Q: Could you tell if it was a gun?  If you had not known it was a gun?

A: That's a question I can't answer.

The defense's version of the same experiment was more realistic. Gene Annan and his assistant used unknown objects wrapped in a towel, and Annan walked directly from outside into the showroom.  Annan testified that he could not identify what his assistant was holding.

 A MATTER OF LOGIC

How, and when, did Tommy Zeigler become a suspect?

Terry Hadley says that Frye claimed to have deduced Zeigler's guilt within minutes after he first inspected the crime scene.  Frye denied this, but did admit in his first deposition that his original observations of the blood spatters did lead him to consider Zeigler "the main suspect." This would have been within an hour after he arrived on the scene, and at least an hour before Edward Williams first told his story to Denny Martin.

In particular, Frye was aroused by:

Zeigler's apparent blood trail from the counter to the front door.

The holster on top of blood spatters from the fatal beating of Charlie Mays.

The fact that those spatters fell on dry swipes of blood apparently left by Perry Edwards, indicating that Mays had been killed at least a quarter of an hour after the struggle in which Edwards died.

The apparent fact that the kitchen door had been closed after Eunice Zeigler was shot.

The bloody footprints.

Frye believed that these observations contradicted Zeigler's story about a robbery attempt involving Mays.

But what was the basis for his suspicions?

Frye had not interviewed Zeigler.  The only information from Zeigler was Thompson's brief interrogation at the hospital, when Zeigler was barely coherent.  That entire conversation, as Thompson reported it, was that Zeigler had shot Charlie Mays, that Mays had shot him, and that Zeigler believed Mays was trying to rob him.

Frye could not have known any more that night.  He could only have assumed what Zeigler's explanation of events would be.

To put it another way, Zeigler became suspected of lying (and therefore of murder) before he ever had a chance to make a statement.