Q: This occurred after the car bad been running—I mean the truck had been started and running for a long period of time?

A: Yes.  He would have more problem when it was hot, had been running.

Hadley now admitted to Judge Paul that he was out of witnesses. Paul recessed until noon.  After lunch, Alton Evans, a sheriff's deputy, gave chain-of-custody testimony for several items that the defense introduced into evidence.  Then Gene Annan and Ernest Crawford—the husband of Zeigler's cousin Connie—testified about a visibility test they performed in the store.

This experiment was similar to the one that Frye had tried with Denny Martin, testing whether Edward Williams could have seen a pistol in Zeigler's hand when he entered the showroom.  But there were a couple of important differences.  Annan, playing the part of Williams, did not allow his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside the building as Frye and Martin had.  And Crawford, standing where Williams said Zeigler had clicked the pistol at him, held three different objects—a can of spray paint, a vacuum cleaner attachment, and a chrome-plated flashlight—as Annan came down the hallway three times.

Annan testified that parking-lot lamps at the Tri-City shopping center did throw some light into the store, but that the kitchen partition created a shadow where Williams claimed Zeigler was standing. Annan said that in three tries he could not make out what Crawford was holding in his hand.

Hadley was barely an hour into the afternoon session when he told the judge that he had no more witnesses for the day.  The testimony had gone much more quickly than he had planned.

Judge Paul recessed until the morning.

It was mixed bag of testimony for the defense: sixteen witnesses, some important and others almost trivial, all of them quickly on and off the stand.  Among them were J.D. and Madelyn Nolan.  Their testimony, by inference, directly refuted Edward Williams at the most critical point of his story—that is, his account of the events at the furniture store that supposedly caused him to run away and try to call the police.  There was no innocent explanation for Williams's arriving at the restaurant after Zeigler had already left for the hospital.

Whether the jury understood that implication or whether the Nolans were just simply lost in the fast shuffle of witnesses may never be known.  Whether the defense team itself completely grasped the significance of the Nolans' testimony is arguable.  But the fact is that the most important independent testimony in the trial, the potential centerpiece of the argument for Zeigler's innocence, had quickly come and gone within the first morning of the defense's case.