- Crime and Prosecution - Page 32

Perry Edwards, who lay about fifteen yards south of Mays on the terrazzo floor, also had been beaten about the head, and had multiple gunshot wounds.  He had been killed--probably as he lay wounded on the floor--by two shots to the head.

Eunice Zeigler had been shot once in the back of the head.  She had died at once.

Judging postmortem lividity,[1]  Dr. Ruiz placed the time of death of all four corpses within an hour either way of 8:00 P.M.

*

Tommy Zeigler at that moment was in the intensive care unit at West Orange Memorial, recovering from surgery.

The entrance wound of the gunshot was about three-eighths of an inch wide--not a small caliber--and was about navel-high, a little less than five inches to the right of the center line of the body.  The exit wound was slightly upward and very slightly to the left.

Gleason feared damage to the internal organs.  In that region the greatest danger was to the ascending colon.  Gleason performed a surgical procedure known as a laparotomy, to trace the path of the bullet.  He found that it had grazed the peritoneum, the lining of the abdomen that holds the colon, but had not punctured it.  It has passed within an inch of the liver.  None of the vital organs had been affected.

Dr. Gleason cleaned and sutured the wounds.  At 11:50 Tommy Zeigler was out of the operating room, resting under sedation in ICU.

He was about to become a suspect.

[1]     Postmortem lividity is the color that results from the settling of blood within a human body.  It is one means of placing time of death, if a body has not been disturbed.