Wrongful Conviction or Cold-Blooded Killing? The Winter Garden Murders

Tommy Zeigler insists he is innocent, but his time on Death Row is running out.

Tommy Zeigler (Image: Orange Observer)

One of the most hotly-debated cases in Florida’s criminal history could be laid to rest once and for all after a prosecutor agreed to support the testing of crime scene evidence for DNA.

Tommy Zeigler was convicted of murder and sentenced to death for the killings of his wife, her parents and a customer at his furniture store in 1975, but he has always maintained his innocence and sworn others were responsible.

Now, although a judge has to officially sign off on the decision, the results could be enough to either confirm or deny his story and work out who was truly to blame. Could an innocent man have spent more than four decades in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, or is Zeigler simply not telling the truth? Here’s a summary of what has happened up to now.

The Winter Garden murders

It was Christmas Eve 1975, and the police had been called to a furniture store owned by Tommy Zeigler in the Floridian city of Winter Garden. When they entered, they found evidence of a shocking massacre.

Eunice Zeigler — Tommy’s wife — and her mother Virginia Edwards had been shot to…