Frye and Denny Martin tested a key point in Williams's story. Williams had said that he had entered the building from the back parking compound, walked up the northwest hallway, and stepped out into the dark showroom.  There, according to Williams, Zeigler pulled the trigger on a gun three times in an attempt to kill him.  Frye wanted to test Williams's claim that he could identify Zeigler and a pistol in the darkness.

One evening after nightfall, Frye and Martin turned off all the store lights.  First Martin stood holding a  pistol where Zeigler would have been standing, a few feet inside the showroom.  Frye came up the hall, as Williams said he had done.  Then the two detectives switched roles, and Martin walked up the hall while Frye held the gun in the showroom.

The results satisfied Frye.  He was able to testify at least four times—at a deposition, the preliminary hearing, the grand jury hearing and the trial—that he recognized Martin and the pistol in the darkness.

Frye was intrigued by Zeigler's account of a brawl in the back of the showroom.  Did Zeigler have any injuries besides the gun-shot? Frye and an assistant state attorney depose Dr. Gleason, the only physician to have closely examined Zeigler between Christmas Eve and the 29th.

Frye wanted to know whether Zeigler had complained of head injuries or severe headaches.  Gleason said that Zeigler did have a slight swelling and tender area at the lower right of his skull, but the skin was not broken.  Gleason also said that Zeigler had complained of some soreness in  his right index finger—his trigger finger.  This interested Frye.  He thought of the bent trigger guard on one of the RG revolvers.  Frye believed that the RG had been damaged during the killings, probably when Perry Edwards swung the wooden footstool to defend himself; whoever had been holding the pistol could have sustained such an injury to his trigger finger.

Frye also learned that Zeigler's service in the Army Reserve had been with a Medical Corps unit.  Here Zeigler would have been exposed to the special knowledge of anatomy that would have allowed him to shoot himself in the abdomen without jeopardizing his life.

Edward Williams and Felton Thomas were now in protective custody. Thomas had disappeared from Christmas Day to December 30.  When he was found at a friend's house in the town of Kissimmee, south of Orlando, Thomas asked police for  protection.  He told them that he had fled because he was in fear of his life.  (WITNESS AT KILLINGS BEGS FOR JAIL was the next day's headline in the Sentinel Star.) Now Thomas and Williams were under guard, living in motel rooms provided by the state attorney's office.

Zeigler, through Hadley, identified six of the eight pistols.

Zeigler said that the .357 Colt, which he admitted firing, normally was kept at his home.  But he had hidden it in the hallway, supposedly as a defense