Ok she did it I agree but why the long method of seduction, camera pics, struggle and death? Why not just do the job and get out? If this was so well planned in advance then why summit yourself to a struggle to eventually offer the fatal blow. This part I am struggling with. You don't bring a gun thinking just in case I might need it. You bring a gun to use it and get it over with.
Imagine the worst thing anyone has ever done to you...now times it by a hundred. You may want the person who wronged you to pay, to be punished, to know a smidgen of how they hurt you.
Just talk to one of the survivors of domestic abuse, a psychopath, or homicide that have brought their stories forward to share. They've felt a similar combination of pain and anger towards the people who have hurt them or those they love...the difference is we have a conscience and while vengeance may 'sound' good our own very human empathy would preclude most of us from enacting it. Most of us too don't have a
constant undercurrent of anger within us.
My theory, because it so fits with the psychopathology of a sadistic psychopath, is Jodi had every intention of murdering Travis with one knife wound to the heart. Knife wounds are very painful, such a wound would allow several seconds to minutes of him knowing what
she'd done, and the sinister seemingly poetic 'justice' of stabbing a lover who in your view has wronged you and rejected you in the heart. She wanted to inflict pain on Travis, she wanted him to suffer, she wanted him to pay for having rejected her.
But where might we be had she only brought the knife? What if Travis could have overpowered her and taken the knife from her? That's where the gun as backup comes into this for me. I think it was simply insurance that if Travis did gain the upper hand she had a way of taking him out. There was
no way she was going to risk leaving him alive.
In order for her knife to the heart scenario to work she was forced to lull Travis into a state of vulnerability and seeming normalcy - especially considering their exchange the week prior to his death had been anything but pleasant. Their phone recording, her email after his death, the letters, her witness tampering via magazines show to some extent just how crafty psychopaths are when it comes to manipulation. When you care for one and believe they are as human as you are...they're capable of tricking your mind into believing almost anything they want you to.
MOO