- The Verdict - Page 234

chilling conversation I ever had. This guy basically told me, The system is in motion, if you don't file on time we are going to kill your client."

Duane drove to Starke and met Zeigler, expecting to meet a depraved, emotionless psychopath. Instead, Zeigler came across as polite, earnest, almost square...like John Boy Walton, Duane thought. Duane also scanned the trial testimony, looking for the "smoking gun" that had convicted Zeigler, and he didn't find it. He did find that the case was much more complex and ambiguous than he had been led to believe.

The brief was filed on time, and one day before the scheduled execution, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay. Zeigler was returned from the Death House to wait out his appeals. Duane did not step out of the case. He read the transcripts again, and looked at the evidence, and he became convinced that Zeigler had been unjustly convicted.

Not that Zeigler necessarily was innocent—guilt and innocence was another issue—but Duane believed that the crime had been badly investigated and wrongfully prosecuted, that the system had been ill-served.

The case captivated Duane. At the age of 30, he thought, Zeigler had had everything. To Duane, the idea of Zeigler's guilt had implications about affluence and realized dreams. If he was guilty, he had deliberately thrown away a life that almost anyone would envy. Could success be so unsatisfying?

But if Zeigler was innocent, then he was the ultimate victim. He had lost his wife, his fortune, his reputation, his dreams, his liberty; and now Florida wanted to take his life as well.

Either alternative was disturbing.

*

By his own description, Duane became obsessed. He wrote letters to the editor and appeared on radio talk shows, declaring that Zeigler deserved a new trial. He found most minds closed on the subject. The Sentinel Star---now the Orlando Sentinel, and still the dominant media outlet in Orange County---seemed to have accepted the authorities' version from the beginning. The newspaper had always been one of the area's big boosters, and boosters are disinclined to question the local establishment.

In 1983, one of Orlando's television stations, WFTV Channel 9, aired a long piece by reporter Ken Kaltoff that summarized some of the lingering doubts in the case. It remains the only locally-generated news report that has ever questioned the investigation or the prosecution of the case.

Duane also interviewed Frye and Eagan. Duane says that Frye told him that one of his confidential informants in the case was Robert Thompson, the Oakland chief of police. This seemed unusual to Duane: he had never heard of