A circuit court judge agreed to decide in the coming days whether to grant Tommy Zeigler a new hearing that could bring his freedom from Florida’s death row, where he has spent nearly five decades for a quadruple murder in Winter Garden.

Zeigler’s attorneys said an evidentiary hearing — based on hundreds of DNA samples recently tested — would be the 80-year-old man’s last chance to prove he did not kill his wife, in-laws and a store customer at his family’s furniture store on Christmas Eve night in 1975.

“Evidence of this magnitude must be heard,” defense attorney Dennis Tracey said Thursday in urging Judge Leticia Marques to schedule such a hearing. “Mr. Zeigler was convicted of four murders that he has always contended that he did not commit.”

The 80-year-old Zeigler, Florida’s long

See Full Page