If they can, defense lawyers will produce evidence of innocence in court. If they can't, they will try to discredit prosecution evidence of guilt. Gerry McCann's lawyers intended to use the evidence presented by the lawyers in the Zapata case should the McCanns be charged. The Zapata lawyers had no evidence of innocence, so they used the 'unreliability' argument to convince the Judge that the cadaver dog alerts were of no use. They were successful, but we now know the dogs were right.
How embarrassing picking proven NOT to be unreliable dogs in the Zapata case.
"Zapata said in that statement he went to the family's home on Indian Trace on the morning of Oct. 11, 1976, to discuss things with his estranged wife and wound up in an argument which escalated and became violent. He said he took a draftsman's weight out of a drawer and struck his wife in the head, then strangled her, first with his hands and then with a cord, to make sure she was dead. After cleaning up her blood, he rolled his wife into a tent, then drove to the rural area east of Madison where he dumped her body in a wooded area he believes along what is now Reiner Road.
Later, he bought a piece of property in Juneau County and used a U-Haul trailer to take the body from the woods and dump it on his new property in Juneau County, covering it with loads of dirt. The body stayed there for some 24 years. In 2001, after he had remarried and retired from state work, he decided to move to Nevada. Before making that move, he retrieved the body again, this time putting it in a rented storage locker in Sun Prairie.
Zapata's plans began to unravel in late 2004, when Peggy Weekly, a longtime friend of Jeanette's, contacted the Madison Police department to ask whatever had become of the investigation into her friend's disappearance. That led detectives to review the old case and, by August of 2006, they were satisfied they had enough evidence to convict Eugene of first-degree murder.
Detectives had two prongs of new evidence that wasn't available in 1976: cadaver sniffing dogs which appeared to show that Zapata had kept the body in various homes he, his children and his new wife lived in while in Madison, at the Sun Prairie storage locker and at the Juneau County landfill. They also had a set of detailed notes Zapata kept of his wife's whereabouts and with whom she was associating in the days when the couple was estranged.
But that was not enough to convict Zapata. Last Fall, jurors deliberated for some four days before telling Dane County Circuit Court Judge Patrick Fiedler they were hopelessly deadlocked: 10 wanting to convict and one holding out for an acquittal with one juror undecided.
Prosecutors said they would bring Zapata to trial again but instead reached a plea bargain. He agreed to plead to the far lesser charge of reckless homicide and face a maximum of five years in prison. With time off for good behavior, allowed under 1976 law, he will serve about three years and one month before being freed.
Part of that deal called for Zapata to make a complete and truthful confession to detectives and, Assistant District Attorney Robert Kaiser said, he has done that.
As they renewed their investigation, Zapata said, he went to the Sun Prairie storage center, cut up the remains of the body, put it into plastic bags and put them in a dumpster at the Juneau County Landfill."
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