scullen@madison.com As Ruth Kuehn lay dying in 1984, she lamented not knowing what had happened to her daughter, Jeanette Zapata, who disappeared on Oct. 11, 1976.

But holding Kuehn's hand, Clark thought otherwise. She knew Jean was dead, Clark told Madison police two years ago, because she had never again contacted her mother.

On Monday, after nearly 30 years under a cloud of suspicion, Eugene Zapata, 67, was charged with first-degree murder for his wife's presumed death. Police in Henderson, Nev., where he lives, arrested him at his home about noon Monday and took him to the Clark County Jail in Las Vegas, where Zapata will await extradition back to Madison.

Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard said the murder charge was filed after Assistant District Attorneys Robert Kaiser and Brian Asmus finished reviewing hundreds of pages of police reports, gathered around the time that Jean Zapata, 36, vanished and after the investigation was rekindled in 2004 by Peggy Weekley's phone call.

A 26-page criminal complaint details the deterioration of the Zapatas' marriage, Eugene Zapata's obsessive diary of his then-estranged wife's movements, his differing accounts of his whereabouts during her last days and newer information about the findings of corpse- sniffing dogs used by police at Eugene Zapata's former homes in Madison.

"Those poor children," Siemers said. "All these years they thought their mother had left them and didn't care about them. . . . She never would have left her children."

Patricia Wiskur of Harrison, Ark., Jean Zapata's half-sister, said it is difficult for her to think that Jean is dead or that Eugene Zapata killed her.

"I met Eugene years ago when he first started dating my sister, so I have some fond memories of him," Wiskur said. "I'm really sad. There's lots of mixed feelings."

Wiskur said that many family members, including their mother, believed that Eugene had killed Jean. She said her mother had hired a private detective, but there was no resolution of Jean's disappearance.

"It's just been one of these things you push out of your mind," she said. "I never really accepted the fact that Eugene had murdered my sister . . . I still picture her alive. I'm not willing to accept her death."

Her family members' suspicions about Eugene's involvement in Jean's disappearance distanced them from the three children of Eugene and Jean Zapata - Christine, Steven and Linda.

"There were some really strong family feelings," Wiskur said. "The unfortunate thing is we lost track of the children. We were never there for them."

Wiskur and Siemers told investigators that they want to re- establish contact with the children but have not been contacted. After losing their mother and having their father charged with her murder, Wiskur said, "It's really her children that have paid the big price."

The criminal complaint, Hurley said, doesn't contain anything new. Even the so- called "stalking diary," Hurley said, "seems to be a journal of evidence of fault in a divorce" at a time when Wisconsin did not have no-fault divorce.

But according to the criminal complaint, Zapata said during a June 21, 2005, interview with police that the evidence found by then was pointing police in his direction.

Reminded that he had also made contradictory statements on his whereabouts to police in October 1976, just after his wife's disappearance, he said: "Yeah, the things you bring up don't look so good."

During a search in December 2005 of a safe deposit box in Henderson, Nev., police found the diary that Zapata kept of his wife's movements, which detailed his suspicions about her sex life. Zapata monitored her use of birth control by searching the trash in their home after he had moved out and asked their parish priest for advice about her activity.

After she disappeared, the complaint states, friends told police that she never would have left her children. Jean Zapata's father, William Herrling, who died in 1990, told police in 1976 that his daughter loved her children and flying so much that she would never abandon them.

On Jan. 6, 2005, police also ran Cleo, a cadaver-sniffing dog, through homes on Dell Drive and Fredericksburg Lane in Madison, which Eugene and his current wife, Joan, had owned. Cleo detected the odor of human decomposition in the basements of both homes.

Six days later, police ran Cleo and another dog, Norse, through the basement and crawl space of Eugene and Jean Zapata's former home on Indian Trace in Madison. Though both indicated the presence of human remains, none were found.

Three months later, Zapata traveled to Wisconsin. Using credit card, cell phone records and other documents, police reconstructed his movements in Madison and Juneau County in April 2005.

He arrived in Minneapolis on April 7, 2005, rented a Toyota Corolla and drove to Onalaksa to stay with friends. He came to Madison on April 9 and stayed at a local motel. The next day, he bought cleaning supplies, a drop cloth, trash bags and an odor respirator at Wal-Mart, and other supplies the next day at ShopKo.

On April 13, 2005, Zapata called the Juneau County Solid Waste Landfill near Mauston. That same day, Detective Al Rickey visited Zapata's friends in Onalaska but was told he wasn't there. The friends called Joan Zapata, Eugene Zapata's current wife, in Nevada to say that the police were looking for him.

The next day, Zapata checked out of his Madison motel. Police continually tried to reach him that morning but he did not answer. Zapata visited the All U-Store Mini Storage Center in Sun Prairie, where he returned the key to a locker he had rented since 2001.

But police would learn in September that Zapata had also visited the Juneau County landfill, where records indicated he dropped off items weighing about 60 pounds. Cleo also found the odor of human remains in the trunk of the Camry, which police had seized from Enterprise Rent-a-Car in Minneapolis.

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