Edward Williams, he would have been back at that party asking the Chief [Ficke], "Gee, I wonder where Eunice is.  Maybe you better go down to the store and check around and let's see if we can find her.'"

This is absurd.  Such a plan could be feasible only if Tommy could claim that he had been nowhere near the store between 7:00 and 8:00. But at least three people—his mother, Dunaway, and Ficke himself—knew that Tommy was supposed to be at the store that evening to pick up the gas grill and Ficke's potted plant.  They knew because Zeigler himself had told them.  By the state's own evidence, Zeigler deliberately sabotaged his own careful arrangements.

Let's assume that, as Eagan argued, Zeigler planned to show up at the party acting as if nothing were wrong.  Having killed Williams, he would have faced a stunning problem: He had no way to get home from the murder scene.  The Dunaway Oldsmobile was in his garage, where he had left it.  Walking would be out of the question: he would almost certainly be spotted during the twenty to thirty minutes he would need to cover the distance at a brisk walk.  He couldn't very well drive the Edwardses' sedan.  He might conceivably drive Edward Williams's truck, but he couldn't take it all the way home, because that would connect him to Williams, who would now be dead.  At some point he would have to park the truck and walk the rest of the way home.

If Zeigler was actually guilty, he had an easy solution to the problem.  He could have followed Williams to the store in the Dunaway car, so as to have a getaway.  He could have accomplished this with one line to Williams: "I think I'll dive to the store, Edward—you follow me."  This would have been an easy feat for a man to whom the state ascribes powers of persuasion so great as to cloud the minds of men.

The simplest, most credible explanation for why he didn't do so is that he saw no need to do so; that he planned no murders, that he went to the store that might for no other reason than to deliver Christmas Gifts, that he expected Edward Williams to drive him  home after they had furnished the job.

Zeigler's actions during the day on Christmas Eve, and later that night, do not fit the image of a predator planning to murder and trying to cover his tracks.  Just the opposite: the evidence shows that throughout that day and evening, Tommy Zeigler behaved like a man with nothing to hide.

THE GUNS

The weapons seized in the store seem to damn Zeigler by their very number.

"That's quite an arsenal for a furniture dealer," Robert Eagan said in his summation, voicing an impression that surely some of the jurors already entertained.