- Almost True - Page 282

Zeigler must have turned off all the wall switches before Mays and Thomas drove up and found the store dark.  Then Thomas pulled down the breaker box switch, cutting off all power inside.  Then, after killing Mays, Zeigler went through the store putting some of the wall switches into the on position (but not turning on the lights, since the breaker box was now turned off).  Thus Yawn discovered some of the switches turned up, but the lights would not come on.

Why Zeigler should engage in such a pointless exercise in the midst of a quadruple homicide is not apparent.  Yet by the state's theory, this is the only explanation for the conditions that police found.

A much simpler explanation exists for both the gate and the lights.

First, the perpetrators—not Tommy Zeigler—bent the prong because they had to get a vehicle in or out of the gate.  However, this directly contradicts Williams, who claimed that he found the gate locked after Zeigler tried to kill him.

As for the switches, the simple explanation is that some of the lights were on inside when the perpetrators—not Tommy Zeigler—pulled down the breaker box arm, so that they could enter the store in darkness.  It accounts for what police found after the crime: breaker box turned off, lights switches inside turned on.

But this compels us to discount Thomas, who said that the store was dark but the breaker switch was up.

BLOODY SOLES, BLOODY CUFFS

Charlie Mays's blood-smeared sneakers and blood-soaked trouser bottoms are inexplicable by the state's hypothesis.  Mays could have collected that amount of blood in only two places: the pool around Mr. Edwards and the pool around Eunice.  These are not places where Mays would have innocently walked.  Furthermore, even if he did happen somehow to stumble into Perry Edwards's blood at the back of the store, his sneakers certainly would have left some traces on the terrazzo-some print of bloody scuff.  But there is none.  In fact, the evidence photo of Mays, sprawled on the terrazzo, is almost eerie.  Here are two obviously bloody sneakers, with no bloody footprints.  It's as if Mays has been carried there and put down.

But the blood splatters from his beating showed that Mays was killed on the spot.  And there are also the bloody cuffs, which do not appear to have left a trace on the white floor, even though Mays's legs must have been jostled as the killer squatted astride his chest and violently beat in his skull.

How does Frye explain these phenomena?

Frye said in his second deposition that be believed that Mays was shot about five feet from where he was killed, in an area of smeared blood and half a dozen blood droplets, which appear in a photograph reproduced in the photo section of