An Atlanta mother and her 22-year-old son charged with teaming up in one of Fulton County's most brutal homicides in recent years could learn their fate in court Friday.

Prosecutors say Jabaris Miller felt neglected by his mother, Tonya, who was often out partying or with her lesbian lover. So when the girlfriend, Cheryl Miranda, dumped his mom, Jabaris helped his mother murder her ex, says Fulton prosecutor Clint Rucker.

"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.

Miller, of Tampa, and his mother opted not to testify during the two-week trial. Through their attorneys, both insist they liked the victim and had nothing to do with her death. Jurors bgan deliberations Thursday.

The victim, a Vietnam veteran who also lived in Tampa, told a friend on Feb. 27, 2005 that she was going to drive Tonya and Jabaris Miller, then 20, 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 March 4 near Welcome All Park in southwest Fulton County, west of I-285, and found the victim's charred body in the back of her pickup truck.

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. Cellphone records showed that 33 calls where made on the victim's cellphone to friends and family of the Millers within two days of the victim's disappearance, former Fulton County police homicide detective Glenn Kalish testified this week. Cellphone towers depict 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.

Rucker 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.

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 Welcome All Road apartment— and dousing the truck and body with gasoline. 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 lead attorney, Wes Bryant, told jurors his client is guilty of arson and concealing a death, but he insists that prosecutors haven't proven who killed Miranda —or if she was killed in Fulton County or elsewhere.

Tonya Miller's attorney, Gary Guichard, said her son made all of the phone calls on the victim's cellphone and there is no proof his client even shared a ride with the victim and her son.