Don't know if anyone has ever pontificated this, but I'm wondering about something. What if... Jodi was going to make it look like Travis committed suicide?
She knew he wanted her out of his life, and he wanted to get back on the straight and narrow in his life. But the sex was his downfall.
She taped the phone sex, egged him on so much in conversations to make him say over the top emotional stuff, went there all shaved and ready for sex... they have sex and take all sorts of naughty pics... now she has what she needs. She could take those pics back home with her and have them ready to go.
Travis was shot near the temple... usually when people kill themselves with a gun it's either in the mouth or on the temple. In the mouth may have been too difficult, but maybe she tried the temple thinking that would kill him immediately. Then she could perhaps stage the scene, put the gun in his hand, whatever else people do to stage that type of stuff.
When the cops would start digging in to his life, they would find all the kinky sex stuff and perhaps she would plant other things, to lead everybody to the assumption that he just couldn't live as a "fraud" anymore. (for the record, I don't think he was a fraud... just using JA thought process).
Abandoning the ME testimony for just a second here... the shot came first, tried to make it look like a suicide shot to temple... he didn't die and fought back, hence the defensive wounds. Turned in to a blood bath with a knife. Now there is no way she can make it look like suicide, that's why she erases the pics. Doesn't need them anymore and certainly doesn't want there to be evidence.
IDK... this thought literally just occured to me tonight. What do you guys think?
I've pondered this a few times. Cue Wild Assed Guessing/Speculation:
She's certainly arrogant enough to think she could get away with faking a suicide. She was arrogant enough to think she could deceive a detective with 25 years experience even
after she botched whatever she
did plan and left a huge messy crime scene with evidence that pointed straight at her, so to me it's not beyond the realms of possibility.
Her reasons remain the same - because they are what they are. She's obsessed with him, tried every trick in the book to hold onto him/get him back and knows it's the end of the line. Furthermore, he's told her he's going to expose her. She can't have him doing anything that would cut of the supply of Mor-Men in the close knit communities she had infiltrated in CA and Utah.
Nothing would have to be different about the pre-meditation we have seen and the crime scene would still be neatly contained by a fake suicide, single shot to the head. (just as I think most people think she fully intended/planned for it to be). Taking the photos in the shower remains the perfect way to get close enough, as well as ensuring her DNA was all off him, and assuming she had some of her wits about her, simply take the camera memory card and/or replace it with an empty one.
She must have anticipated that if Travis was 'simply' found murdered, that she would be a suspect, at least as far as his friends were concerned, (and boy, that was one thing she DID get right), but with a suicide she had a chance to back-craft the story, and much of it could have been rooted in the sexual relationship, as you suggest.
But the same arrogance that would have led her to think she could pull this suicide caper off in the first place, would have led to her over-egging the pudding. I can imagine the most absurd hyperbole in any 'suicide note' written by Arias in this scenario - see the letter pretty much everyone believes she wrote to Lisa A for an idea - and she might well have trapped herself that way. However, without the physical evidence she actually
did leave, it would have been a much more difficult case to prove, imo.
