Thirty-seven

Exactly six months from the day of the murders, on the morning of Thursday, June 24, Terry Hadley opened his defense with a quick succession of witnesses.

His first was Kenneth Walsh, a meteorologist, who fixed sunset on Christmas Eve at 5:35, with full darkness beginning at 6:02.

Boyd Holt, a Winter Garden barber at whose home Edward Williams claimed to be working on Christmas Eve, testified that he gave Williams $20 on he afternoon of the 24th. This agreed with Williams's testimony, but Holt added that the money was a loan, and that Williams did not tell him that he had worked that day.  The testimony was insignificant.

Mary Wallace, the manager of the Winter Garden Village apartments, where Williams had rented a unit on December 23, said that he stopped outside her office and spoke to her for five or ten minutes on the evening of Christmas Eve, as he was leaving the complex.  (Williams had testified that he spoke to nobody when he left the apartment.)  She said that he was dressed in khaki trousers and a light brown jacket; she placed the time at about 7:00, then claimed that it was after sunset, but before full darkness, which would be as much as an hour earlier.  Eagan did not cross-examine.

Wallace was followed to the stand by Tommy Zeigler's cousin Connie Crawford, who testified that she and Hadley had run a time trial between the Winter Garden Village complex and Temple Grove Drive.  The time from Williams's apartment to the Zeigler house was two minutes and forty seconds.  The object of this testimony was to impeach Williams's statement that he had gone straight from his apartment to Temple Grove Drive, where he arrived at 7:28.  Obviously this was impossible if Williams left the apartment before dark, as Mary Wallace testified. But Wallace's first statement, that she saw Williams around 7:00, confused the issue.

Lee Jones told of seeing two cars, including a dark automobile, parked in front of the store at 7:25 on Christmas Eve.

Patricia and Richard Smith repeated the story they had told under oath to Don Frye and Lawson Lamar in early January.  Both agreed that at 7:57 they saw two cars, one very dark and smaller than the other, parked in front of the furniture store.  Patricia Smith said specifically that neither car was the Dunaway Oldsmobile.  Her husband said that the larger, lighter-colored car was possibly two-toned, darker on top than on the bottom—the reverse of the color scheme of Dunaway's car.  Richard Smith also testified about the scene at the hospital on Christmas Day, when Zeigler wept after hearing that Eunice was dead.