Attorneys’ closing arguments are not intended primarily for the record. Reporters and spectators, even the judge, are almost beside the point. Eagan and Hadley were addressing an audience of twelve when they spoke on Wednesday morning.

Eagan spoke before and after Hadley. Early in his first argument he correlated the state's theory with the testimony of its two key independent eyewitnesses.

He recounted that Thomas Hale had seen the Zeiglers together at 7:05, rounding the intersection of Dillard and Route 50. The implication was that Eunice must have been killed within the next two to three minutes. At 7:25, he said, Barbara Tinsley heard the first of two volleys; these must have been the shots that stopped the clock and killed the Edwardses. Now, Eagan recalled, Zeigler had two 7:30 appointments, one with Mays at the store and another with Williams at the house. Eagan recapped Thomas’s testimony about the trip to the orange grove and back to the store, turning off the electricity, and the fence-jumping, then the trip from the store to the house and back to the store.

He said: “At 7:45, estimated, Mrs. Tinsley hears another series of shots. I submit to you that that's when Tommy Zeigler walked into that dark store with Charles Mays."

The state had not presented a time line. This was Eagan's first and only attempt at trial to match his theory of the crime to Barbara Tinsley's testimony.

Hadley, sometimes referring to notes, told the jury that evidence showed a credible alternative to the state's case, a more than reasonable basis for doubt. He did not dwell on any single aspect of the case, but carefully reviewed all of the evidence and testimony that seemed to exculpate his client or contradict the state's theory, especially the indications of what he called "third-party involvement": the missing .22 slug, the tooth that did not come from any of the bodies in the store, the money that was missing from the office, Eunice's missing rings, the contested footprint.

He mentioned that J.D. and Madelyn Nolan had seen Edward Williams at the Kentucky Fried Chicken after Zeigler was taken to the hospital; the Nolans, he said, were "a fine lady and gentleman, nothing to gain in this case, they don't know anybody, they don't know anything about the case."

He said that the evidence for a conviction "must be consistent to a moral certainty of guilt...and if, even after the points I have made, you are still ninety percent convinced Tommy did it, you must acquit him, but I submit, ladies and gentlemen, that the evidence is not ninety percent. The evidence is not ten

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percent. The evidence is zero when you consider the credibility of Edward White and Felton Thomas and compare it to the known facts."

Eagan spoke briefly again after Hadley had finished. He attacked the testimony of J.D. and Madelyn Nolan: "There is no evidence at all that the black man seen trying to use the telephone after the Kentucky Fried Chicken was closed was Edward Williams. Edward Williams was there earlier. The place was open when he was there. There were other customers there. That's when he met the friend that took him to his next place, ultimately to Mary Stewart's."

Speaking of Mays, he said: "This was a deliberate planned act on this part of this man over here to lure that poor black man in there and kill him dead and make a murderer and a robber out of him."

He closed by repeating the dialogue that was supposed to have taken place between Williams and Zeigler in the rear compound: "Edward, I didn't know it was you.' 'Mr. Tommy, you knew it was me. You knew it was me.' 'No, Edward, I didn't know it was you.'

"Perry and Virginia Edwards are entitled to justice at your hands," Eagan said.. "Charles Mays is entitled to have his good name cleared at your hands and this man deserves nothing more than your verdict of guilty because he has committed four of the most horrendous murders, the basest and foulest of murders you will ever hear of.

"For the State of Florida I ask you, don't turn your back on those men [Williams and Thomas] and their sworn, testimony. Don't reject that evidence. Consider it, weigh it carefully, yes, but find it, as I am sure you will, to be convincing...and that guilt is the only true verdict that can be rendered on the evidence in this case. Thank you."

The jury began deliberations at 2:30 on Wednesday afternoon, having missed lunch to hear the closing arguments. During the next five hours, jurors requested the scale model of the store and a magnifying glass—apparently they were scrutinizing the controversial footprint.

In a largely circumstantial case, a verdict within the first few hours would almost certainly have meant an acquittal. But there was not verdict on Wednesday. Around 7:00 P.M., the foreman requested to retire, and Judge Paul recessed until the morning.

"At least they're thinking about it," Hadley told a reporter. "They're being very conscientious."

Maybe no jury deliberations can be called routine. These, however, were extraordinary. The first indication that something unusual was happening came

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shortly before jurors resumed deliberations at 9:00 on Thursday morning. One of the jurors, Irma Brickle, said she felt too ill to go on. This threatened a mistrial.

Brickle was a housewife, a white woman in her thirties. She rested for about two hours, recovering from what the Sentinel Star implied was some kind of stomach distress. In fact, it was much more serious.

Brickle's physician was called, and he sent in medication. By 11:00 A.M., she was ready to continue. Deliberations began again and went on for eight hours without at break—bailiffs sent in sandwiches. Then at 7:00 P.M. Thursday evening, the jurors retired once more.

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Forty-two

Friday was a sultry summer day in Jacksonville. Most Americans who are old enough to remember will recall something of that day: if not specific details, then a memory of anticipation, of impatience to begin the biggest summer holiday of that year or many other years. Friday, July 2, 1976, was the eve of the nation's Bicentennial celebration.

Anyone who was involved with Florida v. Zeigler must remember it as a day of uncertainty and tension and turmoil, and then decision. At 9 a.m., as the jury reconvened, Judge Paul called Eagan and Hadley into his chambers. Irma Brickle had told a bailiff that she wanted a private conference with the judge; if not alone, then with the two attorneys present.

This request was problematic. The judge could not speak with any juror apart from the others.

"I really don't want to bring her in," Paul said.

"Judge, I just don't know," Eagan said. "I've never had this come up before.... I think the thing is fraught with peril in that if we do bring her in we might have a mistrial right here."

They debated whether to send her a note asking her to explain.

"It might not be anything, you know, but it might be something," Paul said. "That is why I wanted to just sit down and talk to you a minute. I don't want the press. That is why we came back here. I don't want anything in the press about this."

"That's right," Eagan said.

Eagan speculated whether it could be misconduct by one of the other jurors.

"It could very well be, but you never know," Paul said. "...Of course, it's all just speculation."

Hadley noted that Brickle and the juror who had been excused a week earlier, Johnestine Young, "seemed to carry the burden of being on the jury probably more heavily than anyone else, you know, just from the trial, watching their facial expressions and things like this."

"A lot of those people in there have never had to make decisions that anywhere approach the decision they are back there making today," Paul said.

Paul told the bailiff to take Brickle away from the rest of the jury, on the pretext that she was going to be examined by a nurse. Then the judge wrote a note to her, asking her to "advise, in writing, the nature of the subject matter you wish to discuss."

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He told the bailiff: "Don't let anyone know what is in the note at all. We don't want anyone to know what is going on here but these lawyers, okay?

The bailiff took the note to her, and brought back a written reply:

Request concerns other jurors and decisions made before they permited [sic] to make them.

"I don't think I understand it," the judge said, and he showed it to the attorneys. They speculated what it meant:

PAUL: What she is talking about, I think, is when they were in there somebody was announcing a decision.

EAGAN: Apparently some of them have said how they stand. I don't think from that they have made a vote yet.

HADLEY: Or before it was submitted to them.

DAVIDS: That is what she is saying, they had discussions at some point before it was submitted to them for consideration.

EAGAN: Well, why did she wait this long to tell us?

PAUL: I don't think that is what it is.

Eagan recommended that the entire jury be brought in and instructed that their duty was to "discuss the thing, work together on it."

She was still alone in the bailiff's room. They decided to send a second note to her. Paul wrote:

“Do you mean decisions announced before or after the case was submitted to the jury on Wednesday afternoon?”

The reply came back:

Statement made immediately after foreman was elected and numerous other things this is just the main item.

And below that was written:

made befor [sic] Wed. afternoon.

A juror could announce an opinion at any time after the deliberations began. But any such statement made before then would be improper.

Paul and the attorneys examined the note.

PAUL: Not bad. "Statements made generally right after the foreman was elected."

HADLEY: Statements made before Wednesday afternoon.

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PAUL: Well, I get the impression from that she is talking about since they were put in there Wednesday.

EAGAN: Some of them have obviously expressed their opinion regarding the weight of the evidence or something of this nature and she has heard it and it has got her disturbed. That is really what the jury is supposed to do.

PAUL: I really don't think we ought to go any further with this.

HADLEY: Your Honor, what does that portion "statements made before Wednesday afternoon" that she put in there narrow it down to? I don't know, I am just disturbed by that part of her response....

EAGAN: She doesn't say that anyone has expressed prior to Wednesday an opinion as to guilt or innocence.

PAUL: She hasn't even said that. "Statements made immediately after foreman was elected and numerous other things. This is just the main item."

HADLEY: But then---

PAUL: It comes down and says "made before Wednesday afternoon," which is---

HADLEY: She has got down "made before Wednesday afternoon.”

PAUL: Well---

HADLEY: How about just direct a question, "Were statements made prior to the case being submitted to the jury that would indicate someone had a preconceived notion?"

PAUL: I think we would we in bad shape if we started to do that.

HADLEY: What concerns me is the lady obviously thought it was serious enough to bring to our attention, so I am wondering if it is something that was said before Wednesday afternoon.

EAGAN: She is a nervous lady, though, and her view of that is not justified by the information that she has given us. I don't think there is anything here that would justify us now going into an inquiry to determine whether or not we are going to upset this jury's deliberations....

Further contact with a sole juror jeopardized the integrity of the jury's work. But if another juror had announced a premature decision, then the trial was already compromised. And although Brickle hadn't hinted where she stood, both sides understood that she might be feeling the strain of being a sole holdout: the verdict could be imminent.

Hadley argued that Paul should ask her to be more specific: "...I think even the possibility of jury misconduct cannot be overlooked and must be inquired into. I don't know, I am in strange territory right now and I just don't know, but if there was jury misconduct I think we need to know about it."

At this point Brickle had already been out of the jury room for several minutes. The others, presumably, were still discussing the case: they had not been instructed otherwise. Paul said that he favored sending Brickle back into the room

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to resume deliberations, and Eagan agreed: "If she should come in here and say some other juror had done something, then we have got to talk to that juror, and immediately we are dividing this jury."

Paul ordered that Brickle be sent back to deliberate with the others. His third note seemed final: "After consideration, it appears that there is no present need to have a conference. Thank you for bringing the matter to our attention."

But that did not end it. At 12:15 the jury broke to go out for a meal; the judge noticed that Mrs. Brickle looked pale as she left the room. A few minutes later, she collapsed, unconscious. A bailiff revived her, and she fainted a second time. She had to be carried to a courthouse office, apart from the others.

"She is up there and has passed out twice on us in an hour," Paul told the attorneys. "She is tight as a tick."

They were looking at a possible mistrial again, with the question of Brickle's health thrown in.

"I can never recall being quite as wrung out from a case as I am right now from this one," Hadley said.

They considered the possibility of having Brickle examined either by a jail house doctor or her own physician, who had sent in medication the day before.

Eagan, Hadley, and the judge went to the office where Brickle had been taken. But they did not see her; they sent a nurse to ask her whether she wanted a doctor.

Brickle answered, through the nurse, that she did not want to talk to a doctor. She wanted to talk to Paul. She felt that she was being pressured, the nurse said; one of the jurors had told her, "If you would make up your damn mind we could get out of here."

Paul instructed the nurse to tell her that he could not and would not talk to her, and the bailiffs sent her back with the others.

Now Hadley believed, almost to a certainty, that Brickle was a holdout against conviction. On the way back to the courtroom, he moved for a mistrial. Back in Paul's chambers, they put it on the record. Mrs. Brickle, he said, "...is being pressured by other jurors to make a decision which she is either morally or conscientiously opposed to.... This pressure has been of sufficient magnitude to cause her these physical problems.... Therefore the defense feels that any verdict brought would be as a result of the emotional strain and trauma being placed upon this lady as opposed to being a true verdict based upon the evidence and the law..."

Eagan argued against it.

"...As I understand it she feels pressured to make a decision, not to change a decision already made," Eagan said. "It would seem to me that this is what a juror

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is expected to do, and it is one of the burdens they bear as jurors. In this case it is an extremely heavy burden on what apparently is an emotional lady, or at least a lady who has shown less strength in that regard to make heavy decisions than her fellow jurors, but I don't submit that it is grounds for a mistrial."

Apparently Eagan, too, believed that Brickle was a holdout. He suggested that the jury be called in and instructed to consider the views of their fellow jurors. This is a standard lecture designed to break a deadlock---the so-called "Allen instruction," also known as "the dynamite charge."

Paul denied the motion for a mistrial, and he told Eagan that he was not ready to deliver dynamite. He sent the clerk of the court to bring Irma Brickle back into the jury room.

It was 2:50 p.m.

Tommy Zeigler passed the afternoon in a holding cell near the courtroom. Wednesday afternoon and Thursday, bailiffs had allowed him to wait with the defense team in an unsecured room. This was contrary to procedure, but in Jacksonville, as in Orange County, Zeigler had won the trust of his jailers.

On Thursday afternoon, however, a reporter noticed the arrangement, and mentioned it in an article that Judge Paul read on Friday. Paul ordered Zeigler kept behind bars.

It didn't matter anyway, one of the bailiffs told Zeigler; an acquittal was in the works. Having attended hundreds of trials, he said, he was never wrong.

At 5:00 p.m., the jury announced that it had a verdict.

Zeigler was brought in from the cell, nervous and a little dazed. Another bailiff had told him that the clue to a verdict was in the jurors' demeanor when they came into the courtroom. If they looked directly at the defendant, it meant that they had acquitted. If they avoided looking at him, they had found him guilty.

Zeigler studied them as they filed in. Most of them averted their eyes. Irma Brickle looked at him, but she was crying, and the look in her eyes was pity.

The foreman was a black man named Charles Ashley. He handed the verdict forms to the clerk, who gave them to Paul, who gave them to the clerk to be read.

In the death of Eunice Zeigler, guilty of murder, first degree.

In the death of Charles Mays, guilty of murder, first degree.

In the death of Perry Edwards, guilty of murder, second degree.

In the death of Virginia Edwards, guilty of murder, second degree.

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There were formalities. With the jury out, Paul adjudicated the verdicts, officially pronouncing Zeigler guilty four times. Law required that the convict be fingerprinted in open court; after the reading of each count, he was brought forward and his prints were affixed to the judgment forms. Then he was taken away, remanded to the sheriff.

Paul had kept the courtroom closed until the jury could leave. Now he recessed, and the doors opened. Mary Van Deventer, who had been seated behind the defense table, was distraught as she ran out. Leslie Gift followed her, to make sure that she didn't try driving home in that condition.

Terry Hadley was stunned and near tears as he walked out of the courthouse. Years later he told an interviewer that hearing one's client convicted of first degree murder was an experience he would not wish on his worst enemy.

Outside, the sky was black and glowering. Thunder grumbled. The afternoon sultriness was resolving itself into a monstrous thunderstorm that rocked the city throughout the evening. It was a huge storm even by the standards of Florida's tropical atmosphere, so violent that it imprinted itself on the memories of many who were there. One more reason to remember July 2, 1976.

It might truly be said that thunder of another sort was grumbling on Tommy Zeigler's horizon. The lead story in the afternoon newspapers was datelined Washington, D.C.: earlier in the day, the U.S. Supreme had specifically declared that because of new sentencing guidelines, Florida's death penalty was now constitutionally acceptable.

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Forty-three

Much of what is now known about the deliberations comes from interviews that the psychologist, Stephen Robertson, conducted with Irma Brickle and another juror, Peggy Dollinger. He synopsized some of his information in a affidavit. Most of what follows is based on that document.

Immediately after the jurors went to the jury room on Wednesday afternoon, they elected the foreman, Charles Ashley. At that point Ashley told them that they could debate all they wanted, but he had already made up his mind; Zeigler was guilty, he said.

That was Dollinger's recollection. Brickle added that Ashley claimed to have made his decision two weeks before---even before the defense had finished its case.

Robertson learned that the first vote was an even split; voting for conviction were the five black jurors and James Roberts, the alternate who had been added to the panel. Gradually Zeigler's support eroded. By Thursday afternoon, Brickle was the last holdout.

Both Brickle and Dollinger described an atmosphere of intimidation as the panel tried to change Brickle's mind. Both said that when Brickle would try to make a point, Roberts would step behind her seat, put one of the revolvers to her head, and pull the trigger.1 Other jurors shouted at her and called her names. Dollinger confirmed that other jurors shouted at Brickle when she tried to discuss the case.

"I suppose it could even have come to actual violence," Robertson quoted Dollinger. "It was a very frightening situation."

Brickle was upset because other jurors refused to look at the evidence on the table beside her. She couldn't get them to study the photo of the tooth on Charlie Mays's sweatshirt. She blamed her illness on the intimidation and the tension in the room; she was unable to eat or sleep.

Brickle told Robertson that she didn't understand why the judge had failed to help her when she told him that she needed help.

The sentencing phase of the trial, held July 16, was literally moot for a number of reasons.

1 The jury had all the evidence, including the weapons, but no live ammunition.

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Testimony required less than an hour. Earlier, Judge Paul had ordered Hadley to limit his character witnesses—a decision that would become worth at least six years of life for Zeigler. Eagan called no witnesses. Hadley's one character witness was Zeigler's Baptist pastor, Fay De Sha, who said that he had known the family since 1966. He said that Tommy and Eunice attended services, belonged to church committees, and sang together in the choir, and that Tommy had often operated the sound mixer for the church's Sunday morning radio broadcast.

Eunice always sat at Tommy's side while he ran the radio equipment, De Sha said. Eunice played the piano in the church, he said, and Tommy always came down and sat about two rows back, to listen to her.

The only other witness was Allen Zimmer, the psychiatrist who was now allowed to testify to his examination of Zeigler.

Zeigler, he said, was "raised in an environment where he had established tremendous self-control, where he had been able to develop within himself control over his behavior in such a way that he did not express outward emotion. What emotions were there were all kept within....

"He was the type of individual who was extremely compassionate...he had tremendous feeling for people and peoples. One of the characteristics of Tommy Zeigler that was extremely impressive to me were his loyalties, loyalties to individuals who he became close to. This was manifested by the fact that he had respect for members of his family including his wife and in-laws and people close to him."

The jury deliberated less than twenty-five minutes before returning an advisory sentence of life in prison.

At Hadley's request, Paul now brought several members of the jury, individually, to be questioned in his chambers. He was inquiring about two minor allegations of misconduct—during the trial, Peggy Dollinger had brought a newspaper into the jury room, and Leatrice Williams was believed to have overheard a reporter's unflattering remark about Zeigler. But most important, Hadley wanted him to ask Irma Brickle about her claim that jury members had made up their minds prematurely.

Zeigler was barred from this proceeding.

Paul seemed hesitant as he asked Brickle to explain the notes she had sent during the deliberations.

Q (Paul): ...I was wondering if you wish to make any further elaboration about, you know, what you may have said or if you feel that—whatever. I don't want to put words in your mouth. We just want to make sure there was a good jury in the sense that everyone—

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A (Brickle): If I could call back the Friday, I would have changed my mind. In fact, I almost did. I still feel he's innocent. My reasons don't seem to be important or they weren't.

Q: But you stated in open court that that was your verdict.

A: I know I did, but I just couldn't take any more.

Q: Well, we are not concerned—

A: I felt I couldn't take any more.

Paul refused to question any of the other jurors about Brickle's claims. He ruled that Dollinger and Williams had not violated the integrity of the trial. He dismissed the jurors with a strong recommendation that they not comment to reporters. Hadley complained that Paul's questions to Brickle hadn't adequately addressed the possibility of juror misconduct, but the judge overruled him. The matter was closed.2

Now the judge began to pronounce sentence, reading from a typed statement. Florida juries can only recommend a sentence; Paul's judgment here would be binding.

"This Court has considered the advisory sentence returned by the Jury this morning," the statement began, and Paul went on to say that he had also been considering the evidence.

"Why you, sir, wanted to kill your wife may never actually be known. However, the record does show one motive which is money, five hundred thousand dollars worth of it."

At this moment Hadley realized that the judge was overruling the verdict. Under Florida law, murder for money is one of the aggravating circumstances which allows a sentence of death.

Paul continued: "The reason in the record for killing Charles Mays is more obvious: to cover up your involvement in the death of your wife. From the evidence it appears Mr. Mays was like a lamb being led to the slaughter, and slaughter it was.

"The killing of Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, from the verdict and I believe from the reasonable inferences of the evidence, apparently was not part of your original scheme but was the result of, unfortunate for them, happenstance; it appearing that they came to the store, they cannot be permitted to leave and, from the evidence, were executed.

"The evidence further shows the last step of your preconceived plan was to lure Edward Williams to the store and kill him to make it look like he too was part of a gang whose purpose was to commit robbery. Had this part of your plan succeeded, then we wouldn't be here today in this court of law.

__________________________________________

2 Shortly thereafter, the judge barred Zeigler's attorneys from contacting the jurors.

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"The law of this state permits a sentence of death for premeditated murder. The facts of this case require it."

For each of the first-degree convictions, Tommy Zeigler was to be committed to state prison, "and at a time to be fixed by the Governor of the State of Florida, you shall be put to death by means of electrocution as provided by Florida Statute 922.10. May God have mercy on your soul."

On Sept. 8, Vernon Davids finally received the results of neutron activation tests to determine the presence of gunshot residue in the pockets of Edward Williams's green slacks. Williams had claimed that he carried the gun in his right pocket. However, the left and right pockets showed equal, very low background levels of GSR metals; the examiner concluded that it was unlikely that any firearm had been carried in either pocket.

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Forty-four

A few hours after he was sentenced, Duval County deputies delivered Zeigler to the Florida State Prison, in a rural area of north-central Florida. The town of Raiford is the closest community, but the prison's mailing address is a post office box in the town of Starke, about 12 miles distant. Inmates and staff usually refer to the prison as "FSP."

Zeigler became the seventy-ninth and newest prisoner on Death Row, which at FSP is the name given to any wing or floor where prisoners under a death sentence are segregated. Through executions, reduced sentences, or (rarely) successful appeals, he gradually moved up in seniority. By the summer of 1992, he was a prison old-timer, tenth in a Death Row population of more than 150.

Death Row inmates are housed singly in six-foot-by-nine-foot cells, and are permitted two hours of yard recreation per week. They send and receive letters, and may see visitors, but are allowed to use a telephone only under extraordinary circumstances; they are usually allowed to call their attorneys when they have been served a death warrant.

Death Row residence—as long as it lasts—is considered preferable to confinement elsewhere in the prison. The general population at FSP consists of the state's most violent and incorrigible criminals. While some Death Row inmates have a career of general brutality, many receive the ultimate penalty because of a single act of violence. Beatings and stabbings, though hardly unusual, are less common on the Row than in the general population. By the standards of a maximum-security prison, Death Row is a high-class neighborhood.

FSP's Death Row inmates are allowed to pass time with water color painting and crocheting, both of which Zeigler began to pursue singlemindedly. He sends hand-painted cards at Christmas and for birthdays. His mother supplies him yarn, with which he crochets afghans and sweaters and comforters as gifts for his friends and supporters. At one point his output of these creations was so prodigious that prison authorities suspected him of pursuing a cottage industry for profit.

In sixteen years he has not been involved in a violent incident; his two disciplinary infractions have been for possession of a small tool for repairing his eyeglasses and an electrical device with which prisoners heat cups of water for instant coffee.

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After he had been in the prison for several years he obtained a copy of the trial transcript and depositions. He spent weeks picking through it, noting discrepancies in prosecution testimony.

That was when he read Don Frye's grand jury testimony for the first time—before the trial, Hadley and Davids had kept it from him. At the time he read it, he says, he had begun to despair; but the hope of disproving Frye's allegations has been a goad to keep him going.

He is circumspect about his religious beliefs and practices. But two devout Christians (not related to him) who have stayed close to him say that they take for granted the sincerity of his faith.

Florida's Death House is a ground-floor annex of the prison's "Q" wing. The annex consists of four cells, a shower and toilet, and a room which contains the wood-framed electric chair in which more than 200 men have died in the past 80 years. Once a week, usually on Wednesday afternoons, the lights dim in the prison for a few seconds, during the regular test of the apparatus.1

The death warrant is a black-bordered document which the governor signs and then transmits to FSP, where the superintendent or his assistant intones it to the prisoner in the presence of official witnesses. The condemned man—now said to be "under active warrant"—is moved immediately into the Death House. All of his belongings are placed outside the cell. If he wishes to brush his teeth, for example, he must request a toothbrush from one of the guards who keeps him under constant observation. Usually warrants are valid for two to three weeks, and the actual executions are scheduled near the end of that window of time (although not so close to the end that they would expire before they could be rescheduled).

Zeigler has twice been under warrant, and walked out of the Death House both times. Once he came within about half a day of his execution.

But that story played out in the arcane arena of appellate law, far from the gritty reality of FSP.

__________________________________________

1 The chair itself does not conduct electricity. The charge is conducted through the body by a metal skullcap and a metal ring that is placed on an ankle; the victim is strapped into the chair, and usually dies of a broken neck, resulting from the violent spasm of his body in reaction to the current. Outsiders have christened the chair "Old Sparky," but the term is almost never used inside the prison.

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Forty-five

Terry Hadley left the case soon after Vernon Davids argued Zeigler's first appeal, although he continued to represent Tom and Beulah in the civil suits that grew out of the crime. Davids had come to know Zeigler well during the month in Jacksonville and had become fond of him. More important, he believed that the verdict was unjust and that the evidence did not support Zeigler's guilt.

Typically for a first appeal, Zeigler's motion for a new trial was based on a wide variety of issues from the trial. But Davids believed that the key matter was Paul's decision to admit evidence seized during the search of the store. Paul had relied on a "crime scene exception" to the Fourth Amendment.

But in 1978, in a significant Fourth Amendment decision, the U.S. Supreme Court had found that the crime scene exception did not exist. In Mincey v. Arizona, the Court ruled that while the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit police from warrantless entry during an emergency, the police must obtain a warrant to remain on the premises once the emergency is ended.

Davids read Mincey with excitement, because it seemed to be completely "on point": the facts of that case seemed to apply directly to the search at the store. Police in Pima County, Arizona, went to the apartment of a suspected drug dealer named Rufus Mincey. An undercover officer, Barry Headricks, had been in the apartment earlier in the day and had arranged to buy some heroin. Officer Headricks left, ostensibly to get some money, and returned with nine other plainclothes policemen and a deputy prosecutor. Someone in the apartment opened the door for Headricks, then the others rushed in. Headricks and Mincey were critically wounded in an exchange of gunfire; Headricks later died. Police held the apartment for two days without a warrant and took over two hundred items of evidence that later were used to convict Mincey.

The Arizona supreme court ruled that the search of Mincey's apartment was legal under a crime scene exception to the Fourth Amendment. But the U.S. Supreme Court found unanimously that once the medical emergency had ended, the police should have obtained a search warrant to remain on the scene. They were entitled to any evidence that was in plain sight during the emergency, but anything else was inadmissible.

Justice Porter Stewart wrote: "...We hold that the 'murder scene exception' created by the Arizona Supreme Court is inconsistent with the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments-that the warrantless search of Mincey's apartment was not constitutionally acceptable simply because a homicide had recently occurred there."

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As Davids read it, that ruling applied precisely to the search at the furniture store. The issue seemed even more clearly in Zeigler's favor: no emergency existed once Ficke and Thompson and the others had found only dead bodies. The evidence in plain sight included the weapons and the holster and the bodies themselves. But the insurance policies, the storeroom bag, and the second .22 would all be inadmissible.

Further, Judge Paul had specifically cited the now-invalid crime scene exception: the police, he said, "were conducting a crime scene investigation which, due to its complexity, continued for more than a week."

Davids argued his case before the Florida supreme court on January 9, 1981.

The decision came down six months later; the court affirmed Zeigler's conviction and sentence and denied his motion for a retrial. It addressed these issues, among others:

Judge Paul's refusal to grant continuance fell within the "sound discretion" of a trial judge.

The "grove bullet" was admissible even though it could not be positively identified as from the Securities gun, and there was no way to know when it had been fired.

The Brevital Sodium test and Dr. Zimmer's psychiatric examination were not admissible.

The evidence from the Dunaway car was admissible, since Thompson and Yawn had entered the home in the belief that an emergency existed.

Frank Smith's hearsay testimony, about his telephone conversation with the man whom Edward Williams described as Zeigler, was not improper.

Herbert MacDonell's footprint testimony may have been a breach of discovery, but Judge Paul had remedied it when he allowed Hadley and Davids to examine the evidence and to interview MacDonell. "Actually, there is very little contradiction between the testimony of [Thomas] Delaney and the testimony of McDonnell [sic]," said the opinion, by Chief Justice James C. Adkins.

Judge Paul was justified in refusing to allow Hadley to question jurors about Irma Brickle's charges of misconduct.

The judge had properly overruled the jury's advisory sentence.

Most dismaying for Davids, the court ruled that Mincey did not apply to the warrantless search of the store, since Zeigler had invited the police when he asked Don Ficke for help.

Until 1978, Davids would have taken the search-and-seizure appeals to the federal system, beginning with the U.S. district court in Jacksonville, state courts have generally been less liberal than federal courts in upholding constitutional safeguards.

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But Stone v. Powell, a 1976 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, virtually ended the right of defendants to appeal Fourth Amendment rulings by state supreme courts. Defendants may still apply to the High Court, but the chances of review there are almost nil. In essence, clerks at the U.S. Supreme Court, who screen writs and submissions, are now the sole federal watchdogs of the states' compliance with Fourth Amendment rights.

Davids did file a writ of certiorari—a petition for review—which the U.S. Supreme Court denied in 1982, opening the way for the first of the death warrants against Tommy Zeigler.

"We have carefully examined the thirty-two volumes of record in this case and carefully considered the brief of the defendant," said the opinion by the Florida supreme court.

Actually, though, that opinion contains at least one serious misstatement of the facts. Justice Adkins described Thomas Delaney's footprint testimony this way (emphasis added):

Although there were general characteristics of similarity, as an expert [Delaney] could not find any specific points of identification. He concluded that the prints in question could have been made by defendant's shoes but he could not positively state that the shoes in fact did make the print.

This is a gross error. Delaney positively testified that Zeigler's shoe could not have made the key footprint, strongly indicating the possibility of an unknown assailant. It was MacDonell, not Delaney, who refused to specify whether Zeigler's shoe had made the print. Given this misapprehension of a basic issue, it's not hard to understand how the chief justice could have found that there was "very little contradiction" between Delaney's testimony and MacDonell's.

The opinion also seemed to ignore the fact that the undercover policeman in the Mincey case was also on the scene by invitation, yet the U.S. Supreme Court found the search unreasonable.

The Florida opinion concluded: "In some instances defendant has been able to show some inconsistencies in the evidence. However, when one considers the magnitude of this case, all facts could not be expected to mesh perfectly."

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Forty-six

In 1982, William Duane was a thirty-four-year-old trial attorney in Orlando. He had recently tried two high-profile cases, including the defense of the so-called "Pershing Plowshares" anti-war protesters, who had been charged with trespass during their demonstration at the Martin Marietta production plant in Orange county.

Duane found himself with some free time. He volunteered for a pro bono case, and was asked to briefly represent a Death Row inmate whose Supreme Court writ had recently been denied, and who was about to go on active warrant.

The job would last only a few days, Duane was told; he only had to fill in some forms and file a petition that would delay the execution and allow the inmate to start a second series of appeals.

The inmate was Tommy Zeigler. The cost of his trial defense had long ago exhausted Zeigler's own estate and had nearly crippled his mother's. Tom, Sr., had died in 1980. Tom and Beulah closed the furniture store in 1977, and sold it at a loss two years later. The apartments had gone to pay Hadley, Davids, and the investigators at trial; Davids had worked mostly without fee in preparing the first appeal.

As Duane remembers it, he nearly rejected the request to represent Zeigler, even for a few days. During 1976, Duane had worked for the U.S. Attorney's office in Orlando. He had socialized with sheriff's officers and some of Robert Eagan's assistants, and he had heard the stories. Tommy Zeigler was a dog-mutilating homosexual who had ruined everybody's Christmas in 1975.

"Zeigler was guilty as hell, and everybody knew it, even before the trial," Duane said recently, recalling the early months of 1976. "You would hear these stories that weren't getting into the newspaper, testimony from the grand jury about what a vicious asshole Tommy Zeigler was. That was the scoop. All the insiders knew it. Everybody knew that Zeigler got what was coming to him."

In six years since then, Duane had heard nothing that changed his mind. Zeigler was, literally, the last man Duane wanted to represent.

But he relented: it was only a few days, and he would have advice from other attorneys who specialized in death penalty appeals. Vernon Davids and Leslie Gift, now married and living in the town of Englewood on the Gulf Coast, agreed to help him with the brief.

Duane had no experience in death penalty issues. He remembers calling an assistant attorney general and naively requesting a few extra days to prepare his case. The man seemed almost amused as he denied the request: "It was the most

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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

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one policeman using another as a c.i., and in effect shielding him from questioning while making his information the basis of an indictment.

Duane came to suspect that at least one major evidence find—the bags with cartridges, a blue towel, and the two empty gun boxes. said to have been discovered in a cabinet in the storage area—had been planted by police, either by the investigative crews themselves or by a local policeman directly involved in the actual crime, with access to the store. This cache of evidence was logged into evidence on January 2, nine days after the investigation began, and fully a week after the last item of evidence was seized from the store. Zeigler had already been arrested four days earlier, and Duane believed that by then the OCSO had begun to realize how tenuous was the evidence against Zeigler.1

After several years of internal debate about the question of Zeigler's guilt, Duane took a new tack. It occurred to him that a gunshot wound in the abdomen was potentially lethal, even if self-inflicted with great care.2

Duane hypothesized how police would have investigated the case if Zeigler had died from his wound.

By living, Zeigler had offered only the sketchy story of an assault in the back of the store, plus the testimony that he loved his wife and had lived an upstanding life. The rest of the evidence would have been virtually the same, Duane thought. It would show that Charlie Mays had been found after hours in the furniture store, with cash and receipts in his pocket, his van parked in a position that suggested surreptitious purposes. It would show that Edward Williams was in possession of the principal murder weapon, that ownership of the other two major weapons had been traced to Williams's friend, Frank Smith, and that Williams's truck had been found at the murder scene. The only difference would have been one more body. Would the police still have attempted to blame the murder on one of the apparent victims?

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1 Don Frye has testified at least twice that the cache actually was found on Dec. 27. But the evidence receipts are dated Jan. 2, 1976. Alton Evans, who found the bags, testified that he made the discovery on Jan. 2, and this is borne out by his official report. Evans was not even in the store on Dec. 27: he was busy preparing the first shipment of evidence for the FBI Lab, which he brought to Washington on the 28th. If the evidence in the bags had been found earlier than the 27th, it would have been included in that original shipment. In fact, it became part of a later submission.

2 In May, 1976, the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice published a study on the effectiveness of soft body armor. As part of the research, the authors canvassed surgeons to determine possible mortality rates from gunshots in unprotected torsos. The study quoted a mortality rate ranging from five per cent to 20 per cent for a shot from a .38 Special which does not strike any vital organs. A shot striking the liver would have a mortality rate of 15 to 60 per cent, while one which passed through the spleen would have a potential mortality of 15 to 30 per cent.

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The answer seemed obvious to Duane: Edward Williams would have been the immediate and obvious suspect. He could have been convicted with the same set of facts and findings which had been used to convict Tommy Zeigler.

If nothing else, Duane thought, this was a powerful argument against capital punishment. If Zeigler was guilty, then only his own luck and good aim had saved the state from convicting and executing an innocent man.

Guilty or innocent, Duane thought, Tommy Zeigler had been very close to keeping his good name on Christmas Eve. All he had to do was die.

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Forty-seven

The principals in the case went about their lives.

Shortly after the trial, Don Frye became a state attorney's investigator. He is still with that office, where he hold an administrative job.

Robert Eagan left office in 1990, and now is a partner in a law firm in Orlando.

Terry Hadley accepted one more criminal defense and then quit the practice. He is a successful civil attorney in Orange County.

Edward Williams lives in Orlando. In 1986, when Zeigler's death was imminent, he told an interviewer from the Sentinel, "Zeigler messed himself up. He was a big man in Winter Garden. Big man. I'd be working for him still. But he tried to move too fast. Wanted the whole world. His wife, she was a fine lady. Always good to me. He killed her. Killer her. Zeigler. That kid, he's all done now."

Jimmy Yawn became chief of police of Winter Garden, a position he held as of the spring of 1992.

Robert Thompson's resignation from the Oakland Police Department became effective during the trial. He and his family later left Orange County.

Felton Thomas's whereabouts are unknown.

Maurice Paul is now a U.S. district court judge in Jacksonville.

After the death of her husband, Beulah lived alone in her home on Temple Grove Drive. She twice underwent treatment for breast cancer.

Mattie Mays received an undisclosed sum in an out-of-court settlement of her lawsuit against the Zeiglers. The suit and countersuit involving the Zeiglers and the two insurance companies was also settled out of court, with Mrs. Zeigler receiving an undisclosed portion of the benefits.

Gene Annan was hospitalized with severe stomach ulcers shortly after the trial ended. He never investigated another case, and is now a computer programmer who specializes in custom billing software for physicians and attorneys. He considers the case an affront to logic and justice. "The prosecution put on two hundred-some pieces of physical evidence, and none of it proves that Tommy Zeigler was guilty. The jurors saw all these guns and all this bloody clothing, and they figured that it must mean something. They threw up their hands and voted to convict, and they gave him life so that somebody else could come along and figure it out.

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In January 1986, Bill Duane joined a large law firm in Orlando and began phasing out his representation of Zeigler. A state-financed group of attorneys specializing in capital appeals was to take over the case. Zeigler's second appeal—known as a habeas corpus or "3.850" petition—was still working its way through the system. It was based on another set of collateral matters, including the argument that in restricting character witnesses during the penalty phase of the trial, Judge Paul had failed to consider possible mitigating circumstances.

That spring, a U.S. district judge, Susan Black, declared that Zeigler and his attorneys had improperly filed his habeas petition. This cleared the way for an unexpected second warrant. Zeigler was scheduled to die on Tuesday morning, May 20, 1986.

This was grave. As far as Zeigler and his attorneys were aware, nobody had ever come back alive from the Death House after being found in procedural default.

Another condemned man was in the Death House at the same time. Ronald "Frog" Straight was a convicted murderer and a Death Row friend of Zeigler's who had run out of appeals. Both he and Zeigler knew that Straight's cause was lost, but neither admitted it.

Zeigler's time, too, got short. On Sunday, May 18, he wrote a series of good-byes and thank-you letters. He asked that his files and his collection of the official record be shipped out to his mother's home, along with all of his personal possessions; he didn't want her to have to deal with it after he was gone.

Vernon Davids had recently returned to work after multiple-bypass heart surgery. Although he had not been Zeigler's principal counsel since 1981, he had remained an attorney of record and had stayed current with the case. He knew that Zeigler still had favorable issues on his habeas petition.

With about thirty-six hours remaining before the execution, Davids finished a motion for a stay of execution, based on the last possible, and least desirable, grounds: Davids averred that his own representation of Zeigler had been incompetent and that Zeigler's newest attorneys had failed to file a timely appeal.

In the meantime, Leslie Gift and Tommy's cousin Connie Crawford made preliminary arrangements for a mortician to recover the body after the execution.

Insufficiency of counsel was the one issue that would earn a stay. After the U.S. district court denied the motion, a judge of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta granted the stay. Zeigler learned of it when a guard summoned him to a telephone to take a call from Vernon Davids; at the time, Zeigler was in the visitor park with his mother, Connie Crawford, and Davids's ex-wife, Pat.

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His visitors were joyful and relieved. Shortly afterward, they left the prison, happy—this wasn't going to be a last visit after all.

But Zeigler believed that he hadn't heard the last word. He suspected that the state would appeal the stay. And he was correct: he learned later that evening that Florida's attorney general, James Smith, had flown to Washington to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the stay.

Zeigler was moved out of the Death House to a cell on Q wing. At that time he knew that if the stay was lifted he would be brought downstairs and executed almost at once. He went to sleep knowing that he might be awakened by guards taking him to his death. By his own account, he read the Bible and prayed, as he did every night. He wrote a short, heartfelt poem about his wife, which he later gave to Leslie Gift.

In Zeigler's words, from a letter he wrote in January, 1992, responding to a series of questions:

After I received my stay on May 19, all of my property was moved from the death house to Q-3-West-5. This cell is on the third floor of Q wing right above the death chamber.

Ronald Straight was still in the death house in Q-1-East-3. I was not allowed to go back into the death house to communicate with him. I was taken to my cell and once I was secured there I called through the ventilation shaft to Frog and wished him good luck.

After my visit that afternoon I had left word that I would see no one else. In other words if things went sour I wasn't going to have anyone here holding my hand. No man should have those memories to haunt him and especially not on my part. I was glad that everyone was home and out of the circus atmosphere.

On Q wing the night before an execution it is so quiet you can actually hear your heart beat. The sounds of the officers opening/closing the security gates and their footsteps making their rounds is deafening. This was not the first time I had been there prior to an execution so the chilling feeling was not new to me.

Special thoughts? I wondered how my execution would affect my family and friends. This has always been my major concern. I don't want my death to haunt them or hurt them. My death should be a matter of rejoicing because all the pain and suffering will be over. I would be with Eunice, Papa, and Mom and Dad Edwards.

My memories of times past all came flowing back and then the thoughts of the present and future pushed them out and I wondered what Frog was doing/thinking.

Frog was executed at 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday. I was very aware of what was happening. I watched the vans bring the

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witnesses and media representatives to the death chamber. I could hear the generator running and smell the diesel fumes from it. At the same moment I could hear the switches clicking and the light bulb in my cell dimmed so I knew exactly what was happening!

A few moment later I heard the door to the death chamber open. I could hear voices outside, the vans cranked up, and I watched them drive the witnesses back down the little asphalt road from the death chamber. I then watched the hearse come in through the sally port gate, travel down the same little asphalt road to the death chamber. The doors opened and closed again and I watched the hearse retreat back down the road.

It's very accurate to say that had the United States Supreme Court lifted the stays I would have been taken back into the death house, prepped, and executed right after Frog.

The stays were not lifted. Zeigler's new lawyers, members of a New York law firm working pro bono, prepared a new petition for the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Bill Duane's proselytizing paid off now. One of Duane's acquaintances in Orlando had been Dave Burgin, who became editor in chief of the Sentinel around the time that Duane took on Zeigler's case. Burgin, after many hours of hearing Duane expound on the case, had become convinced that Zeigler had been unjustly convicted.

Burgin had since left the Sentinel and was now a consultant to the Atlanta Constitution. Atlanta happens to be the seat of the Eleventh U.S. Circuit. Burgin commissioned the Constitution's Florida correspondent to do a series of articles on the crime, incorporating details that the media in Orange County had largely overlooked.

The articles appeared on the three days immediately preceding Zeigler's hearing in Atlanta. Zeigler and his supporters believed that they may have been responsible for saving his life, for shortly afterward the three judges of the Eleventh Circuit accepted Zeigler's argument that Judge Paul should have heard testimony about possible mitigating circumstances before overriding the jury's recommendation.

The two death sentences were thrown out, and Zeigler was awarded a new sentencing hearing.

Shortly before that hearing took place—in Orlando, in 1989—a Sentinel article claimed that a former Death Row inmate named Eddie Odom1 was going to testify that in 1979, Zeigler persuaded his mother to pay $50,000 to Odom's wife, so that Odom could arrange to have Tom Zeigler, Sr. murdered; the motive

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1 Odom is a career criminal who received the death sentence for a 1976 murder conviction; the sentence was later reduced to life.

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was that Tommy's father supposedly opposed spending any more money on his son's behalf. According to the Sentinel, the state attorney's office also had a witness who would testify that Zeigler tortured small animals when he was a teenager.

But Odom never testified about the supposed murder plot. And the witness to Zeigler's alleged brutality toward animals never took the stand; according to the prosecutor, he had gone to Costa Rica.

Two psychiatrists and a psychologist did testify that Zeigler was unlikely to be violent.

"Had I not met Mr. Zeigler at Florida State Prison, I would have come away having met just another man," said Orlando psychiatrist J. Lloyd Wilder.

Assistant State Attorney Jeff Ashton cross-examined psychologist Brad Fisher, who said that Zeigler was unlikely to be violent:

ASHTON: In early December 1975, could you have predicted he would murder four people?

FISHER: My best prediction would have been that he wasn't likely to become violent.

ASHTON: Wouldn't you have been less likely then than now to predict that he would commit murder?

FISHER: That's correct.

Ashton intended to discredit the psychologist's ability to predict Zeigler's future behavior, since Zeigler had been convicted of a violent crime. However, another conclusion was possible. In 1976, virtually the same testimony—that he was unlikely to be a murderer—could have been used to defend Zeigler.

Nevertheless, Circuit Judge Gary Formet did find that Zeigler deserved the death penalty, and restored the sentences. In 1991 the Florida supreme court again affirmed the sentences, and Zeigler's attorneys began the appeal process once more, basing their latest habeas petition on new evidence that had been revealed during the past fifteen years.

Zeigler admits that in 1979 he tried to persuade a Death Row inmate who had run out of appeals—a onetime member of the so-called Ski Mask Bandits—to confess to the Christmas Eve killings. As for the alleged murder plot, he and his mother claim that she was a victim of extortion, that she and Tom were pressured into paying protection money to save their son's life. Apparently the Zeiglers were sent prison photographs showing a murdered inmate: the implication was that this could happen to Tommy.

The sole source of the information about the murder plot was Eddie Odom and his wife. In 1991, two FSP inmates wrote remarkable letters denying that

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Zeigler was involved in any such plot. The letters were remarkable, in part, because they violated the unwritten prison rule against snitching.

One was from Robert Lewis, who participated with Odom in several violent armed robberies during the 1970s and who in 1979 escaped from Death Row by walking out, wearing a guard's uniform. (He was arrested three weeks later.)

Lewis sent an affidavit that alleged, among other things, that "most stories about [Zeigler] were created by my crime partner Eddie Odom for personal gain."

Convicted murderer Jimmy Lee Smith said that he met Odom in 1979, shortly after arriving on Death Row, and that Odom offered to have him moved to a more desirable cell on the ground floor of the wing.2

Smith was one of several inmates willing to repudiate Odom at Zeigler's re-sentencing hearing. He write: "Eddie welded [sic] a little power around death row because he had money and he was the biggest dope connection in the prison. He tells me that he can get me moved to One-North, but, for doing so, he wants me to keep tabs on someone for him.... He says that someone on that floor has information he needs and if I would help him get it he would have me moved....It turns out that Eddie wants me to spy on William Thomas Zeigler Jr.—everybody calls him Tommy. I was moved into the cell right next to him....Eddie wanted any sort of information about Tommy, especially about his Mother and Father."

According to Smith, Odom told him that he had arranged to have photos of a murdered inmate sent to Zeigler's parents, and that Odom boasted of having repeated the threat to Tom senior in the visiting room. According to Smith, Robert Lewis's escape was part of a larger escape plan that would be financed by the money extorted from the Zeiglers. But the plan failed when Lewis was caught three weeks later.

"I asked Eddie what he did with all that money since the grand escape attempt failed," Smith wrote. "He says that he paid for a boob job and a new Cadillac for his old lady. I laughed as tho I tho't that was the slickest con in the world.

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2 The upper floors at FSP are said to be stifling hot in the summer.

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Forty-eight

In 1991, Robert Eagan complained to an interviewer that successive defense attorneys for Zeigler had so distorted the evidence that he could hardly recognize the case he had tried in 1976. He compared them to Communist revisionists, rewriting history to serve their own ends.1

If the debate about the case has been somewhat transfigured with time, it may be because the body of evidence—some direct, some peripheral—has grown over the years. Successive revelations of new information he kept the case controversial, and in some instances have prolonged Zeigler's appeals. Some of that new evidence actually dates from the original investigation and remained in the files of the state attorney for more than ten years, literally undiscovered.

THE ROACH STATEMENTS

In 1979, a husband and wife, Ken and Linda Roach, gave the most detailed eyewitness accounts of events at the store at the time of the murders. If their affidavits are at all accurate, they leave no possibility except that Zeigler is innocent.

The couple lived outside Orange County, but said that they were driving through the town on Christmas Eve in 1975, and that they passed the furniture store that evening as the drove south on Dillard Street. Ken Roach said that the time was about 7:20 P.M. as they approached Route 50.

Both swore that as they passed the store, they heard a single loud noise that sounded like a tire blowout. It was followed quickly by a series of firecracker-like reports, some louder than others. Ken Roach said it was like "a pack of firecrackers being ignited all at the same time...a series of at least ten or more shots or explosions, some at different levels of sound."

Both looked to the right, toward the source of the noise: the furniture store. The lights inside were low.

Each saw four vehicles parked in front.

Linda Roach described two of the cars. One was large, white or cream. The other, also large, was dark metallic blue-green, which is consistent with the Edwardses' sedan. She could not remember the others.

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1 In that same conversation, Eagan also stated that the grove bullet "was positively identified as having been fired from one of Tommy's guns." In fact, FBI ballistics experts could not positively match the grove bullet to the Securities .38, although they shared general rifling characteristics.

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Ken Roach said that one of the four cars appeared to be a new white Cadillac. He also saw a dark-skinned man calmly walking along the front of the store, toward a pickup truck which was backed in along the north side of the building. Ken Roach described the man as of medium build, 150-170 pounds, average height, thirty to fifty years old, wearing dark work clothes or everyday clothes, a dark jacket, and a cap or a hat. (This was compatible with Charlie May's height, weight, and age; also Mays on Christmas Eve wore a dark sweatshirt with a hood).

The Roaches said that after Zeigler was indicted they realized that they had been near the scene of the murders. They discussed several times what they ought to do, and Ken Roach finally called the OCSO. According to him, he gave this same information to a woman who answered the phone, who told him that his statement wasn't needed and refused to give him the name of Zeigler's attorney.

They said that they didn't pursue the matter, but that it continued to bother them, so they looked up Tom Zeigler in the Winter Garden phone directory, to finally give the information. They claimed that they did not know Tommy Zeigler or the rest of the family.

According to Vernon Davids, who took the statement, the Roaches were credible witnesses: a middle-class couple with children, active in state politics.

Besides the rest of their information, the Roaches' statements are notable for the appearance of the light-colored Cadillac from Felton Thomas's account.2 Their recollection of the lighting in the store resembles Zeigler's description of the lights he claims to have left burning that evening, and the timing is consistent with the first shots heard by Barbara Tinsley, although she did not hear as many as ten reports.

Of course, the Roaches' observations are utterly incompatible with the state's case. Among other details, the prosecution's theory cannot accommodate four cars, a pickup, and a dark-skinned man walking in front of the store at 7:20; and even with a revolver in each hand, one man alone could not fire off ten shots so rapidly as to produce a sound "like a pack of firecrackers being ignited all at the same time."

THE MCEACHERN CHARGE

In 1981, former OCSO officer Leigh McEachern claimed that he was present at a pretrial conference at which Judge Paul discussed the evidence in the Zeigler case

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2 Vernon Davids, among others, believes that Felton Thomas's statement could be substantially true, except for the identification of Zeigler; that is, that Thomas and Mays actually did meet a strange--not Zeigler--in a Cadillac, that they did test pistols in the orange grove, that Thomas pulled the switch on the breaker box, and that he actually did run away because he was frightened by something that he witnessed at the store.

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with Robert Eagan, Don Frye, and a third party whom McEachern could not recall.

McEachern had been the chief deputy to Sheriff Mel Colman in 1976. He made this charge from a prison camp in northern Florida, where he was serving a sentence after being convicted of embezzling from his department's investigative funds.

According to McEachern, the ex parte meeting3 took place in a conference room of the offices of the state attorney. He said that Eagan outlined for Paul the major points in the state's case, including the expected testimony of Professor MacDonell.

McEachern claimed that as the meeting broke up, Paul told Eagan: "Bob, get me one first-degree [conviction] and I'll fry the son of a bitch." McEachern said that he later mentioned the meeting to Colman, but did nothing else. He said that he decided to come forward after the Florida supreme court affirmed Zeigler's conviction and sentence.

Such a conference would have been completely improper. Eagan, Frye, and Paul all denied that the meeting had taken place; Zeigler was awarded a hearing on the matter. That occurred in August 1984; Duane examined Frye, Judge Paul, Eagan, and the former beverage agent Herbert Baker, attempting to establish a judicial conspiracy against Zeigler based on ill will from the Andrew James matter. Circuit Judge James Stroker, who heard the testimony, ruled that the charge was without substance, although he admitted that he could find no obvious motive for McEachern to have lied.

LATE DISCOVERY

In 1987, after Florida passed its Public Records Act, Zeigler's appellate attorneys were granted access to the state attorney's files of the case. Leslie Gift, who had cataloged the original discovery evidence in 1976, went along to examine the documents in the file.

Gift found at least three potentially relevant items that prosecutors had not turned over to the defense.

One was a thirteen-page report by Robert Thompson, in which he described the blood around Zeigler's wound as being "dry." In his sworn statement Thompson has said it was "dry and damp," a crucial difference. The significance was that the state claimed that Zeigler had shot himself after calling the Van Deventer home, when he was sure that help was on the way. But Thompson arrived on the scene within a minute after that call; the blood around the wound that fresh could not possibly be dry.

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3 That is, a meeting away from the courtroom.

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Gift also found a long twenty-nine page interim report written by Don Frye, the existence of which which Frye had denied.

She also came across an audiotape, which she copied. The tape was remarkable. It recorded an interview between Jack Bachman, Eagan's investigator, and a young man named Jon Jellison.

On Christmas Eve the Jellison family—Jon, his parents, and his teenage sister, from Minnesota—had been registered in the back wing of the Winter Garden Inn. Their room overlooked the rear compound of the furniture store. In April, Eagan sent letters to motel guests, asking whether they could substantiate some of the specifics of the statements of Edward Williams and Felton Thomas.

Apparently, only the Jellisons had any information. And it was not what the prosecution hoped. This is a partial transcript of the tape that Leslie Gift found, and that apparently was never turned over during discovery:

Q (BACHMAN): What is your name—Jon?

A (JELLISON): Jon, right. Really, we didn't observe very much or we can't really add much more than, you know, what you've got there already. We ate supper—my mom told Mr. Eagan all about this—ate supper at the motel, came back to our room at, I suppose, between 8:15 and 8:30, and we sat around awhile looking at postcards and I, uh, I was going to go over to the office there at the motel and mail them back home there—

Q: Right.

A: —so I went to the door, I cracked the door and I was just going to walk out and there was a policeman out in the parking lot aiming his pistol over the hood of his police car at the back of the building—

Q: Right.

A: —at the furniture store. That was the first time that we had know, you know, anything funny was going on at all. And then, so rather than go to the post office at the office there we just stayed inside our room there and looked out through the window and through the door.

Q: Were you on the back side of the motel?

A: Right. Let's see. We just stood there and watched for quite some time and then we heard what we figured were probably shots, maybe 9:00 or so, it said in the letter—that would be about the right time. We didn't notice particularly what time it was but as close as we can figure that must be about what time it was.

Q: Now, when you heard the shots, was this after you saw the police cars?

A: Right, right, it was. We saw the police car and that was the first time we knew anything was going on at all.

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Q: But you didn't hear any shots--in other words, as you were leaving the restaurant or something you didn't hear any shots.

A: Nothing at all, no, uh-uh. We knew nothing was going on whatsoever.

Q: So then you didn't hear the shots then until after the police had arrived.

A: Right, right. So I am sure they have already filled you in on all that.

...

Q: Well, I was almost on my way up to talk to you—but if you heard the shots after you saw the police cars—

A: Yeah, yeah.

Q: It was all over with at that point.

A: Yeah. What—is there any new leads or anything—do you have any information on what

Q: Well, I mean we got a man charged. In fact, we have got the owner of the furniture store charged.

A: You do?

Q: Oh, yeah.

A: Oh, I see. I didn't know that.

Q: See, he had his wife insured for $500,000.

A: Oh, I see.

Q: And the policies were only about thirty days old when he killed her.

A: Oh.

Q: He killed her, his mother-in-law, his father-in-law, and a customer in the store.

A: Oh, I see. You have him charged then. Oh, I see.

...

Q: ...What we are really trying to find is somebody that saw them [Zeigler and Mays] jumping that fence back there.

A: Oh, yeah, right.

Q: But, nope, as long as you heard the gunshots after, you know, you say you saw the police car then that wouldn't help us a bit....Okay, you might tell your mother I called.

A: Okay. You won't need to talk to her or anything will you?

Q: Not unless, you know, you all get together and decide you heard those gunshots—

A: No.

Q: —before you saw the police car and in that case we'd give you a free trip back to Florida.

A: (Laughs) No, we've, uh, ever since we got the letter here, about last Thursday I guess it was, we've been talking it over and that's as close as we can come...

The tape is startling. The Jellisons were clearly in a position to corroborate key points in the testimony of Edward Williams and Felton Thomas. But they did

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not. Rather, they stated unequivocally that they heard shots after a policeman drove up to the back of the store.

This was powerful material, considering that Zeigler had always charged that he had made enemies of local policemen because of his interest in Andrew James and the alleged loan-sharking racket. Years before the existence of the Jellison tape became known, Zeigler claimed that a Winter Garden patrolman had threatened his life.

The defense deposed every officer who was on the scene during the first half hour after police arrived. None of them described an action like the one related on the Jellison tape. No police car should have been in the rear compound at any time on Christmas Eve. What the Jellisons claimed to see, if accurate, is a corroboration of Tommy Zeigler's long-held theory that he was set up by police.

In 1988, the murders were the subject of a syndicated TV documentary. Researchers for the independent production company interviewed juror Irma Brickle, who told them that on the afternoon of the last day of jury deliberations she was given Valium to calm her nerves; shortly afterward, she said, she gave in to pressure from other jurors and voted to convict.

The documentary left unclear the questions of who gave her the drug, and by what authority. Zeigler's latest motion for a new trial states that Judge Paul persuaded Mrs. Brickle's physician to prescribe her the drug over the telephone.

Shortly after the documentary was broadcast, Vernon Davids received a letter from a certain John Bulled, whom Davids later verified as one of the prison trusties on the work crew that dug up the grove bullet.

According to Bulled, crews searched the grove for two days and found nothing. On the afternoon of the second day, Bulled said, a sheriff's deputy told the crew supervisor, "We will just have to produce one anyway."

Bulled said he believed that the evidence had been fabricated, because inmates were told to say that they had found a slug, when actually they had found none.

Two of Zeigler's present attorneys, from the New York City law firm that has represented him since 1986, have sworn that they contacted a second member of the work crew who confirmed Bulled's story and reluctantly agreed to testify.

And in 1982, Ed Rowe, the manager of a West Orange grocery, signed an affidavit regarding conversations that he had had with Charlie Mays's son seven years after the murders. According to Rowe, he had discussed the crime with Ernie Mays, who was one of his employees. (Ernie Mays denied that the conversations took place.)

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Rowe claimed that Ernie had told him that his father had taken a gun along the last time he left the house, and that before he left had told his family that there would be money for Christmas.

"My father wasn't supposed to die that night," is how Rowe quotes Ernie Mays. "Tommy Zeigler was supposed to die."

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