fingers that were damp with blood.  Also, there were small blood drops on the inside lining of the coat.  The drops could not have resulted from her wound; they suggested that the coat had been open while someone stood over her and dripped blood.  This ran counter to the prosecution's theory that her body had not been disturbed after she was shot.

It was not a minor point.  Eunice was found completely stretched out on the floor, with the coat buttoned up, her legs straight, her left hand still resting in a coat pocket.  The Winter Garden patrolman, Jimmy Yawn, even took her for a mannequin at first glance.  The position of her left hand was the sole basis for the prosecution's theory that she had been killed instantly by a single surprise shot while she stood in the kitchen doorway.  Frye believed that Zeigler had deliberately sprayed the other bullet holes in and around the door after he had committed all the other murders.

Frye and MacDonell took this "surprise shot" as a given.  Evidence that the body had been disturbed would discredit the theory, and with it the rest of the prosecution's hypothetical sequence of events in the store.

No one on the defense team accepted the idea of a "surprise shot." The absence of powder tattooing around the wound meant that the shot had been fired from more than two feet away; yet Zeigler should have been able to approach his wife within point-blank range.  Gene Annan and others also thought that the position of Eunice's body was unnaturally straight: he felt that if she had been instantly killed, her body would have collapsed as it fell.

(Today, at least one member of the original defense team believes that Zeigler may have found his dead wife while stumbling around the store after regaining consciousness, and that he straightened her body and buttoned her coat in a numb gesture of care—he himself was freezing cold, as he recalled for Dr. Mackler.  By this theory, the shock of seeing her dead, after having been attacked and shot, induced a post-traumatic stress amnesia.)

The broken eyeglasses.  Gene Annan was examining the shirt and jacket of Perry Edwards when he discovered an eyeglass case, a broken pair of glasses, and a spent bullet, which police had overlooked. Apparently the case had stopped the bullet.  Later pieces of eyeglass lens were matched to shards of glass that had been found in the bloody patch east of the sales counter, suggesting that Mr. Edwards had been shot at that spot, and that he may have been down on the floor.

Professor MacDonell's report, while dwelling on splatters and fine sprays near the back of the store, did not attempt to explain the obvious concentration of blood.  It did not fit the prosecution's hypothesis of the crime.  Frye and MacDonell claimed that Perry Edwards was first assaulted near the back of the store, probably after coming to investigate the "surprise shot" that killed his