On one side of the small but crowded courtroom — behind Tommy Zeigler and his team of attorneys — sat a cousin of the convicted killer, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, and a woman who has long run a website that claims Zeigler could not have murdered four people on Christmas Eve 1975.
On the other side sat family members of some of those victims. One wiped tears and left the courtroom when gruesome crime scene photos were shown on big screens.
In the hallway, a documentary film crew scurried to capture conversations among attorneys and spectators talking about the horrific killings at the W.T. Zeigler Furniture store in Winter Garden.
For decades, the Zeigler case has fascinated the public and has led to television shows, books, documentaries and a variety of crime sleuths tossing up theories. That interest was on display last week in the Orange County Courthouse during an unusual evidentiary hearing in the 50-year-old case.
Now it’s up to Circuit Court Judge Leticia Marques to decide whether Zeigler — who has been on Florida’s death row longer than any other inmate — should be granted a new trial. He was convicted in 1976 of murdering his wife, her parents and a customer in his store.
On Friday, Zeigler’s attorneys and state prosecutors wrapped up five days of testimony in a hearing ordered by Marques last August to consider hundreds of new DNA tests. The tests were conducted over the past two years on clothing and blood collected at the crime scene in 1975.
Prosecutors say the new tests wouldn’t alter what a jury decided originally: That Zeigler was guilty of the four murders. Defense attorneys, though, say modern DNA testing, not available when Zeigler was tried, cast plenty of questions over the old verdict.
“There’s enough reasonable doubt in this case for a jury today,” defense attorney David Michaeli said in his closing argument on Friday. “If the system doesn’t work for Mr. Zeigler, it doesn’t work for anyone.”
But Assistant State Attorney Joshua Schow said the new evidence still doesn’t show Zeigler is innocent.
“The jury got it right in 1976,” he said.
Marques will likely not make a decision until March.
Zeigler’s cousin Connie Crawford has attended almost every hearing in his case, including walking into the courthouse with him at his 1976 trail. She was in court all last week.
“He’s hoping for a new trial. That’s the one thing he’s always wanted,” Crawford, 83, said as she sat outside the courtroom on Wednesday.
“We’re the only ones really left in our family,” she said. “Tommy and I have to stand strong for each other.”
Pierre Mays, who was 12 years old when his father Charlie Mays was murdered, sat in the back of the courtroom on the first day of testimony and again on Friday. He did not show emotion when crime scene photos of his father’s body — Charlie Mays, a store customer, was shot and beaten in the head — were shown.
“It’s just been so long ago,” said Mays, now 61. “I still think he’s guilty.”
Many who have followed the Zeigler case have long wondered: Why would a 30-year-old successful business owner, who also owned multiple rental properties, suddenly brutally murder his wife, in-laws and a longtime customer and then shoot himself in the side, as prosecutors say he did?
They have maintained money was the motive: Zeigler purchased two separate life insurance policies on his wife totaling $500,000 a month before the killings. His family had just completed a new building on Dillard Street for their furniture store. Zeigler was in debt, as he had recently bought a new car and built a swimming pool at his Winter Garden home. And he and his wife were having marital difficulties, they said.
Prosecutors told the jury in July 1976 that Zeigler committed the murders and then tried to lure three poor Black men to the store to make it seem they were culprits. He shot himself to make it seem the murders were part of a bungled robbery, they said.
But defense attorneys, then and now, claim detectives with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office did a sloppy and incomplete investigation at the bloody crime scene and quickly singled out Zeigler as the killer before considering other suspects — among them Mays and others in the area that night.
Zeigler has always maintained his innocence, even after he was convicted in July 1976 of two counts of first degree murder in the deaths of his father-in-law Perry Edwards and Mays and two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of his wife, Eunice Zeigler, and his mother-in-law Virginia Edwards. He has had numerous appeals and hearings on his case.
Now, 80 and in ill health — he’s in a wheelchair and uses an oxygen cannula to breathe — Zeigler received likely his best and last chance at being exonerated through last week’s hearing.
Throughout the five days of testimony and lawyers’ arguments, Zeigler listened intently. He smiled and shook hands with his attorneys at the start of proceedings. But he did not show any reaction when images of his wife’s body lying in a pool of blood, a gunshot wound in the back of her head, were displayed in the courtroom.
At the hearing, forensic scientists testified about their interpretations of crime scene evidence based on old photos of blood splatter on the carpets and walls, along with shirts, coats, pants and shoes from the victims and Zeigler.
Richard Eikelenboom testified for the defense that Zeigler’s clothing did not show any blood from his murdered family members. A gunman shooting someone at close range would get some back spatter of blood, defense attorneys said.
But prosecutors tore apart Eikelenboom’s testimony after he acknowledged he did not have copies of the autopsy reports and that he hastily wrote his report last August.
Retired Miami Beach detective Ibrahim Garcia, who testified for the defense, called the crime scene investigation nearly 50 years ago “shoddy detective work.”
“My opinion is that the investigation was mismanaged,” Garcia said.
But when pressed by state attorneys, he acknowledged he never visited the inside of the former furniture building, which is a thrift shop today.
Lynn-Marie Carty, a private investigator who delved into the Zeigler case about 15 years ago after reading a news article in the Tampa Bay Times, was in the courtroom all week, too. Her website, tommyzeiglerisinnocent.com offers reams of information claiming to show Zeigler didn’t do it.
“It’s amazing that he’s been in prison this long when he’s never committed a crime; never done anything wrong,” she said.
Carty met Zeigler in prison for the first time in 2011 and has since interviewed witnesses and sought evidence in the case.
The news article that drew her to Zeigler was by then Times reporter Leonora LaPeter Anton, a 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner for investigative reporting and now a freelance journalist. Anton also attended the hearings, taking meticulous notes.
Crawford, Zeigler’s cousin, said she and Zeigler, an inmate at Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, email each other often. She keeps him up to date on the region’s tremendous growth. He’s amazed his old furniture store building is still standing.
Her cousin’s conviction, she said, destroyed his promising life.
“When he woke up on Christmas Eve, his name was gold,” Crawford said. “We never thought this would happen.”
As Crawford spoke, a documentary film crew from Left/Right TV interviewed people in the hallway and captured conversations.
They have been producing a documentary on Zeigler’s case for the past eight years. If Marques orders a new trial, it’s likely they would have to delay their project for several more years to cover that event, one of the crew members explained.
A woman who asked not to be identified other than as a family member of Perry and Virginia Edwards sat behind state attorneys during the entire proceedings. She listened intently and occasionally wiped away tears.
She walked out when attorneys displayed color photos shot by investigators soon after the killings showing Virginia Edwards lying on her side in a pool of blood behind furniture.
Outside the courtroom Friday, Michaeli said the week-long hearing “went very well” for his client.
“Tommy is really happy that he got this chance,” Michaeli said.