Into Thin Air

0:00Music

0:10This 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.

0:32I know people always tell me she's strong and independent and a pioneer, but for me, she was just mom.

0:42I 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

1:15The 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.

1:34I 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.

1:58The very fact 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 and 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 Marianne. I'm Detective Marianne Flint-Stotz with the Madison Police Department, and I was the lead investigator on the Jeanette Zapata case. I took the case and gave it a read. There were a number of red flags that were raised on the initial reading of the reports.

2:46I definitely suspected foul play. The receptionist came back and said, Linda, there's two police officers here to talk to you. And they 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?

3:07Into Thin Air, tonight's 48 Hours Mystery.

3:17Every night during this investigation, I woke up every night.

3:23The loss of Gene Zapata touched so many people that it, yeah, it did touch me.

3:33My main goal was to get the truth out. I wanted the truth out of what happened to my mom. When Jean 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.

4:29Gene's best friend, Peggy Weakley, never believed that Gene 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 Gene 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.

5:18It all started in Madison in the early 1950s. when Peggy and Gene 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 Gene who say, oh, you're going to drive off a cliff? Let's go together. She was a lot of fun.

5:50Peggy was with her best friend for all the good times when Gene 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.

6:30Once the kids were in school, Gene returned to her other love, flying.

6:38and 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, Jean? 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.

7:26Gene 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.

7:57Before long, she met Paul Lee. And they had an instant connection. So you would see her every day? See her and 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 11, 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.

8:52And 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.

9:10They came to me and said, have you heard from Jean? And I said, 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 said, well, that's strange because she never misses. At the house where Jean and the kids lived, Eugene was already explaining to his children where their mother was. But I asked, where's mom? and he said 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.

9:59I 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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12:00In 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.

12:46You couldn't get 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, you know what that son of a bitch did. Remember, this happened when Jean was still trying to save her marriage.

13:37At 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.

14:23Well, 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.

15:02The 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, Jean 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?

15:43Eugene 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.

16:25It'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, I remember sitting at our front window and on our front porch, waiting for mom to come home.

17:25Just 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. That's hard to imagine. Yeah.

17:51Years passed. Decades passed. These Zapata children grew up and moved out. Peggy Weakley 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 Jean 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 Statz. So you read it and what did you think? Immediately was struck that more could probably be done with the case.

18:48She didn't believe that Jean had simply run away as her husband had claimed for all those years. Detective Statz 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 Statz started talking with anyone involved with the 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.

19:30The 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 gonna 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.

20:16What's worse? My father killed my mother or my mother abandoned me? Madison, Wisconsin detective Mary Ann Flynn Statz 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 Statz 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 Jean vanished, when Linda was just 11, Linda not only believed she had been abandoned by her mother, she also believed she was to blame.

20:57I 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 Statz 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.

21:28Early on in her investigation, Detective Statz went to the house where the Zapata's lived. There, she discovered a crawl space in the basement.

21:39It 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 ten 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.

22:27There's no wind, there's no rain, the temperature stays about the same all the time. Hey babe, come here. On January 5, 2005, Detective Stats, Officer Corcoran, and Cleo went to work in the crawlspace. Right away, she started really working and working and working the area of both outside the crawlspace and into the crawlspace. 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 crawlspace. We found some hairs. We collected bug carcasses and Burger King cup. We found things, but we did not find anything that we could tie to Jeanette Zapata.