I've been reading some comments from people who knew Jodi previously (high school teacher, Darryl Brewer, and even the Freeman duo). For the most part, it seems Jodi had some issues before Travis, little things here and there like some emotional or angry outbursts and school issues, but no one was ever really scared of her, and there were apparently people who were able to have long term relationships with her.
While she didn't have an impressive resume, it seems she did work hard for a time and contributed her share towards financial obligations with Darryl. We have not heard of a long history of pathological lying (like a certain other acquitted murderess)
No one really has had bad things to say about her until she got involved with Travis. She got into financial trouble right before she hooked up with Travis, and around that time she seemed to experience a great deal of instability in her personal life -- moving around a bunch, changing religions, changing jobs, and then of course the obsessive/desperate behavior she displayed towards Travis, ultimately taking his life in such a brutal manner.
I'm included in those who have called her a psychopath, and she has definitely exhibited those behaviors in her actions and police interviews and demeanor. But all of that seems to dovetail around a particular time in her life when she was experiencing turmoil and chaos basically in every aspect of her life, and not before.
So, here's my latest pondering about Ms. Arias -- and I don't know everything that creates these psychological abnormalities in a person, so I would love to hear from the experts out there -- could it be that Jodi was fairly normal and able to function pretty well most of her life, perhaps with some latent issues that were well controlled until she started experiencing several stressors all at once?
In other words, it wasn't just that Jodi went psycho on Travis because she's disordered and this is the way her personality is arranged. Maybe it was a combination of all these stressors and chaos ...no place to call home, no job stability or financial security, the ending of an important relationship to her and frustration/shame of being rejected, separation from her new church identity and peers. Everything in her life was in upheaval at that time .. and I mean everything. Don't get me wrong, that is no one's doing but her own, and I'm not expressing any sympathy here -- just observing that everything that had any meaning to her she screwed up and lost. And she probably blamed Travis for all of it.
In that light, maybe she wasn't a psychopath or pervasively disordered as we have all assumed all along. Maybe it was the totality of everything, and because of these latent issues that she had been able to control before then, she just lost any ability to cope and took her rage and frustration out on Travis because she blamed him for all of her losses. When I think about it like this, it starts to make a little more sense why she would do something so self destructive that would almost certainly end badly for her -- she didn't really care because she thought her life was a big nothing anyway. It wouldn't surprise me if she had contemplated killing herself as well. While she went through the motions of disguising her actions and covering her tracks, she did not put a whole lot of intelligent thought into it IMO because she didn't really care that much what happened to her; that was not nearly as important as relieving herself of the source of her pain, as she perceived it.
lease:
