'It's almost like you could write 0 First of three parts By Jennie Hess Tommy Zeigler: 'mastermind' or victim? Cox News Service STARKE - Tommy Zeigler lives here. Ten years, now, he has lived here where the walls are Pepto-Bismol pink and the welcome mat is a barbed wire coil. The neighbors are mostly quiet, , at least in Zeigler's corner of the prison. Everyone here is "sort of settled." That's what Zeigler calls it. Next door to Tommy lives Ted Bundy. Everyone knows Bundy. They've made a movie about him, and he was all over TV and the newspapers last month when he managed to evade his second appointment with the state's executioner. Zeigler knows what that's like. Last May he was scheduled to die in the electric chair. Like Bundy, he got a reprieve before they strapped him in. Unlike Bundy's story, Tommy Zeigler's isn't well known. Zeigler was convicted for the brutal Christmas Eve 1975 murders of his wife, her parents and a black man. One of the jurors who found him guilty said after the trial she was pressured into her decision by other jurors. The judge who sentenced Zeigler to death has since been accused of scheming to have him executed. A team of defense attorneys who have stayed with Zeigler's case over the years maintain to this day that the police investigation which led to Zeigler's arrest was bungled, and that crucial evidence was either withheld or destroyed. On Aug. 13, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta will hear arguments in what the defense hopes is the first step toward a new trial. "There are substantial reasons to doubt the verdict," says Steven Winter, Zeigler's new attorney. "It's not just your run-of-the-mill, a book' 'Hey, I'm innocent' type thing." Tom Tart, an attorney who represented two insurance companies involved in the case, still believes Zeigler is guilty. "Yet, it's almost like you could write a book because to set it up the way he did, he'd of had to have been a mastermind," Tart says. Until the federal appeals court rules, it's tough to tell, says Winter, "whether we're in the last leg of the journey or the first step." Meanwhile, Zeigler, 41, sits at a small table, his steel-cuffed hands shuffling piles of legal papers. His brown hair is neat and parted carefully on the right. He stares through thick spectacles. Turn to ZEIGLER, 3A Tommy Zeigler convicted of killing four, including his wife.