Was Charlie Mays One of the Killers?

According to an affidavit signed by Edward T. Rowe, a policeman in the city of Oakland, right next to Winter Garden, Ernie Mays, the son of Charlie Mays, the dead man shown here in a crime scene photo, told him that his father had taken a gun with him when he went to the Zeigler Furniture Store on Christmas Eve, 1975. Ernie Mays was about 11 years old at the time of the crime. The Edward Rowe affidavit was signed in 1982, two years after Rowe became the operator of Carol's Country Store in Oakland. Ernie Mays was working at the store when Rowe took over and was teased by other black children about working for a white man when a white man had killed his father. According to Rowe, Ernie Mays did not get along with his mother's boy friend and on at least two occasions told him that a white man had come to their home shortly after the murders and talked to his mother outside away from the kids. After the visit, the mother told him that his father "was going to be a hero." He also told Rowe that "his father was supposed to have killed Mr. Tommy and Mr. Tommy was not supposed to have killed his father."

The Rowe affidavit confirms the information obtained by Detective Tom DeMars who learned while working undercover to investigate the loan shark racket that Charlie Mays was the shooter in the unsolved killing of store owner Shorty Reddick. Reddick was killed in his store in the early seventies after he tried to defend himself with the gun he kept under the counter, but which turned out to be loaded with empty shell casings. (Note the similarity to the story Edward Williams told about Zeigler trying to shoot him with an empty gun.) Carol Reddick became the owner of the Reddick stores which she renamed Carol's Country Store after Reddick was killed. Did Carol's Country Store hire Charlie Mays to kill Zeigler? Did they give Ernie Mays a job after his father was killed? How many "coincidences" must there be before the law gets suspicious?

Watch a UTube video of the Tom DeMars deposition in which he decribes how he heard that Charlie Mays killed Shorty Reddick.