You know, there was a lot of speculation early on that it was a tale about getting married to Travis that she had been circulating back home that might have led to the rage after May 26. After all, she did move to Mesa after they "broke up," (but let's face it, there wasn't much to 'break up'), and that may have been partly to protect the fantasy she was still peddling to family regarding the coming nuptials. It would be entirely reasonable to imagine that she was sporting a ring of some kind when away from Travis, claiming that they were engaged.
It sounds nutty, of course, because it is. But it isn't any nuttier than women who pretend to be pregnant for nine months, and then, when their obvious deception will be paraded for all to see, desperately murder a pregnant women to steal their child. That is an inconceivably bizarre thing to do, but we know it as happened, and more often than we'd like to admit. Anyway, I think it's the same kind of "cornered animal" mentality that JA might very well have felt as she realized she was about to be thoroughly revealed and humiliated. I do not believe she could stand the thought psychologically, and given her obvious narcissism and who knows what other associative NPD's, the behavior would be entirely consistent.
For me, it was the statement of her father in the interview he gave to police that "she was planning on marrying him," or something to that effect, that really sealed the deal for me regarding this scenario. I could see then that she had been projecting an entirely false reality to others outside of the Mesa environment -- where she could easily control the dialog, since nobody knew the people in Mesa and could not verify anything she was saying one way or another. Because 'normal' people do not assume someone will lie about something like this, she was able to easily get away with the tale.
I'm not saying all people who have these disorders would resort to these extremes, of course. Only that in this case it does seem consistent with JA's behavioral patterns. She was caught -- the walls were closing in, and in her mind it made sense to simply remove the problem.
Note that after his death, she made every effort to inject herself into the center of all activities -- funerary, police investigation -- why? Because she still had that narrative of the "fiancee" running in her head, and she wanted to world to view her that way -- even though she knew she couldn't make that story work outside of a small, controlled, isolated group that did not know Travis. I say it's just part of her pathology. I hope I don't go batty trying to figure it out for myself.
:cow: