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288 Ga. 662

S10A2033. LOWE v. THE STATE.

BENHAM, Justice. This appeal arises from appellant Antonia Lowe's murder conviction relating to the death of Lula Bell Scott.1 1. Appellant contends the evidence is insufficient to uphold her

conviction. The relevant inquiry on appeal challenging the sufficiency of the evidence is whether the evidence, viewed in a light most favorable to the verdict, would authorize a rational trier of fact to find appellant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crimes for which she is charged. Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U. S. 307, 319 (99 SC 2781, 61 LE2d 560) (1979); Cutrer v. State, 287 Ga. 272, 274 (695 SE2d 597) (2010). The evidence introduced at trial showed that on November 4, 2006, the body of Lula Bell Scott was discovered by hunters in the woods of McDuffie County. Based on the state of the body's

decomposition, law enforcement determined the victim had been dead since at

On August 7, 2008, a McDuffie County grand jury indicted appellant for malice murder, felony murder, and aggravated assault. Her trial took place on October 26-28, 2009, and a jury returned a verdict of guilty on all charges. The trial court sentenced appellant to life in prison for malice murder. The aggravated assault charge merged into the malice murder charge as a matter of fact and the felony murder charge was vacated as a matter of law. On November 24, 2009, appellant moved for a new trial and amended the motion on June 22, 2010. The trial court denied the motion on August 3, 2010. Appellant filed a notice of appeal on August 3, 2010, and the case was docketed in this Court for the September 2010 term for decision on the briefs.

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least the first week of September 2006. Clarice Billings, appellant, and Scott, who was Billings's mother, all lived together. At trial, Billings testified she last saw the victim on September 1, 2006, when she and appellant went looking for Scott in Thomson, Georgia (McDuffie County) to urge her to return to their home in Hephzibah, Georgia (Richmond County). When they could not persuade Scott to come back home, Billings and appellant went to a friend's house. Appellant then offered to go look for and talk to Scott one more time. When appellant came back, she reported to Billings that she had hit a deer. Billings thought nothing of it since appellant had hit a deer in 2005. When Billings did not hear from her mother over that weekend, she reported the victim missing the following Monday, September 4. The father of one of appellant's children testified that appellant confided to him that appellant had found Scott and that they had a physical altercation while sitting inside appellant's tan Ford Expedition. During the altercation, appellant stated she cut the victim. When the victim climbed out of the vehicle and threatened to call the police, appellant told her child's father that she "snapped" and hit the victim with her truck, watching the body fly into the brush on the side of the road. During the investigation, the authorities found car parts, which were identified as belonging to either a Ford F-150 pickup truck or a Ford Expedition, near the roadside adjacent to where the body was found. The State also introduced an invoice of the repair to appellant's vehicle in which she reported hitting a deer on the same date the victim was last seen. Another witness testified that appellant asked her
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to tell the car insurance company that she was with appellant and that appellant had hit a deer on the day in question. During a phone call initiated by appellant, the witness said she also told Billings she was with appellant when she hit the deer. When the police questioned the witness, however, she told them what appellant had asked her to say and confirmed that she was not with appellant on the day in question, but was at home playing cards. Based on the body's state of decomposition, the medical examiner could not perform an autopsy and a forensic dentist had to establish the body's identity through dental records. The forensic anthropologist examined the skeletal remains and testified that the victim sustained numerous injuries around the time of death, including fractures to her neck and spine, a fractured pelvis, a broken right arm, a fractured right thigh, and 24 fractured ribs, all injuries consistent with being hit by a vehicle. He testified that the cause of death was multiple blunt force trauma.2 The evidence adduced at trial and summarized above was sufficient to authorize a rational trier of fact to find appellant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of malice murder. Id. 2. Upon denying the motion for new trial, the trial court resolved all credibility issues against appellant. Appellant contends that the jury's verdict was contrary to the evidence under OCGA

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