- The Defense - Page 155

significance of the tape was that Frye finally had persuaded someone to go on record with the slanderous rumors that had become current since the police investigation began.

Clafler's account contained numerous inconsistencies: the insurance polices were applied for in September, not in December; Eunice had signed the applications and thus knew about them immediately; Perry Edwards, Jr., would testify that his parents had gone to Florida to spend the holidays with Tommy and Eunice, not for a rendezvous in which they would snatch her back to Georgia.  Eunice was close to the wife of Zeigler's supposed homosexual infatuation, yet the wife said that she knew nothing about it, that Eunice had never mentioned such an incident to her.  Nor to anyone else, apparently: none of Eunice's many friends ever claimed to have heard such a story, or anything like it.  If Clafler was telling the truth, Eunice had confided in a near-stranger to the exclusion of everyone else.  And why had Clafler waited nearly five months to tell police that Tommy Zeigler had threatened his wife's life?

Above all, nobody who had seen Eunice on Christmas Eve had suggested that she was under any such tension.  A woman who plans to leave her husband because she fears for her life does not take a cat to the vet, or bake a cake, or routinely plan to attend a Christmas Ever service.  Eunice was alone with her mother and father during most of the day on Christmas Eve.  She had every opportunity to leave with them while Tommy and his parents were at the store on Christmas Eve.

Gene Annan and another defense investigator interviewed Clafler at the mobile home where she lived.  She appeared to back away from some of her allegations.

Hadley had other reasons to discount the tape.  He believed that Clafler was closely involved with a potential prosecution witness, a man who had already given some questionable and highly damaging statements against Zeigler.  This man, they believed, was a source of some of Don Frye's discredited grand jury testimony.

Leslie Gift had seen Cheryl Clafler and refused to believe that Eunice Zeigler associated with her, much less confided in her.

Hadley and Davids debated whether they should depose Clafler.  So far the rumors of homosexuality had not been published.  But any deposition would become public record, and although the local media generally did not search out depositions, Hadley feared that someone in the prosecution would leak the story.  Vernon Davids put it more bluntly: if they deposed Cheryl Clafler, he said, they would read about it the next morning in the Sentinel Star.

Hadley decided against the deposition.  If Clafler's story reached the public, it would have to be from the witness stand.