This is the masterpiece of deduction that helped to set Florida's legal machinery in motion again Tommy Zeigler.3

FULL AND FREE INQUIRY

The four murders were a confusing crime that deserved a thorough, careful, and far-reaching investigation.  Jack Bachman, a veteran homicide detective, called it the largest crime scene he had ever encountered.  From his deposition:

"You know, there was four different areas where there were four bodies and then in between there were a lot of furniture knocked over. There was a lot of blood splattered about.  There were a lot of bullet holes, there were a lot of weapons.   You know, it's not one of those deals where we used to knock them out like petit larceny, where you're in and out and you're gone to the next one.  I mean, this was a highly complex crime scene."

It was not only logistically complex, but mentally challenging. The forensic evidence is ambiguous, and most of the witness accounts are full or variables.  In all, the case presents a very few unquestioned facts within a fluid matrix of great uncertainty.  It will assume almost any shape, depending on one's willingness to make assumptions and stretch probabilities.  You see what you are ready to see.

Such a problem needed an investigator who was ready to see everything, and nothing: someone who could comprehend all the possibilities without committing himself to any one of them.

Don Frye appears to have committed himself almost at once.  A careful review of the record gives no hint that he ever considered, much less investigated, any other possibilities besides Zeigler's guilt.  He must have banished all doubt before he arrested Zeigler on the 29th.  By then he also had to be certain that Edward Williams—whose truck was found at the crime scene, and who showed up at the police station several hours after the murders with a bizarre, mostly uncorroborated story and a murder weapon—was unquestionably telling the truth.

Once Zeigler was arrested, any chance of an open-minded inquiry was lost.  The work of Frye and the rest of the OCSO seems to have been directed toward confirming the correctness of the arrest.  Frye and Bob Eagan have often claimed that Zeigler received a full and fair investigation, and that they carefully examined every possibility of Zeigler's innocence.  But once the police and the prosecutor had committed themselves to convicting Zeigler, their motives for demonstrating his innocence were slight indeed.

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3   Would Frye have considered Zeigler innocent if he had found Zeigler's blood droplets around Mays? It is an argument that Zeigler cannot win and Frye cannot lose.  Actually, the absence of droplets only indicates that whoever stood there wasn't dripping blood.