They found two women's purses open on a settee in the living room.  The dining room was clean and in perfect order.  Cats lounged quietly on the countertops.

Yawn went into the garage and found Curtis Dunaway's 1972 Oldsmobile.  He looked into the car and found a .38 caliber revolver on the floor behind the driver's seat.  The gun's six chambers were loaded with live rounds.

Yawn put the gun in a paper bag.  They continued the search, in every room and up in the attic.  They found no hostages, no disturbance.

Eunice Zeigler's whereabouts were still unknown.

*

At the furniture store, the full extent of the carnage was about to be revealed.

Sheriff's officers were arriving in force.  The chief of detectives, Morris "Gene" Blankenship, drove up at 10:00 with Jack Bachman, a former county chief of detectives who now was a state attorney's investigator.  Bruce Churchill arrived at about this time.  So did Wayne Bird, the staff duty officer.

Sheriff's detectives would investigate the crime.  The sheriff's Technical Services specialists would collect the physical evidence.  That night the detectives and technicians did not arrive immediately; most had been called at their homes.

The building now was secure; Winter Garden fireman had roped off the front of the store, pushing back the curious crowd that was growing by the minute.  The victims inside were beyond medical assistance.

It is an axiom of criminal investigation that the scene should remain pristine until it has been photographed and the evidence preserved.  Anyone intruding on a crime scene, however carefully, may inadvertently disturb the setting or leave some scrap--hair, fingerprints, clothing fibers, dirt--that could later be confused with true evidence.

Blankenship, Bird, and Churchill, all ranking officers, decided to enter the showroom.  They began to tour the darkened store, going from one body to the next.  This was the third party to enter the crime scene, a total of ten different men, using flashlights to navigate through the darkness.

They picked their way around the guns and the blood on the terrazzo floor.  "There was such an amount of it, you couldn't go through it," Blankenship recalled later.  "Blood all over the floor, splattered up on the wall and chairs and furniture around there...."

Blankenship, Bird, and Churchill did not walk directly toward the front door when they decided to leave.  Instead they made their way along the south side of the showroom, the wall opposite the offices and counter.  That was how they found the fourth body, in a heap amid a display of living-room furniture.  She was a middle-aged white woman, with a gunshot wound in the side of her head.