Gun-toting bully or abused: Jury gets two sides of beauty queen

<p>The murder trial of a beauty queen who killed her two-timing boyfriend opened Tuesday with prosecutors calling her a jilted woman vengefully toting a gun and her defense attorney saying she was a frightened, abused woman.</p><p>Sharron Nicole Redmond faces an automatic life sentence if convicted for slaying Kevin Shorter four months after she was crowned Miss Savannah 2003. She admits shooting Shorter at the home of another woman he was dating, but says she fired in self defense.</p><p>Assistant District Attorney Ann Elmore told jurors Tuesday that Redmond had a different motive: "If she couldn't have him, no woman would."</p><p>"Behind the defendant's public image ... the whole tiara thing, there's the reality where our defendant totes a gun and threatens Kevin Shorter with it on several occasions before she actually shoots him," Elmore said.</p><p>Defense attorney Michael Schiavone painted a different portrait for jurors. He said Shorter had abused Redmond during their relationship and threatened to kill her before he was shot Dec. 16, 2003.</p><p>Shorter, he said, became outraged when Redmond went to see his second girlfriend, Rachel Hall, to discuss their rival relationships. He also said Shorter's fury was fueled by illegal drugs in his system.</p><p>"He's mad, he's out of control, he's under the influence of drugs," Schiavone said. "The first words out of his mouth as he's charging Nikki Redmond are, `Bitch, I'll kill you.'"</p><p>The first witness prosecutors planned to call Tuesday was Rachel Hall, who Shorter had been dating at the same time as Redmond.</p><p>Hall, 24, testified in a pretrial hearing last year that Redmond had come to her home and talked calmly until Shorter arrived. She has said Redmond retrieved a .40-caliber handgun from her car and aimed at Shorter after he yelled sexual insults at her. But she didn't fire then.</p><p>Hall didn't see the shot, saying both Redmond and Shorter started to leave and she returned inside.</p><p>Redmond fired the shot from her car window, hitting Shorter in the right buttock and piercing his femoral artery. He died three days later at a Savannah hospital.</p><p>Schiavone told jurors Redmond feared Shorter was reaching for a gun in his own car. He said the right-handed beauty queen fired using her left hand and intended the shot as a warning.</p><p>"She holds the gun and aims it away from him, hopes to scare him and slow him down," Schiavone said.</p><p>He said a ballistics expert will testify that the bullet hit Shorter after ricocheting off his car.</p><p>Redmond finished as a runner-up in the 2003 Miss Savannah pageant, but later took the crown when pageant winner Andrea Bailey won the title Miss Georgia _ a fact Elmore seized on to describe Redmond as jilted and jealous.</p><p>"If she couldn't have him, no woman would," Elmore said. "She'd been fourth runner-up once before, but she became Miss Savannah. And she wasn't going to be runner-up this time."</p>

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