procedure.  It is a compendium of awkward thinking, poor judgment, and questionable methods:

Ÿ         Don Frye never inspected the soles of Thomas's shoes, even though the  detective believed that bloody footprints on the terrazzo floor might identify the killer.  When Thomas left police custody after giving his statement early Christmas morning, his clothes and his shoes went with him.

Thomas's own statement put him at the front door of the furniture store within a minute of Mays's death, and at the back of the store within five to ten minutes after the first three killings.  Sound practice and common sense dictate that anyone who admits being at the threshold of a murder scene, nearly at the moment when the crime was committed, deserves a certain amount of skepticism and close examination.  Yet no OCSO officer ever examined Thomas's clothes.  He was never tested for gunshot residue, which could have verified or disproved his story of the orange grove.

Ÿ         At 3:00 A.M. on Christmas Eve, Alton Evans found a key ring with  three keys in one of Charlie Mays's pockets.  According to Evans in his deposition, the keys were released to Mattie Mays, at Frye's request. Evans said that the keys were not processed for fingerprints and were never tried in any of the store's locks.  Apparently they were never photographed.

Releasing untested evidence from a crime scene is such an egregious breach of investigative protocol that it needs no further comment.

Ÿ       OCSO deputies violated a basic rule of procedure when they began smoking at the crime scene before all the evidence has been collected and processed.  Beginning on Christmas Eve they smoked in at least two areas, at the front of the store and in the office that Zeigler and his mother shared.

This became a issue when one of the state's photographs showed a burned matchstick atop a .22 cartridge on the floor of the office.  Since neither Tommy nor Beulah smoked, this seemed to show that someone else had been in the room during or after the crime.  But the OCSO claimed that the match had been dropped by one of its deputies, and the defense could not prove otherwise.

The question would have been much clearer if sheriff's personnel had observed the prohibition against smoking at a crime scene, not to mention the universal rule that a scene should be disturbed as little as possible until technicians have finished their jobs.

Except perhaps in this instance, smoking at the scene may not have directly influenced the evidence.  But it does reveal a certain attitude, an approach to the work: that in the first few hours of the biggest investigation of their careers, the OCSO investigators did not observe a basic principal of their profession—they could not be bothered to step outside when they wanted a cigarette.