PUBLISHER'S NOTE: "WORDS TO HEED: FROM OUR POST ON KEVIN COOPER'S APPLICATION FOR POST-CONVICTION DNA TESTING; CALIFORNIA: (Applicable wherever a state resists DNA testing): "Blogger/extraordinaire Jeff Gamso's blunt, unequivocal, unforgettable message to the powers that be in California: "JUST TEST THE FUCKING DNA." (Oh yes, Gamso raises, as he does in many of his posts, an important philosophical question: This post is headed: "What is truth, said jesting Pilate."...Says Gamso: "So what's the harm? What, exactly, are they scared of? Don't we want the truth?")
————————————————————
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Zeigler said his last goal in life is to clear his name. He wonders how the DNA results will be received by those with the power to set him free. “We just have to wait and see if a judge will stand up after 48 years,” he said, “and say, ‘we screwed up.’ ”
-----------------------------------------------------
He tried for decades to get the evidence in his case analyzed for DNA. Prosecutors and judges refused six times to allow the tests, even at his lawyers’ expense. Then in 2021, Monique Worrell became the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court state attorney serving Osceola and Orange counties. She had previously reviewed Zeigler’s case as founder of the office’s conviction integrity unit and said the state had a moral obligation to be certain it had convicted the right person. Florida’s attorney general opposed the evidence release, but the Florida Supreme Court refused to stop it. “There is reasonable doubt in spades in this case,” said one of Zeigler’s attorneys, David Michaeli, “and we don’t convict people, let alone execute them, when we’re not absolutely sure they’re guilty.”
—————————————————————————————
PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "He had initially sought early DNA testing in 1994 after he heard about a prosecutor in Orange County being the first to use it to convict a rapist. A judge finally granted the analysis in 2001 after Florida passed a DNA testing law. Forensic tests on four tiny squares of Zeigler’s clothes failed to detect his family members’ blood. But his appeals of innocence went nowhere, even after two expert witnesses testified that based on the limited tests, Zeigler could not have killed his family. Florida prosecutors and judges all the way to the state Supreme Court denied further requests, saying that the information gleaned from the analysis would not automatically acquit Zeigler, as Florida’s DNA testing law required. Michaeli and Tracey told Zeigler they thought they now had enough."
SUB-HEADING: After 48 years on death row, the results of Zeigler’s successful battle for DNA testing could mark a breakthrough.
PHOTO CAPTION: "Tommy Zeigler, 79, pictured on Nov. 26, 2024, has said he is innocent of killing his wife and in-laws at his family's furniture store for 49 years. Now, he says, the DNA tests back up his story."
A trail of blood, rug fibers and cat fur show it is impossible for Florida death row inmate Tommy Zeigler to have killed his wife and in-laws on Christmas Eve 1975, his lawyers assert in a new court filing.
Fresh DNA analysis of dozens of pieces of evidence instead supports Zeigler’s story of walking in on a burglary at his family’s furniture store in Winter Garden, his lawyers say, and provides enough reasonable doubt to overturn his convictions.
The results upend what Orange County prosecutors told Zeigler’s 1976 jury: that Zeigler, who is white, shot and killed his wife, mother-in-law and father-in-law, then lured three Black men to the store to blame them for the murders, killing one. The tests also point to another man as the killer.
Zeigler, who will be 80 in July, has lived on death row for 48 years — the longest among Florida inmates and quite possibly the nation.
He tried for decades to get the evidence in his case analyzed for DNA. Prosecutors and judges refused six times to allow the tests, even at his lawyers’ expense.
Then in 2021, Monique Worrell became the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court state attorney serving Osceola and Orange counties. She had previously reviewed Zeigler’s case as founder of the office’s conviction integrity unit and said the state had a moral obligation to be certain it had convicted the right person.
Florida’s attorney general opposed the evidence release, but the Florida Supreme Court refused to stop it.
“There is reasonable doubt in spades in this case,” said one of Zeigler’s attorneys, David Michaeli, “and we don’t convict people, let alone execute them, when we’re not absolutely sure they’re guilty.”
In a recent interview at a conference room on death row, Zeigler said he hopes his experience showcases the police and prosecutorial misconduct embedded in Florida’s death penalty.
In his case, police or prosecutors coached witnesses, failed to get any of the blood subtyped and lost or destroyed key evidence, including a loose tooth seen in crime scene photos that did not belong to a victim, the new filing says.
Officers or prosecutors withheld the existence of multiple witnesses and police reports, including one of an attempted armed robbery at a gas station across the street from the furniture store within hours of the murders. The original judge also behaved inappropriately, the lawyers say, getting a doctor to prescribe Valium to a holdout juror, who only then voted to convict.
If he were declared innocent, Zeigler would join 30 other wrongfully convicted men released from Florida’s death row — the most of any state.
His appeals lawyers have been with him since 1987 and paid for the DNA analysis. During the last two years, they have sent him glimpses into the exhaustive testing by Forensic Analytical Crime Lab of Hayward, Calif. They’ve offered reassurances, and for the first time in many years, hope.
• • •
That chilly Christmas Eve in 1975, Zeigler, then 30, and his handyman, Edward Williams, 58, pulled up to the back of the W.T. Zeigler Furniture store, about 10 miles north of the Magic Kingdom. They planned to deliver several large Christmas gifts, including a La-Z-Boy for Zeigler’s father-in-law. Eunice, Zeigler’s 32-year-old wife, and her parents had driven ahead of Zeigler to pick out the recliner.
As Zeigler walked into the dark showroom, someone hit him over the head, knocking off his glasses, he later told police and a jury. Two blurry figures, one much larger, threw him up against a wall and into a hallway.
Zeigler hustled to a desk, where he kept a revolver for protection. He remembers hitting someone with it and pulling the trigger, then he got knocked down and lost the gun. As he was getting up, he said, he felt the burn as a bullet entered his abdomen.
Before he fell unconscious, he heard a voice: “Mays has been hit, kill him.”
Zeigler told the first officer to arrive that he had been shot by Charlie Mays, a 35-year-old orange crew chief and father of four who owed the furniture store money.
When the lights came back on, police found Zeigler’s wife and in-laws in different parts of the store. Virginia Edwards, 54, was slumped on her side behind a floral couch in the front showroom, shot in her waist and the side of the head.
Zeigler’s wife of eight years, Eunice, lay on her back in the store’s tiny kitchen, her hand in the pocket of her herringbone jacket and a bullet wound on the right side of her head.
Zeigler’s father-in-law, Perry Edwards, was found in the back of the store, about 15 feet from Mays. Both men had been shot multiple times and struck repeatedly in the head with a steel crank used to turn linoleum rolls. Seven guns lay scattered around the bodies.
Zeigler was still in the hospital, recovering from an operation to his stomach, when a deputy sheriff arrived at his bedside and charged him with all four murders.
The apparent motive: a pair of insurance policies worth a combined $500,000 purchased by Zeigler months before on his wife.
The most damning testimony against Zeigler came from Williams, a Bahamian carpenter who had performed odd jobs for the Zeigler family for almost two decades.
Williams said when he entered the back of the store, he came face to face with Zeigler, who was pointing a .38 Special at him. Zeigler pulled the trigger three times, Williams told police, but the gun failed to fire.
Williams said he noticed specks of blood on Zeigler’s face.
He said he pocketed the gun, jumped over a fence and got a ride to a nearby town.
Hours later, he returned to the Winter Garden Police Department and handed over the gun.
It turned out to be one of the weapons used to shoot Zeigler’s in-laws.
Williams, who is deceased, appeared to have never been treated as a suspect.
Zeigler’s lawyers sent Williams’ pants out for analysis only to learn after the trial that Williams had likely changed his clothes since the pocket where he’d stuck the murder weapon contained no gunshot residue.
Orange County Sheriff’s Office Detective Donald Frye had graduated the previous summer from a week-long school with a now-discredited blood spatter analyst. Frye noticed that Mays’ blood had dried in spots atop 72-year-old Perry Edwards’ blood on the terrazzo floor.
Frye decided Edwards’ blood had dried at least 30 minutes before Mays’ had flowed, suggesting that Zeigler killed his family. Frye, who died in 2017, theorized that Zeigler then lured Williams, Mays and another man to the store to kill them and blame them for the killings.
Zeigler, who had no criminal record, had shot himself with a .357 revolver, Frye suggested, to cover up his involvement.
In front of a jury six months later, that’s the story State Attorney Robert Eagan told.
The prosecutor, who died in September, pointed to blood stains along the underarm of Zeigler’s shirt.
He said they came from Zeigler holding his father-in-law in a chokehold while he hit the older man in the head with the linoleum crank.
If the Orange County Sheriff’s Office had ordered blood subtyping — available in the 1970s but only if performed within two weeks — they would have learned that the blood on Zeigler’s shirt belonged to Mays — not Perry Edwards.
• • •
Forty-eight years later on a muggy, rainy day last June, New York lawyers Michaeli and Dennis Tracey flew to Jacksonville and drove through pine forests and cow fields to Union Correctional Institution in northwest Florida to deliver the latest DNA results to Zeigler.
It was distressing to see the 6-foot Zeigler in a wheelchair with an oxygen cannula stuck into his nose, Michaeli said in a phone interview.
Zeigler had fought pneumonia and been diagnosed with COPD. His weight had dropped to 105. The staff had raced him to the prison hospital so many times that now they kept him there. A doctor had prescribed him a 3,000-calorie-a-day diet that included Ensure Plus, so he was gaining weight.
Michaeli said he handed Zeigler a stack of DNA reports, and they went through them one-by-one.
Lab analysts had tested Zeigler’s corduroy shirt in 18 spots, including the cuffs, the collar, the front and back, and turned up no blood from his murdered relatives. His glasses and his orange, navy and tan plaid pants also were clean.
But Mays, who had been shot twice and beaten in the head with a linoleum crank, had evidence all over his body indicating culpability, according to the lawyers. In addition to what appeared to be the store’s cash receipts in his pockets, blood from Zeigler’s father-in-law soaked Mays' Converse sneakers and the lower thigh and upper calf of Mays’ trousers, according to the results.
The bottoms of Mays’ shoes also suggested he’d moved around the store closer to Perry Edwards’ death. They bore Persian cat fur matted with blood and brown rug fibers from the front of Zeigler’s store, where evidence showed Edwards had been first shot in the ear and shoulder, and near where Virginia Edwards died. Zeigler and his wife kept five Persian show cats that they took to competitions around Florida, but the cats had never come to the store.
There was more. Eunice Zeigler, repositioned after her death, also was splattered with her father’s blood. It was found inside her lapel, on the back of her pant leg, on a sock inside her shoe and on the shoe. Someone with hands covered in Perry Edwards’ blood had rearranged her clothes after her death, the lawyers told Zeigler, replacing her shoe on her foot and buttoning up her jacket.
The absence of any of Perry Edwards’ blood on Zeigler’s clothes meant he couldn’t have been there when Eunice, Perry and Virginia Edwards were killed, the lawyers told Zeigler. The victims had each been shot in the head with large-caliber bullets and there were no exit wounds, which meant the killer would have been splattered with their blood.
Adding to the defense theory that Mays was a perpetrator — and not a victim — his blood and touch DNA were found in minute amounts on the cuffs of Eunice’s herringbone jacket and at the opening of one pocket. This suggested Mays had moved her and buttoned up her coat.
Zeigler allowed himself to feel satisfaction. He knew this was going to be the outcome. At the same time, he couldn’t force himself to get excited. He’d been disappointed too many times before, he said.
He had initially sought early DNA testing in 1994 after he heard about a prosecutor in Orange County being the first to use it to convict a rapist. A judge finally granted the analysis in 2001 after Florida passed a DNA testing law. Forensic tests on four tiny squares of Zeigler’s clothes failed to detect his family members’ blood.
But his appeals of innocence went nowhere, even after two expert witnesses testified that based on the limited tests, Zeigler could not have killed his family.
Florida prosecutors and judges all the way to the state Supreme Court denied further requests, saying that the information gleaned from the analysis would not automatically acquit Zeigler, as Florida’s DNA testing law required.
Michaeli and Tracey told Zeigler they thought they now had enough.
But one mystery remains unsolved for now. Spots of blood on Mays’ shirt do not match anyone who was in the store that night, and a search of the national criminal database of DNA yielded no results.
• • •
Zeigler’s future seems intertwined with that of State Attorney Worrell. The progressive prosecutor approved Zeigler’s testing only to be removed from office by Gov. Ron DeSantis in August 2023 for what he said was a failure to fully prosecute drug trafficking and gun crimes.
Worrell won back her job last November, and on Jan. 8, she was sworn back in as the next state attorney without any interference from DeSantis.
As long as she retains the job, she must decide whether to support Zeigler’s request. As she headed back into her office after her swearing-in Jan. 8, she said she hoped to review the results of Zeigler’s DNA tests soon.
Zeigler was the subject of a 2018 Tampa Bay Times series and podcast, Blood and Truth. The Times found him to be among more than 30 men sent to death row in the 1970s and 1980s who were denied DNA testing, despite the law passed in 2001. Courts rejected their appeals for DNA tests a combined 70 times, or almost three out of every four requests, according to a review of more than 500 death row cases. Eight were executed without ever obtaining DNA tests.
Lynn-Marie Carty, Zeigler’s private investigator of 14 years, said Florida should have been reviewing cases from the 1970s and 1980s once DNA testing became available, especially given its abysmal record on exonerations.
“It doesn’t really seem like that’s a priority one way or the other with the powers that be,” Carty said. “But I don’t think that you can ignore dramatic DNA results.”
But Mays’ two remaining sons, who still live in the Winter Garden area, said the DNA results do not sway them.
Mays’ eldest son, Pierre Mays, 61, was 12 when his Dad died. Initially, he said the DNA results gave him doubts about Zeigler’s guilt. But minutes later, he changed his mind. “In my mind, I think he did it,” he said of Zeigler. “I might be wrong… but my Daddy was a good father, and I don’t believe he would do no one like that. And how could he kill these three people and he was the last one that got killed? How could that be? It’s like a puzzle to me.”
Down the street in a small duplex, his brother, Napoleon, 59, was equally adamant after hearing about the DNA tests. “My mamma always said if my Daddy killed all these people, why didn’t he kill Zeigler?” he said.
Zeigler said his last goal in life is to clear his name. He wonders how the DNA results will be received by those with the power to set him free.
“We just have to wait and see if a judge will stand up after 48 years,” he said, “and say, ‘we screwed up.’ ”
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2025/01/18/long-awaited-dna-analysis-proves-zeigler-innocent-1975-murders-lawyers-say/PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
———————————————————————————————
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
—————————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
