Jurors see gruesome crime scene photos at Jodi Arias retrial • • • By Crimesider Staff October 22, 2014 / 12:12 PM / AP PHOENIX - Jurors at the sentencing retrial of convicted murderer Jodi Arias saw a series of gruesome photos that showed her boyfriend's dead body crammed into a shower at his house with his throat slit. Lawyers warned jurors that they would see graphic crime-scene photos and sexually explicit images that Arias and former boyfriend Travis Alexander took of each other after a tryst, but before Arias fatally attacked him.

Jodi Arias - Bing Images Travis Alexander, Jodi Arias, True Crime, Serial Killers. Graphic nude and autopsy photos of Jodi Arias and Travis Alexander.

'She loved him so much that this is what she did to him,' prosecutor Juan Martinez said of one ghastly photo. He urged jurors to sentence Arias to death. The opening statements came at the start of a retrial to determine whether Arias lives or dies for her crimes. It was less of a spectacle than the initial case, which happened in early 2013, when onlookers from around the country traveled to Phoenix and lined up outside court for the trial that became a tabloid and TV sensation. Still, some of the people who regularly attended the first trial were back in court on Tuesday.

Arias has acknowledged killing Alexander but claimed it was self-defense after he attacked her. Prosecutors said it was premeditated murder carried out in a jealous rage, because the victim wanted to end their affair and planned a trip to Mexico with another woman. Defense attorney Kirk Nurmi said Tuesday that Arias was the victim of profound sexual humiliation by Alexander, and that she is mentally ill and a victim of child abuse. He urged jurors to sentence her to life in prison, saying she is remorseful about killing the man who never acknowledged to others that she was his girlfriend.

'Jodi Arias was always the girl behind the closed door in the bedroom,' Nurmi told jurors. He suggested his client would testify during the proceedings expected to last until December. 'She will tell you how horrified she is that she killed the man she loved,' Nurmi said. Arias, sporting shoulder-length hair and wearing a beige blouse, often looked at the jury while her lawyer laid out his case. She turned away, however, as the prosecutor detailed the crime that included shooting Alexander in the head and stabbing him nearly 30 times. Members of the Alexander and Arias families looked on from the front rows of the courtroom during the opening statements.

Jurors were shown naked photographs that Alexander and Arias took of each other shortly before Alexander was killed. Alexander's sister turned away from the images and wept as the photos were being shown. Arias, a 34-year-old former waitress, was convicted of murder last year in the killing of Alexander at his suburban Phoenix home. Authorities said she slit his throat so deeply that she nearly decapitated him and left his body in his shower where friends found him after about five days.

Jurors couldn't agree on a sentence then. Prosecutors have one more chance with a new jury to secure the death penalty. If the jury fails to reach a unanimous decision, the judge will sentence Arias to spend the rest of her life behind bars or to be eligible for release after 25 years.

• • • • • • • Jodi Arias hid her face and wept today as the court was shown sexually explicit photos of her with ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander just hours before he was brutally murdered. Detective Michael Melendez told the Phoenix court on Monday that he had recovered the deleted pictures from the victim's camera. Arias shielded her face with her hair and touched her eyes with a tissue as the prosecution showed jurors naked photographs of the pair taken around 1.45pm on June 4, 2008. Several hours later, at 5.30pm, a series of photographs show 30-year-old Alexander in the shower with the water running. The images appeared to have been taken by someone else. Scroll down for video. Seedy: The images from the camera were time-stamped as June 4, 2008 Detective Melendez told the court that although pictures had been deleted from the camera, they remained on the hard drive.

Earlier in the day, the jury watched police interrogation tapes of Arias as she denied over and over again that she had stolen a handgun and used it to kill her ex-boyfriend. Arias repeatedly told authorities that she had never seen the gun and did not know her grandparents kept one at their home in Yreka, California until it had been stolen. The.25-caliber gun went missing a week before Alexander was killed, during a break-in at the home Arias shared with her grandparents.

Police told the court today that the burglary appeared 'odd' because only one gun was stolen out of four and piles of coins had not been taken. Caught: An image apparently shows the back of Travis Alexander's head with his arm raised as blood trickles down his neck.