him a ride to Oakland.  Around midnight he heard about the murders in the store, heard that Charlie Mays had been killed.

Q:  Did you see what happened after they [went] in the door?

A:  No sir, it, it was, it was too dark for anybody to see, see them after they stepped in the building.

Q:  So the only thing you can say is that you saw Charlie Mays and, and Mr. Zeigler come in the building together and all the lights were off.

A:  Yes sir.Q:  Okay.  Mr. Thomas, would you say that Mr. Zeigler was acting peculiar or was acting suspicious while entering the, entering the building?

A:  Well, well well I didn’t know the man[‘s] ways, but he had some peculiar ways about him.  The, the, the way he seemed to be acting, you know, it, it, it wasn’t right you know . . .

Q:  Was there anything else about the way he was conducting himself or the way he was acting that made you feel suspicious that he was possibly doing something wrong, anything like that?

A:  Well, well I said in, in my mind . . . Af, af, after what happened, you know, it all seemed like, like he, he was, you know, just trying to use somebody or something.

*By now Robert Thompson had identified Charlie May’s van across the fence, where Felton Thomas had said it was parked.  The dirt road south of Route 50 and the grove were as Thomas described them. Above all, Thomas’s story meshed with that of Edward Williams on a crucial point: apparently they had noticed each other when Zeigler drove to the house with Mays and Thomas.  Williams had seen two passengers with Zeigler; Felton Thomas had seen a vehicle behind Zeigler’s pickup in the driveway, exactly where Williams had claimed he was parked.

Thomas had identified that vehicle as a car, not a truck, and the Dunaway Oldsmobile was certainly not a Cadillac[4].  But the discrepancies seemed unimportant to Frye.  He believed that Felton Thomas was telling the truth, that in watching Charlie Mays enter the store with Zeigler, Thomas had witnessed the last few moments of May’s life.  Frye believed that Zeigler had murdered Mays, shooting him and then beating him to death, within seconds after the front door closed behind them.

[4]              The Zeiglers’ new car was a white Oldsmobile Toronado, which did resemble a Cadillac.