- Crime and Prosecution - Page 60

robbery story was relegated to the last paragraph:  “Although detectives initially said that they thought the killings were a result of an armed robbery, they could find nothing missing from the store.”

The top story on the 29^th was the decision to send evidence to the FBI.  The chief deputy, McEachern, said that no charges would be filed “in the next day or two.”

While that issue of the newspaper was on the streets, however, Frye was reviewing the evidence with his superiors and an assistant state attorney.  On the afternoon of the 29^th, Frye himself signed an arrest warrant.  He and McEachern were among the official party that arrested Zeigler in his bed at West Orange Memorial and formally charged him with the four murders.   He was no longer a suspect, but a defendant.

The next day, the photo at the top of page one was of Tommy Zeigler hiding his face behind a blanket as he was taken into custody.

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Peter de Manio, a circuit court judge, read the charges against Zeigler at a special proceedings held on the 30^th in his hospital room.  The Sentinel Star described him as “ashen-faced” when he listened to the accusations. 

 “Zeigler showed no emotion as the judge spoke,” wrote reporter Paul Jenkins.  “His eyes remained fixed on de Manio and he did not glance around the tiny hospital room crammed with newsmen, court clerks, and sheriff’s deputies.”

In the accompanying photograph Zeigler appeared impassive, stolid: perhaps stunned.  De Manio asked him if he understood the charges against him, and Zeigler whispered, “Yes.”  De Manio explained that the penalty for each of the four counts was life imprisonment, or death.

On that day, the question of a death sentence was moot.  Not since 1964 had the state executed anyone in its electric chair at Florida State Prison.  In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court had declared the state’s death penalty to be unconstitutional.

But the state was preparing to argue otherwise.  In the spring, Florida would ask the Supreme Court to uphold a sentence of death against Charles William Proffitt, a thirty-year-old warehouseman convicted of murdering a high school wrestling coach during a burglary.  The decision, when it was announced in July, would have huge implications for the nearly seventy men who still remained on Death Row, and for Tommy Zeigler.