witnesses and media representatives to the death chamber.  I could hear the generator running and smell the diesel fumes from it.  At the same moment I could hear the switches clicking and the light bulb in my cell dimmed so I knew exactly what was happening!

A few moment later I heard the door to the death chamber open.  I could hear voices outside, the vans cranked up, and I watched them drive the witnesses back down the little asphalt road from the death chamber.  I then watched the hearse come in through the sally port gate, travel down the same little asphalt road to the death chamber. The doors opened and closed again and I watched the hearse retreat back down the road.

It's very accurate to say that had the United States Supreme Court lifted the stays I would have been taken back into the death house, prepped, and executed right after Frog.

The stays were not lifted.  Zeigler's new lawyers, members of a New York law firm working pro bono, prepared a new petition for the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Bill Duane's proselytizing paid off now.  One of Duane's acquaintances in Orlando had been Dave Burgin, who became editor in chief of the Sentinel around the time that Duane took on Zeigler's case.  Burgin, after many hours of hearing Duane expound on the case, had become convinced that Zeigler had been unjustly convicted.

Burgin had since left the Sentinel and was now a consultant to the Atlanta Constitution.  Atlanta happens to be the seat of the Eleventh U.S. Circuit.  Burgin commissioned the Constitution's Florida correspondent to do a series of articles on the crime, incorporating details that the media in Orange County had largely overlooked.

The articles appeared on the three days immediately preceding Zeigler's hearing in Atlanta.  Zeigler and his supporters believed that they may have been responsible for saving his life, for shortly afterward the three judges of the Eleventh Circuit accepted Zeigler's argument that Judge Paul should have heard testimony about possible mitigating circumstances before overriding the jury's recommendation.

The two death sentences were thrown out, and Zeigler was awarded a new sentencing hearing.

Shortly before that hearing took place—in Orlando, in 1989—a Sentinel article claimed that a former Death Row inmate named Eddie Odom1 was going to testify that in 1979, Zeigler persuaded his mother to pay $50,000 to Odom's wife, so that Odom could arrange to have Tom Zeigler, Sr. murdered; the motive

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1              Odom is a career criminal who received the death sentence for a 1976 murder conviction; the sentence was later reduced to life.