Thirty-six

It is a measure of the state’s physical evidence that Robert Eagan's opening and closing statements referred mostly to untrained witnesses whose personal testimony tied Zeigler to the crime.  Edward Williams and Felton Thomas directly incriminated Zeigler.  Mattie Mays, Frank Smith, and Thomas Hale implicated him by easy deduction.  The accuracy of their stories might be argued, but not their significance.  The accounts they gave under oath were incompatible with any theory of Zeigler's innocence.

That could not be said of the forensic testimony.  Much of it, including the FBI's blood work, was so sketchy as to allow almost any construction of the facts.  Some, like the ballistic evidence, was thorough but meaningless: the results might show which gun had fired a given bullet, but gave no clue to who had pulled the trigger.

The fact that the crime scene was a public place complicated the fingerprint work and the hair-and-fiber analysis.  Zeigler's fingerprints were to be expected in his own store.  An FBI expert found a variety of Caucasian and Negroid hairs on the clothing of the victims, but these could have fallen from any of the dozens of people who walked through the store on Christmas Eve alone.  (Similarly, hairs from the Zeiglers' cats were found embedded in the blood on Charlie Mays's sneakers.  But Tommy was at the store every day; hairs from his cats could have been anywhere on the floor.)

Still, forensic testimony-some from defense witnesses, most called by the state-consumed many hours in the courtroom.

William Gavin, the FBI serological expert, followed Mary Ellen Stewart to the stand and used the entire afternoon session of June 21 to testify to the blood findings that had disappointed the prosecution when they were first released.

Gavin's testimony was most notable for his explanation of why he chose not to subtype the dry blood specimens.  He explained that dry samples more than two weeks old are not suitable for subtyping because of the danger of false results.  He said that he received most of the samples from Alton Evans and James Shannon on December 29, but that other examinations of the evidence (in ballistics, among others) had to be completed before he began his work.  "The items of evidence were to be examined prior to my examinations for blood" was how he put it.  He said that by the time he received the evidence back, the blood was too old to be subtyped.

This did not resolve the controversy. OCSO technicians had collected much of the blood evidence on swabs and filter papers that required no other tests.  Yet