Two Trucks, A Fingerprint That Wouldn't Lift, And The Trainee Who Touched The Evidence

Three friends went out on a night-fishing trip outside Frostproof, Florida, in July 2020, and only one of them came home. Tony Wiggins is on trial for his life in Bartow, accused of murdering Brandon Rollins, Keven Springfield, and Damion Tillman, and the State of Florida is asking a jury to send him to death. He is presumed innocent, and he stays presumed innocent through every sentence below, on Day 3 and on every day before or after it. His brother, William "Robert" Wiggins, and his girlfriend, Mary Whittemore, were each charged only as accessories after the fact to a capital felony, and both have already resolved those charges by plea. Neither of them is on trial for murder, and neither of them faces the death penalty. Only Tony Wiggins does, and that distinction matters every time either of their names comes up in what follows.

Days 1 and 2 built the frame around this case. Day 1 was openings and the first people to reach the scene, the friend who held Brandon Rollins as he called out for his father, the deputies who answered a dangerous-shooting call outside their own jurisdiction because nobody else was closer. Day 2 was the investigative and medical buildup, the medical examiner's three autopsies, a Dollar General surveillance clip that put a name in a store the same night as the killings, and the chain of ownership on a truck that keeps recurring through this trial. Day 3 is where all of that turns into physical evidence in front of the jury, and it turned into a long day: four witnesses, eight and a half hours of court, three of them Polk County Sheriff's Office forensic specialists who spent the day carrying bullet holes, blood, gold chains, cell phones, identification cards, and a gun with a fingerprint etched directly into its own metal to the stand.

What makes Day 3 worth sitting with is not only what the State proved. It's what every single witness who carried that evidence to the stand also conceded once the defense had a turn, one procedural crack at a time. There is no single eyewitness to cross-examine here, no one account of what happened that a jury either believes or doesn't. The case rests on physical evidence, and physical evidence is only as strong as the paperwork proving where it came from and who touched it along the way. Watch how many times that paperwork had a hole in it on Day 3 alone.

It's worth stating plainly, before any of this testimony, what is actually riding on it. Under Florida law, first-degree murder carries exactly two possible outcomes on conviction: death, or life without parole. There is no middle sentence a jury can land on. Whatever a jury eventually decides about the truck, the chains, the fingerprint card, and the second bag of evidence Day 3 leaves open, it is deciding it in a case where the only two doors at the end of the hallway are the harshest sentence this state has and the second-harshest. That is the weight sitting underneath every witness described below, and it is why every gap in the paperwork gets more attention here than it might in a case where less was on the table.

A Family Friend, A Truck, And An Admission Nobody Asked For

The day opens with Brandi Strickland, a longtime friend of the Wiggins family who had been living on their property in South Lake Wales, staying in the camper Robert Wiggins used, after her own mother's death left her without a place of her own. She testified to how long she had known the family and who else lived on that property in July 2020, naming Tony Wiggins Jr., his father, Mary Whittemore, and a small number of other people connected to the household who are not otherwise part of this trial. She had lent her own truck to Robert Wiggins the night of the murders, and on the stand she identified that truck in gas station photographs taken minutes apart on the night Rollins, Springfield, and Tillman were killed, pinning the same vehicle at the same Town Star location twice within roughly sixteen minutes of each other. That is the kind of small, mechanical detail, two timestamps and one truck, that a jury can hold onto without needing to trust anyone's memory of what was said or done.

Then, on cross, without being asked for it, Strickland volunteered that she had seen Tony Wiggins and his brother sell a gun. Nobody drew that out of her with a pointed question. It surfaced on its own, in the middle of testimony about something else entirely, and that is exactly why it carries more weight than a scripted answer would. The defense's own cross then turned the same witness around and went looking at who she actually was to this family. Strickland, it turned out, had ties that ran deeper than a tenant staying in a relative's camper. She had previously been married to one of the Wiggins family's own cousins, and she had shared a bed with Robert Wiggins in that same camper. The cross also worked Robert Wiggins' own familiarity with firearms, a line of questioning that sits alongside her unprompted gun-sale admission without ever being fully resolved on this record. A witness whose truck places the family at the scene, who volunteers an unprompted gun admission, and who turns out to be far closer to this family than her own direct testimony first suggested, all inside one appearance on the stand, finished clean, no subpoena, excused for good.

The Truck That Sat Unsealed For A Week

Three Polk County Sheriff's Office forensic investigators followed Strickland to the stand, one after another, and each one built a piece of the physical case against the white Ford F-150 at the center of this trial while also handing the defense something real to work with.

Autumn Slater, a crime scene investigator back in July 2020 and called to the stand under her prior name, Thompson, testified that she photographed the F-150 at a Polk County Sheriff's Office warehouse as part of the case's evidence workup. On cross, she was pressed on exactly who had access to that truck once it reached the warehouse, and how anything inside it could have shifted before she ever arrived to document it. Her answer, and the fact underneath it, was that the truck was never sealed with evidence tape at all, and it sat at that warehouse for nearly a week before anyone photographed what was inside it. A week is a long time for a vehicle at the center of a triple-murder case to sit open, unsealed, in a facility with more than one person who could reach it. The defense does not have to prove anything was actually moved or added inside that cab. It only has to point at the gap and ask the jury what they are supposed to make of it.

Cody Russell, a forensic investigator with nineteen years total with the department, testified next to evidence recovered from the truck, spent casings among it, pulled from beneath the seat liner. But on cross, Russell conceded that Russell's own composite diagram of the scene, drawn to accompany that testimony, carries an admittedly wrong date, and Russell could not confirm on the stand that it carried any measurements or a reliable compass direction either. A composite diagram is supposed to be the one fixed, objective reference point a jury can lean on when everything else in a case is testimony filtered through memory. This one came into evidence with an acknowledged error built into it from the start, and the defense's cross spent real time on the stand making sure the jury heard exactly which parts of that diagram could not be trusted before Russell was excused.

Teresa Kistler, a forensic investigator with the department for more than two decades, then took the stand and began a front-to-back walkthrough of the white F-150: apparent bullet holes in the windshield and dash, blood on the seats and headrest, and, near the end of the window covered in this Part, a gold chain found in blood on the driver's seat. Kistler went on to confirm she personally collected both halves of that chain from inside the truck, one from the seat itself and the other from elsewhere in the cab, tying the same piece of jewelry to two different locations inside the vehicle. Kistler's testimony was not finished by the time the State moved a final batch of exhibits into evidence and the court broke for lunch. It picks up again, and it closes, in the next video, and the way it closes is the same story the morning already told twice: a real piece of physical evidence, sitting right next to an admitted gap in the paperwork that is supposed to prove where it came from.

A Victim's Own License, And Blood That Wasn't Visible

Kistler's cross closes out exactly the way the morning's forensic testimony opened: a real physical detail, undercut by an admitted paperwork error. The two gold chains recovered from the truck got mixed up somewhere in the chain-of-custody record, to the point that Kistler could not say for certain, under cross, which chain came from which seat, and no supplement report was ever filed before trial to correct the record. It sounds small on paper. In front of a jury weighing physical evidence, it is not small at all, because it is the exact kind of scrivener's error that lets a defense argue the whole evidentiary chain deserves a second look.

Once Kistler was excused and instructed to remain under subpoena, Michelle Miller, a Polk County Sheriff's Office forensic investigation supervisor with the department since 2005, took the stand and opened a much larger evidence walkthrough, one that runs the rest of Day 3 and continues directly into Day 4. Miller first walked the jury through a second vehicle in this case, a red Chevy S10: a bullet hole she had measured but could not trace to a source, the vehicle's own identification number read into the record directly off the dash, and a bloodstained bag recovered from the front seat. That walkthrough ends on the single piece of testimony that ties the vehicle directly to one of the men who was killed. Inside the center console, investigators found a driver's license belonging to Damion Tillman, the last trace of him that anyone recovered from inside that truck.

From there, Miller moved to the second truck and sprayed the interior of the white F-150 with a chemical called Blue Star, the same reagent crime labs use to reveal blood that bleach and time have made invisible to the naked eye. It lit up on a seatbelt that nobody had thought to look at twice, and Miller cut the sample out of the truck on the spot, in front of the jury, evidence nobody had known existed a moment earlier.

The investigation then left the trucks behind entirely and moved to the family's own property on Sarver Avenue, where deputies had searched two separate trailers. Inside the first trailer, they recovered cell phones and William "Robert" Wiggins' own identification card, pulled from a bedroom nightstand. Inside the second, a purse and wallet turned up more identification tying the property to the people at the center of this case. It is worth pausing on Robert Wiggins' name appearing here: he remains a recurring figure in this case's physical evidence even though he has already resolved his own, lesser charge, accessory after the fact, by plea, and is not on trial for murder alongside his brother. In a third location on the same property, a bedroom safe, deputies recovered a handgun carrying a partial fingerprint etched directly into the metal of the weapon itself, a print that ordinary fingerprint powder cannot lift off a surface like that. Miller testified investigators could only photograph the print in place. That single fact quietly took what might have been the day's most dramatic piece of individualized evidence off the table before the jury ever had the chance to weigh it as anything more than a photograph.

The State's Strongest Individual Evidence, And A Trainee Who Touched It

Michelle Miller's testimony was not finished by the end of Part 12, and it carries the entire last stretch of Day 3. Court reopened with the jury out to sort exhibit paperwork before Miller resumed, and once the panel returned, the State walked her back through everything deputies had recovered from the Sarver Avenue property, item by item: fingerprints lifted off the handgun found in the bedroom safe, a shotgun with a distinctive gold trigger, a spent shell casing recovered outside a front door, a hand-drawn sketch of the property itself, and four cell phones pulled from one of the trailers, each one logged to the exact spot where it was found. The State then published booking photographs of the three people connected to this case side by side for the jury: Robert Wiggins, Mary Whittemore, and Tony Wiggins Jr., including injuries visible on Wiggins' own hands in his own photograph. It is the kind of image that lands hard in a courtroom, and it is worth repeating here what those three photographs actually represent under the law: one man on trial for his life, and two people beside him in those same booking photos who have already closed their own cases out with a plea to a lesser charge.

Then came the day's single most individualized piece of evidence. Miller testified she personally fingerprinted Tony Wiggins Jr. herself, card by card, in the courtroom, and walked the jury through exactly what a properly rolled print captures that a flat one does not. A buccal swab, for DNA, was collected from him there as well. Unlike a truck, a diagram, or a chain recovered from a scene years ago, a fingerprint card and a DNA swab collected and personally identified in open court are about as direct as physical evidence gets in any criminal trial. It is the strongest piece of individualized evidence the State put in front of this jury on Day 3, full stop.

The defense's cross then went to work on that exact same witness, methodically, starting with the S10's chain of custody: who towed the truck, who signed for it, and who actually gave the order to have it processed for evidence. Miller could not answer several of those basic scene-integrity questions, telling the court more than once that she did not recall. Watch how quickly "I don't recall" becomes the answer once the questions move from what the evidence shows to how it got into evidence in the first place.

The cross then turned to a detail Miller had not volunteered on direct examination: a trainee working alongside her that day had written on some of the evidence bags and had physically handled bloodied evidence recovered from inside the S10, including a bloody shirt and bloody paper towels. Miller held her ground on one point, insisting that every item logged under her own name was an item she had personally collected herself. But she conceded, under continued questioning, that her trainee's hands were on some of that same evidence at the same time she was working the scene, writing on bags that ultimately carried Miller's own name and signature as the collecting officer.

The day's last open thread cuts off cold, right as the clock ran out. The defense raised a second bag of evidence, one Miller testified under oath she had never heard of, said to have been found somewhere else entirely, days after the one bag the jury had already seen and had already been walked through in detail. An objection stopped the exchange before Miller could answer it any further, and the judge sent the jury home minutes later, releasing them for the evening with a reminder to be back the next morning. Miller was excused for the night only, not discharged from her subpoena. Her testimony resumes on Day 4, and the trainee's actual role in handling that evidence, along with whatever the second, unexplained bag turns out to be, are both live, unresolved questions sitting in the record when the courtroom emptied out for the evening.

Two Trucks, One Case

It's easy to lose track of which truck is which across eight and a half hours of forensic testimony, so it's worth separating them plainly, because the State is building two distinct evidentiary threads around two distinct vehicles and Day 3 is the day both threads finally got their full physical workup in front of the jury. The white Ford F-150 is the truck Brandi Strickland lent to Robert Wiggins the night of the murders, the truck she identified in gas station photographs, the truck that sat unsealed at the warehouse for nearly a week, and the truck that carried the two gold chains and, later in Part 12, the seatbelt that lit up under Blue Star. The red Chevy S10 is the second vehicle, the one Michelle Miller walked the jury through separately: a bullet hole, a bloodstained bag, a vehicle identification number read into the record, and, inside its center console, Damion Tillman's own driver's license. Two trucks, two separate physical stories, and by the end of Day 3 the State had put a named forensic witness on the stand to walk the jury through the evidence recovered from each one.

Keeping the two trucks separate matters for another reason. Day 2 already established a chain of ownership around one of these vehicles, the account of who sold it, who drove it, and who eventually gave it to one of the men who was killed weeks before his death. Day 3 is where that ownership history and the forensic evidence pulled from inside the cab start to occupy the same courtroom at the same time, and it is worth watching, as this case continues, whether the State ties the two trucks together into one connected timeline or keeps building them as two separate, parallel cases inside the larger one.

What A Chain Of Custody Is Actually Doing In A Case Like This

It's worth stopping here and naming plainly why a day built almost entirely around evidence bags, diagrams, and warehouse storage windows matters as much as it does in a capital case. There is no confession in this record. There is no single eyewitness who watched the killings happen and can be believed or disbelieved on the stand. What the State has instead is a physical case, built out of trucks, chains, licenses, fingerprints, and cell phones, each one meaningless on its own unless the jury can trust exactly where it came from, who touched it, and when. That trust is what a chain of custody exists to prove, and it is also exactly what the defense spent the entire day quietly working to unsettle, witness by witness, without ever having to argue that any specific piece of evidence was planted or faked. An unsealed truck sitting for a week, a diagram with a wrong date on it, two chains that got confused with each other, and a trainee's hands on evidence logged under someone else's name are not, any one of them, proof that Tony Wiggins did not do this. They are the raw material a defense uses to ask a jury to hesitate before trusting any single piece of that physical case completely, and Day 3 handed the defense five separate versions of that same material before the day was even over.

It is also worth saying what none of this evidence does, at least not yet, on this record. Nothing shown to the jury on Day 3 is an eyewitness account of the killings themselves. Nothing is a confession. What the physical evidence does is place people, vehicles, and property in proximity to each other: a truck at a gas station the night of the murders, a family's own identification cards inside a property tied to that same truck, a defendant's fingerprints and DNA collected in the courtroom itself. Proximity is not the same thing as guilt, and a jury weighing a capital case is entitled to hold the State to the full distance between the two. Whether the State closes that distance is a question for the rest of this trial, not for Day 3 alone.

Where Day 3 Actually Leaves This

Lay the day out in order and a pattern holds across all four witnesses. Brandi Strickland's own unprompted admission about a gun sale came bundled with a family tie to the Wiggins name that her direct testimony never once mentioned on its own. Autumn Slater's photographs of the truck came bundled with nearly a week of unsealed storage before anyone documented what was inside it. Cody Russell's evidence collection came bundled with a diagram carrying its own acknowledged, on-the-record error. Teresa Kistler's walkthrough of bullet holes and blood came bundled with a chain-of-custody mix-up on the one piece of evidence, a pair of gold chains, small enough to actually get confused with each other. And Michelle Miller's testimony, the single most individualized evidence of the entire day, a fingerprint card and a DNA swab taken from Tony Wiggins Jr. himself in open court, came bundled with an admission that someone other than the sworn investigator had physically handled bloodied evidence under that investigator's own name, and with a second, unexplained bag of evidence still sitting open and unanswered at the end of the day.

None of that is proof of anything by itself, in either direction. It is the physical case the State has built so far, laid out one witness at a time, and it is also the exact map the defense will keep coming back to when its own turn comes to argue that every one of those cracks adds up to real doubt rather than ordinary paperwork friction on a five-year-old case. Tony Wiggins has not been convicted of anything, and the presumption of innocence he is entitled to does not shrink as the evidence against him grows more specific. He remains the only person on trial for these three murders and the only person facing a death sentence in this courtroom. His brother and his girlfriend already resolved their own, lesser charges by plea and are not on trial here, whatever role their names or their property play in the physical evidence the jury is now weighing. Michelle Miller remains on the stand, mid-testimony, when Day 4 resumes, and the trainee's actual role and the second, unexplained bag of evidence are the first things worth watching for the moment it does.

For the whole day, gavel to gavel, with every recess cut out and every witness in order, watch the full edition below.