Fatal Flaw

Eighteen

Terry Hadley had heard about the crime from Ted Van Deventer, who called him at home on Christmas morning.  Van Deventer stayed on the line while Hadley scanned the article in the Sentinel Star.

 “Would you come out and talk to Tommy?”  Van Deventer said.  “The word is out that he’s the prime suspect.”

Hadley lived north of Orlando.  His route to Orange Memorial took him past the furniture store, where the sheriff’s vehicles out front gave some hint of the tragedy that had played out there the evening before.

Earlier that year, Hadley had become well acquainted with Zeigler.  Hadley was defending a fifty-four-year-old black man named Andrew James against charges of selling marijuana to an undercover agent of the state Beverage Department.  James was a friend of Zeigler’s.  He was also the only black man in West Orange to hold a full liquor license.  Since the incident was alleged to have taken place at his bar in Winter Garden, James was in jeopardy of losing his license and a very profitable business.

He originally retained Ted Van Deventer, and pled guilty to the charge.  But James apparently had misgivings.  Zeigler referred James to Hadley, and Hadley withdrew the plea.

Zeigler remained actively involved with the case as Hadley prepared for trial.  He told Hadley that James was getting a raw deal.  Florida’s liquor licenses were allotted on a strict quota system and usually were available only by private sale.  Very rarely, though, the state Beverage Department resold licenses that it had revoked.  Zeigler told Hadley that James had been set up for forfeiture because he had refused to sell his license to certain powerful white interests in West Orange.

According to Zeigler, that group included a local businessman whom Zeigler believed to be the operator of a large loan-sharking organization in West Orange’s black communities and labor camps.  Zeigler said that some elements of the local police in West Orange were connected with the operation, working as collectors and enforcers; he claimed that he had seen policemen assault debtors for having failed to make their payments.

Zeigler also said that the loan sharks were aware of his own interest in their operation.  He said that a certain Winter Garden patrolman had threatened his life during a routine traffic stop.

Hadley found none of this difficult to believe.  He knew West Orange, and he had heard of the loan sharks.

Andrew James’s case went to trial.  Hadley knew that if he was to have a chance of acquittal, he would have to attack the credibility of the beverage agent, a man named Herbert G. Baker.  As Hadley remembered it in 1991, his impeachment of Baker’s testimony forced the prosecution to call unscheduled rebuttal witnesses who would testify to Baker’s integrity.  One of those witnesses was a former attorney for the Beverage Department, who now was a circuit court judge and who had signed the original search warrant in Baker’s investigation of Andrew James.

For a sitting judge to testify as a character witness was virtually unheard-of.  Hadley found himself in a position few trial attorneys ever know, and none would envy: his responsibility to his client was forcing him to cross-examine a judge in whose court he had several active cases.

The judge was Maurice M. Paul, who in less than a year would preside at the murder trial of Tommy Zeigler.

James was found guilty and given probation, but the sentence was not adjudicated; technically,  James was not convicted.  Later Zeigler testified at a Beverage Department hearing that found that the evidence against James was insufficient to merit revocation.

The prosecution of James provoked anger in West Orange’s black communities.  Baker’s house was burned, he became the subject of an inquiry by the NAACP, and he left his job.1  Andrew James kept his license, and he probably had Tommy Zeigler to thank for it.

On Christmas morning, Hadley arrived at Orange Memorial around 11:00.  Zeigler was groggy and somewhat disoriented.  He had not yet been told that Eunice was dead.  Twice he asked for her while Hadley spoke to him; he wanted to know why she hadn’t been in to visit him.

Hadley, as he had been instructed, told Zeigler that he didn’t know where Eunice was.

Zeigler was able to answer questions.  In broken fashion, he told essentially the same story he would tell on the witness stand six months later: that he had last seen his wife when she went to the furniture store with her parents around 7:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve, that a few minutes later he had ridden to the store with Edward Williams to pick up some gifts, that he had been hit in the head and

1  In 1984, Baker testified at a hearing that stemmed from one of Zeigler’s appeal issues.  He said he believed that Hadley had put him (Baker) on trial during those proceedings.  “I think I was investigated by about every agency in central Florida over it. . . . [S]omebody brought the NAACP. . . . My house was set on fire once during this time.  My kids were threatened in school.  My wife wound up having to go to a psychologist over it.”  Baker also said he believed that Zeigler had lied during the James trial.

Nineteen

Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, Hadley began to organize Zeigler's defense.1  He hired private investigator Gene Annan, who had twelve years' experience as a special agent with the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations.  William "Pete" Ragsdale, who had recently resigned as director of the Sanford Regional Crime Laboratories, hired on as the defense's forensics specialist.

Hadley also asked Vernon Davids, one of his two law partners, to join him on the case.  Davids practiced mostly civil law, but he was a quick study and he had a mind for details.  Davids began reading textbooks of forensic science.  Later Hadley hired several other investigators.  And his legal secretary, Leslie Gift, soon was working full-time on the defense team.  It was a large, expensive effort. Zeigler's parents had the means to defend their son, which put him in a class beyond most defendants in important criminal cases.

At first the defense knew almost nothing about the case except what Hadley had seen at the store and had heard from Frye.  Hadley offered Eagan an agreement for "mutual discovery" that would obligate both sides to reveal any relevant evidence.  Under the disclosure agreement, Hadley would be legally and ethically bound to turn over any unfavorable information.  In return, though, he would learn exactly what evidence the state had against his client.

Eagan refused the offer.

Zeigler, in a second interview with Hadley, supplied some details. He said that his home had been burglarized in 1974, and he had lost several guns.  To replace them, he had bought three pistols: the Securities .38 the Smith & Wesson .38 (found in the Dunaway Olds), and the Colt .357.  All three were purchased in October 1974 at Ray's Bait and Tackle, a local gun shop.  The Colt and the Smith & Wesson were kept in the store, one in a desk in the rear hallway, the other near the front counter.  He said that he had last seen the chrome-plated Securities Industries pistol and his shoulder holster in the truck desk, around December 11. The passenger door of the truck did not lock: anyone could have taken the gun.

Zeigler told Hadley what he remembered of the assault at the back of the showroom.  He had struggled with a least two assailants, but in the darkness, and having lost his glasses at the beginning of the fight, he couldn't identify them.  His memory of the fight was hazy. He had perhaps fired the .22 automatic that he carried with him; he could remember ejecting a jammed cartridge from the little pistol. After he was thrown into the hallway, he managed to pull the Colt revolver

1   Until he was arrested, Zeigler was technically considered a suspect. After December 29, he became officially identified as a defendant.

But Hadley's investigators found no other evidence that such a man actually existed.  In April, Don Frye told Hadley that a clerk had inadvertently typed "Robert Foster" for "Thomas Felton" in preparing the arrest report, and that he had signed it without catching the mistake.  It was, he said, "a typographical error."

The defense chased other mirages.

On Christmas Eve, the Winter Garden police dispatcher had received an anonymous tip: "If you want to know what happened at the furniture store, talk to Oday Jackson."  Investigators identified a man by that name in Orlando but could never locate him.

And shortly after Tommy Zeigler was arrested at the hospital, his parents received a call from a man who claimed to have information about the crime.  The Zeiglers put him in touch with the law office, and Vernon Davids met him at the Zeigler home.

His name was Nathaniel Brown.  He was black and in his early twenties.  He told Davids that a white man had planned the crime, and that Mays was one of three accomplices.  The other two were black men, named Don and Jerry.  Brown described them both and said that the white man had paid them $1,000. each.  They had wiped the weapons clean before they left.

According to Nathaniel Brown, Jerry was shot during the crime, and was now hiding near Oakland with a bullet wound in his right shoulder.

Tommy Zeigler was innocent, Brown said, the victim of a setup; the victims were already dead when Zeigler entered the store.

Brown wanted a reward from the Zeiglers.  Davids thought the story sounded like a con job, interesting but unsupported, the fact that all of the guns actually had been wiped clean would not be known for several week.  Davids gave Brown's information to the state attorney's office.  Later Frye reported to the defense that Brown's story was without substance, and that Brown was a petty criminal and a habitual liar.

Annan and Ragsdale continued trying to establish the facts of the case.  Annan became convinced that he was being stonewalled by police and prosecutors.  He felt that they deliberately misled him when he tried to find the citrus grove where Zeigler was said to have brought Mays and Thomas.

Still, most of the answers—or at least keys to the answers—were in the store itself, and the OCSO continued to control the crime scene. Pete Ragsdale warned Hadley that some of the distinguishing enzymes in human blood would not be detected in stains more than ten days old.  A thorough sampling of the blood evidence in the store could provide a virtual diagram of who had bled, and where.  It would show whether a sixth person had left blood at the scene.  But any

service, one of Eunice's aunts told the Zeiglers that Tommy was about to be arrested.

On the 29th, Perry Edwards, Jr., and deputy from Georgia came to Winter Garden and tried to claim Eunice's body from a funeral home. Tom and Beulah refused to relinquish the body.  Eunice was Tommy's wife; he and his parents believed that she should be buried in the Zeigler family plot at a local cemetery.

That afternoon, Tommy Zeigler was arrested in his hospital bed at West Orange Memorial.

Eunice's funeral was on Wednesday, December 31, at the First Baptist Church in Winter Garden.  Originally the family had planned a small, closed-casket service.  But after Tommy's arrest, a closed casket seemed to imply shame or guilt.  Beulah believed that they had nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide.  And she was certain that Tommy was not guilty.

So the casket stayed open during the ceremony.  Tommy Zeigler was not present.  He was still hospitalized, in police custody.

The Zeiglers decided to postpone burial.  On Wednesday, January 7—at the same time that Professor MacDonell examined the crime scene—sheriff's deputies escorted Tommy Zeigler to the funeral home to view the remains of the wife he was accused of killing

She was buried the next day.  Zeigler was not allowed to attend.

Months later, Beulah Zeigler realized that she had never properly mourned Eunice.  It was not from neglect, she thought, and certainly not a lack of feeling.  But so much else was happening.  Every time she confronted the fact of Eunice's death, she also faced the reality that her son was accused as a murderer.  It became a matter of priorities. Eunice was gone.  Tommy was fighting for his life.

The chatter was not confined to Winter Garden and the OCSO.  The defense attorneys began hearing it from friends and contacts within central Florida's legal community: that Zeigler mutilated dogs, that he had tried to kill his father, that he was a closet homosexual.  These were the same unfounded rumors that eventually became the keystone of Don Frye's grand jury testimony.  Hadley and Davids believed that sheriff's officers and members of the prosecution team were leaking the information.  There would inevitably be intramural gossip about one of the biggest and most sensational criminal cases that state had ever seen, but this was especially direct and damaging.  Even among those for whom the presumption of innocence is supposed to be a byword, Tommy Zeigler had been summarily convicted.

Even more troubling to Hadley and Davids was the outrage that the death of Charlie Mays provoked in local black neighborhoods.  Defense investigators found themselves shut out when they tried to question blacks in Oakland and Winter Garden.  One of Hadley's investigators got into a shoving match with Brian Nedd, the sixteen-year-old fruit picker who had gone shopping with Charlie and Mattie Mays on Christmas Eve.

Feelings ran hot.  It wasn't just that a white man was accused of killing a black—that was no novelty.  What set this incident apart was the Zeigler was said to have brought Mays to the store on the pretext of a kindness and killed him solely to cover up his own guilt.

This tapped a wellspring of racial mistrust and resentment.  As most blacks saw it, Zeigler had not just slain one of their own, he had betrayed their trust and showed contempt for their judgment.  Most troubling of all, they were ready to believe his guilt before a single piece of evidence had been introduced, before a single witness had testified: it simply rang true to what they knew about white attitudes.  If even those who knew and liked him felt this strongly—and many

Q (Hadley): Are you familiar with the rumors concerning the alleged homosexual of Tommy Zeigler that have been circulating, both in the city of Winter Garden in general and in your department in particular?

A (Ficke): Yes sir, I am.

Q: Who started the rumors within the Winter Garden Police Department?

 A: The night of the alleged motive of Mr. Thompson, we were discussing it and I guess it was Officer Yawn was in the store; and I asked Thompson to get him out of there because if this was the motive, I didn't think it would be good to get it around. And I'm led to believe that Chief Thompson has told another officer in our department at our headquarters that night of alleged homosexuality.. ..Officer Barry Smith....He, in turn, told ten other people.

Q: Who else was present besides yourself and Don Frye when Chief Thompson related this possible motive?

A: I would say the entire investigative staff that was there.

 Twenty-one

Every day for almost two weeks, Pete Ragsdale and Vernon Davids examined the furniture store, floor to ceiling.

Gene Annan went looking for witnesses.  According to the state's theory, as the defense came to understand it, more than an hour and a half had passed from the time Zeigler brought his wife to the store to the time he shot himself after Edward Williams's escape.  During the time, Zeigler was supposed to have fired more than two dozen shots; left the store after the first three murders for some unknown reason, and then returned to meet Charlie Mays; attempted to break into the store; driven from the store to the orange grove and back; and made three trips between his house and the store.

Dillard was a major street.  On Christmas Eve, the Tri-City shopping center was open until 9:00, and the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant served customers even later than that.  Hundreds of people must have driven past the store while Zeigler was supposedly executing his plan.1

Moreover, the two-story back wing of the Winter Garden Inn directly overlooked the furniture store's rear compound, where Zeigler was supposed to have coaxed Mays over the fence and later begged Edward Williams to come back into the store.

Besides Thomas Hale, the prosecution had statements from Barbara Spencer, who heard the shots, while she sat in her parents' home nearby, and Barbara Woodard, who saw someone resembling Zeigler at the front of the store as she exited the shopping center on Christmas Eve. Surely dozens of others could contradict—or confirm—details of the state's theory and the statements by Williams and Felton Thomas.

In fact, four people close to Zeigler came forth with information.

Lee Jones had driven past the store at about 7:25, when Zeigler was supposed to have been killing Perry and Virginia Edwards inside. Jones was the bank executive who was in the hospital room on Christmas Day when Zeigler learned of Eunice's death.  He said that the store was completely dark; he took notice, because the store was always lit at night.

Jones said that he saw two cars parked in front of the store.  At this point, according to the state's theory, both the Edwardses' Ford and Curtis Dunaway's Oldsmobile should have been parked at the store. But Jones claimed that one of the two cars he saw was a dark automobile, a description that didn't fit the light green Ford or the two-tone Olds with its beige top.

Richard Smith, the physical therapist who had told Zeigler of Eunice's death, said that he and his wife, Patricia, had driven past the store at 7:57 on Christmas Eve.  The Smiths were exact about the time, because they had been hurrying home to greet guests who were due at 8:00, and had glanced at a time-temperature display outside the First State Bank on Dillard.

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1     Dillard Street is also a direct route to the First Baptist Church, which held its Christmas Eve service from about 7:30 to 8:30. Apparently neither prosecution nor defense ever canvassed the congregation to find out who had used Dillard to get to and from the church that night.

Gene Annan visited most of the businesses around the intersection of Dillard and Route 50.  He found a man named Donald Dugan, who on Christmas Eve had been at a service station on the corner of Dillard and Route 50.  Dugan told Annan that at around 9:00 P.M., two black men drove up to put gas in a dark 1957 Mustang.

Both men seemed to be drunk.  The driver was a young man, with a bushy Afro.  The other was middle-aged, with short curly hair that was tinged with gray.  This older man, speaking with what seemed to be a Caribbean accent, told Dugan: "You're in the wrong place, you should be at Zeigler's.  They just had a killing, a shooting, and a robbery over there."

Apparently this occurred before the police arrived at the store.

Annan made several trips to the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant where Edward Williams had used the telephone on Christmas Eve.  What Annan learned there suggested that Williams had come into the restaurant after 9:00 that night.  Two waitresses and a seventeen-year old employee named John Grimes had been on duty that night.  Grimes was not exact about when Williams entered the restaurant, though he recalled that Williams was wearing a brown sweater.  One of the waitresses believed that Williams appeared after 9:00 P.M. The second waitress, whose shift had ended at 9:00, said that she never saw Williams.  Amy Crawford, a customer who had driven to the restaurant shortly before closing time, said that Williams had come in around 9:15 or 9:20.

On one of his visits to the restaurant, Annan met Ed Nolan, who lived in a trailer court across Route 50.  Nolan was seventy-four years old and was dying of cancer.  He visited the restaurant nearly every day, and on Christmas Eve he was in the store from 7:00 P.M. until after closing.

Nolan told Annan a startling story, which he repeated at a deposition in May.  He said that after 9:00 P.M. on Christmas Eve, a black man came to the restaurant asking to use the telephone.  Nolan got the impression that there had been an accident.  The man was wearing a light brown sweater.  He asked the telephone number of the police, and Nolan told him.

Then Nolan turned around and saw his brother, J.D., outside.  J.D. and his wife, Madelyn, were driving south on Dillard when they were nearly broadsided by Jimmy Yawn as he rolled out onto Dillard from the Winter Garden Inn.

J.D. Nolan and his confirmed Ed Nolan's story.  They told defense investigators that they were driving to her mother's house, headed south on Dillard, when they were nearly broadsided by a car peeling out of the service station at the corner of Dillard and Route 50.  This was the unmarked Winter Garden police car driven by Jimmy Yawn, responding to Robert Thompson's original call at 9:21.

J.D. Nolan made a U-turn and parked near the furniture store to watch what was happening.  After several minutes he noticed his brother, Ed, standing in the

Twenty-two

Tommy Zeigler tells this story.

After his preliminary hearing, the afternoon of Friday, January 16, he was returned to his cell on the sixth floor of the Orange County Courthouse.  He had just been granted bond of $40,000.

But Zeigler had already decided that he would stay in jail until Monday, when his parents could raise a cash bond.  A bail bondsman could have him out in time for dinner.  But the bail fee would be $4,000.  That struck Zeigler as awfully expensive for a weekend of freedom.

The captain in charge of the jail had Zeigler's belongings in a box on a desk, ready to go.  Zeigler told him to put the box away, that he would be staying for the weekend.

"What do you mean?" the captain said.

"I can wait," Zeigler said.

The captain turned to a guard.

"This son of a bitch is crazy," he said.

 *

Zeigler was not crazy, and in a few months he would have a psychiatrist's testimony to prove it.1

But he was in many respects an unusual man, a personality of contradictions, not always easy to know or like.  He could be brusque, he could be gracious.  He was modest, he was full of himself.  He was a rube, he was a canny businessman.  He was the embodiment of a nineteenth-century Southern cavalier and a prototype of the 1980's want-it-all-now hyperachiever.

He was not inclined to self-doubt or deep reflection.  He knew his own way, and until Christmas Eve of 1975 he was that rare lucky man who could afford to follow his own path generally without resistance or upset.

Now he was caught up in a system to which nobody dictated terms.  Criminal justice ground on regardless.

Between the preliminary hearing and the grand jury's indictment, he was free for nine weeks.  It was an awkward period.  He lived with his parents: the house

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1  In May 1976, Dr. Allen Zimmer conducted a four-day longitudinal psychiatric examination of Zeigler in the Orange County Jail, after which he found that Zeigler "is not a psychopath.  My diagnosis was that he has no mental disorder."

That was the end of his posturing with Gift.  They became friends.  During the weeks and months before the trial, he spent more time with her than with either of the attorneys.  If Hadley and Davids were busy—and they usually were—she would listen to his questions or complaints.  Zeigler didn't easily open up to anyone, but eventually he talked to her about Eunice and his marriage.  Gift became convinced that he truly loved his wife, and that he hadn't yet fully grasped the fact of her death.

He could be a prickly client.  As details of the state's case trickled in, Hadley would bring Zeigler into the office to confront him with the new evidence and ask him to explain it.

The first few times this happened, Zeigler would protest, as if he couldn't understand why anyone, especially his own attorneys, would doubt his version.  But he always answered, and Gift noticed that his answers were always consistent with the statements he had been making since he awoke in the hospital on Christmas Day.  If he was a liar, she thought, he was the most effective liar she had ever known.

He would bristle if Hadley's questions became personal.  Hadley asked him about his sex life with Eunice; Zeigler told him that was none of his business.  Hadley wanted to see the logs of their intercourse that Eunice had kept.  Zeigler refused and stormed out of the office.

A day later he brought the logs to Gift.  Some were torn and repaired with transparent tape.  Zeigler said that he had started to destroy them to keep them out of the public record, but had changed his mind.

At one point Zeigler confronted his attorneys with their doubts.  They were in Hadley's office: Zeigler, Hadley, Davids, and Gift.  One by one, he asked them whether they believed in his innocence.

Yes, Gift said.

Yes, Hadley said.

It was David's turn.  Davids didn't like it.  He felt that he was being pressured into a sort of loyalty oath.  Davids was a libertarian by temperament and philosophy, and didn't care to be pressured into anything.

He told Zeigler the truth: that as yet he hadn't made up his mind about the question of Zeigler's guilt, that he wanted to know more before he finally decided.

Zeigler was affronted.  He didn't understand how any lawyer who didn't completely believe in his innocence could represent him.

 *

Zeigler gradually accepted the doubts and the questions.  He still thought it was more fuss than necessary, but he put up with it.

"Can you see who's hitting you?"

"No."  Zeigler's voice now had a troubled tone.  "I get up.  I see two men."

"Describe the men."

"I can't.  It's two blurs.  I pulled Ficke's pistol, I tried to fire.  But it jammed.  I ejected a shell and tried to fire again."

"What do you feel?"

"I threw the pistol at 'em."

"Can you see any better?"

"No, sir.  They grabbed me and threw me off the wall.  I'm being bounced around....bounced around."

But Zeigler's tone was surprisingly flat.

"What are your feelings?"

"They threw me down the hallway.  I have a .357 magnum hidden in a hallway desk.  I got the magnum and I fired.  They were on me, too close to fire again."

"Can you see them?"

"No, sir.  Just a blur."  Zeigler was still speaking slowly.  "They grabbed me and threw me into the rug rack, I hit the floor.  And another man shot me."

"Another man?  Can you see him?"

"Just a blur."

"Is this a third man?"

"I think so.  Just a blur.  He was a big man."

"How did it feel when you were shot?"

"It was awful hot.  Like somebody jamming a hot poker in me."

"Did they say anything?"

"No.  When they shot me, he said, 'We've got to dispose of Mays, he's been hit, we can't take him with us.'"

"Those are the exact words?"

"Yeah.  The third man said, 'Kill him, he's no good to us.'"

"What did his voice sound like?"

"He--I think he was a white man."

Zeigler described waking up on the floor, trying to put his hands on his glasses, but instead finding only Christmas bows.2  He tried to locate the back telephone, but could see nothing.

"Did you see or hear Edward Williams?"

"No."

"How do you feel?"

"I was cold, I was burning up, I needed a drink of water," he said: the symptoms of shock.

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2  Dozens of Christmas bows were found on the terrazzo floor, apparently having been knocked off a wrapping table in the back of the store.

"Did you sell him the TV set?"

"No.  He said he'd be back for it."

"Did he say when?" Machler asked.

"No."

"Did you believe he'd be back that day or some other time?"

"I thought he'd be back that night or late that afternoon."

Near the end of the interview, Machler asked Zeigler when he had last seen Edward Williams.

"Edward was backing his truck up to the bay door," Zeigler said, and again he picked up his narrative of what happened in the store: "I opened the hall door.  I tried the light switch but it didn't work.  I tried the next light switch....I walked into the store and I was hit on the side of my head....I tried to fire Ficke's gun....I fired [the magnum] but they were on me so close that I started swinging it...they threw me up against a rug rack.  This third blur shot me."

"What did you see?"

"Just fire.  It looked like a house on fire."

The session had lasted more than forty-five minutes.  Machler ended it by telling Zeigler to sleep, and suggesting that when he awoke he would remember as much or as little of the session as he wished.

Machler believed that the interview was genuine.  Zeigler's confusion, his indistinct speech, and his tendency to repeat minor details were all signs that the drug was having its effect.  The fact that Zeigler reverted to the past tense was unsurprising.  Only rare patients were able to recount events as if they were actually happening.  And Zeigler's emotionless manner didn't bother him: Machler thought that was in character.

Next morning Machler and Zeigler watched the videotape together.  Zeigler apparently had retained no memory of the interview; as the tape played he leaned forward in his chair and began nodding.  He took off his glasses, and Machler thought that he was on the verge of tears.

"What are your feelings?" Machler asked.

"My God, that is it," Zeigler said.  At the mention of leaning against a stool, he said, "And it fell with me," as if it were something he had just discovered.

The tape ended, but Zeigler went on talking to Machler.  He seemed to need to keep talking.  He described the trip to the hospital and how it had felt: the bumps in the road, the pain, the burning and the chill and his thirst.

"How do you feel physically?" Machler said, meaning now, at this moment.

Zeigler held his head up.

"It is going to be all right," he said.

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4    The price of the TV was disputed.  The state, based on Mattie Mays's testimony, claimed that Zeigler offered Mays the set at $128 in order to entice him to the store.  Zeigler claimed that he quoted Mays a price of $350 cash.

Twenty-three

The deadline for the first major release of state’s evidence was April 12.  That afternoon, the last few hours of the last day when the state attorney's office could remain in compliance with the law, the prosecution turned over copies of police reports, witness statements, Professor MacDonell's report, partial results from the FBI Laboratory, and copies of crime scene photographs.

The defense team spent much of the next weekend reviewing the photocopied material.  Terry Hadley was wary of a "bombshell": any indisputable fact or test result or statement that would conclusively show that Tommy Zeigler had murdered anyone in the furniture store on Christmas Eve.

The state's files contained no such evidence.

The blood-typing results were so sketchy as to be almost useless for either side.  A transmittal letter from the sheriff's office to the FBI had asked that the FBI Lab "type and group ((the blood specimens) as far a possible."  But for some reason, none of the specimens had been subgrouped.

It was a curious lapse—almost an amateurish one.  Not for the last time, some members of the defense speculated that the FBI and the prosecution had a verbal agreement that the FBI would not report any test results that tended to exculpate Zeigler.

On May 7, defense investigators also inspected physical evidence in the sheriff's lockers.

In all, the state's own evidence contained much to contradict the prosecution's theory of the crime.  There was a bombshell, from the FBI Lab.  But the only case it threatened was the state's prosecution of Tommy Zeigler.

What Hadley and the others found in the prosecution's files included:

The second tooth.  One of the close-up photographs of Charlie Mays on the terrazzo showed what appeared to be a human tooth lying on the sleeve of Mays's dark sweatshirt.  Mays had lost a single tooth when he was beaten, and one tooth was recovered against the north wall of the showroom.  None of the other victims had lost a tooth.  According to police property receipts, the tooth in the photograph was never recovered.  Yet it clearly did exist, and the inference was that it had come from a sixth person in the store: a person who could not exist, according to the prosecution's theory.

Eunice's coat.  Some light "transfer stains" of blood were found along the underside of the lapel at the front of Eunice's coat, as if it had been grasped by

daughter.  But this new evidence showed that Mr. Edwards had been shot and knocked down near the front of the store.

(Frye now believes that Perry and Virginia Edwards left 75 Temple Grove several minutes behind Tommy and Eunice, and that Tommy had killed his wife by the time his in-laws arrived at the store.  This would explain how Mr. Edwards came to be killed at the front of the store—he never heard the "surprise shot"; however, the contention is otherwise unsupported by any evidence.)

The missing slug.  Property receipts showed that technicians had found a .22 Long Rifle cartridge hull in the back of the store.  Of the eight pistols connected to the case, this shell could only have been fired from the .22 automatic that Zeigler carried at this side on Christmas Eve: the jammed gun which Zeigler said he had tried to defend himself with at the back of the showroom.

So the pistol had been fired once.  Where was the slug?

In their two-week examination of the store.  Vernon Davids and Gene Annan had found a .38 caliber slug and a .38 caliber exit hole in the north wall, which deputies had missed.  They believed that this accounted for all of the .38 caliber shots that were fired in the store.

But there was no sign of the .22 slug.  Neither Zeigler nor the four murder victims had been shot by a .22.  If the slug did not exit through the walls, it could only have left the store one way: in one of the perpetrators, as he walked out or was carried out.

Vernon Davids thought of Nathaniel Brown, the informant who approached the Zeiglers in January and told of weapons wiped clean, of a plot engineered by a white man, and of a wounded robber hiding out after being shot in the furniture store.  In the weeks since then, the defense had learned that all but one of the weapons had been wiped clean.  Zeigler in his narcotherapy session had remembered hearing a white man's voice in the back of the store.  A .22 is a small slug. Still, the fact that it had not been found after nearly a month of close searching suggested that a sixth person had been shot in the store.

Davids and the investigators went looking for Nathaniel Brown. But Brown could not be found.1

Mays's bloody sneakers.  Crime scene photographs showed some heavy smears of blood on the sneakers of Charlie Mays.  But the quantity of blood on Mays's shoes and the bottoms of his pants was even greater than the photos suggested.  The left cuff of his pants was caked with blood, as if it had been wicked up from a pool.  Blood almost completely covered the bottoms of Mays's shoes, so thick in places that it nearly filled depressions in the sneaker soles. 

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1     Defense investigators learned that he had left Orange County. Years later, Vernon Davids was told that Brown had been murdered in New York City.

The soles showed no wear at all; a price tag was still stuck  to the instep of one of the boots.

Signs of a robbery.  Tommy Zeigler told Hadley that Eunice wore two diamond rings, but they were not listed among the physical evidence.  Tom Zeigler, Sr., told investigators that he gave Eunice two $20 bills as she was leaving for the store with her parents.  But no money was found on her.  Her purse, and her mother's, had been left at 75 Temple Grove, Perry Edwards's empty wallet was found in his car, in front of the store.3

Eventually Hadley incorporated all of these issues into his defense.  The state's own evidence, along with Zeigler's testimony, would provide the backbone of the defense.

And then there was the bombshell.

Among the April 12 disclosures the defense found a letter from the FBI Lab dated March 10, and received by the sheriff's office five days later, announcing the result of comparisons between Zeigler's shoes and photographs of the bloody footprints.

The letter read, in part (emphasis added):

Due to the absence of sufficient detail in the photographed shoe print marked "A/S-A" for minute comparison purposes, it could not be determined definitely whether this shoe print was or was not made by either the Q52 shoe or the Q53 shoe.  It was determined that the remaining photographed shoe prints were not made by either of the submitted shoes.

The implications of the single paragraph were enormous.  The Q-52 and Q-53 specimens, as the FBI numbered them, were Zeigler's shoes. If the bloody footprints were not made by Zeigler, then they must have been made by a sixth person.  The state's case did not have room to accommodate a second murderer.

Moreover, the "remaining photographed shoe prints" included one that Professor MacDonell had specifically mentioned in his report.  "Most likely this is a shoe print of the perpetrator," MacDonell had written.

According to the nation's greatest crime lab, that print was not made by Tommy Zeigler.

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3   After the police relinquished the store on January 7, Beulah Zeigler claimed that more than $800 in cash was missing from a file cabinet.  She also said that an antique gold watch and several gold coins had disappeared from a large office safe after she opened it for sheriff's officers during their investigation of the store.

If Zeigler was innocent, both Williams and Charlie Mays must be guilty.  What would be their motive in the crime?

The defense believed that money was the answer for both men.  The fact that Zeiglers kept substantial amounts of cash at the store was no secret, and the defense found reason to believe that both Mays and Williams needed the money.

Mays was thought to be a heavy gambler.  The past June, he had been arrested and convicted on charges of illegal betting.  Defense investigators heard reports that during the past year he had bet and lost a large sum that did not belong to him: according to the reports, it was cash that belonged to loan sharks, intended to be the daily payouts to his fruit-picking crew.

Defense investigators that in the past year Williams had twice been laid off construction work, and that aside from his irregular work as a handyman he had worked full-time only five of the last twelve months.  During much of that time he had drawn unemployment of $74 a week.  In December 1975 a local bank was preparing to foreclose on a loan that he had cosigned for a friend.

Around mid-January, as Mrs. Zeigler prepared to open the store, Williams's truck was still parked behind the bay door, where it had sat since Christmas Eve.  She asked Annan to move the truck; inside, Annan found documents showing that his telephone, electricity, and gas had been shut off because of no payment.  (Williams later denied in a disposition that he had failed to pay his utility bills.)

A Florida statute known informally as the "speedy trial law" was intended to protect a criminal defendant from an endless unresolved prosecution.  Speedy trial mandated that a criminal defendant be tried within 180 days of his arrest.

For Zeigler this would be no later than the last week in June. The trials on his two indictments were set for June 1 and June 15.

The defense was not ready.  Discovery material from the state suggested dozens of leads that had to be pursued, and there was more to come.  Witnesses from the state's list had to be interviewed, or else subpoenaed and deposed.  Furthermore, the state seemed unable to locate some pieces of physical evidence, including Edward Williams's slacks, which the defense wanted to examine and test.  Hadley, Davids, and the investigators were already working twelve-to fifteen-hour days, seven days a week, and the work was still piling up.

Hadley needed more time.  He suggested that Zeigler waive his speedy-trial privileges and request a continuance.

Zeigler didn't see the point.  Slacks, minor witnesses—how much could they mean?  Since he had been denied bond, a continuance could mean an indefinite stay in jail.

The defense was not ready for trial, Hadley insisted.

But Zeigler was ready.  He had been ready since he woke up in the hospital bed on Christmas Day.  He would tell his story, and the jury would see that it was true, and this nightmare would be over.

Twenty-five

For five weeks, beginning in late April, Hadley and Vernon  Davids deposed all the major witnesses in the case, and most of the lesser ones.

Depositions are testimony given out of court, but under oath. They are a powerful tool in criminal proceedings, useful not only in fact-finding but for compiling a record that may later be used to impeach the witness's testimony at trial.

The most important depositions in the Zeigler defense were those Hadley took from Felton Thomas and Edward Williams.  Hadley hoped to discredit the two men whose statements on December 25 had led to the arrest of Tommy Zeigler.

Hadley deposed both Thomas and Williams on April 26, in a conference room at the state attorney's office in Orlando.  Robert Eagan himself appeared for the state at the Thomas deposition, in the morning.

Hadley began with the question of Thomas's true name.

Thomas answered: "Well, they call me Felton Thomas; but they don't never use my name as Buddy Felton or Thomas Felton.  They always call me Buddy.  If they call my real name, they call me Felton Thomas."

Thomas said that he was twenty-seven, born in Pelham, Georgia, and that he had been picking fruit for nearly half his life.  He had harvested in Orange County several times since 1972.  In November 1975, he and a friend had come down from New York for the harvest season.

On Christmas Eve he borrowed a friend's car and made several trips from Oakland to Winter Garden and Orlando.  In the evening he joined some friends around a bonfire in Oakland.

"It began to get dark then, when I got back off my last trip.  It began to get dark.  And so, Charlie Mays come up in his truck, his panel truck."

Thomas said that he knew.  Mays, had worked for him the previous season, around January of 1975.

Q (HADLEY): What time was it that Charlie drove up?

A (THOMAS): Just like I say, it was starting to get dark, you know.  He drove up and asked me to come ride with him.  So I told him I ain't have nothing better to do.

Thomas said that Mays drove from Oakland into Winter Garden, then south down Dillard Street and into the furniture store's front parking lot.  There he saw a

A: Yeah.

Q: Did he have on a short-sleeved shirt, long-sleeved shirt?  Do you remember, sir?

A: I don't remember what type of shirt he had on, but I believe it was long sleeves.

Q: Do you remember the color?

A: No, I don't.

Q: How about the pants?  Do you remember what color pants he had on?

A: No.  I don't.

Q: All you remember then—if this is a statement—that it was sort of light clothing?

A: Light-colored.

Q: Light-colored?

A: Right.

Once again Thomas told how he and Mays had gone for a ride with the man in his car.  At the preliminary hearing he called the car a light-colored Cadillac, a description that did not fit Curtis Dunaway's two-tone Olds.  Now: "I say it was a Cadillac because it was a big car.  That's why I say it was."

Thomas continued with the now-familiar story of shooting the pistols in an orange grove, returning to the store, and pulling the master switch as the tall man ordered; and of the white man jumping over the fence and trying to coax Mays and Thomas over, and then driving to a house and parking at the garage.

Q: He pulled up into the driveway?

A: Right.  There was a car and a truck there.

Q: There was a car and truck there?

A: Yeah.

Q: What order were they parked in?  Was the car behind the truck, or the truck was behind the car?

A: Well, the truck was behind the car.

Q: Did you happen to notice what kind of car it was?

A: No; I didn't.

Q: Was it a light-or dark-colored car?

A: Well, I ain't paying no attention.

Q: Did you park right beside the car? Or where did you park?

A: Up alongside of the car.

Thomas said that Zeigler "messed around at some shelves" in the garage, then came back to the car with a box, which he gave to Mays. As they backed out of the driveway he ordered Mays to reload the gun, and he drove to the store.

Q: You stopped and got out at the Zeigler store?

A: Yeah, right.  I stopped and got out.

Q: And you found out then it was Charlie Mays?

A: Right.  But I didn't tell people—they didn't know I was with Mays when he went up there.  And I ain't telling any of the peoples that was standing around that I was with him.

Q: You didn't?

A: No, I didn't.

Q: You didn't tell the police there, did you?

A: No, I didn't.

Hadley had pried loose at least five inconsistencies in Thomas's story.

According to the route that Thomas drew, Charlie Mays had reached the rear lot of the Winter Garden Inn by driving his van over or through a two-foot wall of concrete block which separates the Tucker Buildings property from the motel.

1.     On Christmas Eve, Tommy Zeigler's shirt was rust colored.  His pants were red-and-blue check, with the dark stain that Edward Williams noted.  They were not light-colored clothes.

2.     Thomas claimed to have seen a car parked in the driveway where everyone else—including Edward Williams, Curtis Dunaway, the Fickes, and Tommy Zeigler himself—agrees that Zeigler's pickup spent the entire evening.  Thomas directly contradicted Williams, who claimed that he parked his pickup truck behind Zeigler's, and who saw no cars except the one that Zeigler was driving.

3.     Thomas claimed that Zeigler brought a box out of his garage.  Williams would testify that Zeigler's hands were empty.

4.     Williams claimed that Zeigler drove into the garage and ran into his house when he arrived with the two passengers.  Thomas's testimony was that Zeigler parked in the driveway and walked into the garage, but did not enter the house.

The afternoon deposition with Edward Williams was mostly uneventful.  Hadley did elicit some new details of the incident that had convinced Williams that Zeigler wanted to take his life.  Williams said that he had parked the truck beside the hallway door, that he had stopped to urinate, and that Zeigler had gone into the store ahead of him.

Williams said he had walked up the dark hallway, opened the door to the showroom, and found Zeigler standing with his back turned, several feet away.

"He turned and he had this thing, holding it, like a cloth something he had on it.  He come to me.  He snapped it and it snapped three times....I saw a thing

Q: (DAVIDS): Where did you first see Mr. Williams that night?

A: (ROGENIA THOMAS): Well, I seen him at the Kentucky Fried Chicken.  He was standing outside of the Kentucky Fried Chicken.  My sister and I drove up and was going to get something to eat and he was standing on the outside....He was standing there nervous-like, shaking.  Really, I don't know what was wrong with him.  Because it scared me, you know. So he was—my sister got out of the car and she went jiving with him the way you usually do when you're playing around.  He keeps saying help me, just like that.  I looked at him, like I got afraid of him myself.  Like he was shook, nervous, and mumbling with his words.  He kept saying help me, help me....He was talking like he didn't want to stay around there and tell us anything.  He said, just help me.  I want you to take me to my car at the Exxon gas station on Route 50.  We said okay.

Q: Is that the first thing he asked you to do?

A: Yes.

Q: He didn't ask you to take him to Orlando?

A: No, because his car was at the Exxon gas station. And he asked us to take him there.  So we took him. We asked him what was wrong and he told us when we got inside the car, when we were riding along....He was telling us a white man pulled a gun on him and the gun went off three times, snapped three times but it didn't go off.  That's what he told us.  He told us that when the man pulled the gun and the gun didn't go off, the white man fell on his knees and begged him not to tell the police.  That's what he told us....

Q: That's what he said, a white—

A: A white man pulled the gun on him, pulled three times but it didn't go off.  The white man fell on his knees and begged him not to tell the police.... He pushed him and took the gun and jumped the fence and that's where he wind up at, Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Three times Davids questioned the young woman on this point.  Did Williams say that Tommy Zeigler tried to kill him?  No.  Did he say that the man he worked for had tried to kill him?  No.  Was she sure? Yes, she was sure: Edward Williams said that "a white man", had tried to kill him in the furniture store.

She added that the time was between 9:00 P.M., and 9:30.

To the defense, this seemed curious behavior.  As Williams told it, his friend and employer of more than a decade—a man known to nearly everyone in Winter Garden—had just tried to kill him.  Yet Williams said that "a white man tried to kill me."  Hadley and Davids thought that something frightened Williams that night.  But they didn't believe that a mere three clicks in a half-dark store could

"Okay," Hadley said.

"I was here in front of you before."

"Right."

"What else am I coming back again for?  Do I know that?"

Hadley explained that he still had some questions.

After a few general inquiries, Hadley asked about a young woman with whom Williams had shared an apartment before Christmas Eve.

Williams bristled.

"Come on now," he said.  "I know you've been checking around. Come on now.  Bring up something else."

"Beg your pardon?"  Hadley said.

"I hear y'all been checking around and finding out this and that, how I live, and where I live, and so on.  I try to tell you the truth. You don't believe me.  What I don't know, I can't tell you."

Hadley took Williams through every detail of his testimony, sometimes more than once.

Williams became impatient.  His voice got loud.

"I don't know now if you're playing me for a fool," he said at one point.

"You're trying to get me mad, aggravate me," he said a few minutes later.

After nearly two  hours of testimony, Hadley bored in on the scene in the rear parking compound, when Zeigler was supposed to have given Williams the pistol and begged him to come into the store.  Williams mentioned that he saw a black man and a white man near the motel, across the fence.

Q (HADLEY): Why didn't you call for help?  There were people in the Winter Garden Inn.  Why didn't you call for help?

A: (WILLIAMS): I don't know anybody in the Winter Garden Inn.  Two people I saw on this side of the fence walking.  When I got over on this side of the fence, was a black man and a white man.

Q: Why didn't you say help, I need some help over here?

A: A black man was walking.  I think the last time I seen him is in Tildenville, I said.  I'll call the man.  He (Zeigler) said, Edward, don't call him; no, don't call him.

Q: You had the gun.  Tommy couldn't stop you from calling for help.

A: Well, I jumped the fence and ran for help.

Q: When the people were right there and you had the gun, Tommy's on his knees begging, why didn't you just call for help?

A: I jumped the fence and got help.  I wanted to get the law. 

Hadley thought this was the kind of questioning that Williams should have gotten from police on the night of the murders.  As Hadley remembers it.  Williams now seemed flustered and confused, not combative any longer, but groping for words.  He was ready to blurt something.

Q: If you were nervous, why didn't you tell the ladies what happened?

A: Who?

Q: Rogenia Thomas.  Why didn't you tell  her what happened?

A: Jesus, have mercy on me.  Give me patience.  Didn't I just tell you that I told [her] that man tried to kill me in the store?

Q: You told them that Tommy did?  What exactly did you say to them?

At this moment Don Frye and a state's attorney's investigator, Jere James, walked into the room.

JAMES: That's it.  We quit.

HADLEY: Why?

JAMES: Mr. Eagan's orders.  You get a court order in the morning, whatever you need to do.

HADLEY: You're terminating the deposition?

JAMES: Yes.

HADLEY: On what grounds?

JAMES: On Mr. Eagan's orders to terminate.

HADLEY: That's fine.  I'm just wondering why you're terminating it.

JAMES: I'm terminating on Mr. Eagan's orders.

HADLEY: Certify it.

DAVIDS: You are going to object on the record and request to continue the deposition right now.

HADLEY: Let the record reflect, Jere—Jack, are you terminating it or is Jere?

BACHMAN: that's the word I got from the boss.

HADLEY: Which one of you is terminating it?

DAVIDS: Let the record reflect they have already taken the witness out of the deposition room before we have finished.

Subpoenaed witnesses do not quit depositions. Prosecutors—whose interest in determining the ultimate truth of a matter is presumed greater than any desire to shield witnesses or preserve a case—do not terminate depositions without a protective order from the court.

Yet Williams was gone.

Hadley and Davids immediately went before Judge Maurice Paul.  One of Eagan's assistants represented the state, and told the judge that Eagan intended to

be positive if the pants Williams wore at the restaurant were among the garments he gave to Martin.

But Hadley believed that Williams had changed his clothes during the two hours or more between the time he left Winter Garden and when he presented himself at the sheriff's station.  Williams swore that he had changed into the green slacks and black cardigan sweater before he left his apartment to meet Tommy Zeigler.  But three different witnesses—the apartment manager Mary Wallace, Kentucky Fried Chicken employee John Grimes, and customer Ed Nolan—all claimed that they saw Williams wearing khaki pants and a brown jacket or sweater when they saw him on Christmas Eve.

For the defense, the GSR test of Williams's green slacks was a potential chance to impeach his testimony.  It was not a minor point. If he had changed clothes, he must have done so, and then lied about it, because he had something to conceal.

At first the state attorney would not release the disputed items. Then Eagan wrote a letter to Sheriff Colman stating that the OCSO "may release" evidence to the defense, and Gene Annan went to the 33rd Street station to pick up the packages.  But sheriff's officers told Annan that the word "may" implied that the release was at their discretion, and they refused to hand over the evidence.

recognized the vehicle as he got out and knocked on the Zieglers’ door.  He saw a black man in the truck whom he assumed to be Williams.

The Fickes drove away and resumed their search for Tommy and Eunice, so that they could avoid walking into the party alone.  At some time they drove past the furniture store and found it dark.  That was likely after their second visit to Temple Grove, since Don Ficke noticed the cars of Jimmy Yawn and Robert Thompson who had checked out the service at the Kentucky Fried Chicken at 8:30.

The Fickes returned again to 75 Temple Grove.  This time Tommy's truck was alone in the driveway, the garage door was down, and Curtis Dunaway's car was parked inside.  By now, according to the prosecution, Zeigler had returned from killing Charlie Mays and was about to attempt killing Edward Williams.

Finally the Fickes gave up on finding Tommy and Eunice, and they went to the party.  This was probably no later than 8:45.  Their various short trips around town should have consumed no more than forty minutes.  Don Ficke estimated that they arrived at the party between 8:35 and 8:40.  The Presbyterian minister Herman Fisher thought that he saw them between 8:40 and 9:00.  Rita Ficke said that when Zeigler’s call came in, at about 9:20, she had been at the party "long enough to meet everybody and get a drink."

All the evidence suggests that the Fickes’ last trip to Temple Grove occurred between 8:35 and 8:45.  Frye's time line placed it at 8:40.

How did their observations at 75 Temple Grove correspond to Edward Williams's account?

Williams was vague about times.  To judge from his testimony, he looked at his wristwatch only once between the late afternoon until after he turned himself in at the Winter Garden headquarters.  He said that he checked the time when he arrived at Zeigler's house.  It was 7:28.

After ten to fifteen minutes, Zeigler drove up in a car with two passengers: Mays and Thomas, according to the state.  They stayed two or three minutes; the time now would be no later than 7:45, by Williams estimates.

He said that another ten or twelve minutes had passed when a car pulled up in the driveway: a man and a woman stopped and then pulled out again without getting out of the car.  His mention of the car pulling in and out of the driveway describes the Fickes' action on the first visit, around 8:10, when they claim that he was not present.

However, in his original statement, in his two depositions, and at trial, Williams failed to mention seeing the Fickes a second time, around 8:30, when they saw his pickup truck.  Yet Don Ficke not only parked near Williams's truck, but walked past it twice in going to and from the garage.

The Fickes' depositions posed problems for both Hadley and Eagan. The statement that only Zeigler's truck was in the driveway at 8:15

Table Five

TIME SEQUENCE: 75 TEMPLE GROVE DRIVE

Incorporating Ed Reeves's statement, the depositions of Don and Rita Ficke, and elements from Don Frye's time line study.

7:28 P.M.   Edward Williams arrives at Zeigler's home, finds the note (Williams testimony).

7:50          Zeigler, Mays, and Thomas arrive at Temple Grove Drive (Frye estimate). Williams sees Zeigler and two passengers in Dunaway's car.  Zeigler tells Williams to wait a few more minutes (Williams testimony).  Zeigler, Mays, and Thomas return to the store.

8:05          Reeves sees dark car parked behind Zeigler's pickup.

8:10          Don and Rita Ficke stop in driveway and back out.  They see Zeigler's pickup truck alone, no car in garage.

8:20-8:30  Zeigler arrives home and parks the Dunaway car in the garage.  He wipes down the front seat and the outside door handle.  After closing the garage door, Zeigler gets into Williams's truck, carrying a paper bag (Williams testimony).

8:35          Fickes park in driveway, see Williams's truck behind Zeigler's in driveway; no car in garage.

8:45          Don and Rita Ficke drive in a third time. Williams's truck is gone.  Dunaway's Olds is parked inside the garage.  Ed Reeves sees dark car again.

Mrs. Crawford got the impression that he wanted to call the police.  She thought that he seemed "very uncomfortable, restless or watchful....He also had a hand in his pocket from time to time."  She thought that he might be carrying something in the pocket.

"He was hesitant," she said.  "He seemed hesitant about what his action should be.  Of course I was expecting him to go right to the counter and order chicken, you know.  But instead, he came over to the left of where I was.  So, he was hesitant.  I could not say that he looked over his shoulder, but I felt that he was being observant as to what was happening, you know, in the chicken place, and trying, you know, without being to obvious, to see what was going on around him.

He used the phone and left; he had been in the restaurant around five minutes.  Less than then minutes after he left, she heard someone in the restaurant remark, "What are the police doing over there?"

She said that eventually she waited more than half an hour for her order.  This would place her departure at 9:30 or later.  She said that she did not see any police cars or flashing lights.  However, the defense regarded this as insignificant, since Don Ficke's unmarked car and the Edwardses' sedan were probably the only two vehicles at the front of the store during the first ten minutes after the police arrived.  Robert Thompson was at the hospital with Zeigler, Yawn took his unmarked car down the driveway along the north side of the store, and Cindy Blalock had driven her cruiser into the parking lot of the Winter Garden Inn, past Charlie Mays's van.

The Nolans.  Ed Nolan said that a clerk locked the front door of the restaurant at 8:55, and shortly afterward the cook started a last batch of chicken.  Nolan knew that a tray of chicken needed twenty-two minutes to cook.

His testimony about time was somewhat unclear.  He said that around eight or ten minutes after the store closed he unlocked the front door to let out two customers.  He opened the door and found a black man outside, asking to use the telephone to call the police.  Nolan let him in.

By Nolan's estimate, this would be about 9:05.  But what he next said placed the time nearly twenty minutes later:

"[The black man] asked me what the police number was.  I said, are you local, sir.  He said, I am.  I said, dial 3636.1  It wasn't no use telling him a half-dozen numbers.  Then he turned his back to me.  I got the profile of how he was dressed there.  Just slipped my mind.  Wasn't interested in the call.  When I  turned back around, my brother [J.D. Nolan] was knocking on the door.  He wanted me outside because he had done seen this commotion going on across the street. 

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1  The prefix did not have to be dialed from within the town's single telephone exchange.

NOLAN:....I said,  gentleman, I want to ask you something.  Ain't you the guy I let in the Kentucky Fried Chicken to call the police.  He said, I ain't called no police.  Well, I could see his point, touchy a little bit, thinking I done him a favor.  I backed off again to look at him to see if I was right.  I can see his point.

Q (HADLEY): But you stood back off and studied this man?

A: Studied him out.

Q: In your own mind, were you convinced he was the same man at the Kentucky Fried Chicken?

A: He was the same man.  I don't know whether it was Williams or not.  It sort of burns me. I was as interested as the rest of them was.

Q: He denied it?

A: Denied it right then because he knew who I was.  I suspect he was under shock enough.  I bet he could recognize me right now....I still have been asking myself.  I don't know Williams.  I didn't even know him then.  All I want [is] to see him in the clothes he dressed in.  You can change your clothes in thirty minutes.  When you get out, you look different, especially a nigger.  They're hard to identify.

Q: Yes sir; black people.

A: Yes, they're harder than we are.

Q: Mr. Nolan, thank you very much.  I don't have any further questions....

Ed Nolan died before the trial began.  Ordinarily, Hadley would have introduced the deposition, to be read from the stand as sworn testimony.  It would have been invaluable: Nolan's statement corroborated the accounts of J.D. and Madelyn Nolan.  It also directly contradicted Edward Williams, who swore that he went directly to Orlando after he picked up his Camaro at the Texaco service station.  Nolan placed Edward Williams in front of the furniture store at a time when both Williams and Mary Ellen Stewart swore that he was in Orlando.  Nolan also implied that Williams had changed his clothes before he went to the police. But Hadley kept the deposition out of the record.  Zeigler's jury of twelve included six black men and women, and Hadley could not afford to risk alienating at least half the panel.  With a single obnoxious comment, the dying man not only demolished his own identification of Williams at a time and place where Williams should not have been, he rendered his own testimony virtually useless.

MacDonell admitted that he had written his report without examining the victims’ clothing and without reference to the result of the blood examinations, which were not available.  Hadley asked him about his conclusion that Zeigler had left the blood trail from the counter to a chair near the front door.  MacDonell had noted that there was no blood trail to the phone on the counter; the implication was that Zeigler had called the Van Deventer home, then moved away from the counter and shot himself and walked to the front door, where he sat to wait for the police.

Q (HADLEY): Professor MacDonell, if you don't mind my throwing a monkey wrench in at this point, in your report you indicated you felt that blood trail was caused by Mr. Zeigler, Tommy Zeigler, the defend-ant?

A (MACDONELL): Yes.

Q: What did you base that conclusion on?

A: The fact that he was here in this chair or so I was advised.  That he was in the chair and it led up to that point and the fact that no one else apparently had gone in that direction.

Q: If I may now throw the money wrench.  I wish to advise you you were erroneously advised as to which chair he was sitting in.  In addition; the blood trial is the type of blood that could not have come from Mr. Zeigler.

A: Then it obviously was not his blood.  But it doesn't mean he could not have switched chairs.

Q: Sir?

A: It doesn't mean he couldn't switch chairs.  But if it isn't his blood, then it's not his blood trail.

Q: It's Type A and he's Type O.

A: Hmm.

The bloodstain tests had completely failed to support MacDonell's contention that Zeigler had made the blood trail: "Mr. William T. Ziegler left a rather well-defined trail of blood from the general area of the telephone on the counter to the front of the store." MacDonell had written.  Only three persons found in the store had Type A blood: Eunice Zeigler, her father, and Charlie Mays.  MacDonell and Frye were certain that Eunice had died at once, where she was found in the kitchen.  According to the state's theory, Charlie Mays had been attacked and killed nearly one hundred feet away in the back of the showroom.  Neither Frye nor MacDonell had taken this possibility into account.

The blood on Charlie Mays's sneakers and the heavy bloodstains around the cuffs of his pants also suggested that MacDonell and Frye had failed to address some important questions.  The defense felt that Mays could not have innocently picked up that quantity of blood.

A (FRYE): No, but I heard somebody had contacted him and said, I believe, it wasn't true.  He had been hit by a car or something.  He tried to reset the leg and it wouldn't, so it was amputated.

Q: That is correct.

A: For that particular dog.

Q: The one that went around for about twelve years as a three legged dog?

A: That rumor is still kicking around.1

Frye told Hadley that two confidential informants were his sources for some of the rumors, including the homophilia.  He refused to identify the informants.  The rumors had extended to include most of Zeigler's friends and close associates.  Hadley rattled off several names, and Frye said yes, he had heard that these men were closet homosexuals.

Q: Anybody else?  Spit it out.

A: No.

Q: I didn't get tagged with that rumor?

A: No.

Q: Do you have firsthand information to substantiate any of these rumors?

A: No, I do not.

Q: Has anyone advised you personally that they have had homosexual relations with W.T. Zeigler, Jr.?

A: No, they have not.

Frye told Hadley that one of the confidential informants was the source of the story about Tommy vandalizing a house that his parents had sold.  But he admitted that he had not verified it.

"I planned to go talk to her," Frye told Hadley, "but I was advised from my office that was not necessary, to discontinue that.  It was at this stage of the investigation that my office had informed me that I had done enough on the case.  So, for a few days, there was a lag time and I just never got back to it."

Frye again refused to identify the informant.  But he told Hadley: "I will clarify one thing; just about everybody that I'm talking to out there says he's capable.  Anybody who has known Tommy for a long time—whether or not they would reveal this to you under oath, I don't know...."

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1   There is no evidence that the Zeiglers ever owned more than one three-legged dog.

Davids thought that a third examiner, ballistics expert Robert Sibert, "turned red and flashed like a neon sign" when Ragsdale asked him if he had performed a sodium rhodizonate test for the presence of GSR—gunshot residue—on Zeigler's trousers.

Sibert said yes, he had tested the pants, but had neglected to note it in this written report.  The result, he said, had been negative.  It meant that if Zeigler actually had run around the store, firing more than two dozen shots from several different weapons, he had done so without ever putting a gun in one of this pockets.

Davids also learned that Zeigler's trousers were the only piece of clothing on which the GSR test had been requested, and that both the request and the results were given orally.  The defense would never have learned of it if Ragsdale had not thought to ask.

Davids wondered what else was missing from the written reports.

"The FBI sandbags like hell," he told Hadley and the others when he returned to Winter Garden.

Davids had reached another conclusion during his trip to Washington.  It came from the days he spent with Ragsdale, whom he considered brilliant.  They were immersed in the case.  They talked about it on the airplane, they talked about it over dinner.

They talked about it every morning when they walked to the FBI headquarters, crossing the 14th Street Bridge from their motel in Virginia, and they talked about it in the evening when they walked back; for four days they talked of little else.  By now they knew the state's evidence against Zeigler, and they would take turns trying to construct a conclusive,  indisputable case for his guilt.

They could not do it.  No single fact proved Zeigler's guilt.  No combination of facts and witness statements and test results proved his guilt.  The state had a case, but it did not have proof.  Take away the unsupported testimony of Edward Williams—who could hardly be called a neutral party—and there was not even much of a case, so inconclusive was the physical evidence.  Davids was forced to admit it: he had begun to accept that his client might actually be innocent.

testified about the handwritten consent form that Zeigler had signed on Christmas morning.  Zeigler swore that he did not remember the nurse asking him to sign it.

Hadley again requested a continuance.  He told Paul that the late pace of discovery made it impossible for him to prepare for trial.  The state had still not relinquished some physical evidence for independent testing.

Hadley argued that Zeigler was being forced to choose between his right to a prompt trial and his right to discovery.

"We worked on this case three months without the benefit of the state's witnesses, statements, testimony, or anything else, without the benefit of viewing the state's evidence."  Hadley said.  "We keep stumbling onto more evidence.  We find out work that was not done by the FBI.  We have got to try to do it...

"Your Honor, Mr. Eagan would like it very much if I stood here and said we waive speedy trial.  That is what he wants to hear.  That is the magic word.  He wants me to wave the constitutional right to a speedy trial, when my client sits up there in jail held without bond....The defendant did not delay the presentation to the grand jury and cause a speedy-trial problem....

"We are in good faith asking for this.  We desperately need the time.  My client should not be compelled to choose between two equal rights simply because the state fouled up and arrested him too soon or indicted him too late.  That is the state's problem,  Your Honor.  The state is trying to make it the defendant's problem."

Paul denied the motion for continuance.  He denied the motions to suppress.  The consent form was valid, he said.  The evidence that Yawn seized on Christmas Eve, before the consent, was admissible because Yawn was in the house on what he perceived to be an emergency, which overrides the need for a warrant.  As for the search of the store, he noted that Zeigler himself had called them to the store, and cited a "crime scene exception" to the Fourth Amendment.

"...[T]he police were conducting a crime scene investigation which, due to its complexity, continued for more than a week..." he said.  "The police were legally upon the premises carrying out their required duties."

One of the two minor motions that Paul did grant was Hadley's request that the state turn over physical evidence for testing.  The next morning, Annan signed for the evidence at the sheriff's station, and he delivered it to a private crime lab in Sanford, Florida.  The defense would finally be able to test Edward Williams's trousers, and his story.

*

On May 22, Hadley filed a motion to recuse Judge Paul: a request that the judge remove himself from the case.  Paul's presence on the bench, after his involvement in the Andrew James matter, was a defense attorney's nightmare

by which they could reject a juror without cause.  Hadley intended to reject nearly all of them.  He thought that Zeigler's prospects in Orange County were grim.

On Friday morning, June 4, Hadley and Eagan met Paul in the judge's chambers.  Eagan said that he would not oppose a change of venue if Hadley finally would waive Zeigler's speedy-trial rights.

Hadley agreed.  With apparent reluctance, Judge Paul ordered the trial moved out of Orange County.

Then he denied for a fifth time Hadley's motion for a continuance. The trial would begin again on Tuesday, June 8, at the Duval County Courthouse in Jacksonville.

*

The defense booked rooms in a moderately priced, slightly shabby hotel in Jacksonville.  Five and half months of spare-no-expense defense had depleted the Zeiglers' cash reserves, and business was poor at the furniture store.  Tom and Beulah had put one of their apartment properties in trust to the law firm, to cover the costs of what was expected to be a month-long trial.

Hadley's team arrived in Jacksonville on Sunday, dispirited by the series of denied motions.  What they learned that evening was even more discouraging.

Steve Robertson tacked a street map of Duval County up  on a bulletin board.  He and Leslie Gift placed pins at the address of each of the prospective jurors in the pool.  They found that the majority were in black neighborhoods.  At that time in Florida, juries tended to be overwhelmingly white.  Yet Vernon Davids thought he had never seen such a preponderance of black men and women in a Florida jury pool.

Given the loathing that the murder of Charlie Mays inspired among black residents in Orange County, Hadley and Davids knew that this could not bode well for their client.2  

The trial would have racial undertones, if only by implication.  Zeigler was about to become that rarest of birds; a white citizen tried in a Southern court for the first‑degree murder of a black man.

At about this time, the prosecution furnished Hadley a copy of Don Frye's taped interview with Cheryl Clafler, in which she claimed that Eunice was in fear for her life after discovering Tommy in a homosexual act with one of his friends.

He believed that the testimony was rank hearsay, and not admissible.  If it was admitted, he was sure that he could demolish it. He believed that the only

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2   Ordinarily Hadley and Davids would have welcome a black majority on a jury; in 1976, many trial attorneys accepted the idea that black jury were suspicious of authority and therefore sympathetic to a defendant. That notion has since proved false.  Previous victims of crime are considered ideal jurors for the prosecution, and the percentage of blacks who have been victims of crime is greater for any other racial group.