Picture Perfect

A Camera Captures A Forbidden Romance, But Will It Also Expose A Killer?

(CBS)  With Jodi Arias 1,000 miles away in Yreka Calif., Travis Alexander’s friends believed that he was finally done with her once and for all.

"One of the last conversations I had with Travis he was telling me about the conversation he had with Jody where he told her, 'You know, it's over. I never wanna see you again. You know, this is it,'" says friend Taylor Searle.

But according to Jodi, there was a big difference between what Travis said and what Travis did.

“He would call me at night. And we would have long conversations. And he would tell me the things that -- the things that he would like to see happen when he came up to visit me, to put it in a G-rated manner,” she tells 48 Hours correspondent Maureen Maher.

It would seem that for Jodi and Travis, old habits died hard. Despite wanting to end their unhealthy relationship, Jodi says they continued making plans to get together and travel.

"You're still showing up for sex?” asks Maher. “Yeah. It was hard to tell Travis no,” says Jodi.

Jodi says Travis planned to visit her at the end of May to see Crater Lake and the Oregon coast. But when Travis postponed his trip, Jodi planned a road trip of her own.

The first stop was Los Angeles to visit some friends and photograph their newborn baby. And then it was on to Utah to spend time with potential new love interest Ryan Burns. Like Travis, Ryan worked with Chris Hughes at Pre-Paid Legal and he was also Mormon.

“He was another rising star, you know-- just like Travis," Chris explains. "They met at a breakout session we were doing. They had created this phone relationship and texting and e-mailing. Evidently, simultaneously while some of this other stuff was going on with Travis and Jodi.”

When Jodi hit the road on June 2, she had not heard from Travis and had no plans to see him. As it turned out, no one else would see or hear from him for nearly a week.

“I'd left a couple messages and sent texts and I hadn't heard from him, which was odd," says Chris. "I said, 'Sky, his voicemail's full. Something is wrong and we need to call the cops.'"

On June 9, Travis Alexander was found by his friends, dead in his shower.

“We got a phone call about four in the morning that something terrible has happened," Chris recalls. "He said, 'Travis is dead.' And I remember just going numb…"

It was clear to lead Homicide Detective Esteban Flores when he first entered Travis Alexander's house that he was going to have his hands full.

"The majority of the crime scene seemed to be inside of the master bedroom suite and the master bathroom. There's obvious signs of blood on the carpet. As you go in further, we found other signs of maybe a struggle or something in the hallway leading into the master bathroom," he explains. "And once you go inside the bathroom is when you can see the body of Travis in the shower.”

Evidence gathered during an intensive crime scene investigation included the discovery of a bloody palm print on a hallway wall. Police have removed the section of the wall because they are convinced that print belongs to the killer in the savage attack.

“We spent three full days in that house because we did not want to miss anything -- anything that could lead us to the person that did this," says Flores. "Obviously, we found blood. And we also found hair fibers. We found fingerprints. And we found a shell casing from a bullet. We believed that Travis had been shot first and that shot was in the face.”

Surprisingly, that wasn’t what killed Travis. Flores says he had stab wounds all over his body. "The autopsy report says that he had one single stab wound direct center to his chest which hit his heart. And then he had a cut across his throat as well."