[media-credit name=’JEFF SCHORFHEIDE/Herald Photo’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]In what may be the final twist in a 30-year-old saga, authorities arrested Eugene Zapata in Henderson, Nev., last week and charged him with murdering his wife, Jeanette Zapata, a Madison resident first reported missing Oct. 13, 1976.

"The criminal complaint was filed today and Mr. Zapata is in custody," Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard said at a press conference Aug. 28 announcing the arrest, adding that Eugene Zapata should be extradited to Dane County "fairly quickly."

"It is alleged that the first-degree intentional homicide occurred within Dane County and this is where we expect his trial to occur," Blanchard added.

The original investigation into the disappearance of Jeanette Zapata never produced a body, nor did it result in an arrest.

However, after Madison Police Department detectives reopened the case in December 2004, suspicion came over Eugene Zapata when trained police dogs detected the odor of decomposed human remains in the basements of his previous residences in Madison and a storage locker he rented in Sun Prairie.

Police dogs also detected the odor of decomposed human remains in the trunk of a rental car Eugene Zapata drove to a Juneau County landfill in April 2005, where records show he dropped off a 60-pound object after learning detectives reopened the investigation.

Investigators, however, still have not found a body.

The 26-page criminal complaint detailing the investigation reads like a mystery novel and chronicles the deterioration of Eugene and Jeanette's marriage after a series of alleged sexual improprieties.

According to the complaint, at the time of her disappearance, Jeanette Zapata and her husband were separated and were in the middle of divorce proceedings.

Friends told detectives during the initial investigation that Jeanette Zapata said she was afraid of her husband, who allegedly did "weird things in bed" and brought home men to have sex with the couple.

According to the complaint, friends reported that Jeanette Zapata once said she came home one night and found her husband with another man on the couch performing "unnatural sex acts with the children watching."

What finally prompted the separation, according to a friend's account in the complaint, was when Jeanette Zapata discovered that her husband published a nude, "gynecological" photo of her in a "swinger" magazine and distributed it to his male co-workers.

A year after the investigation reopened, detectives confiscated the contents of Eugene Zapata's safe deposit box at a bank in Nevada and, according to the complaint, discovered two versions of a "dated diary, log or journal," which provided critical information to investigators.

According to the complaint, the journals recount Eugene Zapata's "process of stalking his wife from the time the divorce papers were served."

In his journal, according to the complaint, Eugene Zapata expressed his belief that Jeanette Zapata was seeing other men and recorded how he often found birth control scattered around her house.

Then, according to the complaint, on Oct. 13, 1976, five months after Eugene Zapata was served with divorce papers and just days after an alleged quarrel between the couple arose regarding their children, the manager of the flight school where Jeanette Zapata was an instructor reported her missing to MPD.

An attorney for Eugene Zapata, Stephen Hurley, did not respond to repeated interview requests as of press time.