But Hadley's investigators found no other evidence that such a man actually existed.  In April, Don Frye told Hadley that a clerk had inadvertently typed "Robert Foster" for "Thomas Felton" in preparing the arrest report, and that he had signed it without catching the mistake.  It was, he said, "a typographical error."

The defense chased other mirages.

On Christmas Eve, the Winter Garden police dispatcher had received an anonymous tip: "If you want to know what happened at the furniture store, talk to Oday Jackson."  Investigators identified a man by that name in Orlando but could never locate him.

And shortly after Tommy Zeigler was arrested at the hospital, his parents received a call from a man who claimed to have information about the crime.  The Zeiglers put him in touch with the law office, and Vernon Davids met him at the Zeigler home.

His name was Nathaniel Brown.  He was black and in his early twenties.  He told Davids that a white man had planned the crime, and that Mays was one of three accomplices.  The other two were black men, named Don and Jerry.  Brown described them both and said that the white man had paid them $1,000. each.  They had wiped the weapons clean before they left.

According to Nathaniel Brown, Jerry was shot during the crime, and was now hiding near Oakland with a bullet wound in his right shoulder.

Tommy Zeigler was innocent, Brown said, the victim of a setup; the victims were already dead when Zeigler entered the store.

Brown wanted a reward from the Zeiglers.  Davids thought the story sounded like a con job, interesting but unsupported, the fact that all of the guns actually had been wiped clean would not be known for several week.  Davids gave Brown's information to the state attorney's office.  Later Frye reported to the defense that Brown's story was without substance, and that Brown was a petty criminal and a habitual liar.

Annan and Ragsdale continued trying to establish the facts of the case.  Annan became convinced that he was being stonewalled by police and prosecutors.  He felt that they deliberately misled him when he tried to find the citrus grove where Zeigler was said to have brought Mays and Thomas.

Still, most of the answers—or at least keys to the answers—were in the store itself, and the OCSO continued to control the crime scene. Pete Ragsdale warned Hadley that some of the distinguishing enzymes in human blood would not be detected in stains more than ten days old.  A thorough sampling of the blood evidence in the store could provide a virtual diagram of who had bled, and where.  It would show whether a sixth person had left blood at the scene.  But any