On the night of April 17, 1994, 20-year-old Tina Heins, who was four months pregnant with her first child, was stabbed to death in the apartment she shared with her husband, Jeremy, in the Mayport neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida.
On the night of the crime, Jeremy, who was in the U.S. Navy, was on board his ship, the USS Leyte Gulf, at the nearby Mayport Naval Station.
Jeremy’s 19-year-old brother, Chad, had recently moved in with them from Wisconsin while waiting for his fiancée to join him and find a place to live in the nearby Jacksonville area. Chad reported to police that he came in at about 12:30 a.m. after a night of drinking and playing pool in bars, and that Tina came home about two hours later. He said they chatted briefly and he fell back asleep.
Chad said he was awakened by a smoke alarm around 5:45 a.m. and found three small fires burning. One was in the kitchen, one was in the living room and one was on the sofa where he slept. He said he extinguished the fires, and disarmed the smoke alarm. He noticed that the front door was ajar.
Concerned that the smoke alarm had not roused Tina, Chad said he went to the bedroom and found her in bed, soaked in blood. An autopsy showed she had been stabbed more than 20 times and her throat had been slashed. She also had defensive wounds on her hands.
Tina was a receptionist at the Sea Turtle Inn in Atlantic Beach, Florida. Hotel owner Barry Adeeb told police she got off work about 1:30 a.m. Chad was supposed to pick her up, but because he fell asleep and didn’t show up, a hotel co-worker drove her home.
Jeremy told police he had invited Chad to move to Florida as a way of helping him get a new start in life after several arrests in Nekoosa, Wisconsin, including one for statutory rape in 1992, when his 17-year-old girlfriend got pregnant. When authorities agreed that the sex was consensual, the charge was deferred for a year and subsequently dismissed. The couple would eventually marry.
On April 20, 1994, Chad was charged with first-degree murder and attempted sexual battery. Police said that he had given inconsistent statements to police and to his brother. The police said that Jeremy reported that Chad told him, “I messed up…I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it.”
On Dec. 9, 1996, Heins went to trial in Duval County Circuit Court. The prosecution said it was seeking the death penalty. The prosecution contended that it was impossible for Heins to have slept through the attack that killed Tina in the 600 square foot one-bedroom apartment. Heins’s defense attorney contended that Heins’s apology to his brother was because he had slept through the attack and not prevented it.
The prosecution had no physical evidence implicating Heins. No blood was found on his clothes or under his fingernails. He had no scratches or scrapes on his body. The murder weapon was never found.
A forensic analyst testified that DNA testing performed before the trial on three hairs collected from the victim’s bedroom showed that the hairs came from one person, and that person wasn’t Heins or his brother.
Diane Hanson, a crime laboratory analyst at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, testified that a DNA profile recovered from a washcloth was consistent with Heins’s DNA profile. She also testified that either Tina and Chad or Tina and Jeremy could have been the sources of a mixed DNA sample from a sink drain plug in the home. Hanson testified that Chad Heins’s DNA profile was found in 8.5 percent of the population. She did not testify to the percentage of the population that could have contributed to the sample.
Two jailhouse informants testified that Heins had confessed his guilt to them while they were in the Duval County Jail together.
On Dec. 20, 1996, the jury convicted Heins of first-degree murder and attempted sexual battery. The jury declined to impose the death penalty and Heins was sentenced to life in prison.
In March 1998, the First District Court of Appeal of Florida upheld the convictions and sentence.
In 2001, Heins wrote to the Innocence Project, which took the case with help from the Innocence Project of Florida. In 2003, along with attorney Robert Beckham of Holland & Knight, the Innocence Project filed a motion for DNA testing on skin cells collected from underneath the victim’s fingernails during the autopsy.
In June 2005, the DNA test results showed that male DNA under the victim’s fingernails did not come from Heins or his brother. DNA tests were then ordered to compare the unknown male DNA found from the fingernail scrapings to the three hairs found on the victim’s body that were shown before trial to come from an unknown person. In August 2005, additional testing showed that the DNA profile from the hairs was consistent with the DNA from the fingernails..
In July 2006, Innocence Project attorney Nina Morrison and Beckham filed a motion seeking to vacate Heins’s convictions based on the new test results. The motion also said that the defense had learned that a fingerprint had been discovered before trial on the faucet of the blood-stained sink in the bathroom. The fingerprint came from someone other than Heins, his brother or the victim. The fingerprint analyst who testified at the trial was only asked about futile attempts to find fingerprints on the bathroom light switch cover. The motion said the prosecution failed to disclose the report on the print found on the faucet.
On December 12, 2006, Duval County Circuit Judge L. Page Haddock vacated Heins’s convictions. State Attorney Harry Shorstein said he intended to retry Heins.
While preparing for the retrial, the Innocence Project sought further DNA testing on semen from the victim’s bed sheets. In November 2007, the test results showed that the DNA profile from the semen was the same profile that was obtained from the hairs and the scrapings from the victim’s fingernails. The DNA profile was entered into convicted offender databases, but did not yield a match.
On December 4, 2007, the prosecution dismissed the case. Heins was released. He had been incarcerated for 13 years. He did not receive compensation for his wrongful conviction.
Over the years, law enforcement continued to submit the unidentified DNA profile to the FBI Combined DNA Index System, a database comprised of the DNA profiles of convicted offenders as well as DNA profiles in unsolved crimes. There were no potential matches generated.
Then, after the arrest of the Golden State Killer in 2018, using genetic genealogy, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement recommended that the prosecution contact a Texas laboratory that specialized in identifying profiles from minute pieces of evidence.
In 2021, 4th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Melissa Nelson submitted the forensic evidence in the case to Othram, Inc. located in The Woodlands, Texas to determine if advanced DNA testing could help identify the male perpetrator. Othram successfully developed a DNA extract from the evidence and built a comprehensive DNA profile. Othram used the profile in a genetic genealogy search to develop new investigative leads that were passed along to law enforcement. Using this new information, investigators collected reference DNA samples from potential relatives of the suspect.
On September 4, 2025, police arrested 51-year-old Michael Shane Ziegler in Covington, Georgia. Ziegler, a Navy veteran, was a close friend of Jeremy Heins and was stationed near their apartment at the time of the murder. Ziegler had been a witness at Jeremy and Tina’s wedding and police said his DNA was present at the crime scene.
In October 2025, Ziegler pleaded not guilty to the murder and was ordered held without bail pending a resolution of the case.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 02-16-2026
