Appellant Joseph White was convicted of and sentenced to life imprisonment for the malice murder of Nellie Mae Kirkland. He was also convicted of and sentenced for concealing the death of the victim and for tampering with evidence.1 On appeal, he contends he was not afforded effective assistance of counsel, he challenges the sufficiency of the evidence and the removal of a juror during the trial, and he argues the trial court erred in its charge to the jury. Shortly after 8 a.m. on July 10, 2005, a police officer found the body of a woman lying face-down in a pool of blood and clad only in a nightgown in a parking area of a city park in southwest Atlanta. The forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy on the body testified she had suffered multiple blunt force trauma to her head, with the cause of death being strangulation. The body had post-mortem abrasions on her back, buttocks, heels, and right thigh, shoulder, wrist and hand, most likely inflicted when she was dragged by the feet and by the wrists or underarms to the site where she was found. Between 8-8:30 a.m. that same morning, appellant Joseph White telephoned the daughter of Nellie Mae Kirkland, the woman he lived with in southwest Atlanta, and reported that Ms. Kirkland was not at her home but her purse and vehicle were there. The daughter called police to report her mother was missing and went to her mother’s home, one-tenth of a mile down the street from the park in which the woman’s body had been found.
The homicide unit commander of the Atlanta Police Department testified that at about noon on July 10 he was approaching the site where the dead woman’s body had been found and appellant flagged him down to report that his girlfriend was missing. A detective who was investigating the homicide came to the home of the missing woman after being contacted by the missing woman’s daughter, who feared her mother was the woman found in the park. The detective and the missing woman’s son walked through the tidy home and found the victim’s walking cane and purse, and the detective noticed what appeared to be blood on appellant’s calf. The missing woman’s son took a photograph of his mother to the county morgue where the woman found in the park was identified as being Ms. Kirkland. Police executed a search warrant at the victim’s home and discovered blood-soaked sheets, pillows, and mattress on a bed that had been made, and blood on a leg of a nightstand and on a cardboard box in the bedroom. When the searching officers lifted the mattress, they found a knife lodged in the center of the bed between the mattress and box springs. Found in the backseat of the patrol car used to transport appellant to police offices were two cardboard scraps from the box in the bedroom, which scraps contained blood determined to be that of the victim.
