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When Sue Mary Hickman showed up at his home one day last December, Ernest Larry Bailey knew something was wrong.

She wasn't acting like herself, he testified Tuesday during a preliminary hearing in 3rd District Court. She paced up and down his driveway. She told him she was in trouble and asked him whether she could leave her dogs with him.

"I think I've shot Rosie," Hickman told Bailey, referring to her partner, 54-year-old Rose Marie Harris.

Bailey remembered pressing Hickman, a family friend he had known all her life.

"That's something you can't 'think' about," Bailey recalled telling Hickman. "You did or you didn't."

"I'm sure I did," Hickman responded, according to Bailey's testimony.

There, at Bailey's home, Hickman called 911 and asked for a welfare check at the apartment she shared with Harris, near 550 North Wall Street. When a dispatcher asked her why police should check on the home, Hickman admitted again to shooting Harris.

"She made me snap," Hickman cried, according to a recording played in court Tuesday. "I couldn't take it anymore, the drinking. ... Can you please tell me if she's alive?"

But when officers arrived, Harris was already deceased, according to preliminary-hearing testimony. She was found slumped on a couch, a bullet wound in her chest. A .38-caliber handgun and shell casings were found nearby.

At Bailey's home, Hickman told a police officer that "at least there won't be no more mental abuse and no more physical abuse," Bailey recalled.

Hickman is charged in 3rd District Court with first-degree felony murder for Harris' Dec. 17 death. After hearing testimony from several witnesses on Tuesday, 3rd District Judge Vernice Trease ruled that there was probable cause for the case to move forward to trial. Hickman is expected to be in court July 10 for a scheduling conference.

Hickman is being held at the Salt Lake County jail in lieu of $1 million cash-only bail.