Jodi Arias' Former Cellmate Has A Lot To Say About Her

Warning: This article includes graphic descriptions of murder.

Jodi Arias murdered ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander on June 4, 2008. He was stabbed nearly 30 times. One of the knife wounds was so forceful that it chipped off bone from his skull. His throat was slit ear to ear so deeply that the knife almost hit his spinal cord, and he had a single gunshot wound to the head from a .25 caliber round. Per ABC News, the prosecution claimed that a "direct strike" to the throat killed Alexander as he fled down the hallway of his home, smearing blood on the walls as he tried to escape. The gruesome nature of the crime drew attention from the media, as did Arias, who didn't fit the mold of the typical killer.

The description of journalist Jane Velez-Mitchell's "Exposed" describes Arias as "attractive and soft-spoken," and her former cellmate, Donavan Bering, said she "looked like a model." "She was beautiful," Bering told Fox News. "She was very quiet. We had no idea she was being accused of murder." But Bering has had a lot more to say about Arias over the years, and she hasn't painted the killer in any better a light than her crimes have. Here's what she's said.

In 2008, Donavan Bering shared a cell with Jodi Arias in Phoenix, Arizona's Estrella Jail along with her late wife Tracy Brown, and she claims to have gotten to know the killer quite well. Speaking to Fox News, Bering recalled Arias' angelic voice and said she gave off the appearance of a sweet person. "She was this very quiet, soft-spoken, articulate artist who drew a lot," Bering said. "She was very easy to talk to and she made you feel comfortable quickly. I mean, I was floored. We all were. We had absolutely no idea she was being accused of murder. When she finally told us, I was just in shock because I just had no idea."

Arias is a talented artist, and as the trio grew close, Bering and Tracy let her tattoo them. But the pair eventually saw the dark side of Arias. One more closely aligned with her image on the outside, which Bering said she was not aware of while behind bars.

Donavan Bering said her and Tracy didn't press Jodi Arias too much about her case. After Bering was released in March 2009, she even helped Arias run a social media account. "I did it because I supported her at the time and it kept me busy," she said. "She would have called me all day long if she could just to get things out there."

Jodi Arias' story changed multiple times after her arrest. She initially denied any involvement in the murder of her former flame Travis Alexander. Later, she claimed to have witnessed two masked intruders kill him. Arias and her lawyers eventually settled on arguing that she killed Alexander in self-defense. And then the trial started.

The jury didn't buy it, and neither did her former cellmate. "Because of all the evidence and just all that I knew about all the different stories, and stuff, and the way that she acted," Bering told Arizona's Family. "And she had no remorse." It seems that Arias might never have truly reckoned with what she did to Alexander, but Bering has no guilt. "I can hold my head up high now because I was able to tell the truth," she said. "She had a completely different side to her that I didn't expect."

Donavan Bering said she eventually realized the "innocent, "meek," and "scared" person she described to Arizona Family was not the real Jodi Arias. "The way she spoke to her mother, she would always scream and holler and hang up the phone and say horrible things," Bering alleged in her interview with Fox News. "If she got mad, she wanted horrible things to be posted [on social media], just things that were destructive and hurtful. I realized she was not this person that I thought she was. She had a lot of hate."

At one point when Bering refused to post "horrible things" about Arias' family, the killer set her sights on her former cellmate. "She tried to lash out at me and have people she knew attack me and my family," Bering said. "It made me feel really bad. I felt betrayed. I couldn't understand it. I was floored to see that come out of her."

During her trial, Arias said her parents started abusing her when she was 7 years old. In her first public comments about her daughter with Feminist Collective, her mother, Sandra, did not mention the allegations of abuse. According to the Daily Mail, after Arias' arrest, her parents told an investigator that she had "mental problems" and "would freak out all the time."

Jodi Arias' appearance became a focal point of the media coverage around her case. ABC News described her as "blonde" and "beautiful," and some speculated that the attention she received in the news was largely due to her looks (and the fact that women rarely commit murder — they're responsible for about 10% of U.S. killings, per Gale). And it seems in prison, Arias has leveraged her sexuality for her own gain.

"She used her sexuality to get things from other inmates," Donavan Bering told Fox News. "She flirted with the guards. She was very sexual. She had no problems talking to the male guards at all." Speaking to Arizona Family, Donavan echoed these sentiments. "She would always pose in certain ways ... She got a lot of stuff, that the other inmates didn't get," she said.

In 2013, legal expert Matt Zarrell told CNN's Nancy Grace on her eponymous show that Arias used her "charm" to enter another relationship behind bars — this time with a woman. "Arias has the ability to charm her way into any relationship and charm her way out of any relationship," he said. "And again, we see here a source close to Arias telling us she has charmed again into another relationship, but this time with the same sex, with a female."

Donavan Bering left prison before Jodi Arias' trial began in December 2012 and was a vocal supporter of her former cellmate. The killer was convicted of first-degree murder in May 2013 and sentenced to life in April 2015. In Lifetime's "Jodi Arias: Cellmate Secrets," Bering revealed that she and her late wife Tracy began to see Arias in a new light around 2016..

In 2022, two years after the documentary episode aired, Bering spoke to Heavy about how she now views Arias. "There was no self-defense," she told the outlet. "She is a cold-blooded killer and would do it again." Bering said it was when she began to talk to Arias' mother that she began to piece together a different picture of her former friend. "When I started speaking to her mom way more than Jodi, I started seeing stuff that didn't add up ... like the stories of her relationships [and] how her parents treated her," she told Heavy. "She didn't really care about anything or anyone but herself," she later said. "You crossed her in any way, and you suffered. She didn't know what a true friend was, only someone to use to get what she wanted."