Into Thin Air

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This is Gordon Harris, 81 degrees in Madison, partly sunny and warm this afternoon. It's starting to sink in now what I've missed.
Did I even have a mom?

Do you know that for the last 30 years,

I've been waiting and watching every day, waiting for mom to come home?

I know people always tell me she's strong and independent and a pioneer, but for me, she was just mom.

I remember flying with her

while she taught people how to fly.

Her smile, I remember, a big, big, big smile.

I was a baby of the family, so I always got spoiled and just fun to be with.

As I got older, I would go with her to the air races with my dad.

The last time anyone had seen her,

she was sitting there having coffee in the dining room, sending the kids off to school.

And then, according to Eugene, half an hour later he gets to the house and she's not there.

I remember that she wasn't home, but that was typical. I mean, she was off at work.
And

my next memory is

the three of us kids together saying, you know, where's mom? It's getting late.

The very fact that that somebody called 28 years after she went missing

and her best friend still wanted answers and had the guts to call the police department, say, what are you doing here? Anything happening?

I had the feeling that nobody else had ever asked the police department to do it. And I think the only reason it got reopened was because it landed on the desk of Detective Mary Ann.

I'm Detective Mary Ann Flynn Stotts with the Madison Police Department and I was the lead investigator on the Jeanette Zapati case. I took the case in and gave it a read.

There were a number of red flags that were raised on the initial reading of the reports.

I definitely suspected foul play.

The receptionist came back and said, Linda, there's two police officers here to talk to you. And he said, we're here to, because we reopened the case on your mom.
My gut dropped out.

Her immediate words were something to the effect of, is my mom alive or dead?

Into thin air, tonight's 48 hours mystery.

Every night during this investigation, I woke up every night.

The loss of Gene Zapata touched so many people that it, yeah, it did touch me.

My main goal was to get the truth out. I wanted the truth out of what happened to my mom.

When Gene Zapata vanished from her home in Madison, Wisconsin in 1976, she left behind her daughter Linda, two other children, a lot of friends, and a mystery that would take more than 30 years to solve.

I spent my whole life from age 11 telling people

when they asked, my mom abandoned me.

Linda only knew what her father told her on the day her mother disappeared.

She was just 11 years old. At age 11, when my dad said she took off because

she was stressed out,

It was cemented in my head, she took off and she's raising another family somewhere.

Jean's best friend, Peggy Weakley, never believed that Jean would simply abandon her life in Madison. She could not have walked out on her children because of the way she was raised.

It was just too deeply ingrained in her to take care of those kids, to be a mom. A lifetime of nagging questions and haunting memories would bring Peggy and Linda together.

The friend who grew up with Jean Zapata. You know, your mom had lived all this time.
She'd probably still be slender. And the daughter who grew up without her.

Her profile is so beautiful. It's pure joy.

Neither could have predicted it, but digging for the truth would involve terrible choices and betrayal. It all started in Madison in the early 1950s.

when Peggy and Jean first became best friends.

There are two kinds of friends. One is the kind of friend who said, oh, you're driving off the cliff.
Don't do that.

But then there are the friends like Jean who say, oh, you're going to drive off a cliff. Let's go together.

She was a lot of fun.

Peggy was with her best friend for all the good times when Jean married a promising engineer, Eugene Zapata, when they had three children, Christine, Steve, and Linda. Linda is 43 years old now.

Did you spend time with her alone much?

Yeah, mainly as I got older, watching Sesame Street with my blanket and sitting on the living room floor and her just being around the house. So really fond memories.

Eugene went to work for the Department of Transportation, but his wife was no stay-at-home mom.

Once the kids were in school, Jean returned to her other love, flying,

and became one of the few female flight instructors of her day.

I mean she was almost a trailblazer in a way. Yes, she was.
Trailblazer is a very good description of her. So how long was she happy with you, Gene? Probably the first half of their marriage.

It became one of those marriages where behind closed doors

there was trouble. She told me that they were having problems in the bedroom but she didn't go into any detail at all.

She seemed to think that he had a lot more testosterone before she said I do but we didn't talk about that a lot. After all we were nice girls and nice girls did not have problems with their marriage.

Jean wanted to keep the spark alive.

even if it meant agreeing to do things nice girls didn't always do.

But no matter what she did, nothing worked. And in 1976, 17 years after they married, Jean filed for divorce.

Eugene moved out of the house, and Jean began to explore life as a newly single woman.

Before long, she met Paul Lee,

and they had an instant connection.

So, you would see her every day.

See her talk to her every day. Yeah, well, let me ask you: I mean,

were you in love with her?

Well, if you had asked me at that time, I would have said I was very fond of her. But I think I was.

I'm glad she met Paul. For those few months, she was happy again

in a male-female sort of way.

And I'm glad for that.

They talked every day, but it didn't last long. On Monday, October 11th, 1976, Linda remembers seeing her mother drinking her morning coffee.

She was in the kitchen, and I was looking down the Foyer hallway, and I was leaving for school.

and I just caught a glimpse of her in the kitchen as I was shutting the door and I took off for school.

And just like that, life would never be the same for Jean Zapata's family or her friends. They never saw her again.

They came to me and says, have you heard from Jean? And I says, no.

Why?

Ivan Norton worked with Jean at her flight school. He was surprised when she didn't show up to teach a student pilot that day.
And I says, well, that's strange, because I says, she never misses.

At the house where Gene and the kids lived, Eugene was already explaining to his children where their mother was.

But I asked,

where's mom?

And he said she probably needs a break or vacation and she'll probably be home in a couple weeks. When Jean didn't show up for work after three days, Ivan Norton called the police.

And then he called Eugene Zapata. I says, well have you turned her missing to the police?

No I haven't done it. And I said well you don't have to.
I did.

A week after Gene went missing police officer Greg Martin showed up at the Zapata house.

He was just trying out for the detective squad, so he was assigned what had been classified as just a routine missing person case.

I went in and I noticed there was no damage, no evidence of a fight, no evidence of a struggle or anything that we could see.

The first thing I noticed that was totally out of order was that her purse was there. Her purse was there.
A woman goes nowhere without her purse.

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In police work, you try to prove your hunches. You say something is wrong.
Okay? I knew something was not right.

Officially, Gene Zapata was classified as a missing person by the Madison, Wisconsin Police Department.

But Officer Greg Martin noticed something strange about Eugene Zapata's behavior following the disappearance of his estranged wife, the mother of his three children.

He was like a blank sheet of paper. I mean, there was nothing on him to read, and that bothered me.

Martin says he asked Eugene Zapata to take a lie detector test, and he agreed. Zapata passed the test, but investigators thought there was something unusual about his demeanor.

You couldn't get into this guy's, under this guy's skin? No, I thought

realistically that by pushing him into a

lie detector test that I would get some movement. I got absolutely nothing.

Their only other possible suspect, Gene's boyfriend, Paul Lee, took and passed his lie detector test and was cleared of any suspicion. But police were learning some things about the Zapata's marriage.

Interesting things that added to their suspicions about Eugene.

Eugene had placed an ad for her in a swingers type magazine.

I didn't hear about the pictures until she called me to say, do you know what that son of a bitch did? Remember, this happened when Gene was still trying to save her marriage.

At one point when Eugene said he just didn't seem to have any lead in his pencil, but it might help if he could take provocative pictures of her, she let him.

Never realizing that years later these pictures would come back to haunt her. One day the post office called Jean to complain about X-rated material in a mailbox rented by Eugene.

It was the first she'd heard about the mailbox, so she went to look and was horrified by what she found. She picks it up and is rifling through it and she sees her own

nude picture looking back at her where her husband is pimping her out to anyone who subscribes to that magazine.

Well, he wanted her to go with other men and wear short skirts and go out without underwear. Jean's divorce attorney, Daphne Webb, learned that the Swingers magazine was only part of the story.

They would go to bars and he'd want her to stand off to one side so that he could pretend that she was a pickup and see if men would try to pick her up.

I think most disturbing to her was that he would kind of reach up under her clothes and grope her when the children were present.

Jean not only wanted a divorce, she wanted a restraining order against Zapata. I think she'd had enough.

Eugene moved out, but he didn't move on. The divorce was bitter, and he seemed obsessed with Jean.
In today's terms, I would say she was describing stalking behavior.

He would come to the house on the pretext of seeing the children, and he would go through her underwear drawer and her possessions. And she found it very disturbing.

The restraining order limited Eugene's visitation rights with the children to 9 to 11 on Saturday morning. That's the only time he was permitted to be in this house.

On the Monday morning that she disappeared, Gene Zapata telephoned her attorney from here at about 8.15 and left a message.

And when Daphne Webb returned the call about an hour later, guess who answered? Eugene answered the phone. Which was surprising because he was not supposed to be in the house.
What did you say to him?

Well,

I said, I'm returning Jeanette's call. And he said, well, I don't know where she is.
Her car is still here. I think he said her purse was still on the table.

And I didn't suspect any foul play, so I just said, well, I returned her call, let her know when you see her.

Daphne Webb told police all that at the time, but there was no physical evidence of foul play.

And after just three weeks, the case went cold. Eugene Zapata moved back into the house, and for Linda it was as if her mother had simply never existed.
It's really odd but somehow

no one talked about it.

No one brought her up. I don't think I used the word mom until I was in my late teens, early 20s.
I don't know why. That's so strange.

Back then it was so taboo.

And no one told me not to talk about it, but the three of us kids, we just, I think we all just shut down.

For me, there was this enormous, uncomfortable elephant in the middle of the room,

and no one talked about it.

Two years after Gene disappeared, Eugene married his current wife, Joan. Linda now had a stepmother, but she still waited and hoped.

For years, yeah, I remember sitting at our front window and on our front porch

waiting for mom to come home. Just waiting for her, you know, that car to pull around

and maybe even drive by and keep going.

But I kept waiting for her to come home.

Oh my, that's you're breaking my heart. I mean, that's that's hard to

imagine. Yeah,

Years passed.

Decades passed.

The Zapata children grew up and moved out.

Peggy weakly moved away from Madison, but she never forgot about her best friend. I wish she was still here.

But she's not.

Excuse me. Take your time.

In November 2004, more than 28 years after Gene disappeared, Peggy decided there was something she had to do for her friend. So she contacted the Madison Police.

And I said, do you have a cold case department like they do on TV? And she said, no.

The case landed on the desk of Detective Marianne Flynn Stats. So you read it and what did you think?

Immediately was struck that more could probably be done with the case. She didn't believe that Gene had simply run away as her husband had claimed for all those years.

Detective Stats contacted every agency she could think of inquiring about Jeanette Zapata. Had she used her social security number or tried to renew her pilot's license or get a passport?

They even tried Interpol. You did a fairly exhaustive search and concluded what?

I concluded that she was most likely no longer alive. Detective Stats started talking with anyone involved with the case case back in 1976.

She found Linda, the only one of the Zapata children still living in Madison, working as a nurse at a local clinic.

The receptionist came back and said, Linda, there's two police officers here to talk to you. And I explained to her who I was and that the investigation into her mother's disappearance was reopened.

And I just...

My gut dropped out and I thought, oh my god, did you find her? I mean, is she downtown right now? Is she out in the car?

You know, I thought they found her. They said, no, but we're just going to reopen the case.
The next question was, did my dad have anything to do with it? You asked them that? Yeah, it just came out.

And I said, I don't know why I asked that.

What's worse? My father killed my mother or my mother abandoned me.

Madison, Wisconsin Detective Marianne Flynn Stats knew when she started investigating the disappearance of Gene Zapata that Linda Zapata might have to face a horrifying possibility.

It's remarkable that one of the first things you said to Detective Stats was,

did my dad have anything to do with it? You have no idea where that came from? No, it was like the exorcist. It just came out.

Ever since Gene vanished, when Linda was just 11, Linda Linda not only believed she had been abandoned by her mother, she also believed she was to blame.

I overheard my brother and sister saying it was my fault she left because I was a brat. And I'm sure I was 10, 11 years old.

Now, some 30 years later, Detective Stats was convinced that Jean had been killed. But there was no body.
no hard evidence at all.

It's one thing to believe something, it's another thing to solve something, and it's a completely different thing to charge it and be able to prove it in a court of law.

Early on in her investigation, Detective Stats went to the house where the Zapatas lived. There, she discovered a crawl space in the basement.

It had not been mentioned in the original police reports in 1976.

So, Detective Stats enlisted the help of some specially trained colleagues who can detect even the faintest scent of human remains. Come on, babe.
Come on, old lady. Oh, there you go.

Madison Police Officer Karen Corcoran has trained and handled cadaver dogs like Cleo and Molly for the last 10 years.

But it's hard to imagine that a dog can detect something from 30 years ago in a basement. How is that possible?

I think that an entire body decomposing possibly early on and in a space like the crawl space, which was really a primo environment to contain scent.

There's no wind, there's no rain, the temperature stays about the same all the time. Hey, babe, come here.

On January 5th, 2005, Detective Stats, Officer Corcoran, and Cleo went to work in the crawl space.

Right away, she started really working and working and working the area of both outside the crawl space and into the crawl space.

And then she eventually provided a formal indication, which is a bark for Cleo. Biddy.
Then a second dog reacted the same way, and the police started excavating the crawl space. We found some hairs.

We collected bug carcasses and the Burger King cup. We found things, but we did not find anything that we could tie to Jeanette Zapata.

Even though the search didn't turn up any useful evidence, Linda Zapata was pretty sure police were on the right right track and looking at the right suspect, her own father.

I was hoping, hoping dearly that my dad would turn out to be innocent.

Her brother and sister believe he didn't do it, but as painful as it might be, Linda was now determined to help the detectives find out whether that was true or not.

I knew the deciding factor was could I sleep at night the rest of my life knowing I didn't somehow help my mom

but helping the police would put linda in an almost impossible position in april 2005 word got back to her father eugene that the case had been reopened he was living with his second wife in nevada but he showed up suddenly and unexpectedly in madison and linda immediately called Detective Stats.

What do you think he was doing here? Why did he pop up here all of a sudden? I was concerned that he was somehow tampering with evidence. What kind of evidence? Jeanette.

Her remains? Yes.

Zapata managed to avoid her and flew back to Nevada. Two months later, she paid a surprise visit to his house.
But it was clear that Eugene was not going to admit to anything.

Detective Stats returned home without Eugene's confession, but not without hope.

She had begun reconstructing his movements during that April visit to Wisconsin by pulling his cell phone and financial records.

And that's how she found out he had rented this storage locker just outside Madison.

She also discovered he had visited a landfill about 80 miles from here, but not before he had gone on a shopping trip to Walmart.

I call the Walmart and I get Fax the receipt. and at that point it became so very clear to me

you know what he was actually doing.

Here's what Zapata bought. Two gallons of water, an odor absorbing mask, a few large containers, a tarp, two cans of Lysol, some pledge wipes, scissors, recycling bags, and paper towels.

What did you think he had bought all that for? It looked to me like he was disposing of a body.

Stats looked into the history of this storage locker. Eugene rented it in 2001, just before he moved to Nevada, and had moved everything out of it on his last trip here in April 2005.

Nobody had rented it since he had vacated it on April 14th.

The cadaver dogs smelled something at the storage locker and in this car that Zapata rented.

I strongly believed that Jean's remains had been in the storage locker for since 2001 when he rented it, and that on April 14th when he moved out, that he took her to the landfill in the trunk of the car.

Finding Jean's remains in this large landfill would be next to impossible, but the police were close enough to cracking this case that they thought maybe Eugene Zapata would finally confess.

If not to them, then maybe to his daughter. They needed Linda's help again.

And this time, she'd have to make the most difficult decision of her life.

A hundred times a day, torn back and forth. How can I betray one or not portray the other?

How could I do that to my dad? What kind of daughter am I, you know? But then my mom's, she has no one else to speak for her.

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Nine long months after the case was reopened, there was still no sign of Gene Zapata

and still no evidence to tie her ex-husband, Eugene, to any crime. A lot of times in the investigation, we would feel like we were at a brick wall.

It would take some new piece of evidence, something big, to make this case. And Detective Marianne Flynn Stats had an idea that would be, to say the least, one tough sell.

I asked Linda if she would place a phone call to her father and talk to him about her mother's disappearance. You were basically asking her to,

pardon the expression, set up her own father. Yes.

I mean, what kind of daughter is gonna betray their father?

How could I do that? But then, in the second later, it's like, how could I not do that for my mom?

Hello? Oh, Linda. Hi.

In August 2005, almost 30 years years after her mother went missing, Linda Zapata agreed to make two calls to her father and let the police tape everything.

Ever since that day in 1976, every single day I'm waiting to see if I recognize her or know her and I just, I have to know.

Did you think he'd confess to her after all these years? I thought if he was gonna break, it may be.

Or he may leak something.

It's just between you and me.

Can you at least tell me if she's... Do you think she's alive?

Well, first of all, I didn't have anything to do with

disappearance or anything. But

after all these years,

you gotta think that no.

She's not.

It takes a while, but Linda works herself up to making an awkward... and painful accusation.
I don't know. I guess my gut is that you did it.

Which...

I know it is, but I still love you and nothing's changed between me and you.

I said I love you and I forgive you. And I meant it.
I realized I meant it. I just think a lot of people listening to you will be amazed that you could still love the man who killed your mother.

Yeah, it's not that I don't get angry at him. Believe me, I do.

You can't help it. You know, he's my dad.

He raised me afterwards, and

I think he tried his best.

The phone calls helped, but Detective Stats needed more.

So she went back to Nevada where Eugene Zapata was living, this time armed with a search warrant, which led to a safety deposit box and a discovery that would change everything.

We found three envelopes marked, destroy, do not read.

Is it safe to assume, Detective, that you did not honor Eugene Zapata's wishes in not reading what was in his safety deposit box? We couldn't read them quickly enough.

What they included was details of Eugene following, and in my opinion, the word stalking could be used, Jeanette from the time that she filed for divorce, May 12, 1976, up until about the beginning of September of 76.

I held them in my hand and I said, this is the case. This is the case.
Eugene's detailed notes were the evidence prosecutor Bob Kaiser had been hoping for.

In a written statement sent to 48 Hours, Zapata says he was just building a case to help him win custody of his children.

But Kaiser believes the notes show Eugene's obsessive state of mind when his wife filed for divorce.

Was he going into her pants and sniffing the crotch of her pants to see if it smelled like spermicidal jelly?

Yes, that's what he was doing, breaking into her house, looking through everything in the house.

But it's hard to prove a murder case in front of a jury without a body.

So police were hoping their cadaver dogs would find Jean's remains in this huge landfill Zapata visited on his last trip to Wisconsin.

They looked for five days and turned up nothing.

So Kaiser went with what he did have, circumstantial evidence that Jean was murdered. And 30 years after the case began, Kaiser ordered police to arrest Eugene Zapata.

And Linda's father was charged with murdering her mother.

On September 4th, 2007, Eugene Zapata went on trial for first-degree murder. Please face the clerk and raise your right hand.

Once again, Linda Zapata would play a major role in the case against her father.

What did you ask him? I said, where's mom? She became the first witness for the prosecution. What did he say? He said

she's probably stressed with the divorce. She probably needs a vacation.
And she'll probably be back in a couple of weeks, two weeks.

The judge ruled testimony about what the dogs found was unreliable and threw it out. So prosecutors had to rely on evidence of Eugene's movements and those notes he tried so hard to conceal.

Zapata's one big mistake, argues the prosecution, was answering the phone on the morning of October 11, 1976, a morning he was barred by court order from being at the house.

When you have just murdered your wife and you're not supposed to be in the home to begin with, don't answer the phone.

That should be murder 101. Don't answer the phone.

You will leave this case with questions. You will leave with perhaps suspicions and much uncertainty.
It takes the defense less than one hour to present their case.

They argued that the prosecution failed to connect Eugene Zapata to any crime. Zapata never talked in court

and he never talked to us. But you will not leave with proof, and certainly not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
I ask you to find Eugene Zapata not guilty.

We had come so far from nothing. We were asking a lot of a jury to convict without a body and convict without DNA.

But anyone looking for answers to this 30-year-old mystery would have to keep looking. Because behind closed doors, the jurors argued and debated.

But even after four days, they could not decide what happened to Gene Zapata, no matter how hard they tried. They left the judge no choice.

Members of the jury, I am going to declare that there is a hung jury.

I was devastated. I really was.
I was devastated. I couldn't see what it was that we had missed.
On September 17th, 2007, Eugene Zapata walked out of court a free man. What's your reaction?

But the father of three who kept silent during his trial was about to stun everyone.

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after three decades, two investigations, and one trial,

Eugene Zapata is about to break his silence and tell a chilling story. I felt that he had gotten away with it for 30 years, but I don't like a guy to get away with a crime for 30 minutes.

Prosecutor Bob Kaiser was ready to go back to court to try Zapata again.

And that's when Zapata suddenly announced he was willing to plead guilty. This was an incredible opportunity to learn what happened in Gene's last moments and that this was finally going to be done.

Zapata was ready to finally answer the 30-year-old question, what happened to his wife?

But only if prosecutors would reduce the charge from murder to reckless homicide.

The DA thought that Eugene's daughter, Linda, should be the one to decide whether they should accept accept his plea or start all over again in court.

I said the only thing I want is for him to admit he did it, tell us what happened to her, how he did it,

and above all, I needed to see it come out of his mouth. I needed to see him say I killed her.

The deal was done. Eugene Zapata, who had lied to all his children, broke his silence and told his story to Detective Stats.
He told me that he had gone over to the house,

and shortly upon entering the house, an argument broke out. It turned violent in the kitchen, he said, when he grabbed a paper weight and hit Jean in the back of the head.
She fell to the ground.

Was she still alive at that point? Yes, she was.

So what did he do? He strangled her.

How did he strangle her? He told me that he didn't have an actual memory of his hands on her throat, but he had a memory of his hands and his forearms hurting a lot.

He got a cord, like a tent cord, and wrapped that around her neck to make sure that she was dead. So he basically strangled her twice, you believe, once with his hands and once with a cord?

Once manually and once with a ligature.

According to Zapata, he cleaned up the kitchen and began a grisly 30-year odyssey with Jean's body, burying it, exhuming it, and reburying it. He claims his wife was never in the crawl space.

He says for 25 years, she was buried in a vacant lot he bought right after the murder.

Then he says he moved her to that storage locker, where she stayed until April 2005, when Eugene heard the case had been reopened.

Then he says, he came back here, cut her body into pieces, and took her to the landfill.

Linda asked that her father's entire confession be videotaped. The defense agreed on the condition that she would be the only person to see it, and then it would be locked away forever.

So when you did see it,

what was that like? I felt sick to my stomach. I felt so sad, but it was also very therapeutic.
I felt like I was there for my mom again.

The truth is coming out. This is what happened.
And it was a big, almost a relief.

Eugene Zapata returned to court once more, this time to face his sentence and to face his daughter. Dad, although I don't condone what you did to mom, I do forgive you and I love you.

Zapata said nothing.

Then he was sentenced. And so, Mr.
Zapata, with long last, I'm going to adopt the recommendation and sentence you to the maximum period of time of five years in prison. Do you understand? Yes, I I do.

Five years for reckless homicide. That's all the judge could give him.

And under the sentencing laws of 1976 when the crime was committed, Eugene Zapata will have to be released after only three years in prison. Was justice done?

Yes.

Because?

Because we know what happened. In this case, of these facts, that was justice.

In that written statement he sent 48 hours, Zapata says the real reason he took the plea was to avoid the expense and embarrassment of a second trial.

In fact, in spite of his plea, his wife and two other children continue to believe he's innocent. But Linda believes the truth is finally out.

Having this all behind you now, do you feel like you can move on? I have a huge weight off my shoulders. Huge.
You know, it's such a corny line, but

the truth will set you free. It's true, at least for me.
Linda now knows her mother did not abandon her, and she could begin mourning.

And on April 12th, 2008, she held a memorial service in the same church where Jean had once been a member.

We have come together this morning to remember Jeanette.

The police and the prosecutor who worked so hard to make sure Jean Zapata was not forgotten also gathered to honor the memory of a woman they never knew.

You know, there's sadness, but I was, I just had a smile on my face a lot of the time during the service because she deserved this. I think she's up there just saying, you know,

what took you guys so long, okay, finally we got this.

And

just knowing that she's at peace now.

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