it Q-71.1  At the FBI Lab it became Q-99.  At trial the slug was marked for identification as item VVV, and became State's Exhibit 117 when it was admitted into evidence.

Identifying evidence and tracing custody is a legal necessity that can become tedious.  The number of state's exhibits reached 171;98 were admitted for the defense.  Many exhibits made multiple stops along the chain of custody and had to be accounted for at each destination along the chain.  Alton Evans eventually testified nine times, for both the state and the defense.  His testimony, dealing almost exclusively with chain of custody, totaled more than 180 pages.  Taken together it would compose nearly one volume of the fourteen-volume trial record. Deputies Harry Park, James Shannon, Toivo Nasi, Robert Gosselin, and John Fisher all testified on collection and custody of evidence, as did defense investigation Gene Annan and each forensics expert on both sides.

In all, nearly 500 pages of the 2,800 page trial record are devoted to this kind of procedural housekeeping, or to the minutiae of forensic evidence.  It is difficult to follow even in printed form.  At trial, it must have been beyond the comprehension of the most alert jurors.  Most of that testimony did not bear on Zeigler's guilt.  But, combined with the lengthy and often complicated opinions of the experts, it served to lend gravity—importance by virtue of sheer mass—to the fingerprint cards and the dry blood samples and the firearms and the clothing and the swatches of carpet and the lead slugs and the ammunition and all the rest that eventually filled two large tables.

In the midst of these formalities, Eagan built the state's case.

Jack Bachman, the state attorney's investigator who happened to have been at the scene on Christmas Eve, introduced a detailed model, which he had built by hand, of the furniture store and its surroundings.  Both the prosecution and the defense used the model for reference throughout the trial.

George Daniels, the manager of the TG&Y store, testified about the arrangement of lights on poles in the parking lot of the Tri-City shopping center, across Dillard Street from the furniture store.  These lights, shining through the display windows in front of the store, provided much of the illumination by which Edward Williams, so he said, had seen Tommy Zeigler holding a revolver.

Lynn Churchwell, the nurse who cut the clothes off Zeigler in the emergency room at West Orange Memorial, testified somewhat out of sequence because of scheduling problems.  She said that she saw "markings, some black markings, and

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1    It is standard investigative procedure to designate unidentified specimens by a Q number.  A Q specimen is a "questioned" item Evidence of known origin, such as liquid flood samples drawn from a body, are "known" items and are given a K number.  In the Zeigler case, the FBI Lab changed the numbering key because several of the state's K numbers actually were questioned items.  This caused some confusion, especially for the defense, which was not supplied the revised key system until late in discovery.