for the police to show up, be carried into the back of the squad car and examined by Thompson, and be driven to the hospital.

It is not possible that all of this took place while Williams was traveling from the store to the restaurant.  It is not possible even if Williams crawled from the store to the motel and across the street.

To put it another way; the Nolans’ testimony implies that Tommy Zeigler must already have been shot when Williams left the furniture store.  Not only was Zeigler already shot, but Robert Thompson and the emergency room nurse both found that the blood had dried around his wound.

If the Nolans saw what they claimed to see, Williams's story is fatally flawed, and so is the state's hypothesis of guilt.

If the Nolans saw what they claimed to see—what they swore they saw—then really nothing else matters.  Tommy Zeigler could have had $10 million in insurance on  his wife; it doesn't matter anymore, as far as Zeigler's guilt or innocence is concerned.  Zeigler could have made fifty footprints in blood; it doesn't matter.  He could have owned a hundred pistols, he could have told Curtis Dunaway to turn off every light in the store; it doesn't matter.  If Edward Williams was at the restaurant when the Nolans said he was there, then Tommy Zeigler is not a guilty man.

So why didn't the Nolans create at least reasonable doubt?

I believe that neither the prosecution nor the defense saw the true significance of the Nolans' testimony.  The reason is simple: the Nolans were eyewitnesses, and lawyers and cops know that eyewitnesses are unreliable.  Even Terry Hadley doesn't appear to have regarded the Nolans' testimony as a "smoking gun."

Yet that is exactly what it is, in its implications and its clarity and its credibility, because the Nolans were almost unique as eyewitnesses.  They could not have been mistaken about what they saw. They could not have been mistaken about when they saw it.

The time of the events is perfectly fixed by the radio call that sent Jimmy Yawn rolling out onto Dillard Street, where the Nolans nearly collided with him.  That was at 9:21.  The Nolans could not have been there at 8:50 or 9:15 or at any other moment.  The clock starts ticking on their observations at 9:21.  Both agree that they watched the police at the store for several minutes.  So, it is 9:24, give or take a minute, when the black man tells Ed and J.D. Nolan that he wants to use the phone; by now Thompson and Zeigler are already at the hospital.

Who is the black man?  The Nolans cannot be mistaken on this point, either.  The man has to be Edward Williams.

Here again the Nolans' testimony is unique.  Descriptions of strangers are the great failing of eyewitnesses.  Somehow the details are never quite right.

But the Nolans didn't have to know what clothes Edward Williams as wearing.  They didn't have to specify how tall he was, or how old (although J.D. and Ed