Mar 2, 2003

Bonds In Blood

By BRAD SMITH
bsmith@tampatrib.com

Photo by: COLIN HACKLEY Tommy Zeigler, 57, reads, exercises and studies his case in his death row jail cell. He hopes for a new trial.

WINTER GARDEN - Jimmie Yawn never saw so much blood.

Pooled and splattered, it splashed across the white terrazzo floor of W.T. Zeigler Furniture Store. Four bodies lay among the sofas and mattresses.

A second-year patrol officer on the Winter Garden police force, Yawn was first on the scene. Other lawmen saw owner William ``Tommy'' Zeigler Jr., 30, stagger toward the locked front door. Zeigler was bloody, too.

It was Christmas Eve 1975. A bullet stopped a wall clock in the store at 7:24 p.m. One of the grisliest mass murders in Central Florida had just played out.

Eunice, Zeigler's 29-year-old wife, was shot in the back of her head. Her body lay in a small kitchen off the sales room. Her hand was inside her coat pocket as if someone had placed it there.

Her mother, Virginia Edwards, 54, of Moultrie, Ga., was kneeling among the furniture, face down on the floor. She was shot in the head. A bullet pierced her arm as if she had tried to shield herself.

Near the front door lay retired minister Perry Edwards, 72, Eunice's father. He had put up a struggle. Besides absorbing several bullets, his skull was bashed with a handgun.

Near the back of the store, surrounded by rocking chairs, was a fourth body.

It belonged to Charlie Mays, 35, a black citrus picker whom Zeigler had known for 15 years. He was shot twice and his face beaten with a metal carpet crank. The bottoms of his pant legs and the soles of his sneakers were caked with blood.

The only person left alive, Zeigler, was shot once in the stomach.

He told police he was knocked unconscious during a robbery. He thought Mays fired at him.

Yawn knew Zeigler. They'd grown up together.

Yawn broke his foot when he accidentally kicked Zeigler during a football game. But this was something else.

Yawn didn't know what to think, but he never figured he would still be wondering 27 years later.

``I'm sure the prosecution's theory was not 100 percent right,'' Yawn said a few days ago at the police station in Winter Garden, nine miles north of Disney World, where he's been chief since 1981. ``Anything of this magnitude, there are going to be mistakes.''

New DNA Evidence

Now, DNA testing approved after years of state opposition proves Zeigler's prosecution was flawed, his attorneys say.

It is dramatic evidence, never seen by a jury, that could warrant a new trial, or freedom, after almost 27 years on death row, Zeigler's defenders hope.

``My story has always been the same, and now the evidence backs me up,'' Zeigler, 57, said in a recent interview at Union Correctional Institute in Raiford.

If so, it could mark the latest setback for the death penalty in Florida, where 23 condemned men have been freed from pending executions after evidence surfaced that cast doubt on their guilt.

Rudolph Holton of Tampa was the latest. He was released from death row Jan. 24.

``The state had a case, but it was a false case and now God has shown them through the miracle of DNA that they are wrong,'' Zeigler said.

Maybe, but Zeigler's case has never been quite that clear.

It's a devilish mess, fraught with racial overtones and gay sex rumors, facts and timelines that don't neatly fit.

No theory - defense or prosecution - seems to make perfect sense.

A Theory Of Greed

Hours after the carnage, Zeigler became a suspect. When police found papers in a desk at the store, a motive seemed to emerge.

They believed Zeigler, a well-to-do merchant with political ambitions, executed his wife in a baroque plot to collect $500,000 in life insurance. He killed his in-laws, too.

They were in the store picking out a recliner for Christmas. To simulate a robbery, police said, Zeigler lured three black men to the scene to frame and kill them, but succeeded with only one, Mays.

Another grew suspicious and fled.

When the third ran, after Zeigler's gun misfired inside a darkened doorway at the store's rear, Zeigler turned a .38 Special on himself to create an alibi.

Seconds before, he dialed the Christmas party where he was expected with his wife.

He asked for his friend, then-police Chief Don Ficke, and reported being shot.

In the hospital that night, Zeigler said he stumbled into a theft gone bad.

He said he took a bullet to the gut after a struggle with at least two men. He lost his glasses in a fight and couldn't see much besides blurs.

Zeigler fought for his life before he passed out, he said.

He fired two of the five pistols found at the scene, and used one as a club against his attackers. Nearly 30 shots rang out.

Besides greed, police developed another motive.

They theorized Zeigler was gay. He killed his wife and her parents to stop them from exposing him and ruining his reputation in his hometown, they believed.

A witness who barely knew Eunice Zeigler said Eunice confided catching her husband in bed with a prominent man weeks before the killings.

No proof ever surfaced.

Zeigler's attorneys say the story was spread by police.

Today, Zeigler's cousin, Connie Crawford, says rumors started because a gay man worked at the store.

One strange bit of evidence was the sex diary Eunice Zeigler kept by the childless couple's bed, listing their intercourses. It stopped two weeks before the murders. Tommy Zeigler said it was a temperature chart used to time his wife's ovulations in efforts to get pregnant.

Convicted, Sentenced

Zeigler went on trial in June 1976 in Jacksonville because of pretrial publicity. His family spent at least $1 million on his defense. Guilty verdicts were returned on two counts of first- degree and two counts of second-degree murder. Jurors recommended life in prison. Circuit Judge Maurice Paul overrode the jury and imposed a death sentence.

No one disputes there was an avalanche of physical and circumstantial evidence, much developed after Zeigler went to prison. Clothing, photographs, fingerprints and blood samples piled up. Both sides produced witnesses with contradictory stories.

Just the guns and bullets gave pause. Zeigler owned all five firearms linked to the crime, but could he have acted alone? He carried guns for protection because he handled lots of cash. No fingerprint proved he killed anyone. Were others guilty?

The state's star witness, handyman Edward Williams, testified Zeigler tried to kill him at the store, too. But Williams told of Zeigler's gun jamming, then Zeigler desperately saying he didn't mean any harm.

Williams, who worked periodically for Zeigler, testified Zeigler handed him the gun to prove it was all a mistake. But a frightened Williams ran, leaving his truck parked at the store.

That's how, Williams testified, he turned up later with the gun that killed Perry and Virginia Edwards.

Now preaching near Orlando, police say he's had no brushes with the law since.

The main defense theory was that Williams, Mays and a fruit picker named Felton Thomas were in on a robbery that strayed into murder.

Thomas was poor. Mays was a gambler. Williams worked only part- time. All needed a few hundred dollars more desperately than the wealthy Zeigler needed half a million, Zeigler's attorneys argued.

Later, the defense alleged Williams might have been part of a criminal conspiracy possibly arranged by police. It was aimed at framing Zeigler, who had offended powerful people in Winter Garden by keeping tabs on wrongs allegedly done to black residents.

In the mid-1970s, Winter Garden was still deeply segregated. Zeigler was among the few merchants who extended credit to blacks. He was also a landlord with black tenants.

Months before the crimes, Zeigler and Paul, the judge who would sentence him to death, were on opposite sides of a nasty liquor license dispute involving a black bar owner.

Blood Never Tested

Years passed. Troubling questions and new witnesses surfaced while evidence began to unravel. In 1987, the defense discovered a suppressed 13-page police report that contradicted the prosecution's version of events.

The report, by Oakland Police Chief Robert Thompson, said blood on Zeigler's abdomen wound was dry when police arrived. That supported Zeigler's story of being shot and passing out for a time. But if police were correct that Zeigler shot himself just after summoning help, then his blood would still have been wet.

Most critically, the state failed to match crime scene blood to each victim. DNA testing hadn't been developed yet. But sub-typing - several steps beyond basic typing - could have revealed much more about what happened.

Three of four victims shared the same Type A blood. Without better tests, scientific proof was impossible about who did what to whom and when.

Now, blood smeared on Zeigler's T- shirt, never before tested for DNA, appears to prove Zeigler could not have fatally beaten his father-in-law as prosecutors have always insisted.

Anyone who smashed Perry Edwards' skull would have gotten splattered with blood. At least that's what jurors were told at the trial.

DNA shows that instead of Edwards' blood, the blood on Zeigler was from Charlie Mays. Mays was among those the defense painted as robbers. His was the fourth body found at the store. He had store receipts and $400 in his pocket. His clothing was also saturated with Perry Edwards' blood.

Lawyers now ask, if Mays was a victim, why were his pant legs and sneakers saturated with another victim's dried blood?

Does it prove that Mays' blood alone on Zeigler means Zeigler never beat his father-in-law but struggled for his life in the darkened store against a wounded Mays as Zeigler always claimed?

State Fought DNA Tests

Either way, it raises questions about why Florida fought DNA testing on Zeigler's shirt for more than a decade.

``I think it's sad, it really is,'' said Manhattan lawyer Dennis Tracey, who took on Zeigler's appeals 17 years ago. ``We first requested to test evidence for DNA in 1992. The prosecution resisted that for years. It's very unfortunate they didn't want these facts to come out. Everybody should be interested in getting all the facts.''

Assistant State Attorney Jeff Ashton of Orange County says the state opposed DNA testing ``because they hadn't done it for so long.''

By state law, defense attorneys had to request DNA testing within two years after the crime. But DNA testing wasn't available that long ago. In 2001, a judge approved tests.

As for DNA results disproving the state's case, Ashton said that's ``the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life. Even for a lawyer, that's ridiculous.''

Ashton, who has handled the case since 1989, calls the DNA evidence ``in no way consistent with Zeigler's story'' because it indicates bloody, bodily combat with Mays that Zeigler never quite described in testimony or sketchy police statements.

``The only thing I can tell you is that during the fight I was grabbing everything I could grab ahold to and swinging with everything I had,'' Zeigler testified in 1976.

In fact, Ashton said, other blood on the bottom of Zeigler's sock, also recently tested for the first time at state request, contradicts Zeigler's story of being attacked, losing his glasses and fumbling in the dark.

Mays' blood on Zeigler's sock shows Zeigler must have had time to find his shoes and slip them on after a life and death struggle because he was wearing loafers when found by police.

DNA Proves Innocence..

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