Late in the night just a few hours before Teresa Parramoure was murdered in her bed, she awoke to find her 16-year-old daughter opening a bedroom window to some young men friends.
That made the 38-year-old mother so angry that she yelled at her daughter, Tiffany Taylor, 16, and ordered her to close the window and come to sleep with her in the other end of their Fisk Road trailer.
A few hours later, Parramoure was stabbed to death, and this week, Taylor, now 17, is standing trial in adult court for first degree murder.
Was Parramoure a hard-working, religious woman trying to get control of a wayward daughter, who turned on her in anger and plunged an 8-inch knife blade into her over and over, as state prosecutors say?
Or was she a mother who had not always set a good example and who fell victim to a nightmare her troubled daughter experienced while sleeping that night, as the defense says?
A jury of seven men and five women yesterday listened to opening statements giving the two views of Parramoure.
The first witnesses in the case also began filling in details of what took place on the night of Nov. 26, 1996.
Throughout the first day of testimony, Tiffany Taylor sat at the defense table listening too, tears streaming down her face at times, especially when graphic descriptions of her mother's fatal wounds came from the witness stand.
"Teresa Parramoure was a single mother, a church-going woman who worked in this county's Jail Ministry, and she was trying to raise her daughter the right way," Assistant District Attorney Lillie Ann Sells said.
"Tiffany Taylor took a butcher knife from Shoney's where she worked part-time and brutally stabbed her mother to death.
"This woman died of stab wounds to the lungs. Her lungs filled up with blood, and it took eight to 10 minutes for her to die. This murder was premeditated and intentional."
The prosecutor outlined the several lies Tiffany Taylor told immediately following the killing. The girl had suffered a serious cut on the leg during the attack, and she made up various stories about how she got that injury, lies designed to conceal her mother's death.
But defense attorney Joe Edwards painted a picture of a young girl whose mother had not always been religious.
"This case is about a young girl who has been asking everyone to listen to her and to believe her," Edwards said.
"Her mother walked around naked in front of her and even had intercourse in front fo her up until the girl was 14, and not with her husbands--she had four--but with many different men," he said.
"Tiffany Taylor admits a killing took place, and based on what she knows, her hand held the knife. But it happened during the nightmare of nightmares. This girl was pushed and pushed and pushed. She had a dream that night that somebody was chasing her.
"And this developed into an incredible nightmare and she woke up and there was the body. She had been living a nightmare for years, and did what she could to deal with it, to deal with things as a 14, 15, and 16 year old child--things you and I have never had to deal with."
Edwards said that after first concocting various stories following the stabbing that night, the girl did tell investigators about a horrible nightmare that caused her mother's death.
"But nobody would believe her. She's been asking, `Believe me, believe me' now for a year and two months," Edwards said. "And here we are today, and you are the last resort. This case is about getting past the `Yeah, sure' stage and listening."
Putnam Sheriff's Detective David Andrews testified about what Tiffany Taylor told him of that night:
About 1 a.m. "she had some visitors at her window in her bedroom," Andrews said.
"She said she was in bed and heard a knocking at the window. She got up and tried to motion them away, but they continued knocking.
"She then went to the other end of the trailer to check on her mother and then came back into her own room and locked the door and was starting to open the window when her mother knocked on her door.
"She opened the door and she and her mother got into it. Her mother yelled, `How dare you put our lives in danger by having these people in here!'
"Then she made Tiffany go sleep with her, and from time to time that night her mother would wake her up and yell at her. She said she went to sleep and dreamed that someone was after her, a guy, and that he caught her and she had a knife.
"And she said when she woke up, her mother was dead. She said she sat there at first thinking her mother might come back. She said she didn't know what to do, so she thought if she slept a while, she might know what to do. She went back to her bed, and she talked to their pet dog because she had no one else to talk to."
The stabbing took place around 6 a.m., Andrews said, and two friends of the family called early that morning wanting to talk to Teresa Parramoure, Andrews said. The girl answered the phone both times and told the callers her mother had been sick and was still asleep, he said.
She then got up and bandaged her leg wound, took a shower, washed her hair, put in her contact lenses, and left the trailer driving her mother's car, Andrews said the girl told him.
Andrews also testified about warrants Teresa Parramoure had taken out a month earlier against three men she accused of keeping Tiffany Taylor out after 2 a.m.: Marty K Martin, Robbie League, and Brian McMurray.
But the charges never got to court before Parramoure's death, and thus were dismissed, he said.
Another man, a friend of Tiffany Taylor's named Barry McMurray, has been subpoenaed in the case. Allegedly, Taylor wrote him letters, in one of which she described "cutting" her mother.
Another friend of the girl's, Chris Tinker, testified yesterday that he drove her to the hospital that morning after she showed up at his house and claimed that she and "her boyfriend" had been in an altercation and that she had been cut.
Tinker admitted that he had picked the girl up "on the street" sometimes at night and that he carried a beep on which she and others could contact him to be picked up.
He also admitted to a criminal record that includes aggravated assault, possession of firearms, selling crack cocaine, and possession of marijuana.
But he didn't know anything about the killing of Teresa Parramoure until he heard of it sometime on Nov. 27, he said.
As he cross-examined Detective Andrews yesterday, defense attorney Edwards brought out more of what Tiffany Taylor's official statement to law officers contains.
"As you questioned her, she told you, `I just remembered having this dream about someone chasing me and trying to kill me,' didn't she?" Edwards asked, reading from a transcript of the statement.
Teresa Parramoure kept a knife under the bed out of fear that someone would break into her home, and it was that knife Tiffany Taylor used, according to the statement.
"I thought this person was chasing me, and I grabbed the knife, and then I heard my mom scream," the girl told detectives as she was being questioned back in Nov. of 1996, according to excepts from the transcript read by attorney Edwards yesterday.
"And I thought, why is Mom screaming, and then I woke up. And I was like, Mom, I'm sorry. Mom, are you going to be okay? I didn't mean to kill her," the girl told detectives.
"But you didn't believe her about the nightmare, did you?" Edwards asked Detective Andrews.
"No. I started not believing that when she told me about her mother punching and kicking her in bed that night," Andrews said.
Edwards read more from the transcript of the girl's statement: "I was half asleep and half awake. In my dream, I was running from somebody and somebody grabbed me, and I thought it was him, and all I wanted was to get him off of me."
The state could finish its case today, and after that, the defense will present its case, which could include putting Tiffany Taylor on the stand to tell more about her nightmare.