Eight

The investigation continued in and around the store. Much of it was tedious.  Through December 27, technicians collected blood samples, mostly with Q-Tip swabs or filter paper.  They tried to preserve latent fingerprints and the bloody shoe prints.  They continued to photograph the scene.

They searched for bullets and bullet holes.  Eventually investigators would estimate that twenty-eight shots had been fired inside the store.

Several bullets had struck the north wall, both east and west of the counter.  Five shots had been sprayed westward from inside the kitchen, three of them passing through the closed west door of the kitchen—the door that had been open when Eunice Zeigler was killed.  Spent slugs were recovered on the showroom floor, inside a china cabinet, and in the roofing insulation. One was found in the office closet, where it had come to rest after passing through at least two interior walls.  Another was discovered in the back of an electric clock that hung above the east door of the kitchen.  The slug had dislodged a gear, and the clock was now inoperable.  It had stopped at 7:24.1

The same desk that yielded the two bloody misfires also contained a .22 Beretta semiautomatic pistol.  Although it had not been fired, it would be the last of eight handguns introduced as evidence at the trial.

Technicians found no fingerprints in William’s truck.  Frye speculated that Zeigler had wiped off all of the prints after moving it from the hallway door to the bay door where it was found.

Two dramatic discoveries broke the tedium.

On January 2, investigators opened a cabinet beside the overhead garage-type door in the rear storage area.  Inside they found live and expended .38 Special rounds, three brown grocery bags (one of them apparently bloody), two empty boxes for revolvers, one empty box marked for .38 Special cartridges, and a blue towel.  The evidence perfectly fit the stories of Felton Thomas and Edward Williams.  Here, Frye believed, was the box of bullets that Zeigler had carried out of the garage and from which Charlie Mays had reloaded one of the pistols.  Thomas identified one of the grocery bags as the one in which Zeigler carried the three guns that he took to the orange grove.  And could this be the same towel with which Zeigler had concealed his pistol when he tried to shoot Edward Williams?  

1              Curtis Dunaway testified that the clock was running normally just before closing time on Christmas Eve.  Whether the clock was running when the bullet struck it—that is, whether the power was on in the store—could not be determined.