The implication is that the Dunaway car had to be brought to the store in order to establish how Zeigler arrived on the scene.

But then, according to Hadley, Williams discovered that his truck would not start because of the carburetor problem.  "Imagine Edward Williams's panic," Hadley told the jurors.  "He's sitting there trying to get this truck started.  It wouldn't make it.  He's got to sit for a second with a  murder weapon in his pocket.  He thinks Tommy Zeigler is dead and everything is fine, nobody knows anything.  The crime has been committed.  There isn't a soul inside that store alive....He finds out that Tommy Zeigler is alive and he knows, number one, Mr. Zeigler knows who brought him to that store and number two, more important, his truck, it can be traced to him and he's in a panic."

Hadley believed that this explained Williams's ostensibly voluntary appearance at the police station: "[He's] in a panic and he's got to make up a story."

Bill Duane recently enlarged on this theory: "Zeigler locked Williams's truck  in when he got to the store.  Now they've got a real problem—the truck won't start.  They have to take the Oldsmobile back, because if the truck is there they've got one too many vehicles at the store.

"This would explain all the evidence in the car: the pistol, the small bloodstains, the fact that somebody wiped it down.  It would also explain the cat hairs on Charlie Mays's shoes.  Tommy and Eunice kept their cats in the garage—the floor was full of cat hairs.  Charlie Mays probably walked around in Zeigler's garage.  That's how he got those hairs on his sneakers.  Felton Thomas was probably telling the truth when he said he rode in the Oldsmobile, and that he and Charlie Mays were at Zeigler's house.  I think all that really happened.  I just don't believe that Zeigler was with them at the time.

"This took a lot of quick thinking, but it's something that a cop could have done, somebody who was used to thinking on this feet."

Who would have done such a thing?

According to Terry Hadley, Zeigler told of friction between him and the alleged loan sharks, and about the threat on his life, months before Christmas Eve.

The existence of some kind of loan-sharking organization in Oakland and Winter Garden seems very likely.  Several black witnesses in the Zeigler case, including Edward Williams and Mattie Mays, referred to it in the depositions as if it were fact.  And within a year after Zeigler's trial, Hadley successfully instigated a prosecution for loan-sharking against the owner of a "country store" in the area.

I found Hadley to be a credible source for several reasons.  He is careful and objective.  He has lived most of his life in Orange Country and has practiced law there for twenty years.  His involvement with the Zeigler case ended soon after the trial; Eagan and Don Frye speak respectfully of him.