Fatal Flaw

West Orange, though, was left out of the action.  Most of the wild growth was in Orlando and south, along Interstate 4, where Disney World had its main entrance.  Florida’s Sunshine Parkway, built to funnel visitors into central Florida and the East Coast beaches, runs just below Winter Garden; almost anyone who drives to Disney World from the Midwest or the Deep South passes within half a mile of the furniture store.

But almost nobody stops in Winter Garden.  The wall around the Magic Kingdom effectively seals West Orange from the magic and the money.  On Christmas Eve of 1975, as today, Winter Garden, Florida, was an ordinary small town, maybe tougher than most, where ordinary people lived, and died.

*

Zeigler Furniture was one of the first stops for Charlie and Mattie Mays on Christmas Eve.  They had traded there since they were married, fifteen years before.  They were black, and in 1960 Zeigler Furniture was one of the few white-owned businesses in West Orange that routinely offered credit to black customers.

Today Mattie wanted new linoleum for the small rented house where she and her husband lived with their four young sons, in the rural community of Oakland, which adjoins Winter Garden.  They parked their blue Ford van in the lot out front and went into the store, along with Brian Nedd, a sixteen-year-old fruit picker who worked with their crew.

Tommy Zeigler waited on them that morning.  He brought them to the back of the showroom, where rolls of linoleum hung on racks that were bolted to the rear wall.  Mattie Mays chose the patterns for three rooms.

What happened then would become a matter of controversy, as did much else that involved Tommy Zeigler over the coming hours, days, and months.  According to the depositions of Brian Nedd and Mrs. Mays, Zeigler brought Charlie to the storage area behind the showroom.  There Zeigler showed him a used console color TV, which the store was selling on consignment.

Brian Nedd testified that he overheard the conversation.  He said that Tommy Zeigler offered to sell Charlie Mays the television on credit, at a price of $128.  Mattie Mays supported Nedd’s account, testifying that Charlie told her that it would be a surprise gift for the family.  Charlie was supposed to pick up the TV at 7:30 that evening, after the store was closed.

But she learned all that later from Charlie, she said.  That morning she was unaware of the arrangement; she only knew that when Tommy Zeigler and her husband came back from the storeroom, Zeigler told her:  “You will have the surprise of your life.”

Most of all, they worked as if they still needed the money.  Eunice taught school through much of her marriage.  Tommy immersed himself in the businesses.  Beulah ran the store every day, usually from opening to closing.  Tom senior had worked at the furniture store every day, often at the tasks of a minimum-wage laborer, until he suffered a stroke in July 1975.  The Zeiglers did not avoid drudgery.

This morning Tommy Zeigler himself cut Mattie Mays’s linoleum.  He unwound it from the rolls on the wall, using a heavy metal crank that was kept in a box on the back wall.  He sized the pieces and rolled them again, then placed them in the rear storage area.

Around midday of Christmas Eve, Edward Williams stopped at the store to see Tommy Zeigler.

Williams had known the family for nearly twenty years, as a customer and a part-time employee.  He had helped to remodel the Zeiglers’ apartments and had worked on the construction crew that had built the Dillard Street store.  In the past week, he had worked around Tommy and Eunice’s house and replaced a broken window in one of the apartment complexes.

Earlier in the week, Zeigler had asked Williams to help deliver several large gifts on Christmas Eve: a gas grill that he and Eunice had bought for Tom Zeigler, a La-Z-Boy recliner for Perry and Virginia Edwards, and a big potted plant that Winter Garden’s chief of police, Don Ficke, had bought for his wife.

This morning Tommy Zeigler was cutting linoleum when Williams came into the store.  Williams gave Zeigler the key to the apartment he had repaired.

Now (as William’s later testified) Zeigler reminded him that he needed help in the evening. According to Williams, Zeigler told him to be at 75 Temple Grove at 7:30, and they would drive to the store together.

Zeigler had done Williams many favors.  In the past two days alone, he had loaned Williams $80 for a deposit on his new apartment and had called the local power company so that Williams—who still had a disputed bill from a previous address—could have electricity when he moved in.

Edward Williams, in turn, had done many favors for Tommy Zeigler.

“He’d say, Edward, I want you to do something for me,” Williams testified later.  “If I could get there, I do it.  Edward, I want this thing done here.  I say, okay, I try to make it possibly.  I do that because the whole time I know Tommy, if I asked Tommy to do me a favor, he helped me.”

Once again, Williams did not refuse Tommy Zeigler.

He would be there, he said: 7:30.

 Eunice Edwards and Tommy Zeigler had met when she was a teacher at an elementary school in Winter Garden.  He was coaching a youth football team.  He barged into her office, demanding that she release one of his star players, whom she had kept after class.  She adamantly refused.

From that day, he says, he never dated another.  They were married less than a year later, at the red-brick First Baptist Church, which dominates the town center from a rise of ground at the corner of Dillard and Plant streets.

In a case that became a thicket of uncertainty and disagreement, everyone agrees about Eunice.  Eunice was special.

She is remembered as kind, soft-spoken, genteel.  She sang, played the piano beautifully, and was an organist at First Baptist.  She is said to have detested gossip.  When Winter Garden’s public schools were forced to integrate, she volunteered to teach in a poor black neighborhood.  After Tommy’s father suffered a stroke in July 1975, Eunice often drove him to physical therapy.  She would watch the exercises, then patiently work with him for hours at home.

“A lovely lady,” her mother-in-law said of Eunice, years later.  “A calm, quiet, refined lady.”

“She never met anyone who didn’t like her,” Tommy Zeigler told an interviewer.  “And she always believed that there was some good in everybody.”

“The nicest person anybody could be around,” Edward Williams testified.

On Christmas Eve of 1975, Eunice Zeigler brought the Persian back from the vet and later baked a cake with her mother, and she waited for her husband to come home.

*

After they left Zeigler Furniture for the first time, Charlie and Mattie Mays and Brian Nedd drove across Dillard Street to the Tri-City shopping center at the intersection of Route 50.  They visited two stores, looking for Christmas gifts, and stopped to buy groceries at a Winn-Dixie supermarket.

From the supermarket they drove to a Zayre’s department store near Orlando.  At Zayre’s they bought a ten-speed bike, and after a quick meal they returned to the furniture store for the linoleum.

Tommy Zeigler told them to go around to the back.  Charlie Mays drove the blue van down a driveway that ran along the north side of the building, past a large electrical breaker box.

The store’s front display windows faced east, toward Dillard Street.  Directly behind the building was a paved area several times larger than the small lot out front.  This asphalt had been added to comply with Winter Garden’s zoning regulations.  But it was rarely used by the public.  It was surrounded by a six-foot chain-link fence that secured not only the parking lot but also the rear of the store.

Perry and Virginia Edwards, or the store pickup truck, which he drove most of the time anyway. 

It put Dunaway’s mind at ease.

Dunaway finished lunch early and decided to take a short nap in the storeroom at the rear of the building.  He lay down on a furniture pad and was dozing when Charlie Mays pulled up to load his linoleum.  He recognized the sound of Mays’s voice, but the words were indistinct.  Later he was unable to account any of the conversation.

Around four in the afternoon, a couple of hours before closing, Curtis Dunaway went with Zeigler on their second delivery trip of the day.

Near the end of the trip, Zeigler mentioned to Dunaway that he would be returning to the store that evening to pick up the gas grill for his father, the Edwardses’ recliner, and Don Ficke’s potted plant.  Dunaway volunteered to help him, but Zeigler said he didn’t want to interrupt Dunaway’s family gathering; he would get Edward Williams to help him, he said.

That afternoon delivery was a large one.  They separated it into two shipments, and when they dropped off the last piece their working day was almost ended.  In four years, Curtis Dunaway and Tommy Zeigler had ridden through West County hundreds of times on such errands.

This would be the last.

*

When they returned home in the afternoon, Charlie and Mattie Mays laid down their new linoleum with the help of Brian Nedd.  Around this time, Mrs. Mays testified, Charlie told her about the color TV.  He said that the down payment they had made that morning covered both the linoleum and the television.  Tommy Zeigler was giving them a bargain price, $128 for a beautiful console set.  They rearranged the living-room furniture to make a space for the console.

It was going to be a good Christmas.  It got even better that afternoon, when someone from the First Presbyterian Church in Oakland dropped off a basket of food and about $40 that had been collected from the congregation.  The church’s pastor, Herman “Mickey” Fisher, had asked Oakland’s police chief, Robert Thompson, to give it to a needy and deserving family.  Thompson had chosen Charlie and Mattie Mays and their sons.

Thompson liked Charlie Mays.  Charlie did not smoke or drink or cuss.  He coached the local softball teams, he worked hard, and his children were well-behaved.  You did not see the Mays boys on the streets after dark.

Sometime that afternoon, Tommy Zeigler arrived at the Mays home, making his late round of deliveries.  He had brought the bed that Mattie Mays wanted.  According to Mrs. Mays, Zeigler mentioned the TV again, and again her husband

Curtis Dunaway followed her north on Dillard, as far as the Thriftway.  He continued on to Temple Grove Drive, pulled into Tommy Zeigler’s driveway, and stopped along the right side of the drive.

Tommy drove up almost immediately and parked the pickup truck along the left side of the driveway, in front of the cat room in the garage. He went into the garage and backed out the new white Toronado.

Zeigler helped Dunaway transfer some gifts and boxes of baked goods from the ’72 Olds to the Toronado.  Zeigler invited Dunaway into the house.  Eunice was there, with her mother, Virginia, and their cake was fresh out of the oven.  Eunice cut a slice for Dunaway, and they chatted while Zeigler went into the family room to check the cat, Silver.

Dunaway stayed at the Zeiglers’ house for about fifteen or twenty minutes.  He left shortly before 7:00, when he went home in the Toronado, driving carefully.  It was a beautiful new car, and he didn’t have to worry that it would leave him walking beside the highway on Christmas Day.

*

Edward Williams, too, had car trouble on Christmas Eve.  His Camaro sports coupe was already being repaired at a Texaco station on Route50 east of Winter Garden, and his pickup truck had a balky carburetor: the engine wouldn’t restart when it was warm.

 Williams later testified that he spent several hours nailing up paneling in the home of Boyd Holt, a Winter Garden barber.  Around four in the afternoon, he drove to Holt’s shop, and Holt gave him $20.  Williams stopped at the Thriftway, bought some soap, and went to his new apartment.  He hadn’t yet spent a night in the place.  He had actually rented the apartment the day before, on Tuesday the 23^rd, but the carpets were still damp from being cleaned.

Williams testified that he saw nobody and spoke to nobody while he was at the apartment in the late afternoon and evening of the 24^th.  He showered and—he swore—put on a black cardigan sweater and a pair of green pants and new dress boots, and then went out to meet Tommy Zeigler.

*

A few people got glimmerings of the tragedy as it erupted.

At about 7:20, a woman named Barbara Spencer heard three or four loud explosions, which she believed to be firecrackers.  She was sitting by a back window in her parents’ house, which was located about a block west of Dillard Street, near Route 50.  She was watching the clock, waiting for her brother, whom she had been expecting to meet her at 7:00.

*

Edward Williams later told police that the garage door was open and the light was on when he pulled into the driveway at Tommy Zeigler’s house.  There were no cars.  The only vehicle in the drive was Tommy’s pickup truck.

Williams pulled in and blew his horn.  When nobody came out, Williams went into the garage to knock on the door that led from the garage into the house.  There, stuck in the crack of the door, was a note in Zeigler’s handwriting.  It read: “Edward Wait I’ll be right back” and was signed “Z.”

Williams noted the time: 7:28.

He got in his truck.  He pulled in behind the pickup, on the left side of the driveway, to make room for the car when Zeigler drove in.

He sat and he waited.

*

Beulah Zeigler returned home alone from the candlelight service.  Eunice and her parents had not come to church after all.

Her maid, Mary, was gone by the time Mrs. Zeigler arrived home.  Her husband, who was still showing the effects of his stroke the previous summer, was getting ready for bed.

Beulah Zeigler had work to do, preparing food for the Christmas meal.  She did not go next door to her son’s house.  She did not hear or see anything unusual in the driveway.  She was unaware.

*

Around 7:00, Don and Rita Ficke opened presents in their home with their children and Rita’s parents, who were visiting from Jacksonville. 

Earlier in the day, Eunice Zeigler and Rita had arranged for the two couples to drive together to the Van Deventer party.  Don and Rita had moved to Winter Garden in late 1973 when Don became the town police chief, and the two men and their wives had become close.

Ficke understood that the party was to start at 7:00.  He wasn’t surprised that the Zeiglers hadn’t shown up on time, however.  Tommy and Eunice were inevitably late for any social occasion.  Ficke wasn’t especially anxious to attend the party: he had had disagreements with Judge Van Deventer.  Ficke was not good friends with anyone who was going to be there except Tommy Zeigler.

A few minutes after 8:00, Don and Rita got in his unmarked police car and decided to find Tommy and Eunice.  Ficke was not armed.

window, getting up out of a chair and walking to the back of the house.  A few seconds later, Don Ficke followed Van Deventer to the back.

Thompson got out of the car and went up the walk.  He was at the front door when Don Ficke came out, in a big hurry.

There was trouble, Ficke told Thompson.  Trouble at Zeigler Furniture.

*

The Presbyterian minister Mickey Fisher was one of the guests at the Van Deventer home.  He was at the buffet table when the phone rang and had a view of the front door when Thompson walked in.  He could also hear Ted Van Deventer on the phone in the dining room.

“Tommy, what’s the matter?”  Van Deventer said.

On the other end of the line was Tommy Zeigler.  Six months later—in a hearsay testimony to which the defense did not object—Van Deventer recalled that Zeigler said, “Ted, I’m hurt,” and asked to speak to Don Ficke.

Van Deventer was a good friend of Zeigler’s and had known him to play practical jokes.

“Are you kidding me?”  Van Deventer said.

“No, hurry,”  Zeigler said, and Van Deventer called for Ficke.

Ficke took the receiver.

“Don, I’ve been shot,”  Zeigler said.

Ficke asked him what had happened, and Zeigler repeated that he had been shot.

“Please hurry,”  Zeigler said.

Ficke ran into Robert Thompson and told him what he knew.  In separate cars they rushed to the store with their emergency lights flashing.

The trip took less than a minute.  On the way, Thompson radioed to the Winter Garden dispatcher that he was en route to the store on Ficke’s authority, and that they should send other units.  The dispatcher logged the call at 9:21.

Two other officers and their cruisers were within a quarter mile of the scene.  Cindy Blalock was in the Tri-City parking lot, escorting TG&Y’s manager as he carried out a bag of cash.  Jimmy Yawn, who had been with Thompson less than an hour before, was at the Winter Garden Inn; Yawn cut through a service station on the corner of Route 50 and Dillard and drove up to the store.

Thompson, Ficke, and Yawn arrived almost simultaneously.  Thompson and Ficke pulled up out  front, so Yawn continued around toward the back, using the driveway along the north side of the building.

Thompson positioned his cruiser so that his headlights and spotlight illuminated the south side of the building, down to where the high fence joined the rear of the building.

Then Zeigler began to babble.  He talked about his parents' Christmas presents.  He kept repeating, "Don's plant at the store." It made no sense to Thompson, and he asked no more questions.

*

After Thompson left with Zeigler, Don Ficke waited outside the store.  He had no gun, and he wasn't going to enter the dark building without one.  He asked Jimmy Yawn for a shotgun, but Yawn didn't have one in his patrol car.  Cindy Blalock drove up, and Ficke asked her for a shotgun.  She didn't have one, either.  So Ficke sent Yawn to get weapons from their headquarters.  Blalock went around to the back, outside the high fence--she must have passed May's van--to the southwest corner of the back lot, where she could watch the rear of the building.  Out front, Ficke called for backup from the Orange County sheriff's office, and he waited.

Ted Van Deventer drove up with the Presbyterian minister, Mickey Fisher; they had followed Thompson and Ficke.  Ficke asked them to go to Zeigler's house to notify Eunice that her husband had been shot; they left immediately.  A former Winter Garden patrolman named Phil Cross drove up with a friend, Richard Sims.  They had heard the call on a police scanner.  Ficke deputized them both.

After about six minutes, Yawn returned with shotguns, and Ficke passed them out to Sims and Cross.  At about that time, Thompson came back from the hospital with the news that Charlie Mays might be wounded in the store.

Violence was not uncommon in West Orange, especially during harvest season, when the migrant camps were full.  Yawn, Thompson, and Ficke all had known tense situations and had seen the effects of shootings, stabbings, and assaults.  During the past year Ficke had even been involved in a hostage standoff, when a man in an apartment threatened to kill his wife; the apartment belonged to Tommy Zeigler, and Zeigler, who knew the man, had come to the scene and talked him out.

But this was something else:  a large dark store, a wounded robber who was already supposed to have shot one person.  And this on what was supposed to be the quietest night of the year.

Ficke may have felt the tension.  Yawn reported later that the chief was unable to load his own shotgun.  He fumbled with the shells, dropped them to the ground.  Yawn loaded the weapon and gave it to Ficke.

"Let me go in first," Thompson said.  "I know Mays, and he knows me."

Thompson and Yawn went in together, with Phil Cross behind Thompson and to his left.  Ficke and Sims followed.

of blood radiated from his skull across the terrazzo, a ghastly corona.  The store's black metal linoleum crank lay across Mays's right arm.

Yawn and Thompson--perhaps some of the others--had already flipped several wall switches, but the power was off. Yawn and Thompson began to look for a master switch.  Three or four times Yawn passed near the body of Charlie Mays. He noticed two revolvers on the floor within a few feet of Mays's head, two more pistols near Mays's feet.  A fifth pistol lay near the head of the white man, in front of a pair of metal doors in the back wall of the showroom.

Yawn went through these doors, followed by Thompson.  They found themselves in the rear storage area.  The big overhead doors at the loading dock were closed and locked.  But at the back, a second swinging door was unlocked.  Thompson and Yawn opened it and looked out into the fenced back parking area.  They saw a pickup truck, no driver, parked at the loading dock.

They were in the store for several minutes.  During that time Yawn went into the kitchen to look at the young woman.  At first glance he thought she was a mannequin.  She had no obvious wounds.  Her left hand was in the pocket of her cloth coat; she seemed too straight, too composed, to have fallen where she lay.

Her feet were against a closed door that would open onto the rear of the showroom.  Yawn noticed three bullet holes in the door.

Apparently Ficke did not go into the kitchen to see the body.  Although his wife had pointed out the Edwardses' car less than an hour earlier, he failed to make the connection.  None of the others on the scene knew Perry and Virginia Edwards.  None knew Eunice.

*

Gerald Justice, a uniformed sergeant in the sheriff's office, was on road patrol when he got the call.

He found nobody when he parked out in front of the store.  According to a message from the dispatcher, Don Ficke was supposed to be here.

The store was dark.  Justice was walking around to the north side of the building when he heard shouting behind him.

He turned around and saw Ficke, Thompson, and the others leaving the store, through the front doors.

Ficke spotted Justice.

"God damn, Sarge, get me some help," Ficke shouted.

"What do you have in there?" Justice said.

"Multiple homicides," Ficke said.  "I need assistance."

Justice made a radio call to Bruce Churchill, the sheriff's lieutenant who was in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division, and he told Churchill what Ficke had said.

Someone suggested that Eunice and the Edwardses might be hostages inside her home, and the idea seemed to make sense.  Ficke ordered Yawn to Tommy Zeigler's house, with orders to enter the home if necessary.  Yawn got in a car with Fisher, Van Deventer, Phil Cross, and a local photographer named George McClellan.  They headed out to Temple Grove Drive, looking for Eunice Zeigler.

Soon a uniformed sheriff's deputy named James Pearson arrived at the store, followed shortly by Frank Hair, the sheriff's lieutenant in charge of the patrol shift.

Ficke, Hair, and Justice went back into the store.  They went to each of the three bodies.  This time, according to Hair, Ficke looked at the dead woman on the kitchen floor.  But the light was poor, and he did not identify her.

Winter Garden firemen were roping off the parking lot and pushing back the onlookers when Hair and the others came out of the building.  Hair decided to check the back of the building.  He brought James Pearson with him, and they walked up the north drive, to the fenced rear compound.

Pearson saw that the gate was locked, and he climbed up on it.  At about that moment, Hair turned around to look toward Dillard Street, and when he turned back, Pearson had jumped down on the other side of the fence and was looking around the back lot.

Hair walked up to the gate and found it ajar, open five or six inches.  The prong-type latch was still padlocked, but one of the latch's prongs was bent, which allowed the gate to swing back into the compound.

Hair came up behind Pearson and surprised him.

"How the hell did you get in?" Pearson said.

Hair looked around.  On the far side of the fence, in the Winter Garden Inn parking lot, was a shabby blue van.  That was the van of Charlie Mays.  Hair also noticed the pickup truck parked at the loading dock, inside the compound.  The registration of that truck would show that it belonged to Edward Williams.

*

Jimmy Yawn knocked on the front door at 75 Temple Grove, looking for Eunice Zeigler.  He got no answer.  He could see lights inside, but no movement.  Yawn walked around to the back; everything seemed quiet.  He noticed a small tear in the back screen door, just above the latch.

Yawn got on the radio to request backup.  Ficke sent Revels and Robert Thompson, who had returned after finding Curtis Dunaway at home with his family and bringing him to the store.

Yawn covered the front door while Ted Van Deventer tried the keys.  None of them worked.  Thompson used his flashlight to break a pane of glass in the French doors around back, and Yawn and Thompson entered.

*

Some of the evidence technicians had appeared by the time Blankenship, Bird, and Churchill left the store.  Blankenship walked around the north side of the building, down the driveway that led to the fenced parking area in the rear.

He found the electrical junction box on the outside wall.  The lever of the master switch was down.  Blankenship told one of the technicians to photograph it.  Then he used his flashlight to push the lever up.

The lights came on inside.

*

Robert Thompson showed up twice at Curtis Dunaway's family gathering.  The first time, Thompson only checked to be sure that Dunaway was safe.  He told Dunaway that Tommy Zeigler had been shot, and asked why Dunaway had turned off the power at the junction box when he left the store that evening.

Dunaway told him that he had not turned off the master switch.

Thompson showed up again less than an hour later, to bring Dunaway to the store.  A sheriff's detective brought Dunaway into the building, with instructions to keep his head down, not to look right or left but to follow the detective's path, step for step.

He was led to the body of Mays and asked to identify it.

Yes, Dunaway said, that was Charlie.  Then he was marched out again with the same instructions.

Dunaway stood outside beside Rita Ficke until shortly after midnight, when he was brought into the store again.  Dr. Guillermo Ruiz, a medical examiner, was on the scene.  Dunaway followed Ruiz to each of the three unidentified bodies.  He knew them all.

The white man was Perry Edwards, Eunice's father.

The older woman was Virginia Edwards.

The pretty young woman in the kitchen, straight and composed, was Eunice Zeigler.

Dr. Ruiz would perform autopsies on the bodies throughout most of Christmas Day.  That night at the store, he made preliminary examinations where they were found.

He began with Virginia Edwards.  She had been shot twice.  One bullet had passed through an arm, penetrated her chest, and nearly exited the other side--Ruiz could feel it under the skin.  The other bullet had entered her brain.

Charlie Mays had been shot twice in the abdomen, once from the front and once from the back, and had been badly beaten around the face and skull.

Four

Donald Frye’s beeper sounded when he was at the movies. He telephoned the sheriff’s dispatcher and was told that there had been a shooting and robbery attempt at Zeigler Furniture in Winter Garden.  He got to the store just after Blankenship,  Bird, and Churchill discovered the body of Virginia Edwards.

Frye was twenty-nine years old and had nearly five years of police experience, all with the Orange County sheriff’s office.  He had been an OCSO detective since mid-1973, assigned to the Crimes Against Persons Section.  Detectives in that unit usually worked in pairs and were assigned cases by rotation.  In December 1975, Frye was teamed with Detective James Jenkins, and on Christmas Eve their names were at the top of the call list.

Frye took charge almost immediately.  Jenkins was already busy with another case, to which he would be assigned full-time in the next day or two.  From Christmas Eve on, Frye had day-to-day responsibility for the investigation.

No Orange County detective had ever investigated a quadruple homicide.  Few had ever confronted a murder scene so large or complex; the building measured 10,600 square feet, and potential evidence could be found throughout, although the greatest violence seemed to have occurred near the back of the showroom, especially in the northwest corner where Mays’s body was found.  The signs there were obvious: furniture in a jumble, bullet holes in the walls and ceiling, and dried sprays of blood.

That night and early Christmas morning the crime scene technicians collected and impounded items that included:

Ÿ       A pair of glasses and a set of keys on a ring, near the northwest corner of the showroom, not far from Charlie Mays’s body; both were later identified as belonging to Tommy Zeigler.

Ÿ       A tooth found in that same general area, against the north wall.

Ÿ       Receipt slips totaling about $415, and $405 in cash, stuffed in one of Charlie Mays’s trouser pockets.

Ÿ       A footstool with blood smeared on the legs, found at the back of the showroom where much of the carnage had occurred.

Ÿ       A shoulder holster, found between Mays and the west wall of the showroom.

Ÿ       What appeared to be the fingertip from a surgical rubber glove, just west of the kitchen door.

Smears and droplets of blood formed a trail past the west door of the kitchen, along the north wall of the store to the corner of the showroom.  The trail continued as a series of faint blood swipes on the terrazzo, ending at the body of Perry Edwards.  Frye surmised that this trail marked a fierce battle between Perry Edwards and his attacker.  He decided that the swipe marks on the terrazzo had been transferred from bloody clothing during a struggle that ended when Edwards was shot through the head.  Some of the blood droplets from Mays’s beating had splashed on top of these swipes, and when Frye examined them closely he saw that the swipe had already been dry when the droplets fell.

This was startling.  It meant that at least fifteen minutes—the minimum time required for the swipes to dry—had elapsed between the murders of Perry Edwards and Mays.

There was more.  The shoulder holster was spotless, although it was found within the scatter of blood from Mays’s beating.  When Frye lifted the holster he found blood on the floor beneath it.  However, none of that blood had spotted the bottom of the holster.  So the holster had been placed there, on dry blood, sometime after Mays was killed.

And more.  The kitchen door at Eunice Zeigler’s feet was closed.  Yet when Frye opened the door he found, along the door frame, the minute blood spray that can only be produced by a high-velocity impact.  It was located almost exactly at the height of the wound behind Eunice’s left ear, the single shot to the brain that killed her.  Frye, noting that her left hand was still in her pocket, believed that she had been surprised while standing in the open doorway.  The door must have been closed later.

Frye realized that what had happened in the store had not been a single, frenetic event. Rather, Charlie Mays had been shot and beaten a quarter hour or more after the first three murders. Someone, presumably the killer, had walked around the scene after the murders: the bloody shoe prints and the holster on top of dry blood seemed to demonstrate that.  To Frye, all of this cast doubt on Tommy Zeigler’s statement that he had shot Mays in a robbery attempt.

Yet Tommy Zeigler was in West Orange Memorial with a gunshot wound in the abdomen.

A few feet east of the service counter, seventy or eighty feet from the carnage at the back of the showroom, was a large patch of blood that had soaked into the carpet. Some tiny pieces of glass lay in the blood. Frye assumed that they came from the broken lens of a flashlight nearby.  A few feet from that pool of blood, on the facing of the counter, Frye could make out the high-velocity splatter from a gunshot wound.  A bloody trail of drips and smears led from this spot to the front door.

Five

Edward Williams first tried to tell his story at the 33rd Street sheriff's substation in south Orlando.  The desk officer there, apparently unaware that the crime was now a county matter, told Williams that he should go to the Winter Garden police headquarters.

Williams left.  The sheriff's officers at the store were dismayed to learn by radio that their first potential witness had been sent off into the night.

An OCSO detective, H.D. "Denny" Martin, was waiting for Williams when he arrived at the Winter Garden headquarters around midnight.  Williams was driving his gray Camaro.  He was accompanied by a woman named Mary Ellen Stewart, whom he described as a friend from Orlando, and Mrs. Stewart's son-in-law.

Edward Williams was a black man, a forty-seven-year-old native of the Bahamas who had come to the United States in 1953 with a harvesting crew and had become a citizen ten years later. He still spoke with a soft Bahamian accent.

This is the story he told:

At 7:28 that evening he arrived in his pickup truck at Zeigler's house.  On Monday, Zeigler had asked Williams to meet him at 7:30, to help deliver some large gifts.  Zeigler had reminded him of the appointment on Christmas Eve.  Nobody was at home when Williams arrived at Temple Grove Drive; Williams found a note from Zeigler saying that he would be back in a few minutes.

Williams waited in his pickup.  After about ten to fifteen minutes, Zeigler drove up to his car, accompanied by two people, one up front beside him and one in the backseat.

Zeigler went into his house while the passengers stayed in the car. When he came out, two or three minutes later, he walked up to Williams in the truck.  He told Williams to wait another ten minutes, and he drove off with the two passengers.

Williams waited.  After ten to twelve minutes another car came up the driveway, a white man and a woman; they backed out and left.  The time now would have been about 8:00 to 8:10, based on Williams's estimates.  After about twenty minutes Zeigler drove up again.  This time he was alone.  He parked the car in the garage and jumped out holding a small bag.

Zeigler went to a sink in the garage.  He wet a towel or cloth and appeared to wipe around the car.  He put the towel in the sink, came out, and closed the garage door with a remote control in his pickup truck.

He climbed into Williams's truck, and Williams noticed something strange.

Zeigler still had the gun.  He insisted that he meant Williams no harm.  Williams asked Zeigler to unlock the gate so he could leave, and Zeigler asked Williams to follow him inside so he could get the key.

Williams refused.  He was sure that Zeigler meant to kill him.

Zeigler told Williams to calm down and be quiet.  He gave Williams the pistol, and he put an arm around Williams, trying to hold him. Williams noticed spots of blood on Zeigler's face and clothes, and he pushed Zeigler off.

Zeigler pleaded for Williams to come into the store with him: "Edward, if you don't go, you're gonna frame me."

Williams decided to lie his way to safety.  He told Zeigler that he would follow him into the store if Zeigler would first open the gate.

Zeigler agreed.  Instead, though, he got in Williams's truck. Williams ran in the opposite direction, to the southwest corner of the compound.  He climbed the fence and jumped down into the back lot of the Winter Garden Inn.

Williams put the pistol in his pocket, went across Dillard Street to the Kentucky Fried Chicken, and asked to use the telephone.  He also asked the number of the police.

A clerk gave him a telephone number and showed him to a phone in the office.  Williams tried the number he had been given, and had a confused conversation with someone who told him, "There ain't no police here." Frustrated, he left the restaurant.  Outside he met two girls whom he knew; he asked them for a ride.

"They said they was on their way to Orlando.  I said could you drop me in Orlando.  She said yeah.  I said will you hurry because it's urgent.  I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm in a bad fix."

Williams was in their car when he remembered that his Camaro was supposed to have been repaired that day.  He found it outside the service station where he had brought it, with the key inside.  He drove to Orlando, to the home of Mary Stewart, whom he had known for years. He told her what had happened; she called her attorney, and on his advice they went to the sheriff's substation.

Williams concluded his statement:  "This is Edward Williams speaking, concerning what happened to him on Christmas Eve....[T]he only thing I was wondering was, what worries me why, it worries me wondering why Mr. Tommy being so nice to me, why he would try to take my life."

*

One of the crime scene technicians removed a chrome-plated Securities Industries .38 snub-nose revolver from between the front seats of the Camaro.  All six cylinders were empty.  According to Williams, this was the pistol that Zeigler gave him when he tried to coax him back into the store.

Table One

TIME SEQUENCE:  EDWARD WILLIAMS

Based on Williams's original statement and his subsequent testimony. Williams apparently looked at his watch only once on Christmas Eve, when he arrived at 75 Temple Grove Drive.  All other times are approximate, based on his estimates and the known driving time between the house and the furniture store.  Where Williams estimated a range of time--between fifteen and twenty minutes, for example--the greater figure is used.

7:28 P.M.    At Tommy Zeigler's house, Williams finds a note from Tommy Zeigler, checks watch.

7:40            Zeigler arrives in a car with two passengers, goes into his house, comes out, and asks Williams to wait about ten more minutes; then drives away.

8:00            A white man and a woman pull into the drive, then leave.

8:25            Zeigler drives up alone, parks the car, and wipes it down.  Williams notices dark stain on Zeigler's pants. Zeigler gets into Williams's truck, and they drive to the furniture store.

8:35            Williams and Zeigler arrive at the store.  Zeigler enters the front door and Williams waits at the back gate.

8:40            Zeigler brings Williams into the store, tries to kill him; chases him into rear compound, pleads with him to come into the store again; Williams refuses and climbs the fence.

8:45            Williams attempts to call police from Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Q:  Okay, did he tell you the man’s name or tell you who the man was or what he did or anything like that to identify him?

Q:  Okay, the man named Zeigler who owned the furniture store that you were at, right?

A:  Right.

Near Thomas’s feet on the floor of the Cadillac was a supermarket paper bag containing three pistols.  The white man whom Mays called Zeigler lowered the electric windows.  Mays took one pistol and fired three or four shots outside, without leaving his seat.  Thomas took a gun, but Zeigler told him to put it down, try another, and Thomas did.  He fired a single shot.

Q:  Okay, let me, let me clear a few things up about the weapons, now and when you were firing them. Did, whose idea was it for you to fire the guns?

A:  It, it was his idea.

Q:  Okay, you’re talking about Mr. Zeigler?

A:  Mr. Zeigler’s, it was his idea.

Q:  Okay, what did he say to you to get you to fire them?

A:  He said he wanted our opinion about seeing whether they good guns, accurate guns, you know.

Q:  So in other words he, he just wanted to, wanted you—

A:  Just wanted us to fire the guns seemed like.

Q:  Okay, just wanted you to fire the guns to see if they were good guns—

A:  Right.

Q: —in your opinion

A:  Right.

Q:  Okay, and after you had fired the weapons…you fired the one weapon and Charlie Mays fired the other  one, is that right?

A:  Right.

Q:  Okay, now, did Mr. Zeigler ever fire any of the weapons?

A:  No sir, he, he, he never touched the weapons.  He just, just, just looked at the one I had in my hand and said try the other one.

Q:  Okay, so he never touched the weapons as, as far as you saw, right?

A:  As far as I saw, he never touched them.

After they had fired the pistols, Zeigler drove them back up Dillard Street to the furniture store.  He put Thomas out of the car and told him to pull the switch at the electrical box along the north side of the store.

him a ride to Oakland.  Around midnight he heard about the murders in the store, heard that Charlie Mays had been killed.

Q:  Did you see what happened after they [went] in the door?

A:  No sir, it, it was, it was too dark for anybody to see, see them after they stepped in the building.

Q:  So the only thing you can say is that you saw Charlie Mays and, and Mr. Zeigler come in the building together and all the lights were off.

A:  Yes sir.Q:  Okay.  Mr. Thomas, would you say that Mr. Zeigler was acting peculiar or was acting suspicious while entering the, entering the building?

A:  Well, well well I didn’t know the man[‘s] ways, but he had some peculiar ways about him.  The, the, the way he seemed to be acting, you know, it, it, it wasn’t right you know . . .

Q:  Was there anything else about the way he was conducting himself or the way he was acting that made you feel suspicious that he was possibly doing something wrong, anything like that?

A:  Well, well I said in, in my mind . . . Af, af, after what happened, you know, it all seemed like, like he, he was, you know, just trying to use somebody or something.

*By now Robert Thompson had identified Charlie May’s van across the fence, where Felton Thomas had said it was parked.  The dirt road south of Route 50 and the grove were as Thomas described them. Above all, Thomas’s story meshed with that of Edward Williams on a crucial point: apparently they had noticed each other when Zeigler drove to the house with Mays and Thomas.  Williams had seen two passengers with Zeigler; Felton Thomas had seen a vehicle behind Zeigler’s pickup in the driveway, exactly where Williams had claimed he was parked.

Thomas had identified that vehicle as a car, not a truck, and the Dunaway Oldsmobile was certainly not a Cadillac[4].  But the discrepancies seemed unimportant to Frye.  He believed that Felton Thomas was telling the truth, that in watching Charlie Mays enter the store with Zeigler, Thomas had witnessed the last few moments of May’s life.  Frye believed that Zeigler had murdered Mays, shooting him and then beating him to death, within seconds after the front door closed behind them.

[4]              The Zeiglers’ new car was a white Oldsmobile Toronado, which did resemble a Cadillac.

 TIME SEQUENCE: FELTON THOMAS

Thomas gave no specific times or intervals.  Don Frye reconstructed a time line, on the premise that Thomas and Charlie Mays arrived at the furniture store around 7:30 p.m.

7:30 p.m. Mays and Thomas are at store.  Store is dark, Zeigler is gone.  Edwardses’ car is parked out front.

7:35 p.m.             Zeigler drives up and parks beside Mays’s van.  Mays and Thomas leave with Zeigler in his car.  Mays and Thomas fire pistols in the orange grove.

7:40 p.m. Back to the furniture store.  Thomas pulls electrical switch,  Zeigler attempts to break into the store, Mays objects.  They drive to Zeigler’s house.

7:50 p.m. The three arrive at Zeigler’s house.  Zeigler comes out of garage with a box of ammunition, tells Mays to reload.  They return to store.

8:00 p.m.   Mays and Zeigler enter the furniture store.  Thomas refuses, runs away, finds a ride back to Oakland.

2:30 a.m. Thomas turns himself in to OSCO patrolman near Orlando.

*

Frye and Ficke went from the hospital to 75 Temple Grove.  They were joined by Jenkins and two evidence technicians, and the party searched the house for two hours or more.

In the bath of the master bedroom they found a Holiday Inn towel with reddish stains, suspected to be blood.

In a nightstand drawer they found twenty-four live .38 cartridges, twelve each of Remington and Winchester.

In the garage they found a damp hand towel.

They spent considerable time examining the Dunaway Oldsmobile parked in the garage.  Frye found reddish smears, suspected blood, on the front of the driver's headrest.  He found blood-like smears on the interior door handle, driver's side.  Later the car was towed to the 33rd Street station, where it was examined again.  Technicians found a tissue paper with a blood-like stain crumpled under the driver's seat.

Detectives questioned Dunaway.  He had not bled in his car, he said; he had no explanation for the stains.  They had not been there on Christmas Eve, when he exchanged cars with Tommy Zeigler.

*

Dr. Guillermo Ruiz began to autopsy the bodies at 7:00 A.M. on Christmas Day.

The first body was that of Virginia Edwards.  She was five feet nine, 147 pounds.  Ruiz traced the path of the bullet that had passed through her right arm, then penetrated her chest, one lung, the liver, and stomach.  He recovered the .38 caliber slug nearly intact from under the skin on the left side of her torso.

The second shot, the killing bullet to her head, was in three fragments in her brain.  Dr. Ruiz noted powder tattooing around a bullet wound in a finger of her right hand, and surmised that she had been shot at close range while holding her hand to her head.

Eunice Zeigler, five feet six and 114 pounds, had died from the gunshot behind her left ear.  Ruiz recovered the bullet in two pieces. He found no other injuries.

Perry Edwards, who apparently had struggled so bravely at the back of the store, was five feet ten, 150 pounds.  He had been shot five times.  There were through-and-through wounds—that is, from bullets that had exited the body-in his right ear, his right shoulder, and his left shoulder.  Ruiz recovered two .38 caliber slugs from his brain, the close-range shots that had killed him.

bleed profusely.  Frye speculated that Edwards had bled on Zeigler's shirt while Zeigler held the seventy-two year old man clenched in a headlock and battered his skull with the crank.

The soles of Zeigler's shoes were of a ripple pattern and showed traces of what appeared to be blood.  The OCSO technicians had lifted an impression of one of the bloody prints in the rear hallway.  Frye performed an "overlay."  That is, he lightly placed one of Zeigler's shoes over the impression of the bloody print.

Frye was not a footprint expert, but he knew the evidence of his own eyes.  It was a match.

*

One of Tommy Zeigler's close friends in Winter Garden was Richard Smith, chief physical therapist and director of security and safety at West Orange Memorial.  In the early 1970's they had served together in an Army Reserve unit.

On Christmas morning, Smith visited ICU several times to see his friend.  Smith knew that Zeigler had not yet been told about the deaths of Eunice and the others.  After speaking with Zeigler's physician, Dr. Gleason, Smith decided that he must break the news.

His account of that moment is contained in his trial testimony, and in the sworn statement that he gave to police on January 12.

Smith said that at around 11:00 Christmas morning he went into the ICU room with Wayman "Lee" Jones, who was also close to Zeigler.  Lee Jones was president of Orange Federal Savings and Loan in Winter Garden.

Smith stood by Zeigler's side.

"Do you know what's happened?" Smith said.

"I went down there with Edward," Zeigler said.

Smith asked him again if he knew what had happened.  Zeigler said that he had gone into the store.  He tried a light switch, but the light didn't come on.  He moved toward another switch, and he was hit from behind.  He felt a sharp, hot pain.

Now he seemed to doze off again.  Smith shook him and blurted, "Tommy, Eunice is dead."

And at that, Smith testified, Zeigler closed his eyes and began to cry, and Smith took him in his arms.

7:50        Zeigler, Mays, and Thomas arrive at Temple Grove Drive.  Thomas sees Williams truck.  Williams sees Zeigler and two passengers in Dunaway's car.  Zeigler gets a box of ammunition from the house and tells Williams to wait a few more minutes.  Zeigler, Mays, and Thomas return to the store.

7:55-8:00 Zeigler parks at the front of the store and coaxes Mays inside.  Thomas runs away.  Zeigler kills Mays.

8:10         Don and Rita Ficke drive to 75 Temple Grove, looking for Tommy and Eunice. They see Williams in his truck, no car in the lighted garage.

8:20-30    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.

8:35-40   Zeigler and Williams arrive at the store in Williams's truck.  Williams parks his truck in the back lot as Zeigler instructs him.  Zeigler locks the gate.

8:40         Don and Rita Ficke drive to Zeigler's home.  Williams's truck is gone. Dunaway's Olds is parked inside the garage.

8:40-50   Zeigler attempts to shoot and kill Edward Williams with an empty revolver (Securities .38).  Zeigler gives the gun to Williams.

9:20       Zeigler phones the Van Deventer home.

On December 26, Frye began to study the financial paperwork in Zeigler’s office desk.  In a locked drawer of the desk2 Frye found three term life insurance policies.  All had been applied for in September of 1975.  One was issued in October 1975, the other in November, less than two months before the murders.

One of the policies, in the amount of $250,000, was on Tommy Zeigler.  Two others, each for $250,000, were on Eunice.  Both of these had been applied for by Tommy.  Counting smaller policies, Tommy Zeigler and the family corporation of which he was part owner stood to gain more than half a million dollars from the death of his wife.  The policies not only provided a classic motive for murder, but suggested that Zeigler had contemplated the killings for many weeks.  Other evidence implied that Zeigler had planned in thoughtful detail.

Mattie Mays told investigators about the promised TV, and the 7:30 appointment at the store.

Curtis Dunaway said the blue towel came from his car: he used it to cover up holes in the upholstery.  Dunaway told how he and Zeigler had exchanged cars on Christmas Eve.  Zeigler, not Dunaway, had initiated the swap.  The new white Toronado would have been obvious as Zeigler drove around the streets of his hometown.  But he would be much less conspicuous in Dunaway’s drab four-year-old model.  When he drove with Felton Thomas, and later, Edward Williams that night, Zeigler followed routes that bypassed busy Dillard Street.  He literally went out of his way to escape recognition.

Don and Rita Ficke told Frye about their three trips to Temple Grove Drive when they were looking for Tommy and Eunice.  On their second visit, around 8:10, they saw Edward Williams in his pickup truck, waiting in the driveway.  There was no car.  This corroborated William’s account.  On their third trip, the pickup truck was gone, and Dunaway’s Oldsmobile was parked in the garage.  This, too, was consistent with William’s story.

Robert Thompson, the Oakland chief of police, told Frye that Zeigler had come to Oakland on December 23, specifically to invite him to the Van Deventers’ party.  At Zeigler’s request, Ficke had posted a bulletin at Winter Garden police headquarters, inviting all officers to attend the gathering.  Frye felt that Zeigler had contrived to have all the local police at the party and off the streets by 7:10, when he would be bringing Eunice to the store to kill her.  Her parents would arrive a few minutes later, and Charlie Mays’s appointment was less than a quarter of an hour after that.  At the same time, Edward Williams would be finding the note in the garage at Temple Grove Street.  Frye was convinced that Tommy Zeigler had planned four murders almost to the minute.

2              Investigators forced it  open with a screwdriver.

Zeigler's story did not address the beating death of Charlie Mays, or the fact that Zeigler's shoulder holster was found on top of Mays's dry blood splatters.  It did not explain why Edward Williams and Felton Thomas, two black men apparently unknown to each other, each had come forth with damning stories against a man whom they had no reason to dislike, much less to hate.

Orange County’s police and prosecutors learned that the term “fast” could in no sense be applied to the FBI Lab.

Speed was not the only consideration.  Some of the results, when they were finally released, became instantly controversial.  Before the trial was finished, both prosecution and defense would have reason to question the work of the nation’s finest crime laboratory.

*

The murders and the investigation dominated local news.

Central Florida’s most important print outlet was the Orlando Sentinel Star.  On Christmas Day, because of deadlines, the newspaper reported the killings at the top of its Metro pages.  The crime was described as a “robbery attempt,” and by press time the four dead had not been identified.  Sheriff’s lieutenant Bruce Churchill was quoted as saying, “It will take us a long time to determine what happened.”

Every day for the next week, the story was at the top of page one of the Sentinel Star.  Much of the reporting relied on unnamed police sources, and the tone of the articles reflected a growing skepticism about Zeigler.

In the early editions of December 26, authorities were reported to be “totally baffled about how or why the shootings occurred—although not ruling out robbery.”  The afternoon edition, however, reported, “Exhausted investigators today predicted charges will be filed almost immediately….While police first said they thought robbery was the motive in the early evening gun battle, they now say ‘there are other things to consider here.’ “

The next day, the 27^th, the headline was KILLINGS SURVIVOR REFUSES TO TALK.  The lead paragraph read:  “The lone survivor and only witness to a bloody Christmas Eve massacre…refused on the advice of his lawyer Friday to answer investigators’ questions.”

Sheriff Melvin G. Colman would not comment on whether Zeigler was a suspect.  As for the robbery theory, Colman said, “We haven’t ruled out anything in the case.”

The article went on:  “Some investigators said early Friday they believed they were ready to charge a suspect.  But following an afternoon conference at the blood-spattered furniture store between Colman and Assistant State Atty. Lawson L. Lamar, it was decided to continue gathering evidence and await results of laboratory tests.”

On Sunday, the 28^th, the Sentinel Star reported the existence of an unnamed “mystery witness”—Edward Williams—who was described as having gone to the police “minutes after the shootings.”    Eunice Zeigler was said to have been found at the front of the showroom, her mother in the kitchen.  By now the

Eleven

The preliminary hearing in Florida v. Zeigler was scheduled for January 16.  Florida law required that a defendant either be indicted or be given a preliminary hearing within twenty-one days of arrest.  The state attorney, Robert Eagan, chose a preliminary hearing.  The deadline was January 18, a Sunday.  So Friday, January 16, was the last practical day the hearing could be held.  Otherwise Zeigler would have to be released, though he could be arrested again later.

The state attorney's office needed all the time it could get.  So far the FBI Lab had not returned any results.  In particular, there were no findings from the ballistics section.  The prosecution hoped to show that Eunice and her parents had been killed by Tommy Zeigler's pistols.  But until the FBI Lab came back with its report, none of the recovered bullets could be matched to any of the eight firearms. Professor MacDonell studied the crime scene on January 7, after which police relinquished the store to the defense.  But MacDonell's report would not be ready in time for the hearing.

Frye and Denny Martin continued to work.

Thomas Hale, an acquaintance of the Zeiglers, told Frye that at around 7:15 P.M. on Christmas Eve he had seen Tommy and Eunice at Route 50 and Dillard.  Hale said he was in the inner southbound lane of Dillard, waiting for the light to change, when Tommy made a left turn off Route 50.  The two cars passed within three feet of each other, with Zeigler continuing north up Dillard, toward the store.  Hale said that Eunice was beside Tommy in the front seat.

This was a breakthrough.  Hale was the first witness to place Tommy and Eunice together near the furniture store at the time of the murders.  The testimony contradicted Zeigler's assertion that he had stayed at home while Eunice drove to the store with her parents.

By inference, Hale's story supported the accounts of Felton Thomas and Edward Williams.  The left turn that Hale noticed, from Route 50 onto Dillard, suggested the same indirect route to the store that both Williams and Thomas described.

Frye interviewed Rogenia Thomas,1 one of the two young women who had met Williams outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken.  She basically corroborated Williams's story, although later there was some disagreement about whether he had actually mentioned Zeigler's name to her.

1              Apparently no relation to Felton Thomas.

against the Ski Mask bandits, the gang of armed thieves who at the time were robbing businesses throughout central Florida.  This was the pistol found near Perry Edwards.

The .22 Smith & Wesson Escort, which Zeigler said he had fired once before it jammed, was on loan to Zeigler from Don Ficke.  Zeigler carried this little semiautomatic at his belt.  It was one of the two guns found near Charlie Mays's feet.

The .38 Burgo derringer, also found near Mays's feet, was normally kept under the cash register at the counter.  Zeigler could not explain how it ended up on the terrazzo floor with an expended shell in the top chamber.

The Securities Industries .38 also was used for Zeigler's personal protection.  He said he usually kept the pistol and a shoulder holster in the custom metal writing desk built into the dashboard of his pickup truck, which he used for making collections on rent and furniture accounts.  This was the gun the Edward Williams brought to the Winter Garden police after Zeigler apparently had tried to kill him.  Zeigler did not explain how it had ended up in Williams's possession.2

The .38 Smith & Wesson belonged to Zeigler and normally was kept against a file cabinet in the store's customer service area.  Zeigler did not explain how it had ended up in Curtis Dunaway's car, in Zeigler's garage, where Jimmy Yawn found it on the night of the 24th.

The .22 Beretta belonged to Zeigler, and had been found where he usually kept it, in his desk drawer.

According to Hadley, Zeigler had never seen and could not explain the two .38 RG revolvers found near the head of Charlie Mays.

Early in January, Thomas showed Frye and Martin the remote orange grove where he said Zeigler had driven them and they had shot the revolvers.  Martin and a second deputy, James Lee Bryan, brought a crew of trusties from the Orange County Jail and began to dig for bullets in the earth.  On January 12, after two days of sifting dirt and sand, Bryan reported that they had recovered a single .38 slug.

If that bullet could be matched to any of the guns from the store, it would lend great substance to Thomas's story.  Without ballistics testing, though, the slug meant next to nothing.  The OCSO shipped it to Washington, where it was added to the earlier submissions.  The chance was nil that it might be tested before the preliminary hearing.

As the date of the hearing approached, only one set of results came back.  These were the test swabs for gunshot residue, taken from the hands of the four murder victims.  The swabs had been submitted to the state's Sanford Laboratory rather than to the FBI.

__________________________________________

2    The Securities Industries .38 was chrome-plated.  The .357 Colt found near Perry Edwards was stainless-steel, and also bright.  All the other Handguns were black or dark blue.

Twelve

An Orange County judge, Frank Kaney, listened to nearly six hours of testimony in the preliminary hearing on January 16.

Zeigler had recovered from his wound and was brought by elevator from the county jail, in the courthouse building.  A sheriff’s deputy told reporters, “We’ve received some thirdhand, hearsay-type threats against Zeigler.”

There was no jury.  Preliminary hearings usually are less formal than a trial, and the rules of evidence are somewhat relaxed.

In the absence of physical evidence, the state pinned its case on Felton Thomas and Edward Williams.  They were still in protective custody; each was escorted into the courtroom by a pair of sheriff’s deputies.

Thomas again gave his name as Thomas Felton. Assistant State Attorney Lawson Lamar led him through virtually the same story he had told Frye and Jenkins in the early hours of Christmas Day.  A crucial point came early in his direct testimony, when Thomas told of sitting with Charlie Mays in the blue van, parked behind the store:

Q   (LAMAR):  Did you say a guy drove up to your car?

A   (THOMAS):  Right.

Q:  And did you all talk with him?

A:  He told Charlie to come around and ride with him a minute.

Q:  He told Charlie to come and ride with him?

A:  Yes.

Q:  Who was this guy?  Had you ever seen him before?

A:  No, I haven’t.

Q:  Is that guy in this room today anywhere?  Look around the room.

A:  The guy right there.

He pointed out Tommy Zeigler, seated between his two attorneys.

The Zeiglers had retained Ed Kirkland, an experienced trial lawyer from Orlando, to assist Terry Hadley.  Kirkland, like almost everyone else except the police and the prosecution, was hearing this account for the first time.  Under Kirkland’s cross-examination, Thomas admitted that he had drunk two or three beers in the late afternoon before he met Mays.  But Kirkland did not shake him from his story.

Edward Williams followed Thomas to the stand.  Williams, too, remained mostly consistent to his original account.  He described again how Zeigler had

Q:  How dark was it in there?

A:  It was clear enough for me to see the person ahead of me.

Q:  What light was there available in that store?

A:  It was clear light from the outside of the store.  I could see a clear light inside; I couldn’t see nothing in the hall, but in the main store it was clear enough that I could see if anybody was there.

Q:  In other words, you say right in this open hallway there’s absolutely no visibility, that it’s dark, but once you got even with this workbench, you could see?

A:  When I got inside, it was clear enough that I could see Tommy, Mr. Tommy.  And looking for a dead body, I wasn’t looking for nothing; I didn’t expect to see nothing.

Q:  Just answer my questions.

A:  Yes, sir, I just couldn’t see—

Q:  Just answer my questions.

Kirkland shifted to a new line of questions, implying that Williams was in need of money.  Then he went back to the gun that Williams brought to the police.

Q:  And you say you had a weapon then, a pistol?

A:  No sir, I didn’t have no pistol?

Q:  He gave it to you, didn’t he?

A:  He gave me a pistol after he came out.

Q:  So you had a weapon then.  He came out of that building, and you say it was in Mr. Zeigler’s hands?

A:  He gave me the weapon, yes.

Q:  So you were in the building that night, were you not?

LAWSON LAMAR:  Your Honor, this is repetitious.

JUDGE KANEY:  I think he’s entitled to ask him questions one at a time.

Q:  What I am saying is, you were broke, and you had an opportunity to kill these people, and you had a weapon in your hand that you turned in to the police, did you not, Mr. Williams?

A:  No sir, I didn’t kill nobody since I been born.  I got the weapon from Mr. Tommy Zeigler.

Don Frye summed up the evidence against Zeigler.  He testified to the bloody footprints, to the holster found on top of the blood spatters, to the cache of paper bags and ammunition and the blue towel found in the cabinet near the loading dock.  He described the apparent bloodstains found in Curtis Dunaway’s car.

Without lab results, Frye could not testify that the stains actually were blood.  Without a ballistics report, he could not match any of the fatal shots to the guns

Thirteen

One day after Tommy Zeigler’s release, police investigators traced the ownership of the two .38 RG revolvers.  They had been bought new the previous June from a pawnshop in Orlando.  The purchaser was Frank Smith, a black twenty-seven year old cab driver who was a friend of Edward Williams.

Smith told Don Frye that he had bought the guns for Tommy Zeigler, whom he had never met.  He said that in May he had spoken to Zeigler when Williams telephoned Zeigler from Smith's apartment.  According to Smith, Zeigler wanted two revolvers that could not be traced.  Smith said he brought the pistols two or three weeks later and  immediately phoned Zeigler at the furniture store.  The next day, according to Smith, Edward Williams gave him $159 from Zeigler and took a paper bag containing the two weapons.

Edward Williams corroborated Smith's story.  According to Williams, Zeigler first approached him about buying "hot" guns in March or April 1975.  Williams recommended Smith, on the assumption that a cab driver might know a source of stolen property.  Williams confirmed that he delivered a sealed envelope—presumably containing money—from Zeigler to Smith in June, and that he had brought the paper bag from Smith's apartment to Zeigler's house.  He said that Tommy was not home when he delivered the package, but that he gave it to Eunice.  Later Zeigler told him that he had received the package.

This satisfied Frye.  It seemed to prove that Zeigler actually had been planning the crime for more that half a year.  All eight guns in the case—six from the store, one from Curtis Dunaway's Oldsmobile, and the one that Edward Williams turned in to police the night of the murders—now were tied to Tommy Zeigler.

Frye continued to work exclusively on the case.  Since about the first of the year he had been  interviewing the Zeiglers' friends and neighbors, acquaintances and enemies.  Frye wanted to know more about the marriage of Tommy and Eunice: a happily married man does not plot for months to murder his wife.

Over several weeks, Frye compiled a portrait of a stifled, dissatisfied wife in an unequal marriage.  He believed that Eunice had been unhappy, living next door to a meddling mother-in-law.  He was told that Beulah Zeigler was an overbearing woman who dominated both Eunice and Tom senior.  Eunice's beautician told Frye that Tommy berated her for running the air conditioner, and that there was friction between wife and mother.

Frye heard frightening stories about Tommy Zeigler as a youth. Unhappy that his parents had sold the family home, he returned there and vandalized the house after the new owners moved in.  He had cut the leg off a dog, the family pet. 

Fourteen

In February the FBI Lab began to release its test findings.

Ballistics examinations showed that the five bullets recovered from the bodies had been fired by two or three different pistols.  The bullet in the brain of Eunice Zeigler was too badly deformed to be identified with a specific gun.   However, its rifling twists and grooves were consistent with having been fired from either of the two RG revolvers.  The two killing shots to the head of Perry Edwards had come from the Securities Industries .38, Tommy Zeigler’s chrome-plated “truck gun,” which Edward Williams gave to the police.  The same pistol had also fired the killing shot into the head of Virginia Edwards.  But the slug found in Mrs. Edwards’s chest was from one of the two RGs.

The slug recovered from the orange grove could not be linked to any specific gun.  However, it shared the unusual rifling characteristics of the Securities .38.  This was also true of the .38 slug that had disabled the wall clock.  Several other slugs recovered from around the store were generically identified with the two RG pistols.

Eight empty cartridges from the Securities .38 were identified from the bags in the cabinet at the rear of the store.1

Of the other weapons involved:

Ÿ       The Colt .375 magnum found near the feet of Mr. Edwards seemed to have been fired six times without being reloaded.

Ÿ       The .22 Smith & Wesson Escort automatic found at the feet of Charlie Mays apparently had been fired once before it jammed.

Ÿ       The .38 Burgo derringer had fired one shot.  The two bloody cartridges found in Zeigler’s desk drawer probably had misfired in this weapon.

Ÿ       Apparently neither the .22 automatic found in Zeigler’s office desk nor the .38 Smith & Wesson from the Dunaway car had been fired.

The fact that Mrs. Edwards had been shot by two different guns suggested to Frye that she had run toward the front of the store after being shot through the chest.  Frye believed that Zeigler, having fired all five shots from one of the RG

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1              In order to fire eight shots or more, this revolver must have been reloaded during the crime. The chambers were empty when Edward Williams brought it to the Winter Garden police headquarters. The killer must have dumped out the spent cartridges and then placed them in the bag where they were found. For some reason he failed to reload a second time, although live .38 cartridges were found in the bag along with the empty hulls.

*

Herbert MacDonell’s report on the crime scene, submitted on March 9, lent unqualified support to the state’s case against Zeigler.  The findings of the criminalist from New York State matched Don Frye’s reconstruction and conclusions, almost point for point.[pagebrea

Professor MacDonell confirmed Frye’s theory that Charlie Mays had been killed at least a quarter of an hour after Perry Edwards.  “…Mr. Mays was not in the store at the time,” MacDonell wrote.  “The basis for this conclusion is the fact that when Mr. Mays was beaten his blood spatters did not mix with the already dried, swiped blood patterns that resulted from Mr. Edwards’s movement throughout the rear of the store.”

Table Four

 WEAPONS IN EVIDENCE

1.   Colt .357 magnum six-shot revolver—found with broken handle grip near feet of Perry Edwards, six empty cartridges in chambers; two lead bullets recovered in the store; bought by Zeigler, October 31, 1974, and kept in rear hallway desk.

2.    .22 Smith & Wesson Escort automatic—found near Charlie Mays, one empty cartridge on floor,  several live rounds in clip, one live round jammed in chamber; no bullets recovered; loaned or given to Zeigler by Ficke, carried by Zeigler. 

3.   .38 Burgo derringer—found near Mays, one empty cartridge in top chamber, one live round found in bottom; one lead bullet recovered, two misfired cartridges with bloodstains found in desk of Zeigler; owned by Zeigler, kept under cash register in store.

4.    .38 RG five-shot revolver—found near Mays, five empty cartridges in chambers: lead bullet found in torso of Virginia Edwards: bought by Frank Smith, June 20, 1975.

5.    .38 RG five-shot revolver—found near Mays with bent trigger guard, two empty cartridges, three live  rounds in chamber; bought by Frank Smith, June 20, 1975.

6.    .38 Securities Industries six-shot revolver—surrendered to police by Edward Williams, cocked, with all chambers empty; several lead bullets found in store, empty cartridges found in bag in storeroom cabinet, lead bullets found in Perry Edwards and Virginia Edwards; purchased by Zeigler, October 31, 1974, kept in “truck desk” of Zeigler’s pickup. 

7.     .38 Smith & Wesson six-shot revolver—found in Curtis Dunaway’s Oldsmobile, six live rounds in chamber; no bullets or empty cartridges recovered; bought by Zeigler, October 31, 1974, kept in a file cabinet of store counter.

8.    .22 Beretta automatic—found in Zeigler’s desk drawer, no bullets or empty cartridges; owned by  Zeigler and kept in desk.

Several wounds to Mr. Edwards and Charlie Mays were “through-and-through” shots and could not be traced to any one gun.  Also, several bullets exited the exterior walls and were never recovered.  The Securities revolver and the two RG revolvers apparently were the chief instruments of mayhem.  The Securities .38 fired the close-range shots that killed Mr. and Mrs. Edwards.  The shot that stopped the clock and the orange grove bullet were generically traced to this weapon, from which at least nine shots were fired.  The shot that killed Eunice Zeigler probably was fired by one of the two RG revolvers.  Five other lead bullets

Fifteen

Through most of the day on March 25 and part of the following day, Eagan brought forth a series of witnesses, thirteen in all, who laid out the state's evidence against Tommy Zeigler.

Many of these witnesses had appeared at the preliminary hearing in January.  In particular, Felton Thomas and Edward Williams would be telling their stories under oath for the second time.  This day, though, they would face no hostile cross-examination.  Grand jury hearing are closed to all but the prosecutor, the witnesses, a court reporter, and the jurors themselves.  The atmosphere is usually informal.  Jurors sometimes interject questions and observations, and there is no judge or defense attorney to insist on rules of evidence.1 In essence a grand jury hearing is a sales pitch, and jurors are the prospective buyers.  They may be skeptical, but a good prosecutor, like a good salesman, knows how to overcome resistance.

The privilege of prosecuting Orange County's most celebrated murder case belonged to Robert Eagan by right as well as rank.  He was smart, tough, and compelling.  He grasped the subtleties of argument. He also possessed a certain physical presence: he was tall and substantial, and he moved with a slightly shambling grace.  His deep voice had a gravelly timbre.  He projected command and authority. There would be no mutinies on any of Bob Eagan's grand juries.

Eagan established the crime and the scene with his first witness. The associate medical examiner, Dr. Guillermo Ruiz, described the store layout and showed photo slides of the bodies from the store and at the morgue.

Russell Courtney, an agent of the Life and Casualty Company of Tennessee, testified that Tommy Zeigler had a four-year-old term policy on his own life, in the amount of $200.000.  Courtney said that on September 9, 1975, Zeigler applied for $250,000 of term life insurance on his wife.  Courtney said that he spoke to Eunice and that she was aware of the application.  The policy cost about $600 a year, to be paid monthly through an automatic bank withdrawal, and Tommy Zeigler was the beneficiary.

George Henry, an agent of Gulf Life, told the jury that Eunice was present when Tommy applied for a $250,000 term policy on her life.  The date was September 11, and Zeigler did not tell him of any other policy on Eunice.  But Gulf Life did discover Life and Casualty's policy on Eunice, and issued its policy only after Tommy Zeigler agreed to bring his own insurance up to the level of his

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1    However, defense attorneys may later seek to have grand jury testimony suppressed from later hearings.

A juror wanted to know more about Zeigler and the party.

JUROR: Chief Thompson, I understand that this is a party that is given every year by Attorney Van Deventer for the police of West Orange County. Why was Mr. Zeigler so wrapped up in it?  Was he a policeman?

THOMPSON: I don't know.  I have no idea....This is just hearsay, but they say he [Van Deventer] used to have a Christmas Eve open house.  I have never been to one....

JUROR: I still don't understand Mr. Zeigler's connection if he is not a policeman.

THOMPSON: I don't know.

Thomas Hale told of seeing Zeigler with Eunice just after 7:00 P.M. on Christmas Eve, making a left turn from Route 50 onto Dillard Street.  He said Zeigler was driving "a light-colored big Oldsmobile."

Curtis Dunaway testified about seeing Zeigler together with the Mays family, in the store the morning of the 24th.  Dunaway did not know what took place between Zeigler and Charlie Mays.  He related closing the store that evening, changing cars with Tommy Zeigler, and later being summoned to the store to identify the bodies.  Bob Eagan's questioning was brisk and pointed:

Q: (EAGAN): Mr. Dunaway, had you injured yourself in any way or bled in the area of your neck or the back or your head?

A: (DUNAWAY): No, sir.

Q: Do you have any account for the bloodstain that was found on the headrest of your automobile by the law enforcement officers?

A: No, sir, I do not.

Q: The last you were in your automobile that day was when you left it there at the Zeigler residence?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: Do you have any explanation, or can you give us any reason why the law enforcement officers found blood on a tissue in the backseat of your automobile?

A: No, sir, I cannot.

Felton Thomas repeated the story he had told at the preliminary hearing.  Edward Williams followed him to the stand and was mostly consistent with his first testimony, although this time, in describing the scene in the back parking lot, he added that Zeigler got down on his knees to beg him to come into the store.

Frye answered with a long narrative that Eagan interrupted only briefly.  It is still the most detailed explanation of the reasoning behind the prosecution of Tommy Zeigler.

Frye told the jurors that Tommy Zeigler had been planning the crime since the previous June: "So, this was thought out pretty well." He said that Zeigler talked his wife and her parents into going to the store on Christmas Eve.  He used the Van Deventers' party to ensure that at 7:10 he "would have all the policemen isolated at one location, and nobody would be patrolling the streets of Winter Garden; that he could have free access from his house to the store without being observed by somebody that would recognize him later."

He led the jurors through his blood-spatter observations and his reconstruction of the crime.  He correlated Felton Thomas's visit to Temple Grove Drive with Williams's observation of the two passengers in Zeigler's car.  He described the fatal assault on Mays.  Zeigler's arrival back at 75 Temple Grove after having killed his fourth victim, and the attempt to kill Edward Williams.

He displayed photographs as he told of comparing Zeigler's shoes to the bloody footprints:

"When I recovered Zeigler's clothing, I took the shoes myself and did an overlay of the print that we had lifted.  It matched.  They matched Tommy Zeigler's shoe prints.  There were other shoe prints of Tommy leading away from the body of Mr. Edwards....This is another shoe print of the area where Mr. Edwards was struggling.....This photograph shows the shoe impression again.  This was caused by a dripping of blood from Edwards and Mr. Zeigler could not get his balance and continued the assault.  He stepped in it again.  This is another heel print.  We found these throughout that floor area all over the floor."

Zeigler, Frye said, had shot himself after the phone call to the Van Deventer home.  The proof of this is that when Ted Van Deventer spoke to  him.  Zeigler was "calm and not shaken."

Frye continued:

"Ficke got on the phone and he [Zeigler] said, I've been shot. Get to the store.  I have been shot.  Now he was real excited.  Like I said, when he talked to Van Deventer, he was very cool, calm, and collected.

"After the phone call was made, he walks around here [east side of counter].  Again, our blood didn't pan out right.  We couldn't type it. There is a high-velocity blood splatter on the counter....A bullet went through the wall and lodged into the closet of the office.  He was standing there and held the gun to his side like this, it went off, and the bullet passed through his body and lodged in the closet....

"Tommy Zeigler used to be a medic in the Reserves.  He has studied the anatomy.  He knew the one place in the body where he could shoot and be relatively safe but it could be nothing more than just a superficial injury....

"There is another point where you have a man of this caliber.  As you people know, there are some who are sorry for what they did and admit to wrongdoing.  When they get caught, they say, I'm sorry for it. You feel somewhat compassion for them. But, in Tommy Zeigler's case, he would not admit to it, and he probably never will. This is the kind of man that is a real threat to society, because he will do it again.  He has no soul, no conscience and no remorse whatsoever.  Neither does his mother....

"There is one occasion when Tommy and his father were out in the lake, and Tommy was trying to drown him.  The mother was standing on the shore looking.  Some person came by and said what are you doing. Tommy said, we are playing, and they laughed it off....

"Tommy was kind of a miser.  He didn't allow Eunice to run the air conditioner in the summertime, as hot as it was in the house.  He wanted to save the money.  He drove an old 1968 Oldsmobile.

"Okay.  Last year, Tommy goes out and buys an $8,000 vehicle.  In November or December, he had a  $13,000 swimming pool put in his yard. We find that he had credit-life insurance on himself and upon the death of this wife.  These items are now paid off, and he doesn't owe a damn dime, not a dime."

Frye now discussed a loan for $866 which Edward Williams received by refinancing his vehicles.  According to Frye, Zeigler took the check and cashed it, and never gave Williams the money.  This launched the last important element of the state's case, the racial subtext that became a palpable part of the trial, though it was rarely explicit.

"Charlie Mays and Edward Williams were two nice guys," Frye said. "Charlie Mays was one of the leaders of the community in Oakland.  He was the leader of a girls softball team.  He was a very likable person. Anytime anyone wanted to go somewhere, he would always take them.

"Edward Williams is the same way Edward Williams and Charlie Mays are what you might call a yes-man to Tommy Zeigler.  They were black and he was white.  He was dominant in their minds, apparently. Anything he said or he told them to do, they would do it.

"Why he tried to utilize these two men, he knew that they would be where he told them to be at a certain time.  At 7:30, he had  one at the store to kill, and back at the house was one to be killed.  He knew Edward Williams would wait there for him."

Eagan had two more witnesses, both experts whom the defense had retained.

Dr. Theodore Mackler was a psychiatrist who had conducted a session with Zeigler on March 11.  Mackler had administered a dose of the drug Brevital

Zeigler enters jail, indicted in 4 murders was the headline in the Sentinel Star, and the photo was of Tommy Zeigler at the jail's booking office, with his head bowed and his palms flat on the desk as he was being frisked.

And then she got to talking and she told me what all she had seen, you know.  She—Q:  Let’s go into—I know it’s hard for you to recall but if you would, kind of go into detail with it.  Everything that she told you.

A:  Well, she said that they were in bed.  Both of them was nude and they were all lovey-dovey and she got sick to her stomach.  And she had to rush out and she run out of the house and she went back down to the store and a—she wanted to call me but I didn’t give her my phone number so she couldn’t call me because she didn’t know where I lived.  So she stayed in the store and in a few minutes he come on down.  Then she left. 

Q:  Did she say whether or not he said anything to her when he first came in?

A:  Yeah.  He told her to keep her mouth shut or else….She says, “Cheryl,” she says, “he’s in love with him.”  I says, “He’s what?”  You know, I’ve heard about it but I’ve never really known anybody that was that way.  She was crying and I said, “Eunice,” I said, “what are you going to do?”  She said, “I don’t know, he just threatened, he said, he told me, if I didn’t keep my mouth shut that I knew what I was going to get.”  So I said, I said, “Have you told your mother?”  She said, “I called Momma a few minutes ago,” and she said, “they’re suppose to come down.” . . . So when he takes the insurance out on her—she—about two weeks after—he had taken the insurance out on her she come—then she called me.  And she says, “Cheryl I need somebody to talk to again.”  I said, “All right, I’ll be there in few minutes.”  So we met at Ronnie’s again.  And that’s when she told me he had taken out all that insurance on her. . . 

 So she says, “Now I am scared.”  She said, “But Momma said they’d be down Christmas Eve to pick me up—said then I’ll have everything straightened out where I can leave.”  I said, “What you gonna straighten around?”  She said, “Some things I got to take care of before I can leave,” and the next thing I heard she was—she was killed.

Q:  Okay.  What about the a—you knew now for a fact that [X] and Tommy were homosexuals.  What about [Y]3?  Did she ever have anything other than just her own suspicions about him also?

A:  All she had was just suspicions about him because, you know, he was buddy-buddy with them, too.  And she said he acted like [X] did towards Tommy, but she had never caught [Y] with him like she did [X].  It just tore her up.

Q:  I imagine it did.

A:  She—she was a sweet girl.

3          Another well-known Orange County man who was known to associate with Zeigler.