character takes over the public imagination. But Zellwegger and Zeta-Jones both find the lights and attention suddenly re-focused on incoming murder defendant Lucy Liu. They both struggle to gain it back. At the end of the film, the sparkle of public attention enjoyed by Zellwegger on her day of triumph in court is quickly extinguished by a murder committed on the courthouse steps as all the assembled reporters and microphones dash outside to follow the new case.

In Jodi's case, the Chicago plot point "new case" occurred on Monday, May 6th, the first full day of deliberations in the guilt phase in Arizona. So real life actually was quite a bit more swift than the movie scenario. On May 6, three young women miraculously escaped an evil captor in Cleveland while Jodi cooled her heels in a courthouse holding cell and before she learned if she'd be deemed guilty or not.

That's just the crime portion of the screenplay of real life. The next big trial will start in a few days when HOA wannabe sentinel George Zimmerman defends his version of how he killed teen Trayvon Martin. If you thought the Jodi jurors had pressure, wait till that jury gets seated....

At least the Jodi jurors had the bliss of not knowing what they were in for when they went through jury selection process and promised to proceed with their civic duty. There will hardly be a person in the Zimmerman jury pool who can be unaware they are being selected for a racially charged case with national significance.

While writing this post I could easily think of 2 dozen other cases of extreme high profile that played out in the last 20 or 30 years. I don't know how Zervakos the younger defines a "generation" but just my idle memory without even doing any research works out statistically to one big case every 12-14 months, not one per generation.

My memory banks tilt toward the west coast, so I'm sure I'm missing quite a few, but here are the first dozen or so of the cases I came up with that had comparable attention: Casey Anthony, Amanda Knox, Drew Peterson, Scott Peterson, the Cleveland case, George Zimmerman, Warren Jeffs, Andrea Yates, Conrad Murray, Amy Fisher, Clark "Rockefeller,"  Menendez brothers,  Elizabeth Johnson (Baby Gabriel), Sandy Murphy (Ted Binion), Mary Kay LeTourneau, Daniel Pelosi, Andrew Luster and, well, a whole lot more. I didn't even get into the defendants whose celebrity status preceded their arrests.*

The good news for the foreman's son then is that there are way more people to commiserate with his dad than he thought. "Over cocktails" is going to be more like a cocktail party...in a convention hall.

Zervakos the son tells us how the media works and paints a picture of predatory ABC minions overtaking his dad's home and staying there overnight. I know how the media works, too, having been a part of it all my adult life. They don't carry bayonets and wear red coats, billeting themselves by force in the homes of hapless citizens. They had to be invited in. At any time in the process, Zervakos the foreman could have said no. Far from bayonets, most producers, bookers, and reporters carry a polished smile and a friendly voice in their back pocket arsenal. We already know about the foreman's level of immunity toward such overtures. At least he's consistent.

But none of this is to say that Mr. Zervakos pere did anything wrong by not voting to send Jodi Arias to execution. There are many good reasons not to give a death sentence. Jodi is young. People seem to find it easier to say your life is toast to a 52 year old than to a 32 year old. Even a death penalty supporter could make such a decision. Jodi did not come into court overtly glorying in bloodlust by displaying hand drawn images of stabbings or other gory acts. Her drawings may be offensive to many but you can find far worse stuff by some inmates.** A truly death-qualified juror can decide that is his or her own personal criterion for whether or not they will vote for Death Row.  These are two examples of defensible benchmarks for when a death-qualified juror might feel he could not deliver the ultimate verdict.

Marjorie Orbin, the defendant in my book WHAT SHE ALWAYS WANTED (see bookstore tab above), was spared the death penalty not because she was a busty blonde who looked hot in a french cut panty. Jurors stated she was given a life sentence out of deference to the grown man her child would one day become. They did not want to martyr her in his eyes nor deprive him of the chance to unload his feelings directly some day. Now that is a very excellent reason to stay the hand from the noose.

But what the Zervakos family is feeling the backlash of is not that the death penalty wasn't given snip-snap no questions asked, although some commenters in their venting of their feelings may sound like it. The backlash is from the stated reasons for causing a mistrial.  The defendant looks like my daughter/lost love/waitress-I'm-crushing-on not a murderer, although she admitted to the very acts we saw such terrible evidence of, is not a defensible reason.

Following it up with a raid on the character of the young man whose throat was sawed down to a "hinge" about as slender as Jodi's lethally supple wrist, is to throw out a challenge, a dare, a sortie that must be met by those who also have opinions on the case. And, as Mr. Foreman should have known by the network television foot soldiers scouting him out, they are legion.

Another way to avoid the tough time he is having now would have been if the foreman would have revealed during jury questioning that he felt influenced by the appearance of the defendant. He would have been excused well before opening arguments and would currently be happily enjoying public neutrality and obscurity, maybe barbecuing over the holiday with his loyal son, making conversation about how he was almost on that jury that's all up in the news right now.

That sounds kind of nice, jawing with your son about the news and sharing tales of your life over barbecue. Richard Zervakos, the foreman's son, closes his own column by invoking a vision of his sleeping four year old son and stating a message of love and loyalty to his father. It's lovely. I appreciate it.

It's so lovely that it reminds me that Travis Alexander had already lost his own father and that on June 4, 2008, he lost the chance to ever have a son.

If Zervakos, father or son, ever visits this blog, that line will evoke a strong emotional reaction. I actually do not mean to taunt them in any way. I strongly condemn any harassment of them. But perhaps they might be called upon to understand that the foreman's comments similarly provoked a deep emotional response in others. This is not because people are blood thirsty or sordid. It is because they are human.  The need to process grief is deep in the marrow. So very many of the people who send me messages on twitter, post comments on this blog, or meet me at book signings reveal some personal sorrow of their own. I believe this, more than anything, explains the magnetic attraction to trials and to true crime shows and books. It is not a phenomenon of social media, television, or even the printing press. It is a phenomenon of being human.

In the very ancient Greek story of the Iliad, Homer tells us about the woman Briseis who discovers her friend and protector Patroklos has been killed in battle. She sings a heart-wrenching lament about her friend and is joined by the other women of the community, women who did not have such a personal connection to the deceased. At the very end of her solo, Homer has a special message for us about the women behind Briseis, in the chorus:

"So now I cannot stop crying for you, now that you are dead, you who were always so sweet and gentle."  

So she spoke, weeping, and the women kept on mourning in response. 

They mourned for Patroklos, that was their pretext, but they were all mourning, each and every one of them, for what they really cared for in their sorrow.

                                             (Iliad translation by Professor Gregory Nagy)

Grief is personal. Grief is universal. Grief is heavy and it needs sharing. The Greeks of thousands of years ago knew it. For all our TV and web and mobile technology, we are still made of the same ancient stuff and must cry together.

__________________________________________


* Some more of the random big case names from the last 20-30 years: Aileen Wournos, Susan Smith, Betty Broderick, Phil Spectre, Michael Jackson, Robert Blake, Karla Hmolka, Tonya Harding, OJ Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith (Howard Stern criminal case as well as custody case). Oh, my goodness, how could I forget? The arrests and trials of the captors of Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, that super-creep in Austria, what other painfully obvious case am I forgetting still?!

**Think of school shooter TJ Lane who, during a court appearance that took place in Ohio while Jodi's case was underway in Arizona, unveiled a hand made "KILLER" T shirt, flipped off the families, and bragged he used the same hand to pleasure himself that he used to kill their children.

• You can find the blog that inspired this essay by googling the term SamirsDad. It is a tumblr blog. 

• Also, click here << for a post about a similar mis-statement about big trials made by Casey Anthony judge Belvin Perry 

Jury Foreman for Jodi Arias - Crime Writer Inside the Courtroom

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Pssst! Going to jail, buying documents, and everything else it takes to get this kind of info for the blog takes time and money! Every time you make a purchase here, it helps me be able to do more for you!

--Friday, May 24, 2013

The courtroom for the Jodi Arias trial is a large one, almost cavernous, with an extra pair of tables behind the attorneys making the "well" area extra grand. This has the effect of putting those of us sitting in the rows of the gallery at a gaping distance from the players. Viewers on TV often have a better view of Juan Martinez, Kirk Nurmi, and of Jodi Arias herself than we do. 

But one thing the TV viewers never could see was the jury.  

That is, until this morning. When I went to bed last night after a long day, ending with an appearance with Jordan Rose and Mark Victor on KPNX at the top of the 10:00 news, I knew the faces and demeanor of the Jodi Arias jurors well but not their names. 

When I got up this morning, large as life there was William Zervakos outed by ABC and telling Good Morning America's (and former Phoenix reporter) Elizabeth Vargas what he, as jury foreman, thought of Jodi Ann Arias.

Zervakos said he felt Travis Alexander had "mentally and verbally abused" Jodi. He was "sure in his mind," he said firmly.  

Although I didn't know his name until this morning, Zervakos was quite familiar to me. In that walloping open plain of a courtroom well he sat in one of the closest seats to us every day. Picture the courtroom you have seen on TV. The judge's bench backs onto the east wall. We in the gallery are stacked up on the west wall. The jury box is on the north wall. Juror number one, a woman, sat in the front row of the jury box at the east end, a short skip from the witness box. Juror number eighteen, who turns out to be William Zervakos, sat in the back row at the west end of the jury box and therefore near us in the gallery. 

The day of the 1st deadlock note, southeast corner of the Jodi Arias courthouse

I had often watched Zervakos during the trial. It was natural, since I could see him clearly unlike so many of the other actors in the drama. He is a very solidly built guy who usually wore golf shirts. Sometimes at lunch time I would see him in the courthouse's small cafeteria dining room. He always had a book with him and kept to himself. Whenever I spotted him there, I had a kneejerk reaction of instantly reviewing in my mind any conversation I'd had in the last 30 minutes or double checking the positioning of my laptop screen for visibility to others. 

Like most of his fellow jurors, Zervakos resembled a statue most of the time during testimony. But one day I tweeted to my followers that I saw a juror nodding in agreement with a witness. I can now disclose that the juror I watched nod his head positively in concurrence with a witness was number 18, William Zervakis. It came when one of the trial's psychologists was saying that what happens to us as children, especially abuse, shapes who we become as adults. 

He did it in a most definite way, not just one vague dip of the chin but a clear series of nods to several statements from the stand. My twittles were instantly panicked, engaging with my tweet, feeling it meant he "bought" the defense theory that Travis was abusive to Jodi. 

After spending several hours searching my old tweets, I discover twitter won't let me go back further than April 17 so I am unable to access those tweets to post them here. If there are any twitter wranglers out there who know how to access the full archive, please contact me.

To those panicked twittles on that day, I responded that the juror nodding his head to this testimony didn't necessarily mean what they feared it meant. Maybe he just recognized the phenomenon, maybe it resonated with his own life.

Now that William Zervakos has spoken out, we know that I was in the wrong and the instincts of my twittles were right on target. He believes, "sure" in his mind, that Travis was "mentally and verbally abusive" to Jodi.


In his first interview, Zervakos also told how Jodi "didn't look like a murderer." In this statement, Zervakos clearly revealed a gender bias. If the facts of the case had been the same but the deceased was the woman and the defendant was the man, few can reasonably doubt that an Arizona jury would send him anywhere but death row. In fact, one day while waiting for the Jodi Arias trial day to begin I watched Judge Sherry Stephens wrap up the case of Dzevad Selimovic. My twittles rapidly became interested in the case, so I wrote about it and you can click here<< to find it and his pic. Selimovic viciously killed his ex-girlfriend. From What Zervakos has said, Selimovic would "look like a killer" to him. Selimovic didn't want to face a jury full of William Zervakoses. He pled out and got life. 

But the facts of the two cases have many parallels. A breakup of lovers, jealousy, an inability to let go, a long trip, and a horrific and fatal head wound with the victim left to die in their own home. It's even eerily true that both murders began in the bathroom, with the injured victim trying to escape to the hall. Selimovic, like Jodi, depicted his victim as previously abusive to him. In Selimovic's case, his allegation involved finances but also matters of the heart. Two similar sets of facts, but nobody is much interested in the brawny man's excuses for doing what he did to another human being. Interestingly, Selimovic actually inflicted fewer wounds than did the slender girl with the soft voice. 

Speaking of that soft voice, in one of the many TV interviews I did on the day of the deadlock mistrial, I told ABC15 reporter Amy Murphy that I found it to be the scariest thing about Jodi Arias. With someone like Selimovic, if he randomly met him on the street a William Zervakos would keep his guard up. Even with convicted dismemberment killer Marjorie Orbin, whom I have interviewed personally in a small cell, not knowing what she did Zervakos would keep his guard up at least as much as one does with any strong adult personality.

Photogs aimed at courthouse doors as I step out, the day of the mistrial, but jurors  were elusive

But what is the impact of Jodi's stinginess with the decibels? The whisper-soft tones cause the other person to lean in. And to come close is to become vulnerable. It was reported to me that one of the reporters who went to interview Jodi Arias remarked that, far from being creeped out by Jodi's presence, felt like "giving her a hug" afterward. I did not take this to mean the reporter became a fan of the convicted first degree murderer, but that the reporter acknowledged the insidious nature of Jodi's personality. To me, this is exactly what the jury foreman fell prey to, Jodi's well-polished technique of getting people to lower their guard, to pull them in close, to make them more vulnerable than she is. 

This external softness, sadly, had a lot to do with how Travis let his guard down and leaned in too close to Jodi Arias. Did Travis have angry words for Jodi at times? Certainly he did. They are memorialized in electronic messages. But prosecution psychologist Dr. Janeen DeMarte testified Travis burst out in angry language when he had a reason to and reasonable people could relate to the reasons she listed, as memorialized in these tweets of mine from inside the courthouse as she was speaking:

Dr D explaining Travis's angry language occurred when he "felt lied to, betrayed--" SIDEBAR #JodiArias
— Camille Kimball (@CamilleKimball) April 18, 2013

The pattern Dr D saw was that he reacted that way when he felt his privacy invaded, etc. No indication of it outside these. #JodiArias
— Camille Kimball (@CamilleKimball) April 18, 2013

Arizona Republic reporter Michael Kiefer captured part of this testimony in this tweet:

DeMarte says Alexander used bad names "very rarely." Willmott: define rare, then cuts DeMarte off when she implies it was deserved.
— Michael Kiefer (@michaelbkiefer) April 18, 2013

What were some of the ways in which Jodi lied to, betrayed, or invaded the privacy of Travis to make him so angry?  Jodi did all of the following things to Travis:

• stole an engagement ring he had purchased for a girlfriend before he ever met Jodi
• slashed his tires, more than once
• snuck into his home repeatedly, even hiding behind the Christmas tree
• manipulated his social media accounts with his stolen passwords
• sent harassing anonymous emails to his romantic interests
• lied to his best friends about him
• disrupted his relationships with other women and with his friends

Who wouldn't have angry words burning on the tongue after such incidents?  By discounting Dr. DeMarte's testimony that Travis's anger was not an abnormal response to the provocation of betrayal and deception, and instead characterizing Travis as "abusive" to Jodi, the jury foreman is telling us that men don't have a right to be angry with women. Or, rather, they don't have a right to be angry with young, slim women with long hair and full lips. And soft voices.

When the final deadlock came, I personally observed three women on the jury crying, jurors #3, #6, and #16. That tells me that these women were less susceptible to the poor little waif persona spun by the defendant. She even tried it on ABC reporter Ryan Owens whom she called "a hater" when he did nothing more than speak plainly to her. Poor little Jodi, all beat up by the abuser from ABC.

The Zervakos comments contrasted with the crying women in the jury box remind me of an interview I once saw with actress Megan Fox, who was preparing to play a villainess in a horror film. Fox talked about choosing to use a soft and appealing voice for the character, a voice she said some little girls first learn to use on their fathers to get out of trouble. The actress felt it was the perfect touch, she said, to make her villain truly terrifying. As Fox pointed out, some things create a sense of protectiveness in men but do not fool other women.

Which isn't to say that they fool all or even most men. If we are to believe the 8-4 split reported, several men on the jury wanted to put Jodi Arias on Death Row. Here I must state that it is not a given that execution is the assumed proper sentence and anything else is a failure. But we are not discussing the death penalty itself right now. What I am focusing on are the statements from the jury foreman that he was "sure" in his mind that Travis "abused" Jodi and that this must be "taken into account" during the sentencing deliberations. 

Zervakos discounted more of the testimony of Dr. DeMarte, captured again by Michael Kiefer:

And now Willmott goes on to insulting emails from Alexander. Willmott asks if that's OK. "No, that's not OK," DeMarte says, but not abuse.
— Michael Kiefer (@michaelbkiefer) April 18, 2013

Dr. DeMarte did not characterize Travis's angry outbursts in response to provocation as abuse but Zervakos did. Since Jodi was in no way dependent on Travis financially or legally or for shelter and did not share a child with him, she could have "escaped" this alleged abuse at any time without suffering the slightest consequence. Yet time and again, she did everything in her power to get closer to Travis, even moving to Arizona after their official breakup.

Travis continued to have a sexual relationship with Jodi and kept it private. One could equally say Jodi continued a sexual relationship with Travis and kept it private. Was Elvis abusing the ladies who threw their panties on stage at him? What about the gals lining up for Evel Knievel, Wilt Chamberlain, and Magic Johnson? Groupies may find respect elusive, but where does their own personal responsibility end? If you don't want Andrew Dice Clay coming to your hotel room, don't throw your room key at him. 

All women know this. All. All women. Know. This.

Travis told Jodi he would not marry her. He told her their couple-hood had come to an end. What consenting adults choose to do with their libidos after such full disclosure of intent is their own business and hardly exploitative let alone abusive. 

Speaking to Vargas on GMA, Zervakos told us that it was his job as a juror to "divest himself from the personal and emotional" but in the same breath he told us the defendant's looks "just didn't wash" in relation to the crime. 

The Jodi Arias jurors had a hard job to do, I do not question that. Even if you are comfortable with the death penalty, it doesn't mean you have to give it out for any given crime or even for this particular crime, the brutalization of a young man at his most vulnerable. Twelve people had to figure out what was the right sentence and it would be respectable if they had all agreed to something. There is even dignity in working long hours but finding no agreement.

I just wish Mr. Zervakos had based his mistrial-inducing decision on something better than Jodi's well practiced posturing herself into the small and helpless. We know she's not helpless. We know her wispy bangs crown a cunning mind. We know her pretty eyes mask violent anger. I know that Mr. Zervakos carefully considered the testimony and evidence presented to him, I know he wanted to do the right thing. But his comments to Elizabeth Vargas will live forever.

And I know I won't be the only one wishing he had thought less about how Jodi looked and focused more on how Travis looked after she was done with him.


For more on Zervakos, click on the Zervakos label. See new post May 26, 2013

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