Tonya Miller

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She was a single mom in her 30s, struggling to cope with her own sexuality.

She decided to take that step and come out.

So when she found love with a female veteran 15 years her senior, everything felt right.

They started out hot and heavy, very passionate.

She fell hard and she fell fast for her.

Until a heinous discovery threatens it all.

There is a mass in the back of the truck.

You cannot recognize whether or not this was a male, a female, the race, or anything.

Investigators are left trying to piece together a deadly chain of events.

Three lethal methods used on one person.

It was overkill.

And one key source of evidence leads detectives to a string of potential killers.

Got somebody that tells us their attorney's gonna contact us.

Now they changed their phone number, and we still can't find them.

The focus really becomes: who are these two people that she was taking to Atlanta?

I'm saying she got hexodo sign.

She hurt.

Yeah, she got an exotic.

I was about to kill her.

You're

going down the river.

Do you understand that?

I mean, dang it, man.

I don't even know what's going on.

There's this fine line between love and hate, and that often leads to murder.

In the early morning hours of March 4th, 2005, an officer with the Fulton Police Department is on routine patrol on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia.

As he was driving down the street in the middle of the night, working morning shift, he came across a vehicle on fire.

It was a smaller pickup truck, but the fire had fully engulfed the front and the significant portion of the bed area of the truck.

Obviously, he called it in to the fire department.

He went over to see if there was, you know, anything that he could do.

By that time, the vehicle was engulfed too much.

The fire is just too big for him.

So, as luck would have it, there was a fire department just a half mile down the road, and they were able to come and extinguish the fire.

With the blaze extinguished, patrol officers examine the smoldering wreckage.

The cab of the pickup truck was completely burned.

The windows were blown out.

The glass was shattered.

To their relief, the cab of the pickup appears empty.

Once they determine that nobody is injured inside the vehicle, they have to start to think, okay, why is there an abandoned burning truck on the side of the road?

That's when an officer's flashlight illuminates a blackened object in the bed of the truck.

That at that point, everyone sort of says, well, wait a minute, whoa.

There was a body in the bed of the pickup truck.

The burn damage on the body, it was significant, probably third-degree burns over the majority of the body.

Face was unrecognizable.

The burns were so severe that you could not necessarily recognize whether or not this was a male, a female, the race, or anything of that nature.

Who is this person?

Why are they here?

And who put them here?

This fire was fast and furious and intense and it mainly focused on the cab and the truck bed.

The pickup truck has a lot of damage to it, so much damage that they can't even open the doors.

Doors are just sort of seared shut.

From the driver's side of the bed of the truck, there was a significant, almost looks like a pour or drip stain going down the side of the truck.

So it became readily apparent to them that an accelerant was used.

An intense fire, it can eliminate things like DNA, weapons, other forms of evidence, fingerprints.

Other potential clues, such as a driver's license, were also destroyed in the blaze.

The burns were so significant that if the person had a purse, wallet, anything like that, it would have been burnt up and gone.

While identifying the victim is proving to be a challenge, investigators do find evidence that sheds additional light on the true cause of death.

As they examine the body and they see there's a belt around the neck.

There is binding around the wrist and the ankles.

We're looking at, you know, a badly burned body in the back of a truck with ligature on their wrists and ankles and an accelerant used.

We're aware that it's a homicide.

The fact that they have a murder on their hands only raises more questions for investigators.

It could have been a drug deal gone bad, could have been, you know, a robbery and things went bad.

Could have been somebody being tortured, could have been some sort of gang involvement.

Still, to pinpoint a motive, investigators need to identify their victim.

In a stroke of luck, they ultimately find something that was spared by the blaze.

You get to the rear of the pickup truck and it's just an oddity that you have the one spot at the the rear of the pickup truck where the license plate is that's almost completely untouched.

The plate on the truck was a Florida license plate.

It was a veteran's license plate.

So we were able to run that and get that information.

It was a aha moment for the detectives because at that point this is where we can start.

So we run the license plate and it comes back registered to a Cheryl Miranda out of the Tampa, Florida area.

So that's really our starting point.

That's really the only place we have to start.

The problem right now is still, you don't know who Cheryl Miranda is.

Is that your victim?

Is that your perpetrator?

Is that just someone who innocently lent her truck out?

Now the key becomes, let's find Cheryl Miranda.

An Army veteran born and raised in Rhode Island, Cheryl Miranda was bright, outgoing, and always ready for a good time.

She was a big personality, very full of life.

She was a genuinely kind, nice person.

She would do anything for you.

She was generous to a fault.

She was funny.

She was just a fun, fun person.

But not everything in Cheryl's life was so carefree.

She was torn between the life she had and the one she truly wanted.

Cheryl was an adult when she finally came out as a gay woman, and she was met by a mixed reaction from her loved ones.

Coming out to parents in the 60s or 70s, especially blue-collar, working-class, second-generation parents, is a pretty harrowing experience, I think.

In Cheryl's case, her father just, he knew she was a lesbian, but they just didn't talk about it.

She decided to move to Tampa to just start anew.

When Cheryl moved to Tampa, she met Kim, who was her first official girlfriend, and she fell hard and she fell fast for her.

Kim was the love of her life.

They were very much in love and Kim kind of dumped her.

Cheryl was heartbroken when Kim left.

In my mind, she never really came back from that.

I thought they were going to be together a long time and then all of a sudden Kim was just gone.

Cheryl's heartbreak was compounded when she learned her father was terminally ill.

He did eventually pass.

Now she's without her father, who she was very close with, and she's without her first love, who abruptly ended their relationship.

Cheryl became more callous, colder.

I don't think she wanted to give her heart up to anybody else again.

But Cheryl's hard facade began to crack when she met Tanya Miller in February of 2004.

Tanya grew up in the Atlanta area.

She had a large family, a family who was very loving, a family who was very supportive.

In her early 20s, Tanya followed the same path many others in her family had.

She started a serious relationship and soon became a mother.

Tanya had two children.

She had a boy and a girl.

She had many things going for her that normalcy in life.

She had family.

She had friends.

She had a mate.

And she had two children.

Deep down though, Tanya was conflicted.

Tanya realizes she was gay.

Eventually, Tanya's relationship with her children's father came to an end, and Tanya came out of the closet.

Tanya's announcement was met with mixed reactions from her family.

There was one person, however, whose support for her was unwavering.

Tanya's son, Jabaris.

When she decided to come out, he didn't reject her.

He didn't turn his back on her.

He accepted her just for who she was, the way she was.

He accepted her as being mom no matter what.

In 2003, Tanya decided to leave Atlanta, seeking a fresh start in Tampa, Florida.

Jabaris, now 18, decided to go with her.

It's sort of like a packaged deal where Tanya went and Jabaris went.

It was not long after moving to Tampa that Tanya started dating Cheryl Miranda.

They started out hot and heavy and they move in together.

Cheryl also welcomed Tanya's son Jabaris into her home with open arms.

Tanya had a son and the son came as a package deal with Tanya.

She loved Tanya, so of course she wanted to accept her son.

Shortly after moving in, Tanya took a job as a cafeteria worker, which combined with Cheryl's military pension helped the couple get by.

Cheryl had worked.

worked, she was retired from the military and disability, and so she had a regular income there.

Cheryl is the breadwinner.

She is the person who's bringing in the money.

Though money was a little tight, Cheryl and Tanya couldn't have been happier.

By all accounts, they had a great loving relationship.

However, What Cheryl and Tanya's friends could have never imagined is that in March of 2005, the horrific discovery of an unidentified body in the back of Cheryl's truck would thrust the couple's relationship into the crosshairs of a heinous homicide case.

What then began as a stolen vehicle or a dumping investigation now has turned to possibly a murder investigation.

Coming up.

Could the victim's secret life be the key to catching the killer?

That automatically, you know, makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

I'm like, oh, this isn't good.

This is somebody we got to look at.

March 4th, 2005.

Police in Fulton County, Georgia, have just discovered the charred remains of a body in a smoldering truck on the outskirts of Atlanta.

After running the truck's plates, homicide detectives learned that the truck belongs to a woman from the Tampa, Florida area, a woman named Cheryl Miranda.

Fulton County investigators contact police in Tampa.

They agree to send some deputies over to the residents.

It's a rental, so they're able to get, you know, contact with the owner and then go inside.

They see no signs of struggle, no signs of a crime scene, no blood, no disarray, nothing like that.

Just looks like a regular apartment that somebody's not in at the time.

Hoping to learn more about Cheryl, officers reach out to her neighbors.

They began knocking on doors.

They found the landlord.

Landlord tells them and other people that they speak with say that they haven't seen her in a few days.

When Tampa police reach out to Cheryl's family in Rhode Island, they explain that they hadn't spoken to Cheryl in quite some time.

She was mostly disassociated from her family.

She was retired.

She wasn't working at the time and, you know, we really didn't have a lot to go on.

While police in Tampa continue searching for Cheryl Miranda, back in Atlanta, investigators are at the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office.

We attend the autopsy.

We're able to watch as they're going through.

And there's things that obviously we don't see when the body's in the bed of the pickup truck that come to light at the autopsy.

Beginning with the victim's sex and race.

Medical examiners find that this is a middle-aged white woman.

With regards to the victim's cause of death, the medical examiner finds any number of things could have killed this woman, but fire wasn't one of them.

What investigators determined from the autopsy was that she did not die from the fire.

There wasn't any soot in her mouth or in her lungs.

She had blunt force trauma to her head.

She had a stab wound to her neck, and she had bindings around her neck indicating possible strangulation.

This crime was gruesome and torturous.

You now have a victim that was

beaten with blunt force trauma to the head, stabbed in the neck, and strangled.

And that was all before they were bound and set on fire.

As for the identity of their victim, the medical examiner is ready to put that mystery to rest.

We had one viable fingerprint that the medical examiner was able to use and get a print that we were able to run and confirm that it was Cheryl Miranda's.

She had served in the armed forces before.

And part of the processing in getting into the armed forces is you have to be fingerprinted.

When they were able to get that single fingerprint, they did have her fingerprints in a database.

With a positive identification of the victim, detectives now need to figure out who would want Cheryl Miranda dead and why.

Based upon what we know is probably somebody that knew her personally and had personal ties to her, it's a very personal murder.

The next step for the investigation is, well, who are Miss Miranda's friends?

Who does she hang out with?

What is her lifestyle like?

Investigators turn to Cheryl's phone records.

At this point, the police can start looking into who she's calling, who are the numbers that she's calling, the frequency of the numbers that are calling.

From February 28th through March 4th, Cheryl's phone pings along the highway from Tampa to Atlanta.

Among the final calls made from Cheryl's phone are several to an Atlanta resident named Betsy.

Investigators contact Betsy, hoping she can shed some light on the case.

Betsy is very short with me, says she doesn't want to talk to me and says, you know, she'll have her attorney contact me.

She hangs up.

Well, that immediately raises red flags everywhere for police.

That automatically, you know, makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

That brief conversation I have with her maybe lasted maybe about 30 seconds.

Detectives try to contact Betsy again the following morning, but they quickly learn that Betsy has changed cell phones and the number she gave them is no longer in service.

That raises red flags because you wonder if this person is hiding something.

Do they have information to solve this crime?

Did they, in fact, play a part in this crime?

And why don't they want to speak to police?

On the afternoon of March 16th, investigators head to the residence that Betsy shares with her husband.

While Betsy isn't home, her husband is, and he's more than happy to provide information about his wife.

He lets us know that she's got an ongoing drug problem.

He doesn't see her much, and his intention is to leave her to get divorced from her.

He has no idea where she is.

He seems very, very honest and forthcoming.

He does not seem happy with her.

This provides at least a loose motive.

There is the possibility that this could have been a robbery of Cheryl for drug money or to get drugs or to support a habit.

It's like another bad notch.

This is not going well.

This is, you know, we got somebody that tells us their attorney's going to contact us.

Now they changed their phone number and we still can't find them.

So our resources are allocated in trying to find this Betsy.

Despite the suspicious behavior of Betsy, the detectives do not put all their eggs in one basket.

She is a person of interest that they want to talk to and find out what she may or may not know about the situation, but they're still looking at other avenues.

Investigators are pouring over these phone records and they tap into Cheryl Miranda's voicemail and they hear something very interesting.

It's the voice of a woman who's trying to get in touch with Cheryl Miranda.

So who is this person on the phone?

You don't know.

Is this person leaving fake voicemail messages to pretend they're looking for him?

Or maybe she had something to do with the murder?

Coming up, detectives talk to a potential new witness in the case.

They hadn't heard from her, so I was just concerned.

Anything could have happened, you know?

And a shocking revelation brings the case into sharper focus.

Tampa police come back with a doozy.

They find that Cheryl had in fact taken out a restraining order against a woman.

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For investigators in Atlanta, Georgia, the discovery of the body of retired military veteran Cheryl Miranda has raised a flood of possibilities.

Arson investigations are some of the toughest scenes to work because they leave so many unanswered questions.

After tapping into Cheryl's voicemail messages, detectives work to uncover the identity of a woman who left Cheryl a message after she went missing.

This led detectives to someone by the name of Teresa Smith.

Teresa, a resident of Tampa, Florida, appears to be the last person to contact Cheryl before her phone began moving north towards Atlanta.

Fulton County detectives give her a call.

I was just shocked.

You know, I don't remember breaking down in tears or anything.

I was just...

It was one of those things where you're surprised.

Teresa is eager to help.

Teresa is able to tell us that on the night of February 27th, that Cheryl was supposed to come over to her house and watch the Oscars with her.

And Cheryl hadn't showed up.

I hadn't heard from her, so I didn't know if she'd been in a wreck.

I didn't know if she'd gone away.

I just didn't know.

I was just concerned.

Anything could have happened, you know?

So I just tried to call her.

For her to find out that Cheryl's body had been located in in Metro Atlanta was a surprise to her.

She had no indication of why she would be in Metro Atlanta, in Atlanta, traveling through Atlanta, anything like that.

As for Cheryl's love life, Teresa informs detectives about Cheryl's girlfriend, Tanya Miller.

I never met her, didn't know her.

I remember her talking about the woman that moved into her apartment.

Detectives are anxious to talk to Tanya Miller.

But when they try to track her down, they discover she's missing too.

Tanya is nowhere to be found.

Unfortunately, a lot of old addresses, a lot of old phone numbers.

So, you know, we went to a lot of houses trying to find Tanya Miller.

With neither Tanya Miller nor Betsy anywhere to be found, investigators again search for answers in Cheryl's phone records.

We come across one of the numbers is registered to a Josette Skeens, who luckily we're able to get in contact with.

It turns out that she was a lifelong friend of Cheryl's.

And she finally gives police the information that they need as to why Cheryl was in Atlanta.

She told police that she was up and moving her life to Alabama.

My impression from Josette was just Cheryl wanted to change the scenery, that she was just, you know, ready for a new life and ready for a new start somewhere else.

According to Josette, Cheryl intended to pass through Atlanta on her way to Alabama.

Cheryl also told Josette that she didn't plan on making the trip alone.

She's going to be driving a couple friends and dropping them off in Georgia.

Who are the people that she's driving to Atlanta?

Why is she driving them?

And what happened either on the way or what happened here in Atlanta?

Josette tells investigators that she's never met Betsy or Tanya, but she does offer police a new lead.

Roughly a week before Cheryl left town, Josette had run into her and one of the people with whom Cheryl planned to travel.

Cheryl was with a black male in his early 20s, late teens, from what it appeared to Josette, and Josette told me she didn't know who that person was.

Could this unidentified person have something to do with Cheryl's murder?

We'd love to know who this is.

This is something we have to try try to dig into to find out.

We have very little information to go on.

The focus really becomes who are these two people that Cheryl was taking to Atlanta.

Detectives hope the answer lies in the one piece of evidence they do have, Cheryl's phone.

Police are still sifting through these phone numbers.

They're working their way back.

They speak with a woman named Erica Hammond.

Police ask Erica, how do you know Cheryl?

And she said, well, my aunt Tanya dates her.

According to cell records, Erica received a call from Cheryl's phone soon after she left Tampa.

When investigators question Erica at the station, they ask her to describe the call.

Erica explains it wasn't Cheryl she'd spoken with.

She told me that those phone calls were made from Cheryl's phone, but it was her cousin, Jabaris Miller.

We basically have now identified or think we've identified this younger black male in late teens, early 20s.

According to Erica, Jabaris said they had just left town, but that Cheryl's truck was out of gas and they were all flat broke.

Erica tells us that she could hear Tanya in the background telling Jabaris to tell Erica, just tell her to just send the money, just send the money.

Erica turns them down.

She does not give them gas money.

She has no idea how they made it to Atlanta, but the next morning, they did.

Erica says she knows this because once they arrived in Atlanta, Tanya and Jabaris contacted another relative for a place to stay.

She had told us that Jabaris and Tanya were both staying with her aunt, Martina, on Welcome All Road.

The location of Martina's address leaves detectives speechless.

The apartment complex is literally maybe 50 to 100 yards through the woods to where Cheryl and Cheryl's vehicle was located.

If Tanya and her son Jabaris were staying so close to where Cheryl's body was found, it could mean one of two things.

Could they be victims as well?

Or is it possible they had something to do with Cheryl's death?

It was a really positive lead that we had.

We had something to go on to try to locate these two and find out, you know, a why why are they using her phone and what happened to cheryl

in addition to tanya and jabaris police are still working to track down a woman named betsy who has been missing since police first contacted her about the case

what's strange about what betsy did was betsy pretty much said i have nothing to say to you and the next time that you call me you need to speak to my attorney

police finally catch up with Betsy and they tie up that loose end and they find out that she had no connection to Cheryl Miranda whatsoever.

It was actually Jabaris who was calling from Cheryl's phone.

I don't know if it was, you know, a relationship or drugs or needed money or anything like that, but when I spoke with Betsy over the phone, she told me the same thing, but kind of in the same breath.

I don't know Cheryl Miranda, but you can talk to my attorney.

The more pressing question remains: why was Jabaris Jabaris in possession of Cheryl's phone?

Background checks on Jabaris and Tanya offer little additional insight.

When looking at both Jabaris and Tanya's criminal histories, they each had arrests.

I don't think it was anything extremely violent, any violent felonies.

So nothing that stood out and said, oh, you know, we've got a couple of killers on our hands.

That's when investigators get a call from their colleagues in Tampa, who have also been working on the case.

Tampa police come back with a doozy.

They go through Cheryl's records and they find that she had in fact taken out a restraining order against a woman by the name of Tanya Miller.

Investigators discover that the incident that prompted Cheryl to file the restraining order not only involved Tanya, but Jabaris as well.

Cheryl believed that they had stolen something from her.

She confronted them.

They denied it, and a big altercation ensued.

The relationship became quite volatile between Cheryl and Tanya.

According to the order, Cheryl claimed that tension between her and Tanya had been building for some time.

Jabaris was not working.

He didn't have a job.

He was not responsible.

When Cheryl would tell him what to do, Tanya would come down on Cheryl and get Cheryl off of his back.

And so there was this friction that continued to ensue.

And Jabaris was at the center of it.

For Cheryl, Tanya's devotion to her son brought out a side of Tanya that Cheryl had never seen before.

Tanya had changed.

She starts seeing an ugly side to her.

Tanya is abusive.

Tanya is violent.

When they really delved into the restraining order, they had found that Cheryl said, I believe she will kill me.

Despite Cheryl's statement that she feared for her life, it appears she and Tanya continued to see each other even after the restraining order went into effect.

They would, you know, have these passionate makeups and everything would seem okay for a while until something else came up.

They'd have another big blow-up.

Had Cheryl and Tanya had another fight?

One that turned deadly?

We have no idea if they're involved.

Did they get into an argument?

Did she try to kick them out of the truck?

There's a multitude of things that could have happened on the ride up from Tampa or here when they got to Atlanta.

We really needed to find Tanya Miller.

Coming up, detectives receive new information about the days leading up to Cheryl Miranda's murder.

Tanya and Jabaris show up at her apartment.

They're driving a white truck.

And they finally zero in on a suspect.

Did you set her on fire or did you kill her?

Who knows?

Just days after the grisly discovery of 56-year-old Cheryl Miranda's body in the bed of a burned-out pickup, detectives have finally identified the two passengers who allegedly traveled with Cheryl to Atlanta, Tanya Miller and her son, Jabaris.

Tanya has become at least someone that the police want to interview and to find out what she knows about Cheryl's demise or her disappearance or her truck or anything of that nature.

So she is, again, at this point, a potential witness and possibly a suspect.

Detectives head to the apartment of Tanya's sister, Martina, where Tanya and her son Jabaris have allegedly been staying.

Tanya and Jabaris aren't there, but Martina agrees to answer detectives' questions.

Martina tells us that Tanya and Jabaris show up at her apartment.

They're driving a white truck.

She walks me over to the store and points to the area where it was parked.

I said, okay, which was very positive for me because I knew that that was Cheryl Miranda's truck.

So the truck sat in the parking lot of the apartment for a few days in the same parking spot in Jabaris, and Tanya wouldn't drive it, according to Martina.

It was on the night of March 3rd, Martina says she woke up to feed her baby and discovered Jabaris was gone.

Jabaris is not there on the couch where he had been sleeping the past couple of nights.

She feeds her baby.

She's walking around with the baby while feeding it, looks outside and realizes that this time the white truck that Jabaris and Tanya had shown up to George in is now gone.

She wakes Tanya up and says, hey, where did Jabaris go?

Why is he gone at three o'clock in the morning?

And Tanya tells her that Jabaris is gone to return the truck to the owner.

Martina says the following morning, she began to put two and two together.

She's watching the local Atlanta news and sees the truck on TV and that a body was found in it that was burned right outside of her apartment complex.

She tells them, I don't know what's going on with you, with the two of you, what you've done.

You have to leave here.

Martina Miller said when she kicked them out, they went to Pamela's house in Atlanta.

Tamela Given is the sister of Tanya Miller.

Martina's statement is all the evidence investigators need to take the next step.

Armed with all that information, we were able to get applications for arrest warrants for Tanya and Jabaris.

On March 22nd, detectives and patrol officers converge on the home of Tanya's sister, Tamila.

Investigators finally find Jabaris, so they take him into custody.

We tell him why he's under arrest, handcuff him.

He's compliant.

We don't talk to him at all there.

We put him in the back of a police car.

As for Tanya, she is still nowhere to be found.

According to Jabaris, Tanya has gone back to Florida.

We bring him back to our major case division.

We put him in an interview room and begin to slowly try to pull information out of him and interview him.

When detectives tell 20-year-old Jabaris why he's in custody, he claims he had nothing to do with Cheryl Miranda's murder.

In fact, Jabaris says he loved Cheryl like a second mother.

That's what we're asking.

It was like pulling teeth from him.

She had a court order to keep your mother away from him.

Well, I can't take it.

I'm telling

He's not dodging the questions.

He's answering them, but he's not answering them truthfully.

We could tell he was trying to hide stuff.

Still, Jabaris remains steadfast in his claims of innocence.

Detectives then decide to turn up the heat on Jabaris.

And you know what you did on the night of the fourth?

You left her house in this truck, and then you set

Moran on fire.

Who told you it?

I know it.

They're really working him over in this interrogation room.

You know, they're not letting up.

Jabaris kept denying everything.

Did you set her on fire or did you kill her?

No.

Who did?

No way.

Everything matches up.

All the puzzle fits in.

You know what doesn't fit in?

You.

Based upon the information we had with the cell phone records and knowing he was in the truck, we were able to tell that he wasn't being honest with us.

We told him exactly what we had.

You're going down the river.

Do you understand that?

After two hours of intense questioning, Jabaris changes his story.

He changed his story about not knowing that her body was back there, you know, in the bed of the truck.

Jabaris tells investigators that he discovered Cheryl's body in the back of the truck.

He says that he did not commit the crime, but he was scared and he freaked out and he decided decided that he was going to set the truck on fire as to not to be implicated in the crime.

Investigators still aren't convinced Jabaris is telling the truth.

As far as what happened to her body, what caused her death, he would not talk about that.

When it comes to whether or not his mother was involved, Jabaris claims she had nothing to do with it.

Yes, I mean, she says my mom did.

I know my mom went down, but I don't even know what's going on right now.

Jabaris never implicated his mother.

He constantly kept her innocent in this entire crime.

The interview leaves investigators with no clear answers about what happened to Cheryl.

Detectives now need to track down Tanya to find more answers about the night Cheryl was killed.

Tanya has gone back to Florida, local law enforcement, try to find her in Florida.

Thankfully, on March 26th, detectives catch the break they've been looking looking for in a call from Tanya's sister, Tamila.

She ends up calling me on my cell phone one morning and saying that Tanya has shown back up.

Coming up, detectives bring Tanya Miller in for questioning.

I mean,

hang on, man, I don't even know what's going on.

And detectives turn up the pressure.

Your son,

your lifeblood, is going to go to jail for the rest of his life for you.

You understand that?

That's the meat for you.

Nearly three weeks after the murder of Cheryl Miranda, Fulton County police have secured an arrest warrant.

for Cheryl's on-again, off-again partner, 40-year-old Tanya Miller.

Tanya's son Jabaris, is in custody when Tanya's sister informs detectives that Tanya is ready to talk.

They bring Tanya in, and Tanya's position is: I don't know what you're talking about.

I mean,

hang on, man.

I don't even know what's going on.

Once again, detectives get tough.

No, what I'm saying is that you killed Cheryl Miranda and your son and your son.

I killed Cheryl Miranda.

No, sir, no, sir.

And you and your son, your lifeblood, is going to go to jail for the rest of his life for you.

Do you understand that?

Not for me.

For you.

You got to understand one thing.

You saying that I killed this woman and this boy is covering it for me?

That's not, that's a lie.

We tell her exactly what Jabara said and confront her with it and she's basically, you know, an I don't care attitude.

Being stabbed and burned like an animal, do you think your son would say whatever was necessary to protect you?

I never discussed that with him.

Why would Jabbar

tell me that he drove up in Cheryl Miranda's truck from Florida with his mother, Tanya Miller, if it wasn't true?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Even without a confession, prosecutors believe they have enough evidence to move forward with charges.

If it wasn't clear before, let me make it clear now.

No, I don't think you do.

I have an arrest warrant for you for murder for the death of Cheryl Miranda.

Fast forward to February 2008, Tanya Miller and her son Jabaris stand trial together in Fulton County Criminal Court.

Prosecutors open their case by laying out the events they believe led to the murder of Cheryl Miranda.

Now she was looking to go to Alabama to see, can I start over again, get this behind me, get rid of this pain.

Tanya and Jabaris approach Cheryl and ask her, can they ride to Atlanta, even though she has a restraining order?

Prosecutors assert that somewhere along the ride north, Cheryl's final act of kindness took a deadly turn.

They don't believe the crime was planned at all.

They think that there was some sort of a discussion that led to an argument and an altercation, most likely between Cheryl and Tanya.

Jabaris, they believe, came into his mother's defense.

And that is when the beatdown of Cheryl began.

And this is when the overkill came into effect.

That resulted in Cheryl Miranda's death.

Prosecutors argued that Jabaris and Tanya then put Shon Miranda's body into the truck and continued on with their plans to Georgia with Shoe Miranda in the back of the truck.

Prosecutors claim that after arriving in Atlanta, Tanya and Jabaris were unsure what to do with Cheryl's body.

Finally, after three days, Tanya instructed her son to burn the truck and Cheryl along with it.

My theory is Tanya directed the majority of what happened and directed Jabaris on what to do.

As far as motive goes, prosecutors believe that the altercation that led to Cheryl's death was a combination of volatile romance and cold, hard cash.

Cheryl Miranda had been a big financial support for Tanya Miller and her son Jabaris.

So when Sheryl Miranda filed the restraining order, that was a signal to Tanya Miller that her good days were coming to an end.

She was angry because she believed that Cheryl ruined her life by having her arrested and filing this restraining order.

I mean, when somebody files a restraining order on you, it puts you in a very difficult position.

So she resented Cheryl for that.

She resented her for taking away her financial support.

As for the defense, they argue that neither Jabaris nor Tanya should be convicted on circumstantial evidence alone.

Nobody knows exactly what happened from February 27th to March 5th.

And the state has the burden of piecing that together.

And the defense wanted to create as much confusion as possible so that the state could not put those pieces together solidly.

The defense can argue, that's reasonable doubt.

You should have quit my client.

On February 22nd, the jury announces they have reached a verdict.

43-year-old Tanya and 23-year-old Jabaris Miller Miller are found guilty of malice murder.

Jabaris is also found guilty of arson for setting Cheryl's body on fire.

Tanya is sentenced to life plus 10 years, and Jabaris gets life plus 20 years.

My initial reaction was just total meltdown.

I could not handle it.

I could not process it.

I couldn't deal with it.

I mean, this kind, warm, funny, gentle, wacky, delightful woman, and her life ended that way.

It's a tragic end to a story of two women whose love for each other blinded them to the rage one of them carried in her heart.

You have all kinds of feelings involved.

There's anger.

You're still in love with the person, but you hate them.

There's this fine line between love and hate, and that often leads to murder.

For more information on Snapped, go to oxygen.com.

It's all a light-hearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid.

We're your hosts, I'm Alina Urquhart, and I'm Ash Kelly.

And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy.

The stories we cover are well researched.

Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group.

With a touch of humor.

Shout out to her.

Shout out to all my therapists out the years.

There's been like eight of them.

A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing.

That motherfucker is not real!

And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tale of the paranormal, or you love to hop in the Wayback Machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes, you should tune in to our podcast, Morbid.

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