Gene Annan visited most of the businesses around the intersection of Dillard and Route 50.  He found a man named Donald Dugan, who on Christmas Eve had been at a service station on the corner of Dillard and Route 50.  Dugan told Annan that at around 9:00 P.M., two black men drove up to put gas in a dark 1957 Mustang.

Both men seemed to be drunk.  The driver was a young man, with a bushy Afro.  The other was middle-aged, with short curly hair that was tinged with gray.  This older man, speaking with what seemed to be a Caribbean accent, told Dugan: "You're in the wrong place, you should be at Zeigler's.  They just had a killing, a shooting, and a robbery over there."

Apparently this occurred before the police arrived at the store.

Annan made several trips to the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant where Edward Williams had used the telephone on Christmas Eve.  What Annan learned there suggested that Williams had come into the restaurant after 9:00 that night.  Two waitresses and a seventeen-year old employee named John Grimes had been on duty that night.  Grimes was not exact about when Williams entered the restaurant, though he recalled that Williams was wearing a brown sweater.  One of the waitresses believed that Williams appeared after 9:00 P.M. The second waitress, whose shift had ended at 9:00, said that she never saw Williams.  Amy Crawford, a customer who had driven to the restaurant shortly before closing time, said that Williams had come in around 9:15 or 9:20.

On one of his visits to the restaurant, Annan met Ed Nolan, who lived in a trailer court across Route 50.  Nolan was seventy-four years old and was dying of cancer.  He visited the restaurant nearly every day, and on Christmas Eve he was in the store from 7:00 P.M. until after closing.

Nolan told Annan a startling story, which he repeated at a deposition in May.  He said that after 9:00 P.M. on Christmas Eve, a black man came to the restaurant asking to use the telephone.  Nolan got the impression that there had been an accident.  The man was wearing a light brown sweater.  He asked the telephone number of the police, and Nolan told him.

Then Nolan turned around and saw his brother, J.D., outside.  J.D. and his wife, Madelyn, were driving south on Dillard when they were nearly broadsided by Jimmy Yawn as he rolled out onto Dillard from the Winter Garden Inn.

J.D. Nolan and his confirmed Ed Nolan's story.  They told defense investigators that they were driving to her mother's house, headed south on Dillard, when they were nearly broadsided by a car peeling out of the service station at the corner of Dillard and Route 50.  This was the unmarked Winter Garden police car driven by Jimmy Yawn, responding to Robert Thompson's original call at 9:21.

J.D. Nolan made a U-turn and parked near the furniture store to watch what was happening.  After several minutes he noticed his brother, Ed, standing in the