Eunice Edwards and Tommy Zeigler had met when she was a teacher at an elementary school in Winter Garden.  He was coaching a youth football team.  He barged into her office, demanding that she release one of his star players, whom she had kept after class.  She adamantly refused.

From that day, he says, he never dated another.  They were married less than a year later, at the red-brick First Baptist Church, which dominates the town center from a rise of ground at the corner of Dillard and Plant streets.

In a case that became a thicket of uncertainty and disagreement, everyone agrees about Eunice.  Eunice was special.

She is remembered as kind, soft-spoken, genteel.  She sang, played the piano beautifully, and was an organist at First Baptist.  She is said to have detested gossip.  When Winter Garden’s public schools were forced to integrate, she volunteered to teach in a poor black neighborhood.  After Tommy’s father suffered a stroke in July 1975, Eunice often drove him to physical therapy.  She would watch the exercises, then patiently work with him for hours at home.

“A lovely lady,” her mother-in-law said of Eunice, years later.  “A calm, quiet, refined lady.”

“She never met anyone who didn’t like her,” Tommy Zeigler told an interviewer.  “And she always believed that there was some good in everybody.”

“The nicest person anybody could be around,” Edward Williams testified.

On Christmas Eve of 1975, Eunice Zeigler brought the Persian back from the vet and later baked a cake with her mother, and she waited for her husband to come home.

*

After they left Zeigler Furniture for the first time, Charlie and Mattie Mays and Brian Nedd drove across Dillard Street to the Tri-City shopping center at the intersection of Route 50.  They visited two stores, looking for Christmas gifts, and stopped to buy groceries at a Winn-Dixie supermarket.

From the supermarket they drove to a Zayre’s department store near Orlando.  At Zayre’s they bought a ten-speed bike, and after a quick meal they returned to the furniture store for the linoleum.

Tommy Zeigler told them to go around to the back.  Charlie Mays drove the blue van down a driveway that ran along the north side of the building, past a large electrical breaker box.

The store’s front display windows faced east, toward Dillard Street.  Directly behind the building was a paved area several times larger than the small lot out front.  This asphalt had been added to comply with Winter Garden’s zoning regulations.  But it was rarely used by the public.  It was surrounded by a six-foot chain-link fence that secured not only the parking lot but also the rear of the store.