He believes Mays - who had cash from the store stuffed in his pocket - was one of the attackers and was killed in the gunfight. He lost his glasses but managed to find and fire one of the guns he kept in the store. Unbeknownst to him, his wife and in-laws, who had come to look at a recliner that was to be her father’s Christmas present, were already dead in various places in the store.Īfter finding the lights shut off at the breaker box, he was hit over the head and beaten by two men. Zeigler said then and now that he went to the store to make some last-minute Christmas deliveries. They say he staged the robbery so he could collect on a $500,000 life insurance policy he took out on his wife just months before. They said Zeigler then shot himself in the stomach to make it appear that he, too, was a victim. A fruit picker Zeigler knew named Charlie Mays was killed, too. Prosecutors contended at Zeigler’s 1976 trial that he lured his wife, Eunice, to the store to kill her, and her parents, Perry and Virginia Edwards, got in the way.

A previous test in 2001 failed to detect any DNA from the victims on four small patches of his clothing, but prosecutors blocked attempts to do a full test, saying other evidence ties Zeigler to the murders.

In particular, Zeigler’s attorney wants to test his clothing to see if it has the victims’ blood on it and the fingernail clippings of his father-in-law, who fought his killer before being shot. The agreement will now go before a judge, but is expected to be approved. The Tampa Bay Times reports that Worrell’s office recently agreed to give all evidence in the case to Zeigler’s attorneys for testing at a lab certified by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors. Previous prosecutors have contended Zeigler staged the massacre as a robbery to collect his wife’s life insurance policy.

Worrell, who was elected state attorney for the Orlando area in November, has agreed to allow testing that Tommy Zeigler and his many supporters believe will show he is innocent of gunning down the four on Christmas Eve. A Florida prosecutor has agreed to allow DNA testing on evidence that helped convict a man for the 1975 murders of his wife, in-laws and an acquaintance at the family’s furniture store and landed him on death row.

Florida man june 6 1975