PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Lined up to testify on his behalf are a veteran Miami Beach homicide detective sergeant and a forensic expert who was the first to get a touch DNA test into a U.S. courtroom. Both say the testing makes clear that Zeigler did not kill his wife or her parents, according to reports filed by his attorneys with the Orlando County Clerk of Court. “It is my professional opinion that police did not allow the evidence to take them to the subject,” former detective sergeant Ibrahim Garcia wrote in his August report. “Instead, the police took their chosen suspect, Mr. Zeigler, to the evidence.”
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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "The killings baffled the people in Winter Garden, a town surrounded by citrus groves and a dozen miles north of Disney’s recently opened Magic Kingdom. How could a respected business owner with no criminal record commit a quadruple murder? That question has drawn people to Zeigler’s case for five decades. Over the past 20 years, he repeatedly asked for modern DNA analysis of the evidence. His efforts were the subject of a 2018 Tampa Bay Times series and podcast, Blood and Truth. Florida lawmakers had tried 25 years ago to make DNA testing more available, especially for those on death row. But prosecutors and judges rejected Zeigler’s requests for advanced testing six times, saying that the results would not clearly exonerate him as state law requires."
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PASSAGE FOUR OF THE DAY: "Terry Hadley, the attorney who represented Zeigler in 1976, has been working with his appeals lawyers for years. He is now 83 and plans to be in the courtroom for the new hearing. “We have waited almost 50 years for this,” he said. “You know, here’s a man who spent a major part of his life behind bars when he shouldn’t have. My hope is that he will have a chance to breathe air as a free man and walk in the sunshine."
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STORY: "Starting Monday, an Orlando judge will hear evidence in a 50-year-old murder case," by Former Tampa Times Reporter Leonor LaPeter Anton, published by The Tampa Times, on November 27, 2025.
SUB-HEADING: "Tommy Zeigler’s last, and probably best, hope to get off death row comes thanks to DNA testing."
PHOTO CAPTION: "Tommy Zeigler has been on Florida's death row since 1976.
GIST: "Next week, in an Orlando courtroom, a judge will hear evidence in a 50-year-old murder case. Then she will decide the fate of Tommy Zeigler, the longest-serving death row inmate in Florida.
Zeigler, now 80, will return to a courtroom for the first time in decades thanks to DNA testing of the evidence. A jury convicted him of killing his wife, Eunice, in-laws Perry and Virginia Edwards and another man at his family’s furniture store in Winter Garden on Christmas Eve 1975.
Zeigler will arrive for the hearing in a wheelchair, an oxygen canister by his side. He has COPD, weighs 122 pounds and has been in declining health for years.
Lined up to testify on his behalf are a veteran Miami Beach homicide detective sergeant and a forensic expert who was the first to get a touch DNA test into a U.S. courtroom. Both say the testing makes clear that Zeigler did not kill his wife or her parents, according to reports filed by his attorneys with the Orlando County Clerk of Court.
“It is my professional opinion that police did not allow the evidence to take them to the subject,” former detective sergeant Ibrahim Garcia wrote in his August report. “Instead, the police took their chosen suspect, Mr. Zeigler, to the evidence.”
Circuit Judge Leticia Marques, first elected in 2012, will preside over the weeklong hearing that in many ways should resemble a trial. In addition to the DNA results, Zeigler will be allowed to bring up evidence discovered after his conviction. That includes evidence the court had procedurally barred because it had already been brought up or had exceeded a time limit.
At the end of the hearing, Marques will decide whether to toss aside the conviction of a man who has been on death row possibly longer than anyone in the country. It’s not clear how soon Marques will rule.
In an email Monday, Zeigler wrote that he’s still not allowing himself to get excited.
“I pray for an honest judge and hope for the truth!” he wrote.
Lawyers for Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier are fighting Zeigler’s claims of innocence. On Oct. 20, they told the defense attorneys that they would be adding a witness to the hearing, a crime scene and bloodstain expert who once worked at the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.
Marques rejected the state’s request to limit witnesses unrelated to the DNA testing. That includes Felton Thomas, the last person to see one of the victims walk into the furniture store, supposedly with Zeigler. Many of the witnesses, policemen and prosecutors involved in the original case have since died.
Thomas recanted some details of his 1976 testimony during a meeting with Zeigler’s private investigator in 2013. Lawyers questioned Thomas for the first time since the trial this past week.
Zeigler was 30 years old when he walked into the back hallway of his furniture store late that Christmas Eve to make last-minute deliveries. He said someone struck him in the head.
Zeigler told police and later testified at his trial about what he thought was a robbery gone wrong:
He fought with two men inside the dark store, one larger than the other. They threw him against a wall, and he grabbed a Colt .357 revolver he kept in a nearby desk. He may have fired that gun. He felt the burn as someone shot him in the stomach and he passed out. When he woke up, he called police, who found four bodies in the store — his three relatives and an orange grove crew leader named Charlie Mays.
The killings baffled the people in Winter Garden, a town surrounded by citrus groves and a dozen miles north of Disney’s recently opened Magic Kingdom.
How could a respected business owner with no criminal record commit a quadruple murder?
That question has drawn people to Zeigler’s case for five decades.
Over the past 20 years, he repeatedly asked for modern DNA analysis of the evidence. His efforts were the subject of a 2018 Tampa Bay Times series and podcast, Blood and Truth. Florida lawmakers had tried 25 years ago to make DNA testing more available, especially for those on death row. But prosecutors and judges rejected Zeigler’s requests for advanced testing six times, saying that the results would not clearly exonerate him as state law requires.
When Ninth Judicial Circuit State Attorney Monique Worrell took office in 2021, Zeigler cleared the hurdle. Worrell had studied the case a few years earlier as founder of the office’s conviction integrity unit and felt the state had a moral obligation to allow the testing.
Even so, last July, her prosecutors refused to support Zeigler’s request to set aside his conviction based on the DNA tests. They said the results did not outright exonerate him.
Zeigler’s crime scene experts have suggested that Mays, the orange crew leader, played a role in the killings.
Blood from Zeigler’s father-in-law had soaked into the knee of Mays’ pants, Richard Eikelenboom, the forensic DNA and bloodstain expert, wrote in his report. That could only happen if Mays had been there when Edwards was killed.
Yet prosecutors have always argued that Zeigler lured Mays to the store after the murders to kill and take the blame.
Traces of Mays’ touch DNA were found on Eunice Zeigler’s coat in five locations, Eikelenboom said.
It’s likely Mays moved her body and put her hand in her pocket, Eikelenboom said, before he was wounded. Though the concentrations are low, he said, you would expect them to be with 50-year-old evidence.
“It’s not likely that testing would produce match results with Charlie Mays five times by coincidence.”
The recent testing, he said, found no DNA match to Zeigler on his wife’s coat.
The medical evidence also suggested an altercation between Mays and Perry Edwards, wrote Garcia, the former homicide detective. Mays’ right hand had swelled, and he had a small puncture wound near the knuckle of his right pinky finger, both indicative of someone who had struck another person in the face and made contact with a tooth. Edwards had evidence of trauma around his mouth, Garcia said, including “either a missing tooth or one that has been pushed inward.”
Zeigler had no such damage on his hands.
Arguments beginning Monday will center on where blood was found — and where it wasn’t.
Zeigler’s experts say that if he had killed his family, the blood evidence on his clothes would be overwhelming, since they were all shot at close range.
Garcia said the scene itself points to several people involved — with eight firearms, multiple holsters and bullets lodged throughout the store. One casing did not match any of the firearms in evidence.
Prosecutors, over the years, have defended the police investigation and looked for ways to explain any contradictory evidence or test results.
In the past, they have raised the possibility that Zeigler may have worn a raincoat when he killed his family. An employee apparently had left the coat at the store, and it was never found.
Even if he had worn a raincoat, Zeigler’s experts said, blood spatter would have sprayed the bottom of his pants, socks and shoes and the sleeves inside his cuffs.
At a hearing in August, the judge questioned whether the raincoat theory had ever been raised, and an assistant attorney general agreed that it had not been introduced as part of the prosecution.
Terry Hadley, the attorney who represented Zeigler in 1976, has been working with his appeals lawyers for years. He is now 83 and plans to be in the courtroom for the new hearing.
“We have waited almost 50 years for this,” he said. “You know, here’s a man who spent a major part of his life behind bars when he shouldn’t have. My hope is that he will have a chance to breathe air as a free man and walk in the sunshine.
The entire storey can be read at:
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
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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;
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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;
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