A mother and her 22-year-old son are on trial in America for the brutal murder of her lesbian lover.
Prosecutors say Jabaris Miller felt neglected by his mother, Tonya, who was often out partying or with her lesbian lover.
But when the girlfriend, Cheryl Miranda, eventually dumped his mother, Jabaris and Tonya Miller came up with a murder plan that led to the lesbian lover's death, Fulton prosecutor Clint Rucker said.
"In a twisted kind of way, the murder brought them together," said Rucker, who is fighting to send the mother and son to prison for the rest of their lives.
He said that the murder was one of the most brutal seen in his county for many years.
Jabaris Miller and his mother opted not to testify during the two-week trial, which is expected to end today.
Through their lawyers, both insist they liked the victim and had nothing to do with her death.
The victim, who had served as a soldier in Vietnam, told a friend on February 27, 2005, that she was going to drive Tonya and Jabaris Miller to Georgia on her way to Alabama, where she was going to start a new life.
Miranda was never heard from again.
A Fulton County police officer spotted flames on March 4 near a park in Fulton County, and found the victim's charred body in the back of her vehicle.
Miranda had been bound with a rope, strangled with a belt, stabbed in the jugular and beaten in the front and side of her head, suffering skull fractures in several places. Any one of those injuries could have caused her death.
Prosecutors say cases involving this type of "overkill" usually stem from a personal rage against the victim by someone the victim knew intimately.
Tonya Miller and Jabaris, her only child, told police they didn't know what happened to the victim.
Mobile phone records showed that 33 calls where made on the victim's mobile telephone to friends and family of the Millers within two days of the victim's disappearance, former Fulton County police homicide detective Glenn Kalish testified.
Mobile phone towers depicted a path of those calls from Florida to Georgia.
Rucker told jurors that the victim had previously gone to a court in Florida to get a protection order against Tonya Miller, who had threatened her.
But the two women reconciled for a while, until the victim finally called off their relationship, pawned Tonya Miller's belongings behind her back and changed the locks to the Tampa home they shared.
He told jurors the two women likely talked one last time in Tampa, with the victim agreeing to give Miller and her son a ride to Georgia.
But along the way, the women argued and the Millers ganged up on Miranda, killing her and putting her body in the back of her white pickup truck, he said.
Witnesses told police they saw Jabaris Miller, who had never owned a vehicle, driving a white pickup truck after the victim disappeared.
After police confronted him, Jabaris Miller confessed to driving the victim's body to a secluded area about half a mile from his mother's apartment and dousing the truck and body with petrol.
He told investigators he didn't think the victim would mind if he borrowed her truck because she wasn't around.
He said he noticed her body in the back of the truck under a tarp on March 3, 2005, but was scared to tell police. The next day, he torched the body and truck.
His lawyer, Wes Bryant, told jurors his client is guilty of arson and concealing a death but he insisted that prosecutors had not proven who killed Miranda or if she was killed in Fulton County or elsewhere.
Tonya Miller's lawyer, Gary Guichard, said her son made all of the phone calls on the victim's mobile phone and there is no proof his client even shared a ride with the victim and her son.
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