Crime Junkie - INFAMOUS: Tommy Zeigler

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

Tommy Zeigler was sentenced to death for the murders of his wife, her parents, and a customer at his Winter Garden, Florida furniture store in 1976. He’s still on death row today - 45 years later. But did he do it? And could DNA evidence exonerate him? For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/infamous-tommy-zeigler/ 

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. And the story I have for you today is one that's playing out right now. And in fact, it's been playing out for the last 45 years. Ever since the brutal murder of four people in a small town Florida furniture store on the day before Christmas, 1975. This is the story of Tommy Ziegler. It's Christmas Eve, 1975 in the small town of Winter Garden, Florida.

And anyone not still busy doing their last-minute shopping is either getting ready for church or spending some time with friends and family at holiday parties. And according to a 1986 series by Jenny Hess for the Palm Beach Post, that's exactly what a bunch of the town's officials are doing. They're at this like open house get-together kind of thing at the home of a local civil attorney and judge named Ted Van Deventer. Wait, an attorney and judge? Like, I didn't think you could be both. Well, you can, according to Philip Finch's book, Fatal Flaw,

which says that Ted is both a local attorney and a municipal judge for three local communities nearby. Sometime around 9.15 p.m. in the middle of all these festivities, the phone rings. When Ted picks it up, he hears a frantic but familiar voice on the other end of the line. It's a client of his named Tommy Ziegler. And right away, he says, Ted, I'm hurt. At first, Ted thinks this is some kind of joke because sometimes Tommy's just like that. But Tommy says he swears this is no joke.

And he asked Ted to put the chief of police on the phone. Who I assume is at this party? Yes, and Tommy knows that because he was supposed to be at this party too. Just like the judge and the chief of police, Tommy's also kind of like this guy about town. 30 years old, married, he's a successful business owner. He owns and operates this furniture store in town and owns several rental properties. But instead of sipping champagne like he was supposed to that night, Tommy tells the chief of police that he's at his store and that he's been shot

and that the chief needs to get down there right away. Why didn't he call 911? Well, he says that he knew exactly the person he needed. Don Fick, the chief of police, and he knew that that person was going to be at the party. And the party's like a minute away or less. So I think he just figured like this is going to be the quickest way to like get the help that I need here as soon as possible. So the chief rushes out the door and on his way out the door, he runs into the chief of police from the next town over.

So he grabs that guy to go with him and they head out to help with whatever is going on at Ziegler's furniture. They make the one minute drive with the lights and sirens going, radioing dispatch while they drive. And by the time they pull into the parking lot, there's another officer pulling in right behind them. They climb out of their cars and walk up to the front door of the store. And the first thing they see is Tommy covered in blood trying to get the door unlocked from the inside. When Tommy finally gets outside, he literally collapses. And that other police chief, the one from the next town over, catches him, throws him over his shoulder,

puts him in the back of the patrol car and rushes him to the nearest hospital. It's clear that Tommy has been shot. And when the officer asks if he knows who did it, Tommy says, yes. It was Charlie Maze and he was trying to rob me. Now, Charlie is this guy that they both know from around town, a long time customer of Tommy's actually. And he's this like well liked husband and father. Now, another thing that Tommy manages to tell the chief before he starts drifting off into unconsciousness is that he shot Charlie too. Once he gets Tommy settled at the hospital and in the care of medical staff, the chief heads back to the furniture store.

By the time he gets there, there's one more officer at the scene, so four of them in total now and more on the way. But no one has gone inside the store yet. Why not? Well, a couple of reasons. First, they didn't have any weapons on them at the time, so they had to send someone out to grab some. But the other thing is all of this has been happening in the span of like just a few minutes. Like from the time Tommy called the judge's place for help to the time that he arrived at the hospital was only five minutes. Maybe another five-ish after that for the chief to drop Tommy off and get back to the furniture store.

So this is like happening quick. But anyways, just as he is arriving back, so is the officer who rushed out to get the weapons. Weapons that they may need if Charlie Mays is still in that store armed and alive. Once everyone is armed, a few of them go in to clear the scene. The whole building is pitch dark and dead quiet. They yell for Charlie, but they don't get any answer. Now, normally the store has lights on, even when it's closed. Like, you know, just the kind that like show the merchandise on display in the window, stuff like that.

So they try and flip the lights on, but nothing happens. Using flashlights, they weave in between chairs and tables and lamps in the showroom looking for Charlie. There may be three-quarters of the way into the store, heading toward the back warehouse area when they spot a man, laying face down in a huge pool of blood. Right away, they think that they got him. But as they get closer, they realize this for sure isn't Charlie because Charlie is black and whoever this man is is white. They can see a number of injuries to the man's face as well as a bullet wound to his head. So they call for Charlie again and again they get no response.

They keep walking and they're only a few steps away from where they found that first body when they see why Charlie hasn't been responding. Charlie is dead. They can see serious injuries to his face and blood everywhere, like all around him. It's on his clothes and it's dried on the bottoms of his shoes. There's a piece of black metal lying near Charlie's right hand, money coming out of his pants pocket, and a cash box not far away. They keep walking through the showroom floor up towards the front of the store where the customer service desk is and the office. And on the way, they find another body, an older white woman lying dead amid the living room furniture. As they keep moving their way through the store, they finally get to the service desk.

Behind it is a back office, but when they peek inside, they find it empty. And aside from some damage to the door, nothing seems out of place. Then they sweep their flashlights through the little employee kitchen right next to the office. And that's when they see another body lying in another huge pool of blood. It's a younger woman flat on her back, eyes wide open, a bullet wound just behind her ear. Do they know who any of these victims are? No, none of the first responding officers can ID anyone but Charlie. And is Tommy in any kind of shape to be able to help them right now or no?

Well, he's in surgery at this point, so no. But at like midnight, the medical examiner finds one of Tommy's employees actually brings him through the crime scene to see if he can identify any of the other three victims. And in the podcast series, Blood and Truth from the Tampa Bay Times, this employee talks about walking carefully from the front door to the first body, then the next, then the next, paying really close attention to where he stepped, even where he looked. And it turns out he knows exactly who the other three victims are. The other three victims in the store are Tommy's wife, Eunice, and her parents, Perry and Virginia Edwards. So you're saying that none of the local officers recognized any of these three people? Well, Perry and Virginia Edwards were from Georgia and they were just in town to visit Eunice and Tommy over the holidays, so like that's not unusual to me. As far as Eunice though, like Tommy's wife, you'd at least expect the chief to know her because he knew Tommy, right?

But like according to the book called Fatal Flaw written by Philip Finch, he didn't even go into that kitchen area where her body was found. And in fact, up to this point, police actually had officers out looking for Eunice and her parents, worrying that maybe they were in trouble, like they had been taken hostage or something. Okay, so before he went in for surgery, Tommy told that chief that Charlie had tried to rob him. So is the running theory that Charlie came to rob the store and was surprised to find this full house after hours, like Tommy's there, his wife, his in-laws, and everyone just got caught in the crossfire? That's the initial assumption law enforcement is making, yeah, and crossfire is the right word for it because aside from Eunice, who remember was shot just once in the back of the head, everyone else has multiple gunshot wounds. Virginia had been shot twice according to Philip Finch's book. One bullet passed through her arm into her chest and almost exited her back and then once more in the head. And it looked like Perry had struggled with his attacker. I mean, there were wounds on his face and head and he'd been shot five times in total, once in the left ear and once in each shoulder and then twice in the head at close range. Charlie had several injuries to his face and head as well. Like he'd also been shot twice, both times in the abdomen, once through the front and once through the back.

I mean, that seems like a ton of bullets. I mean, I think I just counted 10 based on what you told me. Plus, I mean, at least once more because Tommy got shot. Oh, it is a ton of bullets. Investigators estimated that a total of 28 shots were fired that night from as many as eight different guns, some of which were still at the scene. So surely someone must have heard something with that many shots. Police haven't seen any reports of anything yet from people hearing shots, but there is at least one clue at the scene to help them figure out when this all went down because one of the many, many bullets fired that night happened to go through a wall clock. And when it did, the clock stopped. That was at 7.24. Hold on. Didn't you say Tommy called the police at like 9.15, 9.30, somewhere around there, like much later than 7.24? Yeah, almost two hours from when the bullets stopped the clock to when Tommy called for help. And this is where things start to get kind of complicated for detectives at the scene. Now, it's important to know that the lead detective working this case recently did training on blood spatter analysis. And so he's coming into this investigation with a little more knowledge than maybe like the typical winter garden investigator in the mid 1970s.

Like the training taught him how to read blood evidence at the scene. And as you know, there is a ton of it, spray and spatter, streaks, pools, droplets. I mean, there's blood pretty much covering this entire crime scene from one end of the store to the other. What's interesting is that a lot of that blood is dry, including what they found on Charlie Maze's sneakers. Even the blood on Tommy's shirt when he stumbled out of the store and into the officer's arms was dry. And they know that because according to reporting by Roger Roy for the Orlando Sentinel, that guy who basically carried Tommy over one shoulder out to his car, he was wearing a white shirt and there was no blood transfer from Tommy's blood soaked shirt to his like at all. And when the detective looks at the blood evidence in the back of the store specifically where both Perry and Charlie's bodies are found, he notices that the blood spatter from Charlie had dried on top of the blood from Perry, which means,

that Perry was killed at least 15 minutes, maybe more like a half an hour before Charlie. And you wouldn't expect that much time to pass if everyone died in this like one big blitz of an event. Right. So is the medical examiner able to narrow down any further with an autopsy? I don't think so, actually. The Emmy's estimated time of death is mentioned in Philip Finch's book as between 7 and 9 p.m. for all four victims. So that doesn't really like give them any more insight. But it's not just the blood spatter at the back of the store that makes detectives think that some time had passed between each one. There are also footprints in blood all over, which means someone walked through the store after the murders. And they find gun holsters next to both Charlie and Perry.

Both of those holsters are sitting in blood, but neither has blood transferred. So like someone put the holsters there after the blood had dried? Right. But if Charlie shot Eunice Perry and Virginia in this, again, like blitz attack and then ended with himself getting shot, how did a holster end up next to him after his blood dried? Right. It like couldn't. So like more importantly, who put it there? Within like an hour of being at the crime scene, the lead detective is starting to wonder if the story Tommy told from his hospital bed might not be entirely accurate. So he starts to pull his thinking back a bit and try to like piece together a story of what happened based on what the evidence at the scene is telling him.

And what it's telling him isn't looking good for Tommy Ziegler. And it starts to look even worse for Tommy later that night when a man shows up at the police station with a truly bizarre story to tell. The man's name is Edward Williams, and he tells them that he was actually with Tommy earlier that evening. Edward says that he's known the Ziegler family for a long time, 20 years, and that he'd been kind of like a handyman for Tommy, who he says has been nothing but good to him over the years. Not just hiring Edward when he needed a hand, but just that week had loaned Edward money when he got laid off and couldn't make rent. So when Tommy asked if he could come help with a couple of last minute deliveries on Christmas Eve, Edward didn't hesitate. Edward says that he met Tommy at the Ziegler residence that evening, and they drove together in Edward's truck to the store. He says he let Tommy out at the front of the store, and he was supposed to drive around to the back doors to park his truck and then come through that way to meet Tommy inside the store. So he backs his truck to the door like he's asked to, climbs out, walks in.

And when he walks in, the hallway is pitch black, like so dark, he's actually like feeling along the walls to help find his way. He finally gets to the doorway at the end of the hall, and that's when things finally start coming into focus for Edward. And he can start to see his surroundings, except what he does see gives him the absolute shock of his life. Edward Williams tells police he saw Tommy standing a few feet in front of him holding a gun. He says the gun was wrapped in cloth, and Tommy pointed it straight at him and fired three times. Oh my God. Edward was lucky because apparently the gun jammed or misfired or whatever. Like he basically just didn't go off, and he tells police that right away Tommy said, oh, I didn't know it was you.

He says that Tommy tried to get him to come further into the store anyway after that, but Edward's like, hard no, like no way. So he runs. He tells police that Tommy chased him to the far end of the parking lot where he climbed up over a chain link fence to escape. He says that he ran to the KFC across the street from Ziegler's furniture and tried to use their phone to call police, but he couldn't get through. He tells police that he flagged down some friends who drove him to pick up his other car that was in the shop for repair. And he drove straight to the police station. So what time was this? Well, Edward showed up at the station sometime around midnight, but he says that this whole scene went down with Tommy in the store sometime around 8.40 ish, but he doesn't know for certain.

And here's the kicker. Before he leaves the station in the wee hours of the morning on Christmas Day, Edward is like, oh, and one more thing. By the way, I have the gun. Like the gun, the one he says that Tommy tried to kill him with. Wait, why does he have the gun? I thought you said he ran and jumped a fence and went to KFC or something. Well, Roger Roy's piece in the Orlando Sentinel says that at some point during that altercation, apparently Tommy tried to give Edward the gun to like show him he wasn't going to hurt him. Like, I swear, I'm not going to hurt you here.

Just like, take this, you know, come into the store, you can have the weapon, whatever. And Edward says that he didn't really think about it at the time. He just like shoved the gun into his pocket and bolted. So police collect the gun as evidence, along with the clothes and shoes Edward was wearing. And nothing about the fact that he has this possible murder weapon really. That doesn't make police wonder about him or his story at all. Apparently not. In fact, no one really challenges any part of Edward's story.

They just kind of take his statement, gather the gun, gather his clothing as evidence and kind of move along. But here's the thing, that gun isn't just a possible murder weapon. That gun is the murder weapon, the one used to kill Virginia and Perry. Did he mention anything about either Virginia or Perry or any of the victims in his statement to the police? Not as far as I can tell. All he talks to police about is this exchange that he had just with Tommy and the gun before he ran. He doesn't say anything about seeing or hearing any other gunshots except for those three shots that he says were directed at him and ended up being misfires. But Edward does mention that he saw what may have been blood stains on Tommy's pants and more blood sprayed on his face.

Now, Edward isn't the only person who had a strange interaction with Tommy that night. Because right around the same time police are taking his statement, another man comes forward to say that he has information about what happened at the store. Unlike Edward, the man is taken directly to the crime scene to speak with detectives leading the case. His name is Felton Thomas and he says that he was with Charlie Mays that night at Ziegler Furniture. According to an article in the Palm Beach Post by Cox News Services reporter Jenny Hess, he says Charlie asked him to go along to pick up a new TV that he was playing to surprise his family with for Christmas. Felton says that Tommy had arranged to meet Charlie at the store that night at 7.30 after closing time. But when they arrived, it was dark and there didn't seem to be anyone there, so they parked in a nearby lot to wait. Felton tells them that he and Charlie talked for a bit and then a man pulled up next to them and asked them to get in his car to go for a ride.

And this is Tommy, I assume. Well, Felton says that he didn't actually know the guy at all, but says that Charlie introduced him as Zieglers and said that he owned the store, so he assumed that it was the guy that they'd be planning to meet. Anyway, Felton says that they drove out to an orange grove and stopped and then the guy asked Charlie and Felton to try out a few guns for him. Guns that were in a paper bag on the floor of the car. I'm sorry, what do you mean try out a few guns? Well, according to a transcript of the police interview that I read in Philip Finch's book, Felton tells the investigators that quote, he wanted our opinion about seeing whether they were good guns, accurate guns, end quote. The documentary goes a step further and says that Tommy was supposed to be testing them so he could sell them.

So anyway, Charlie grabbed one and fired three or four shots out the open window and then Felton says that he grabbed another and fired one shot. And nothing about this seemed weird at all, like going out to fire some strange guy's guns in an orange grove on Christmas Eve. Yeah, just hang on, there's more. Oh, Lord. So after they fired the guns, Felton says that they left and went back to the store and once they got there, Tommy asked him to pull the switch on the electrical box outside the store, like the main breaker switch that powers the entire store. So Felton says he did that and then they all went back to where Charlie had parked his van, which is on the other side of the fence from the store. Then he tells investigators Tommy said, oh, what the hell, I'll just crack a window.

So then he jumps over the fence in his own store parking lot, picked up a metal pipe and swung it against one of the store's back windows. So he broke the window to his own store? So he said, Felton tells him that Tommy was saying he didn't have the store key with him at the time, but like still wanted to give Charlie the TV so he could like have it Christmas morning, I guess and didn't want to wait, didn't want to go back, whatever. But I guess at this point, Charlie was like, yeah, no thanks, like I don't need it that badly for you to like break your own window. Like this isn't making sense. So Tommy said, fine, like let's go back to my house and get the key, which then they did. And on the way back to the store, Tommy handed Charlie a box of bullets and asked him to reload the gun.

Felton says that once they got back to the store, Tommy tried to get both him and Charlie into the store with him so they could pick up the TV. But Tommy says like by this point, like with everything that's happened, he is getting like all of the bad vibes. So he's like, you know what? Hard pass. If Charlie wants this TV so bad, like go ahead, you guys go do it, but I'm out. He can get it for himself, right? I'm piecing out. Exactly.

And when Tommy and Charlie went in, he left. So I can't understand. Like I don't know if these stories are too unbelievable to be true or too unbelievable to not be true, you know? I know. Well, and police just don't take Edward and Felton at their words entirely. Here's the thing, like, because I think they're thinking the same too. They actually send a team out to the Orange Grove where Felton says that they went to fire those guns. And wouldn't you know it?

They find a spent bullet right where Felton said it would be. And it matches one of the guns that was at the store that night. By the time the sun rises on Christmas morning in Winter Garden, police already have a solid working theory of what happened inside Ziegler Furniture the night before. And things have only gone from bad to worse for Tommy, who is still recovering at the local hospital. Because police no longer think he's the victim of an armed robbery. He is now the prime suspect. Okay, so what is their working theory of what happened? Well, based on evidence at the crime scene and those two witness statements, here's what investigators think happened that night.

Tommy and his wife arrive at the store together sometime between 7 and 7.15, planning to get there a little ahead of her parents who are planning on meeting them to pick up a new chair. Tommy then kills Eunice pretty much as soon as they get there, taking her by complete surprise with one bullet to the back of the head. Perry and Virginia then get to the store between 7.20 and 7.25. They are not caught by surprise, though. Virginia runs, but ultimately Tommy catches up to her and shoots her. There is a significant struggle between Tommy and Perry, during which Tommy shoots him three times, but it doesn't kill him. So then he beats him over the head and then ultimately shoots him twice more in the head at close range. At 7.35, Tommy meets Charlie and Felton and they drive to the Orange Grove. Apparently it's a quick trip because police say they're back by 7.40 and Tommy is asking Felton to turn off the main power, and he, Tommy, is breaking the window to the store.

They then drive to Tommy's place for keys and park at the front of the store. Felton leaves like 7.55, 8 o'clock, right around the same time Charlie and Tommy go inside to the store where Charlie ends up dead shortly after. And what about the other witness, Edward? Where does he fit into all of this? So police think that after he killed Charlie, Tommy goes back to his house to meet Edward, and they drive in Edward's truck to the store and park in the back lot. Based on Edward's statement to police, Tommy tries to kill him between 8.40 and 8.50. Then at 9.18, that's when Tommy calls the judge's Christmas party and asks the police to come help him. I guess what I don't get is why bring Edward into this at all. Like, yeah, if you're going with the police's theory and Tommy did this, why go out of your way to bring in another person into this whole narrative?

I mean, you have the guys you want to set up for it. Why go through the trouble of leaving this crime scene for someone to discover on accident? You're potentially covered in evidence just to go lure another person there? This is the part of the story that, like, drives me nuts. The only thing that I can think is that based on Felton's statement to police, he wasn't planning to be with Charlie at the store that night. He was just, like, hanging around a bonfire when Charlie, like, rolled up in his van on Christmas Eve and was like, hey, just come for a ride with me. So by his own admission, he was, like, an unplanned extra in this whole thing. But Edward, Edward had a plan to meet Tommy to make deliveries that night.

So my only thinking is that if Tommy did stage all of this, he knew it would be hard to pin maybe on one person. So he could have been thinking that he needed, like, two perpetrators. So the police's theory is that Tommy arranged for two different people to meet him in two different places at the same time so he could pin it on both of them. Oh, my gosh, I have so many questions. But exactly who is thought to have shot Tommy then, and when? Well, police think that Tommy shot himself with one of the many other guns at the scene to make the robbery story more believable. And in the police's theory of events, this happens after Tommy calls for help at 9-18. And that's when they think he's making the whole thing look like a robbery gone sideways.

Right. Okay, and do police have a theory as to why Tommy did all this? That takes investigators some time to figure out. I mean, on the surface, there's honestly no good reason for Tommy, who seemed to have a pretty great life to want to kill his wife and her parents. Like, everyone who knows Tommy says that he and Eunice were happily married. They were, you know, this beautiful young couple. His business was doing great. In fact, Tommy is worth about a million dollars at this point, so money isn't an obvious motive either.

That is until police search Tommy's office. And there, they find two life insurance policies totaling half a million dollars for Tommy's wife, Eunice. Both of them purchased within the last few months. Okay, but you just said that he had zero money issues. His business is doing great. So why would he want to kill his wife to draw down on a life insurance policy? I mean, half a million dollars is a lot of money, even for someone who has a lot of money. So like, the only thing better than a million dollars is two million dollars.

Right, and just because someone looks happily married doesn't mean they're happily married either. Within the first 12 hours of the investigation, police start to hear some rumors. Rumors that cast doubts on the shiny, happy relationship between Tommy and Eunice. Rumors that a well-to-do married businessman would want to keep quiet in 1975. Because they were rumors that Tommy was gay. And that at some point, Eunice caught him having sex with another man. And according to police, Eunice had no plans to keep this a secret. Her only plan was to leave him.

And is there any truth to any of that? Yeah, right, the rumors. Investigators hadn't been able to substantiate any of it. But it didn't matter anyway, because even without it, police are able to get an arrest warrant. And on December 29th, this is five days after the shootings, they go to Tommy, who is still recovering in the hospital, and place him under arrest. It's not until the following March that the prosecution takes its case against Tommy to a grand jury looking for an indictment.

The grand jury hears about the blood evidence at the scene, about the insurance policies, about the rumors that Tommy was gay and that his wife was about to leave him. They even hear from Edward Williams and Felton Thomas. And after two days of testimony, the grand jury indicts Tommy on four counts of first-degree murder. 42 days after that, the case goes to trial. Oh, wow, that's a really speedy trial.

Really speedy. According to Leonora LaPeter Anton's reporting for the Tampa Bay Times, the defense pleads for more time to prepare. I mean, there are hundreds of pieces of evidence to go through, test results still pending from the crime lab, and more than 100 witnesses to testify, some of which came as a complete surprise to the defense right there in the courtroom. The only small victory the defense gets is that the trial is moved to Jacksonville because no one thought that they could seat an impartial jury in Winter Garden,

but they definitely didn't get it delayed. The trial starts in June and lasts three weeks. And during those three weeks, the prosecution tells the jury and the court that Tommy spent months meticulously planning to kill his wife and collect on her life insurance, that he lured his wife and her parents to the store under the guise of shopping for a recliner. Then he shot them one by one, his wife, his mother-in-law, and his father-in-law. The prosecution says that Perry put up a fight,

and so Tommy beat him with a metal crank used to roll sheets of linoleum. Then he waited for Charlie to arrive to collect his new color TV for Christmas. He took Charlie and Felton out to the Orange Grove to make sure their prints would be on the guns, and then he came back and broke the window and cut the power to the store all to make it look like someone had broken it. He killed Charlie and then went back to his house to meet Edward, brought him back to the store, tried to kill him too, but the gun jammed. And then, I guess, was like, oh well, and walked to the phone at the front of the store

to call for help before shooting himself in the stomach and going to wait by the front door for his friend, the police chief, to arrive. The prosecution says that Tommy went to great lengths, planning each step meticulously to frame two black men, Charlie and Edward, for killing his wife and her parents during an attempted robbery. And Tommy was counting on his friend, the chief of police, to believe his story without questioning anything, and to take his work, the loving husband, the successful businessman,

over anyone who happened to get in the way. Okay, so I assume that Edward and Fulton both testified at the trial. Yes. And we know about the bullet in the orange grove. Is that pretty much it for evidence? So the prosecution's other key witness is this renowned crime scene expert who supported the investigator's analysis of the scene with blood evidence specifically. Yeah, the blood spatter on top of blood spatter, like that whole thing.

Right. And the expert also testifies that Tommy's shoes match a bloody shoe print left at the scene, and that Tommy left a trail of blood from the phone to the front door, but that there was no trail of blood to the phone. Because in their eyes, he shot himself after he had made that call for help to make sure he would survive. Bingo. Now, the prosecution lays out a ton of physical evidence.

Fingerprints and shoe prints and guns and bullets and blood-soaked clothes. And among those blood-soaked clothes is Tommy's shirt, which was covered in blood when he arrived at the hospital. Which is to be expected. Yes, but not all of the blood on the shirt was Tommy's. According to an episode of Unsolved Mysteries that aired back in 97, there were two blood types found on Tommy's shirt. Type O and type A. The type O blood belonged to Tommy,

but type A belonged to his father-in-law, Perry. Proof, says the prosecution, that Tommy killed Perry. And specifically, that Tommy held his father-in-law in kind of like a headlock, they say, while he beat him with that metal crank. The jury hears from over a hundred witnesses by the time they get to the very last one. Tommy Ziegler himself testifies. As Leonora Lapeter Anton writes in the Blood and Truth series, Tommy tells the court that he loved his wife more than anything

and that their marriage had only gotten stronger over time. That they were in the process of trying to start a family when she was killed. He says the life insurance policies that he had for Eunice were purchased on the advice of his lawyer because Eunice had recently been named a director of the family business. Nothing about those policies was a secret. I mean, she'd signed for them herself. Does he say what actually happened from his perspective in the store that night?

Well, he does. He says that around 7 p.m. Eunice and her parents left the Ziegler house for the furniture store so that they could pick out their new recliner before making their way to an evening church service. Tommy says that he didn't travel with them because he had already arrived separately with his handyman, Edward Williams. Okay, so Edward was around that night.

Yeah, he was. And in fact, Tommy never denied being with Edward that night. So they could do some last-minute Christmas deliveries. What he denies is what Edward says happened after they got to the store. Tommy pulling that gun on him and pulling the trigger three times, chasing him into the parking lot, all of that stuff. And I mean, someone is clearly lying, not about like just what happened but about when.

Right, because Tommy's saying that he and Edward got to the store between like 7, 7.30. Right. But in Edward's story, he's there at what, like after 8, right? Over an hour later at like 8.40. What Tommy says is that Edward parked the truck at the back of the store and then Tommy went in first through the back door. And as soon as he walked in, he was struck on the head.

He says that he could make out two men, one short and stocky, the other taller and bigger, but he couldn't see who they were. He says that he pulled a gun from his waste holster and tried to fire at one of the men, but the gun jammed so he threw it. Then as he tells the Tampa Bay Times, quote, I started flying through the air and bouncing off the walls and refrigerators and the shelves, end quote. He tells the court that he managed to get to another gun that he kept in the store

and he swung that hard and hit someone. Then he was shot. Right before he lost consciousness, he says he heard one man say, quote, Maze has been hit, kill him, end quote. Tommy tells the court that when he woke later, he crawled around trying to find his glasses and eventually made it to his office where he kept a spare pair. And then that's when he called for help.

Okay, so Tommy says all this stuff happened within a few minutes of his arrival at the store. And then he was passed out for like two hours before calling for help. Right. So where does Felton Thomas and the Orange Grove come into the picture? It doesn't. I mean, in Tommy's version, Felton never comes into the picture. Tommy says it's a complete and total fabrication. In fact, he told unsolved mysteries that the first time he ever laid eyes on Felton

was in the courtroom at his murder trial. But they found evidence out there in the Orange Grove, right? They found a bullet, yes. But there are some question marks around that too. For starters, the narrative around this bullet is that it matches one of Tommy's guns. But in fact, all the experts could say about that bullet is that it shared some same characteristics as other bullets from the crime scene, including that bullet that they found in the wall clock.

In the Blood and Truth podcast, Tommy's defense attorney actually says that it took police two days of searching the Orange Grove to find that one bullet. And when they did, it was buried in the sand. And it wasn't even an officer who found it. It was actually an inmate that the cops took with them to do the search. Like, apparently one of those inmates told Tommy's lawyer that the bullet was for sure planted there. Like, they were told exactly where to find it. I don't know if there's any truth to the bullet being planted.

I mean, I'm always skeptical of anything that comes from a jailhouse informant type, but I'm kind of skeptical that they only found one bullet buried. Either way, if we ignore that, there are other issues with this Orange Grove story. Like, you know how the prosecution said the whole reason Tommy took Charlie and Felton out there was to get their prints on the gun? Yeah. Well, police found no usable prints on any of the eight guns collected as evidence during their investigation. What?

Yeah, and of the five found scattered between Perry and Charlie's bodies at the back of the store, four were completely wiped clean of prints. Ashley, wait, hold up. Explain to me how that's supposed to make any sense. Like, was anyone wearing gloves? Maybe at some point. So here's the thing, Charlie wasn't wearing gloves when he was found. And obviously, Tommy wasn't wearing gloves when police showed up.

That would have been, like, very weird. But during their initial search of the crime scene, police did find, like, the very tip of a finger of a latex glove. But the rest of the glove was never found. No, just the very tip of the glove. So explain to me how that fits into Tommy's narrative. Like, Charlie killed everyone, then hid the gloves so well before he died that no one ever found them. Well, this doesn't explain why there are no prints, but I don't think the surgical glove actually had anything to do with the crime. So apparently, Tommy said that he kept surgical gloves, like those latex hospital gloves, in the store to use when polishing furniture.

And Jenny has his Palm Beach post-covered states that initially, apparently there was, like, some kind of stain on that little tip that police thought was blood spatter, but when it was sent for analysis, it was found to be furniture polish. Okay, fine, but doesn't explain why there are no prints on any of the weapons. I mean, some of them actually belong to Tommy, right? Yeah, of the eight guns in total, all were presumed to belong to Tommy. But two of the five found at the scene near the bodies don't officially trace back to anyone. Now, Edward eventually told police that he recognized those two as black market guns that he got for Tommy at Tommy's request six months before the murders.

Of course, Tommy denies that. Okay, but guns don't just float through thin air and show up at crime scenes. Why are there no prints? Yeah, so this is one of the things that I think makes Tommy look bad. If Charlie came in and shot everyone, if Charlie wasn't wearing gloves, why aren't Charlie's prints on any of the weapons? And if Tommy grabbed a gun from his office in defense to shoot Charlie, why aren't his prints on that gun? Exactly. I mean, it makes him look bad. But that's the thing about this case.

It's not just Tommy's story that doesn't make sense. None of what Felton and Edward say makes sense to me either, like none of it. It's like you said, the whole thing is either too unbelievable to be true or too unbelievable not to be true. And that's more or less what the jury has to decide when Tommy's trial comes to a close at the end of June 1976. Are Felton and Edward both lying about what happened that night? Or is Tommy the one lying? The jury deliberates for three days before finding Tommy guilty on all four counts of first-degree murder. Two weeks later, they're back for sentencing, and while the jury recommends life in prison for all four convictions,

the judge overrides that recommendation and actually sentences Tommy to death. Oh, can they do that? I wouldn't say it's a widely supported practice, but yeah, absolutely. In the years after, Tommy's team appeals many times on many different grounds, but those appeals are always denied. Execution dates are set, but then canceled because of a last-minute appeal. In 2001, after years of fighting, Tommy's team finally gets the courts to agree to run some DNA tests on the evidence from the scene, which, you know, obviously weren't available back in the day. Specifically, he wants them to run tests on the fabric from the clothing that Tommy was wearing that night.

Tommy says the DNA on his shirt will prove that the blood doesn't belong to his father-in-law. But didn't the state's tests already show it was the father-in-law's blood? What the state's testing showed was that the blood on the shirt was Type A, and that Perry Edwards had Type A blood, but three of the victims had Type A blood, Perry, Eunice, and Charlie. So, what? He's saying if it's Charlie's, it proves that he's not the killer because it makes more sense for him to have the perp's blood on him? Pretty much, but more than that, it proves that he wasn't the one who had that violent struggle with Perry, because remember, the dude fought hard and was beaten severely.

The theory has always been that whoever killed Perry would likely have his blood on them. And sure enough, when they run the tests, they don't find Perry's blood on Tommy's shirt. They find Charlie's blood. But you want to know who did have Perry's blood on their clothes? Charlie Mays. And as far as I can tell based on my research, this is the first time Charlie's clothing is ever tested, ever. Even with the blood all over his shoes and his pants. Even with all that blood.

The prosecution says that the presence of Perry's blood on Charlie's clothes isn't enough to establish him as the killer, and that the absence of Perry's blood on the four little squares of fabric Tommy's team was allowed to test, that doesn't prove Tommy's not the killer, since Perry's blood could have just missed those spots. Okay, so why don't they just test all of it then? Well, that's the big question. That's always been the big question. Why don't they just test it all? And that's what Tommy wants. That's what he's been fighting all this time for. Yeah, and honestly, it seems like a no-brainer to me, especially in a case where the guilt of someone on death row is being called into question. Yeah.

And this happened in the 70s. There are way more advanced tests available that weren't available back then. Yeah. Well, the way I understand it with post-conviction DNA testing, it's that it's not just about having this pile of physical evidence and the technology to test it. The judge has to believe that the results of those tests could change the outcome of a trial. So it's not like in a sexual assault case where DNA from a rape kit would be pretty definitive. It would prove whether or not a person was even there. We already know that Tommy was there. We already know that he fired at least two guns. Right. And the case against him, the one that the jury decided was worth a conviction,

had more to do with testimony from Felton Thomas and Edward Williams than with physical evidence at the scene. And as the prosecutor said in an interview for the Blood and Truth podcast series, DNA on Tommy's shirt doesn't change Edward or Felton's testimony, and therefore probably doesn't impact the outcome of the original trial. And, you know, I think Tommy and his supporters could maybe live with that if the original trial were even a little bit fair. But it wasn't, not even close. In what way? In so many ways. In the documentary, they talk about how the judge had an axe to grind with Tommy from day one because the two of them had been witnesses on opposing sides of a civil matter not long before.

Like the judge had testified for the prosecution and Tommy for the defense. So Tommy's legal team filed a motion requesting the judge recuse himself from trial, which to me seems kind of fair, but the motion was denied. They also ask for more time. Remember to review the evidence and get their own tests back, and that was also denied. One of Tommy's lawyers was in the documentary and said that he'd never been to a trial that was so one-sided, where every motion was denied and every objection sustained. But there weren't just problems with the judge. There were issues with the jury too. Wait, I thought that's why they moved the trial to Jacksonville, like to have a completely impartial jury.

Well, it's not that the jury wasn't impartial. It's more about what happened during deliberations. Apparently, there was this one juror in particular who was one of the only ones who felt like Tommy was not guilty. And she has actually spoken publicly about how the foreman and others basically bullied her into changing her vote. Even like taunting her with one of the weapons from the crime scene. Taunting her how? Like, he put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger. What? Yeah, this juror actually fainted several times during the three days of deliberation and was under so much stress about the whole thing

that about halfway through day two, the judge authorized her doctor to prescribe her medication, which turned out to be Valium. She says it was after she took the Valium that she changed her vote from not guilty to guilty. Mmm, that feels sketch. Tommy's team didn't know the full extent of all of this until much later, when a few of the jurors went public. But at the time, they were hearing like whispers of things that weren't right. So they actually filed a request to the judge to interview members of the jury and find out what had happened. But not only did the judge deny that request, but he filed an injunction forbidding the team to ever speak to anyone on that jury. So that's just a couple of examples.

There is so much crap with this case, like it would be impossible for me to walk you through every single detail in one episode. The Tampa Bay Times turned it into a whole podcast series, like literally there is that much and it's worth a listen if you're looking for something to binge this summer. So where do things sit now today in 2021? Things sit exactly where they always have, with Tommy on death row pleading for a chance to test the evidence and with the prosecution continually blocking his ability to make that happen. And listen, I don't know if Tommy Ziegler is guilty or not. Maybe he is. Maybe he did it and if that's the case, then he belongs behind bars. But what if he didn't?

I know the courts have said that the test won't prove anything and therefore would have no bearing on the outcome of the trial. But how can you even know that unless you run the test? Like if that's true, why not just do it to prove it, right? Right, I guess this is my biggest issue with death penalty cases. Like if the state is so confident that they have the right guy behind bars and their case against him holds just as much water today as it did. Then let the defense run as many tests as they want because it will all prove you're right. Yes, what have you got to lose? Like there should be no question.

If you're going to take a man's life, there should not be questions like this. And I still have so many questions about this case, right? Like for example, the theory has always been from the police that he shot himself after he makes the call so that he could be saved. And there's that no blood trail to the phone, but blood trail from the phone. Right, but when the first like police chief shows up and like carries into his car, they said that the blood is totally dry and there's no transfer. Which they somehow make both of those like a reason that he did it. But both things can't be true. But both things can't be true.

And like I don't know what I know about Tommy. Like I don't know how to fit that in with Edwards testimony and Felton's testimony. Like they would have to almost be working together, but I don't get it. But for what at what end game? I just this has me like spinning in circles, Ashley spiraling. I have been spiraling for weeks over this and I just don't know what to think. But again, at the end of the day, what is the harm in double checking? Our justice system only works if trials are fair.

If you believe his defense team and his supporters and Tommy himself, nothing about his murder trial was fair. And no one can change that. What's done is done, but we can at least start to change it now by giving Tommy's team the chance to test all of the evidence and see what story it has to tell today. Is it the same one that it told all those years ago? You can find all of the source material for this episode on our website crime junkie podcast dot com and be sure to follow us on Instagram at crime junkie podcast. We'll be back next week with another episode. Crime junkie is an audio Chuck production. So what do you think Chuck?

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