specimens would have to be collected and tested immediately if they were to be fully sub-grouped.2

Eventually the sheriff and prosecutor held the store for two weeks, and yielded it only after Professor MacDonell had completed his inspection.  Sheriff's officers assured Hadley that the samples had been properly collected and would be subgrouped as far as possible.

On January 7, Gene Annan was allowed to follow MacDonell around the store while the professor examined the scene.  MacDonell dictated notes into a tape recorder.  Annan was struck by how closely MacDonell's observations paralleled Frye's theory of how the crimes had been committed.

After the sheriff relinquished the crime scene, Ragsdale and Vernon Davids immediately went to work, taking photographs and collecting evidence.  By now, though, the dried blood had lost much of its value for identification.  Some of the footprints were still visible, and the bullet holes still remained.3  But the defense had to assume that most of the useful physical evidence was now in the custody of the sheriff or FBI Lab.

*

After they were embalmed, the bodies of Perry and Virginia Edwards were shipped to Georgia.  Beulah and Tom Zeigler attended their funerals on Sunday, December 28, at a Baptist church in the Edwardses' hometown of Moultrie.

Both Perry and Virginia, like their daughter, had been schoolteachers.  They had touched many lives, and their friends and admirers filled the church.

Beulah thought the service was disappointing.  In his eulogy, the minister didn't talk very much about what wonderful people the Edwardses had been or all that they had done.  Instead, he kept condemning the murderer who had taken their lives.

Some of the Edwardses' relatives, particularly their son, Perry junior, had been in contact with the Orange County authorities.  At a reception following the

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2              As late as 1960, only the tests for ABO blood grouping were considered reliable.  By 1976, criminal labs using micro-methods could test for eight or more groups of enzymes, proteins, and antigens to small samples of blood.  The various combinations of these substances, varying from one sample to another, allowed investigators to differentiate among several persons who had bled at a crime scene, often even if their blood was mixed.

  If a specimen was too small to allow testing of all these factors, forensic serologists still could subgroup the known blood (that is, the relatively copious specimens drawn from Zeigler and the four dear victims) to learn which two or three factors would differentiate the unknown specimens, then they could test the unknowns only for those critical factors.  Assuming that the samples were properly collected and promptly tested, the odds of distinguishing among the five persons known to have bled in the furniture store amounted to a virtual certainty.

3           Several can still be seen in the store.