I agree about the reason for all the fatal wounds. Travis didn't die fast enough for her. Also, agree that she wanted to keep it clean to the shower area. She even tried to clean up the hallway because of trying to stick to that plan.
This is my thought, too. I think that killing him (and leaving him) in the shower was her original plan, and she felt compelled to stick to it. I don't think she was prepared for a bloody crime scene, and in fact, her efforts afterward have little to do with cleaning up the scene from a housekeeping perspective, and everything to do with getting rid of evidence of her presence in the house.
Although I, too, find the "gunshot first" sequence compelling (and I don't believe that the casing landing in blood says anything either way -- if the gun jammed she might have ejected it later, and the roommate who found TA could have inadvertently kicked it into the already-dried bloody spot), I defer to the ME. Assuming the knife came first, I think her plan was simply to get Travis posing, ask him to "now lean back, put your hands behind your head, close your eyes... that's it" and then strike a single, fatal blow when he wasn't even looking. Given the upward angle, I think he might have been standing when she did it -- a bold risk by JA, but we're not talking about a trained hitman, but a psycho who believes she is too clever to get it wrong. The fact that she nearly succeeded at striking a well-aimed stab to the heart would suggest to me that she had an adequate chance to aim it, and wasn't blindly stabbing wherever she could, as the other wounds appear. I think she brought the knife and gun, with the knife intended to be the primary weapon, and the gun her back-up in case she lost the upper hand. She probably had a number of alternate plans in her head, which may or may not have included using the gun to threaten or subdue TA, or to threaten to kill herself.
The blood and photo evidence tell much of the rest of the story for me. He got out of the shower, staggered around the bathroom bleeding and attempting to defend himself (because she was standing in front of him and the shower door opened toward his right, effectively blocking the path straight out the bathroom door, I think he instinctively went left, toward the windows/sinks and by the time he reached the sinks, had sustained the defensive wounds to his hands that left bloody handprint smears on the countertop, and of course the chest wound that caused him to aspirate blood on the mirror). He may have paused at the sink with the idea of grabbing something with which to defend himself, or he may have fallen down in front of it and grabbed onto it to drag himself back up. He ultimately managed to reach the door and get down to the end of the hallway, sustaining multiple additional stab wounds on the way, and then was overcome by his injuries.
We all know that regardless of whether the knife or gun came first, his throat was cut at this point in the struggle, but my main point of confusion is pinpointing the location where the throat-cutting occurred, based on the "foot/bleeding TA" photograph. Given the location and extent of the bleeding down his neck and onto his shoulder, I believe that this was taken immediately after the throat-cutting occurred, and that JA triggered the camera when she stepped up/back after doing it, and was looking down at TA to watch what would happen. The ME testified that TA would have been conscious for up to a few seconds afterwards, and that it was possible that he was raising his own arm and head in that photo in one last, futile effort to defend himself or escape. (To me, the angle of the arm is too low for JA to have been dragging him at this point). This photo was clearly taken with him lying on his back, parallel to the direction of the hallway, with JA standing behind his head, on tile. The huge blood puddle on the bedroom carpet at the end of the hall is where I've always assumed his throat was cut. However, I'm not sure how this jibes with that photo, which has TA on his back in the hallway -- can't tell if his feet are toward the bedroom or bathroom. Did she cut his throat in the bedroom with him on his knees facing toward the bed, grab his hair, pull him up and backward toward the bathroom headfirst (dragging him far enough that his feet were not folded beneath him but were now extended), and then hit the camera with her foot (with it taking a photo facing toward the bedroom)? (That might explain why the puddle was so blood-drenched as to soak through the carpet and padding as shown in some of the evidence photos, yet shows no "dragging path" away from it toward the hallway: if he was on his knees and she cut, then pulled his head and shoulders back and began to drag him backward, there would be no drag marks from the puddle -- and this could have been when he would have sustained the bruising to his legs.) OR did she cut his throat in the bedroom, flip him over onto his back and start dragging him toward the bathroom feet-first, and then run back around behind his head when he started to move, again snapping the photo toward the bathroom? Or did she simply drag him backwards (from the bedroom back into the hallway)
before the cut to his throat, cut his throat right there in the hallway, in the position he appears in the picture, with that insular puddle of blood on the bedroom carpet coming from his initial efforts to escape through the bedroom?
I'd love to hear some thoughts on this! I just can't tell precisely where the camera was in the hallway for that picture (or the one of the baseboard that follows).
Whatever happened, my guess would be that she dragged TA back to the bathroom, where the shower was still running. There, she administered the coup de grace with the gun, either because it had symbolic value for her, or because he was still barely alive (ME said the throat slash would have caused him to be unconscious within seconds, and die within minutes), and then put him into the shower, where she had intended that he be in the first place.
What surprises me most is that she did not take the camera's card with her. Her last photos of TA look to me like more than staging to get him in a vulnerable position -- I think she initially intended to have them as souvenirs of someone she believed she had owned and conquered, but then abandoned that plan in her panic over the unexpectedly messy scene.
Just my thoughts. :seeya:
