Last night broke the record for the quickest "a true story" Lifetime movie, filming having been started before the trial ended.

The Mormon church exercises quite a lot of influence when it comes to movies and how they portray Mormonism. They had the clout to stop the movie "The Mormon Murders" and it miscarried, never seeing the light of day.

I might point out to those posting on Mormon influence in America that it is not just in politics that we see the real use of tithing dollars and the ability of corporations to put their interests above the desires/interests/opinions of the public.

Travis Alexander is seen holding a Bible study in his home instead of Family Home Evening. He is quoting a Bible passage condemning the wearing of fine clothes and how they will become as filthy rags in the great day of the Lord, etc.

The truth is that Mormons are not allowed to have scripture studies in their homes. Have any of you, in any country in the world, ever attended a Bible study in a home as part of your membership in the LDS religion?

They also showed an argument about why Mormons don't allow the drinking of coffee (because its addictive like alcohol). I believe the party line on that one is more like "because we said so, and we really don't know why, but we exercise faith and obedience in trusting the leaders of the church in these matters."

They did not touch on the hot arguments Arias and Alexander had about which sexual acts were allowed and which were forbidden. Without this debate, the girlfriend "Katie" in the movie breaks up with Travis because he has left his true principles. This makes no sense since he had already called off the relationship with Arias. What was it he believed that was not according to his true principles?

He had been telling women that oral and anal sex were not against the Law of Chastity, just vaginal sex. This was the real reason he lost the girlfriend. The previous girlfriend dropped out of the picture because he didn't properly control his erections. She was so naive she didn't even have basic knowledge of human male physiology.

I enjoyed the movie and thought the scriptwriting was excellent. Unfortunately, the issue which the jurors said was the most relevant to their decision to find Arias guilty was left out completely--the purchase of the three gas cans and then lying about them on the stand, after which the prosecution produced the receipts and proof via testimony from the retailer WalMart.

They knew she lied in her first version of events that she wasn't there and his death was a complete surprise. She also lied in her next version that she was there when two ninjas burst in and killed Travis and she ran from the scene without calling 911. She claimed to be now telling the truth when she said she killed him in self defense after months of abuse by him and by the way he was a pedophile.

The gas cans revealed this last version was also a lie.

I did get an epiphany in an area where I have had a nagging and unresolved question. How could she summon the energy and adrenaline to kill someone after hours of sex play and lovemaking? Especially when having it explained by the medical examiner that it took quite a bit of force and a good angle/swing to penetrate the chest wall 3-1/2 inches and reach the heart with a knife.

Now, thanks to this movie, I get it. Before Travis took his shower, when they were in his office, Jodi had the opportunity to jump on his computer and that's when I think she learned that he had broken up with the last girlfriend but had someone else lined up to go to Cancun. I think she saw the emails of that budding romance and realized that he was lining up another Mormon virgin despite his return to her embrace.

I suspect she didn't kill him immediately upon arriving (perhaps as planned) because she thought they were getting back together after all when he told her his girlfriend dropped him. When she spied on his computer and possibly his cellphone (which is what the movie showed) she saw him making plans to go to Cancun, one of the 1,000 places to see before you die, without her.

She really was just a booty call after all.

Now...why was she packed and ready to kill him before knowing this? I believe it was because he threatened to tell the Prepaid Legal Group that she had done something illegal--Travis knew she had been hacking into his bank accounts, his work accounts, his MySpace, and even had the gall to send messages as if she were him. Apparently he discovered that she had hacked into his personal finances or Prepaid Legal online account management and redirected funds to herself.

He said, "You scammed me." And he threatened to tell her upline at Prepaid Legal, Chris Hughes and all their friends what she had done. This would ruin her chances with Ryan Burns. Of course she didn't care about Ryan if she was back with Travis, but with Travis out of the picture, she would need Prepaid Legal to hop to another host, er, find another boyfriend.

So I am thanking the producers for the bit of closure here. I think I understand the missing pieces of Motive 1 and Motive 2.

My only regret is the movie did not show the reception that Jodi arias received from the Mormon virgins. Since I was once a new pretty woman from California on the singles scene in California, I can verify that the cattiness and unfriendliness of the other single women is absolutely real and exceeds the gossiping of the married wards.

It was like being pecked to death by ducks.




Anagrammy

Yep, ya gotta watch out for them duck peckers in the singles wards.

Anagrammy, I saw part of the movie (came in late, and then fell asleep after awhile, unfortunately,) and thought about you immediately. I was interested in your take on the accuracy of the Mormon aspects of the movie. I was puzzled by the bible study as well, but intrigued by the depictions of the YSA scene.

I'd like to see all of the movie when I get a chance. What I did see was well done. I noticed (as you did) that the more graphic elements of Jodi and Travis's sexual relationship were left out.

One of the things about this whole crime that makes it so interesting to so many people is that it demonstrates the juxtaposition of sexuality and religion in a way which isn't ordinarily seen.

Sure you get your secretly-homosexual preacher and your affair-having hypocrite, but how many times do you encounter a skank-turned-Saint being counter-seduced by a Mormon claiming anal sex is not sex?

...if indeed you can believe a proven multiple liar who is also claiming the same man is a pedophile?

The Mormon image of wholesomeness is a wall of porcelain smiling teeth and the general public is wondering what's really behind the facade. There are plenty of sincerely wholesome Mormons, which makes the discovery of dismembering murderers all the more horrifying.

We all know Mark Hofmann even fooled the prophet himself--what chance have we to recognize a killer? Doug Grant seemed like a regular guy...and Mark Hacking looked just like the EQP from our old ward. How could anybody tell Josh Powell was capable of killing his wife and then blowing up his house with his children in it?

I believe that Mormonism feeds sociopathy and encourages detached behavior because "this life doesn't matter." When you make earthly life just a test for ranking in the real eternal life, it encourages murder, imo.

If you think you are going to hell or outer darkness for masturbating or having a cocktail, why not take out your wife and smoke a cigarette after?


Anagrammy

Hi Anagrammy,

I missed the show last night. Once in a blue moon, if you know what I mean, something more important than Arias arises.

I like your summary a lot. The one point where I am not entirely convinced is the motive. I agree that there was some deep, dark secret, something horrible that she had done. I doubt it was through accounts, though, since Martinez's detectives would have found that. It had to be something that was not documented, not documentable.

I also don't think that Ryan Burns was very important. If he was, then she would have made more trips to SLC in the weeks after the murder and before her arrest. A man like that would have been receptive. But she made no efforts to further that relationship, which says to me that she was using him simply for an alibi.

But I think you have nailed (dare I use that word?) it on the new woman. I believe that after hearing that Arias was going to Cancun with another woman, Jodi stole the gun, got the gas cans, and left for AZ with murder clearly in mind. Her goal was to give him one last chance. If he rejected her, she would kill him. I don't know if she looked up his email traffic after the sex to decide on the killing him, but something happened that made up her mind and sealed his fate. It was time to put the plan into action.

The one other piece of this puzzle that I'd emphasize is the desire to "possess" and "control" other people that sociopaths have. Arias's single biggest mistake (tactically, since the strategy was flawed) was spending so much time with Travis that last night and day. She'd planned the trip to Utah so that she could leave California and arrive in Salt Lake appearing to have slept on the road. But by spending all those extra hours in Mesa, she made herself late to meet Ryan and raised huge doubts about her alibi.

Why would she make such a big mistake? This is where the "possession" comes into play. She arrived in Mesa, hopped into bed in part for sexual pleasure and in part to "own" his last sexual experience. The eroticism of sleeping with someone whom she might soon "own" murderously must have been overwhelming. She took photos, possibly also to possess him, to memorialize her control of him, like the momentos and souvenirs that sociopathic and serial killers often like to keep.

I suspect that a second big mistake was her misunderstanding of how hard it is to kill a person with a knife. It takes a while for even a stab to the heart to kill. So she applied the knife (like strangulation, a favored method among sociopaths), expecting him to collapse and expire. When he did not die but rather stood up and started staggering away, she must have panicked. Was he going to call the police? Walk downstairs and out the door? Suddenly she's engaged in a life-or-death battle, is cut and bleeding, struggling wildly down the hallway,leaving evidence everywhere.

After this minute of chaos and panic, she faces another terrifying danger. The roommate will soon arrive and she only has an hour or so to erase the evidence. She does this pretty well but her judgment was at least partially impaired. She fails to get the handprint off the wall, fails to remove some of her blood. Acting emotionally rather than fully rationally, wanting now to escape capture more than anything else, she decides to get rid of the photographic evidence rather than keeping it.

My point, however laboriously made, is that the final session of sex was probably driven by her desire to "own" Travis, to be his last "love," and to make sure no one else was ever with him again. That was a big part of the motive, in my mind much bigger than any hope for a relationship with Ryan and possibly greater than the need to prevent Travis from revealing her dark secret, whatever that was. Sociopaths crave control; they often kill in ways that imply possession and ownership. Jodi's actions fit this pattern quite closely.

Good points.

My lingering question was basically what happened to give her the adrenaline necessary for the deed.

The movie helped me see that all she had to do was check his phone or computer and discover that he was badmouthing her or that he had lied to her. She had been known to have flown into a rage over women laughing in the background of a phone call, so it's not hard for me to imagine now that she saw something in the office and lured him into the shower for a few good-bye photos (while seething inside).

I hope this all ends up with this horror of a woman getting the death penalty. If she doesn't deserve it, I don't know who does.


Anagrammy

Sociopaths are unemotional in general and, as you know, can sometimes pass polygraphs because they have almost no emotional response to stimulus. The exception is that they are usually filled with rage; that is the single, almost definiting, emotional trait. So they can go from cheerful and happy to murderously furious almost instantaneously.

I don't think it would have taken much to set Jodi off. She'd planned Travis's murder, which means that she was already deeply angry at him. That emotion may have subsided when she saw him and slept with him--as I wrote, I think she was surprised by how pleasant the sex was and so stayed with him much longer than she original intended--but it was still there, lurking below the surface. It could have been reading his phone or email that triggered the violence, or it could have been something he said. Perhaps she asked if he really was going to Cancun with someone else, hoping that the sex had changed his mind, and he answered honestly. That would have been enough.

The other sociopathic part of this is that even when enraged, she was apparently still cool. My opinion of the pre-death photos is that he was not scared, at least not until perhaps the last couple of photos. She must have been smiling, apparently happy, when she approached him with the camera. Given her character, I don't have trouble seeing her conceal her anger, playfully start taking pictures, and then pull knife out of the back of her pants (or somewhere else) and finally let the rage express itself. For people like her, rage and adrenaline are not hard to generate.

I hope she gets the death penalty, too. I don't like that form of punishment personally, but if it is available there would be great injustice in sparing her from it. If we look closely enough at any criminal's life, we can find mitigating circumstances and reasons for empathy. But understanding someone is not, and must not be, the same as tolerating his or her extreme misbehavior. Arias deserves the most extreme punishment on the books, whatever that punishment is, and Travis's family deserves the vindication that that would bring.

The movie will air again tonight (Monday) at 8:00 PM EDT, and again several times within the next two weeks.