For 40 years, the tale of a well-connected Winter Garden man said to have killed his family and a furniture store customer on Christmas Eve has gripped Central Florida.
William “Tommy” Zeigler, now 70, has spent much of that time contesting his conviction from death row, insisting blood splattered across his shirt during the mass murder will prove his innocence — but to no avail.
Now fresh sets of eyes will review the case. They belong to students from Northwestern University’s renowned investigative-journalism center, The Medill Justice Project. A class of 10 undergraduate and graduate students from the Chicago-area school officially takes up the case this month.
“We think there are a number of significant questions about the conviction,” said Alec Klein, professor and director of the award-winning organization.
“We get hundreds of requests a year from people who want us to look into their cases, people from all over the country, sometimes even from abroad, so it’s a very weighty responsibility to decide which case we are going to investigate.”
One of those investigations led to an Illinois woman’s 2014 release from prison after a shaken-baby syndrome murder conviction. More recently, the center found an eyewitness in a decade-old Miami murder who said the man serving a life sentence for the killing is innocent. That case is still pending.
Now the group turns to Zeigler, who was convicted in 1976 of killing his wife, Eunice, 29; her parents, Perry and Virginia Edwards, 72 and 54; and Charles Mays, 35, a customer at Zeigler’s Winter Garden furniture store. All of the victims were shot, the men also bludgeoned with a metal flooring tool called a crank.
The Medill Justice Project selection comes at a sensitive time for Zeigler’s case.
His death sentence — imposed by a judge after the jury’s recommendation of life in prison — embodies a problem the U.S. Supreme Court defined when it threw out Florida’s death-penalty sentencing scheme in January, an issue ripe for argument. And there’s a pending petition to release crime-scene evidence for new DNA testing.
Additional “questions” about the case also got Klein’s attention: The original trial judge’s potential conflict of interest. Zeigler’s strange, self-inflicted gunshot wound. Most recently, a witness recanting crucial testimony.
New-York based lawyer John Pope, who has worked Zeigler’s case since 1991, welcomed the Medill Justice Project’s involvement.
“It’s always very helpful to have more eyes, especially such discerning eyes, look at the facts and the evidence and to dig deeper,” he said. “Because every time we’ve dug deeper in the case, we’ve turned up exculpatory evidence.”
Evidence against Zeigler
Investigators homed in on Zeigler shortly after discovering the carnage at his Dillard Street furniture store in 1975.
Four bodies covered the floor in the dark shop. Detectives found multiple guns strewn about and a metal crank stained red with blood.
Four days later, Orange County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrested Zeigler after he underwent surgery for a gunshot wound in his stomach, sustained during the attacks.
But detectives and prosecutors did not see Zeigler as a victim.
He killed his wife, they said, to cash a $500,000 life insurance policy and staged the scene, including shooting himself, to make it look like a robbery gone wrong. The other casualties were just part of the plan.
Much of the evidence against Zeigler was circumstantial, except for Type A blood found on the armpit of his shirt. The strangely placed marks matched his dead father-in-law’s blood type.
During the intensely watched trial, then Orange-Osceola State Attorney Robert Eagan told jurors the blood was there because Zeigler held Perry Edwards in a headlock while he slammed his head with the metal crank, fluid spewing.
Later tests, however, have shown the blood belonged to Mays and not Edwards, potentially supporting Zeigler’s long-held theory that Mays was one of the killers.
Since then, key eyewitness Felton Thomas has also recanted his testimony.
Initially, Thomas testified that he, Zeigler and Mays fired guns out a car window in an orange grove the night of the killings. Prosecutors argued Zeigler did that to frame others and get their prints on weapons.
In 2013, Thomas told a private investigator he told the story because “police told him it had to have been Zeigler,” according to court records.
Continuing investigation
Zeigler filed his first motion to test DNA evidence in 2001.
While the results initially appeared beneficial to his case, trial and appellate judges — in 2005, 2007 and 2013 — said the evidence was not lofty enough to exonerate him and reveal the true killer.
In his latest request, filed in July, Zeigler asks to test material with a new technique that can detect DNA transferred by merely touching an object.
“It would not have been possible for Zeigler to beat Perry Edwards while holding him in a headlock without transferring significant quantities of Perry Edwards’ touch DNA onto his shirts,” according to the motion. “The testing Zeigler seeks will confirm that no such DNA exists on his shirts.”
Attorneys want to test other items too — the two murder weapons and Eunice Zeigler’s fingernails — with hypersensitive scans.
Orange-Osceola Circuit Judge Reginald Whitehead will hear the evidence at a hearing on March 31 before ruling.
Zeigler’s attorneys also asked to question Thomas in light of his recanted testimony, but Whitehead denied the request, saying only an expert witness would be appropriate at this stage.
In the meantime, Klein said the self-inflicted gunshot wound merits more investigation.
He has already traveled to Orlando to interview witnesses and has sifted through boxes full of evidence at the New York offices of Zeigler’s attorneys.
“According to one of the individuals we spoke to, who was in law enforcement at the time [of the murders], the gunshot wound indicated that it would have had to come from Tommy Zeigler’s non-dominant hand, which is unusual …,” he said.
“Why would you shoot yourself in the stomach, of all places? It’s an inherently risky thing to do if you’re going to shoot yourself to try to make it look like you’re the victim.”
echerney@tribune.com or 407-420-5735
