Thirty-two-year-old "Mormon Casey Anthony" Jodi Arias killed her ex-boyfriend back in 2008, and now the details of their bizarre relationship are coming out during her salacious murder trial.
“He was my ex-boyfriend. He was kind of like a best friend in a way because we were still very close," Arias told a jury Thursday, according to HLN TV. "The best way to put it is that it was complicated."
The ex-boyfriend in question, Travis Alexander, was stabbed roughly 30 times, shot twice, and nearly decapitated in his Mesa, Ariz. home.
Police say Arias plotted his demise because she was jealous he'd moved on to another woman.
Arias says Alexander, a Mormon motivational speaker, was an abusive pedophile, and that she killed him in self-defense.
It's fair to say that she's not the most trustworthy defendant.
Her multiple lies to prosecutors have earned her the nickname "Mormon Casey Anthony," and jurors' questions for her indicate that they doubt her story.
But "complicated" is probably a pretty accurate way to describe their relationship.
The two met in Vegas in 2006, but Alexander's friends say he tried to break things off with her just a few months after they started dating, ABC has reported.
Arias converted to Mormonism during their brief relationship. After it crumbled, they continued sleeping together — even though the Mormon faith forbids premarital sex.
Alexander's friends say Arias was obsessed with him after the breakup. His former coworker Julie Christopher saw the two together at a business conference a few weeks before his death, CBS 5 reported.
They didn't come off as a couple, but Arias seemed infatuated with him, Christopher says.
"When she was sitting next to me at that event, she goes, 'He changed my life, he changed my life. He's so amazing,' and then she keeps on taking pictures," Christopher told CBS 5. "She (Arias) was, like, totally obsessed with Travis."
Alexander appears to have encouraged her obsession, at least a little. He apparently let her take nude photos of him in the shower the day she killed him.
Twenty-four hours after she killed Alexander, Arias had lunch with her friend Leslie Udy, one of the prosecution's witnesses, the Associated Press reported.
Arias told Udy that she and Alexander were officially over, Udy testified. But Arias said she thought she and Alexander "would always be friends."