Twenty

Even before his preliminary hearing, Zeigler’s attorneys realized that he had problems beyond the evidence.

One of these was the spate of rumors that spread throughout West Orange County after his arrest, small-town gossip gone amok.  Terry Hadley thought that some of it was predictable, even understandable. Nothing like this crime had every happened in Winter Garden.  Moreover, Zeigler was not an ordinary citizen; he had money and influence, and he had bruised some feelings with his political machinations.  He was a natural target for jealous chatter.

But one topic was especially obnoxious; the speculation that Zeigler and several other important men in the county had formed a secret homosexual ring.  Maybe nobody hears a community's whispers more clearly than its lawyers, but neither Hadley nor Vernon Davids had ever encountered this rumor until after Zeigler was arrested.

Davids was forty-one years old, at five feet ten a former all-state high school basketball player: a tenacious, combative personality.  He decided to trace the rumor by confronting someone who he knew was spreading the information.  As Davids recalled it later, he said to the man: "It's my understanding that you think Tommy Zeigler is a homosexual."

"Well, yes," the man said.

"Tell me," Davids asked, "how many blow jobs did you receive from him, and how many did you give?"

The man quickly said he had only heard that Zeigler was a homosexual.

"Who told you?"  Davids said, and when he got the name he went to that person and followed the same routine.  He pursued this for several days, in nearly a dozen interviews.  He found nobody who would admit to having direct knowledge of Zeigler's sexual preferences.  He became convinced that the rumor got much of it momentum from sheriff's investigators who now were interviewing Zeigler's friends, acquaintances, and enemies.  According to Davids, the usual line of questioning went like this:  "How long have you know Tommy Zeigler? Did you know that he's a homosexual?"

Davids thought that if Don Frye was hearing rumors, it was probably the sound of his own voice coming back to him.  Davids believed that the OCSO's original source of the information was Robert Thompson, the Oakland chief of police, who had mentioned it to Frye and others on the night of the murders.1

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1      From Don Ficke's deposition of May 5, 1976.