from the drawer there.  He might have fired it, maybe several times, but he didn't know whether he had hit anyone.

After he was shot, and passed out, he woke up on the terrazzo floor.  He crawled around in the darkness, trying to find his glasses. Eventually he got his spare pair from the desk in his office.  He remembered Bobby Thompson bringing him to the hospital, but he could not recall Thompson questioning him in the examining room.  He did not remember mentioning Mays' name to Thompson, and could not explain how Thompson learned that Mays was in the store.

Above all, except for having fired in self-defense, he knew nothing of the four deaths in the store.

Police obviously knew more.  Before New Year's Day, the accounts given by Edward Williams and Felton Thomas began to surface, piecemeal, in rumors, Hadley assigned his investigators to learn everything they could about the crimes.

There were gaps in even the basic outline of what had happened in the store.  The defense learned details of the wounds inflicted on Eunice and her parents only when Annan spoke to an attendant at the mortuary that had prepared the bodies.  The funeral home where Charlie Mays had been taken was less helpful.

Defense investigators tried without success to locate Edward Williams and Felton Thomas, in hopes of interviewing them.  They also searched for a "Robert Foster" whom Don Frye's original arrest report listed as a witness.  An article in the Sentinel Star of December 31 prominently mentioned the name.

One report was that "Foster" had followed Charlie Mays into the store and had run away after seeing the body of a white woman inside. After many black residents of Oakland and Winter Garden denied knowing anyone by that name, Gene Annan finally found a witness who claimed to know Robert Foster.

Mary Wallace, manager of the apartment complex where Edward Williams moved on the 24th, said that her husband and Mays played on the same local baseball team; Robert Foster, she said, was an acquaintance of Mays's who umpired some of the games.  She described him as "a big black man" about six feet two, weighing 250 pounds.

One eyewitness, an elderly man named Ed Nolan, testified that a man fitting that general description was with Mattie Mays outside the furniture store in the early hours of Christmas morning when a plainclothes sheriff's officer informed her that her husband was dead. Nolan, whose testimony would become significant in another regard, remembered that Mrs. Mays cried, "Lord have mercy," and collapsed in the officers’ arms.

Nolan said that the plainclothes officer walked Mrs. Mays out from the police lines and spoke to a man whom Nolan described as "tall" and "stout-built."  This man said that he was a friend of the family, and the officer advised him to take Mrs. Mays to the hospital.  Nolan said that the man's name was "Robert" somebody.