About three decades ago pregnant 20-year-old Tina Heins was stabbed to death in her Mayport apartment while her husband was on duty at the naval station. Her brother-in-law Chad Heins was arrested, convicted and sentenced to life in prison but cleared and set free 13 years later.
Prosecutors and investigators have not given up and now they have a new suspect behind bars, State Attorney Melissa Nelson, who picked up the case in 2005, announced at a 25 September news conference.
Michael Shane Ziegler, 52, who was also in the Navy and a close friend of Tina Heins’ husband Jeremy, was taken into custody on Sept 4 in Newton County, Georgia, where he lived and then extradited to Jacksonville on 18 September on charges of first-degree murder and attempted sexual battery, jail and court records show. Enhanced forensic technology and DNA evidence led to the arrest.
It was DNA evidence that was also a focal point in Chad Heins’ case. He was 19 when his sister-in-law was stabbed 27 times and had maintained he was passed out on the couch when the slaying occurred and fires were set in the apartment.
Jurors didn’t buy it and found him guilty in December 1996.
The turning point came in 2001 when Heins wrote to the New York-based Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals. The group convinced a judge to reopen DNA testing that ultimately revealed another man's DNA on Tina Heins' bed and body.
A new trial was ordered in 2007, but then-State Attorney Harry Shorstein agreed not to prosecute as long as Heins waived his rights to a speedy trial. That would allow prosecutors to reopen the case if new evidence came to light.
Heins, now 51, moved back to his home state of Wisconsin, and that’s also where the Livernash family of Tina Heins lives.
Nelson said the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has collaborated with Jacksonville investigators since 1994 and conducted almost 200 tests in the case. She also credited additional agencies, individuals and the Livernash family.
"By the early 2000s new DNA technologies had come online that would allow preserved evidence that had been collected in 1994 from Tina's body and her bed to be tested in a way that had not been available to law enforcement at the time of her murder," Nelson said. "Using this advanced and more sophisticated technology, post-conviction testing on this evidence began. The story of the forensic evidence took shape. A DNA profile of an unknown man emerged. DNA from under Tina's nails, from hairs collected from her body and from a semen stain on her sheets were that of a man who was not her husband and was not her brother-in-law Chad."
The DNA profile was uploaded into a national database and processed for years. Nelson said investigators interviewed countless people associated with Tina Heins and collected more DNA. When she became state attorney, she said she made this case a priority.
In 2021 the State Attorney's Office sent what little DNA remained in the case to a specialized lab in Texas called Othram that incorporated genetic genealogy searches, and a likely match was identified that investigators confirmed was Ziegler.
"He was living with his mother outside of Atlanta, Georgia. He is a retired merchant marine," Nelson said. "We learned that in 1994, Michael Ziegler was here in the Navy stationed at Mayport aboard the USS Leyte Gulf. We also learned this: He was not a stranger to Tina Heins.
Michael Ziegler was her husband Jeremy's very close friend. In fact he stood witness at their courthouse wedding just five months before Tina was killed. ... For three decades, Ziegler remained under the radar, but his biological footprint endured and with persistence and advancements in science, we finally caught up to him."
Court records show Ziegler, whose Georgia arrest report says he also went by "Diggy," was scheduled for his first court appearance on 9 October but on 24 September his attorney Timothy Miller of Harris Guidi Rosner P.A. filed for a waiver of his arraignment opting instead for a written plea of not guilty.