QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The state decided that Zeigler killed his wife for an insurance payout and lured Mays, a 35-year-old father of four, and others to the store to blame them for his family’s deaths. Defense attorneys Dennis Tracey and David Michaeli keyed on new DNA tests that found no blood from Zeigler’s relatives on his clothes. That alone, they say, should raise reasonable doubt, the standard they said is required to win a new trial. “This is devastating to the state’s case,” Michaeli said. “They don’t have anything. Nothing.”
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SECOND QUOTE OF THE DAY: "And now, they must all wait. Terry Hadley, Zeigler’s original criminal attorney, told Crawford that the hearing had to be transcribed, then each side would have 30 days to file final statements. The judge would have another 30 days to file her response. “Tragically, we’re waiting until mid-March,” Hadley told Crawford, “and the way Tommy is looking, I’m worried because of his health.”
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STORY: "Scientists try to bring certainty to 50-year-old murder case," by Former Times Reporter Leonora LaPeter Anton, published by The Tampa Bay Times, omitted December 9, 2025.
SUB_HEADING: "Tommy Zeigler’s attorneys hope to have convinced a judge to grant a retrial."
PHOTO CAPTION: "Tommy Zeigler watches his lawyers and prosecutors tell conflicting stories about the DNA evidence in his case. Zeigler has been on Florida's death row since 1976.
GIST: Ten attorneys sat before Circuit Judge Leticia Marques at the Orange County Courthouse last week during a hearing for a 50-year-old murder case. In a few months, she will decide whose arguments in Courtroom 13E were the most compelling as she weighs the fate of death row inmate Tommy Zeigler.
A frail Zeigler, 80, sat quietly next to his six volunteer lawyers, his feet and left arm shackled to his wheelchair and an oxygen cannula stuck in his nose, his declining health evident on hollowed cheeks.
A jury convicted him in 1976 for the Christmas Eve murders of his wife, Eunice; her parents, Virginia and Perry Edwards; and another man, Charlie Mays, at Zeigler’s furniture store in Winter Garden, about a dozen miles from the Magic Kingdom.
Confined to a cell for nearly a half-century, Zeigler has become the longest-serving death row inmate in Florida and quite possibly the nation. His case landed back in court this month after Monique Worrell, the elected state attorney for Orange and Osceola counties, agreed to let him extensively test the evidence for blood and touch DNA, something her predecessors declined to do over two decades.
The test results arrived from a California lab earlier this year. Worrell, though, declined to support Zeigler’s efforts to overturn his conviction, saying the new evidence didn’t exonerate him. She joined Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier in fighting Zeigler’s request and allowed his office to take the lead. But Judge Marques, first elected in 2012, saw enough to warrant this weeklong inquiry.
The judge listened intently as assistant attorney general Joshua E. Schow stood at the podium in front of her, pounding away at the quality of the forensic analysis, the qualifications of the defense experts and the interpretation of the DNA results. He argued, sometimes successfully, to keep out witnesses, reports and taped interviews.
“After all these years, the jury got it right in 1976,” said Schow during his closing argument.
The attorney, a 2020 graduate of the Stetson University College of Law, demonstrated a command of the case details and Florida criminal law. Most of the defense attorneys are from a global law firm in New York that specializes in corporate litigation, but they have been working pro bono on Zeigler’s case for 40 years.
The crime scene that police encountered at the Zeigler furniture store on Christmas Eve 1975 defied easy explanation. Four people had been shot in the head in different parts of the store. Two of them — Zeigler’s father-in-law and Mays, a crew chief at a nearby orange grove — had been struck repeatedly on the head. Multiple guns lay scattered around the bodies, all of them wiped clean.
Zeigler was bleeding from a bullet wound to the stomach when police arrived. He said he’d walked in on a burglary, been hit over the head, lost his glasses and fought with two men, including one he thought was Mays, one of his customers. He struck one of them with a gun and possibly shot him. Then he’d felt a bullet enter his abdomen and passed out. He said he did not realize that Eunice, his wife of eight years, and her parents were dead in the store until the next day.
The state decided that Zeigler killed his wife for an insurance payout and lured Mays, a 35-year-old father of four, and others to the store to blame them for his family’s deaths.
Defense attorneys Dennis Tracey and David Michaeli keyed on new DNA tests that found no blood from Zeigler’s relatives on his clothes. That alone, they say, should raise reasonable doubt, the standard they said is required to win a new trial.
“This is devastating to the state’s case,” Michaeli said. “They don’t have anything. Nothing.”
On the prosecution side of the courtroom, family members of Eunice Zeigler and her parents kept a daily vigil, tearing up and occasionally leaving as experts pored over bloody pictures on overhead screens. Many days, they drove from their homes in south Georgia and sat with Mays’ sons when they showed up.
Zeigler’s supporters included his cousin, Connie Crawford, and her daughter; his private investigator of 15 years, Lynn-Marie Carty; and Catholic volunteers who visit him weekly on death row. The hearing also drew a documentary crew that has been filming Zeigler for about eight years.
The lawyers from Hogan Lovells US, the firm that paid more than $100,000 for Zeigler’s DNA testing, returned over and over to the lab results in their defense.
DNA analysts, the lawyers said, examined 47 samples from Zeigler’s dark orange shirt, undershirt, checkered pants and the socks he wore the night of the murders. The experts said he could not have killed his relatives without any traces of their blood on his clothes.
“We don’t have to prove to a certainty that Tommy Zeigler is innocent,“ Michaeli told the judge. “We have to raise questions that give rise to reasonable doubt about his guilt, and I think we have done that in spades.”
The prosecution, though, focused on getting scientists to acknowledge that the two female victims — Eunice Zeigler and Virginia Edwards — didn’t have blood spatter on their clothes. Which means, they argued, that Zeigler might not have gotten their blood on his clothes.
Kristen Harty-Connell, a senior analyst with Forensic Analytical Crime Lab in Hayward, Calif., did find two small spots of Perry Edwards’ DNA on Zeigler’s brown suede shoes. Both were mixed with Mays’ blood.
Other tests had shown Perry Edwards’ blood soaked into the lower reaches of Mays’ plaid pants. And Mays could not be excluded as a source of five of the 21 samples taken from Eunice Zeigler’s herringbone overcoat, Harty-Connell said.
DNA expert Richard Eikelenboom, who has worked on the murder cases of Casey Anthony, Jon Benet Ramsey and Amanda Knox, testified for the defense. He said that the shots that hit Virginia Edwards and Eunice Zeigler would have produced spatter. Perry Edwards’ injuries, five gunshots to the head and torso and 10 lacerations on his head, also would have left spatter on his killer, Eikelenboom said.
When it was the prosecutor’s turn to question Eikelenboom, Schow dropped a 6-inch stack of documents on the podium. Some referred to a case in Colorado where Eikelenboom had been excluded from testifying because of an accreditation problem, among other issues, which he later resolved. Schow got Eikelenboom to admit that he hadn’t read Zeigler’s 3,000-page trial transcript, that he hadn’t visited the store where the murders took place and that he got a few facts wrong in his report.
At one point, Schow’s disparaging commentary prompted Marques to admonish the attorney. “Just ask your questions.”
Schow zeroed in on whether Zeigler had killed and beaten Mays. Eikelenboom pointed to spatter from Mays on Zeigler’s collar and the back of his shirt.
Zeigler has always claimed he fought with and may have shot Mays in self-defense. But the prosecutor said the evidence now shows that Zeigler struck Mays repeatedly.
“Is it your opinion that the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that Tommy Zeigler beat Charles Mays?” Schow asked.
“Yes,” Eikelenboom responded.
“Remind me what the cause of death for Charles Mays was?”
“A beating.”
Ralph Seegobin, an assistant state attorney, questioned the credentials of another defense witness, Ibrahim Garcia, a former Miami Beach Police Department homicide detective. Garcia criticized the original investigation. He said it would be unlikely for the right-handed Zeigler to shoot himself with a .357 Magnum at that trajectory.
But Seegobin suggested Garcia didn’t have the expertise to comment on a 1975 homicide. He pointed out that Garcia now managed security at Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant in Miami Beach, that he didn’t have a college degree and hadn’t been working in law enforcement for eight years.
The state’s only rebuttal witness was Anna Cox, a former crime scene and bloodstain pattern expert for the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and now a forensic consultant.
Michaeli, the defense attorney, asked Cox how Zeigler could have murdered Perry Edwards and walked away without being covered in his blood.
She offered no explanation.
She did say, however, that the blood evidence did not indicate Edwards fought with his attacker.
“Ms. Cox, are you aware that the state argued something different at the trial?” Michaeli asked.
“I don’t care,” Cox responded.
Later, when Michaeli made his closing statement, he pointed out how Cox’s testimony undermined the prosecution’s narrative. In fact, he said, the new evidence had contradicted the state’s previous conclusions on the order of the murders.
“If the state wants to change its story, well it needs to share the evidence to support that with a new jury,” Michaeli said. “Even if the state is allowed to change its story, the new story wouldn’t hold water, either.”
Michaeli reiterated that the original jury harbored doubts about Zeigler’s guilt. They decided in favor of a life sentence, rather than the death penalty, but were overruled by the judge.
In his closing statement, Schow reminded Marques that Zeigler’s lawyers had to prove more than that the state changed its theory from the original trial. They had to prove the defendant was not culpable in the murders.
“If he beat Charlie Mays to death, then his entire story collapses,” Schow said.
The judge interjected.
“Is it your insinuation that because he beat Mr. Charles Mays, then he must have killed the other three?” Marques asked Schow.
“Correct.”
Marques asked Zeigler’s lawyers to comment on his involvement in Mays’ death.
The new evidence, Michaeli said, did not reveal one way or another whether Zeigler was acting in self-defense.
Schow asked the court to consider the victims’ families and the pain they have had to go through every time Zeigler challenged his conviction.
As the hearing concluded, the victims’ family members held onto each other’s shoulders, conga-style, as they moved through the crowd to another room. They declined to talk about the case. “This is my family,” said Pierre Mays, Charlie Mays’ 62-year-old son, as he disappeared into the room, reflecting the solidarity of the two families. Schow declined, as he slipped into the same room, to talk about the case.
Carty, Zeigler’s private investigator, held both of Michaeli’s hands and tearfully told him he had done a great job.
Zeigler was wheeled out of the courtroom, headed back to death row.
Crawford, who has stood by her cousin’s side throughout the 50-year battle, said she was hopeful that he’d leave prison at some point. “I have a place for him,” she said, a bedroom in her home.
And now, they must all wait. Terry Hadley, Zeigler’s original criminal attorney, told Crawford that the hearing had to be transcribed, then each side would have 30 days to file final statements. The judge would have another 30 days to file her response.
“Tragically, we’re waiting until mid-March,” Hadley told Crawford, “and the way Tommy is looking, I’m worried because of his health.”
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.tampabay.com/news/2025/12/09/scientists-try-bring-certainty-50-year-old-murder-case/
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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