A judge Monday sentenced Eugene Zapata to five years in prison on a reduced charge of reckless homicide in a deal with prosecutors. It was the maximum allowed for that charge in 1976.
Dane County Circuit Judge Patrick Fiedler said the important thing is that the Zapata children know their mother, Jeanette, didn't abandon them.
Jeanette Zapata, a 37-year-old flight instructor, was in the middle of a messy divorce with Eugene Zapata when she disappeared Oct. 11, 1976. Her body was never found.
Eugene Zapata, now 69, retired from his post at the state Transportation Department in 2001 and moved to Nevada. Prosecutors charged him in 2006 with first-degree murder, but his trial last fall ended in a hung jury. Prosecutors made plans for a retrial.
Assistant District Attorney Robert Kaiser said Monday that Zapata told detectives this month that he went to his wife's home the morning she vanished. An argument ensued, and Zapata said he "snapped."
He grabbed a paperweight and clubbed his wife from behind. After that, he strangled her. Zapata cleaned up the blood, wrapped the body in a tent and hid it in the woods.
A week later, he bought land in Juneau County, northwest of Madison, for the purpose of burying her. There her body stayed for more than 24 years, Kaiser said.
Zapata became worried he would have to sell the land when he retired and moved to Nevada. In 2001, he moved the body to a storage locker in Sun Prairie, cutting it in two to make it easier to transport and store.
In 2005, after he learned detectives were working the case again, Zapata returned to Wisconsin, cleaned out the storage locker and took pieces of his wife's body in bags to a Juneau County landfill, where he buried them.
Zapata's youngest daughter, Linda, helped detectives by trying to get him to confess during taped phone conversations in 2005. She read a statement to her father in court Monday, calling what he did horrible.
"I had to do the right thing, even if it meant betraying you," she said, adding that she had forgiven him and still loved him.
Kaiser told Fiedler that prosecutors could have retried Zapata and sent him to prison for the rest of his life, but that the secrets of his wife's death would have gone to the grave with him.
"The defendant is old and seems to have come to terms with what he's done," Kaiser said. "Linda is at peace. She knows where her mom is. She knows her mom didn't leave her. That is the power of truth."
