Outside, Las Vegas persisted on, restless and expanding. Inside, I sat with my good friend Justin Chomintra, an incurable loafer always abreast of the news of the day, and we ate the stellar dish on the pub McMullan's menu, the Irish nachos, relieved from the midday heat and as anxious as ever to talk about the world revolving outside, and even a bit fearful that our tab, if not our lives, would close out on us before we finished speaking our minds.
It was Saturday, September 2, and just five days after Warren Jeffs, a polygamist from Utah wanted by the FBI, had been apprehended in north of Las Vegas. Justin, a young man committed to his girlfriend, had gone off on a long diatribe condemning Jeffs, and he finished it off with a clincher typical of his humor:
"Anyway, dude, no one should be shocked: The only people crazier than Las Vegans are the weirdos from Utah."
And then, moreover: "Man, I'm tellin' you, it seems like they arrest people in Las Vegas all the time for crimes committed in other places."
It's true. It does. You can start back in December of 1959, when Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, on the run for killing an all-American Kansas family in cold blood, were apprehended right here in Las Vegas, where Smith had been born and Hickock had had plans of cheap thrills along the Strip. There was Michael Lee Laub, who in 1979 escaped an Oregon prison where he was serving a seven-year sentence for rape, and settled into Las Vegas with a wife for 16 years before his capture. And Buford Furrow, a white supremacist wanted for killing a postal worker and then wounding five others at a Jewish center in Los Angeles, had his plans to continue his terrorism ruined by Metro in 1999; and don't forget the notorious Ohio highway sniper Charles McCoy Jr., arrested at the Budget Suites near the Stardust in March 2004; nor the corrupt New York City police officers Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, who were handcuffed a year later at Piero's Italian Cuisine for murders in complicity with the mob decades earlier; and the grandmotherly Doris Payne, international jewel thief, arrested here last year; and, of course, Jeffs just this past week.
"And not just those," I said to Justin, half out of my seat and running over with exuberance, for even after half a decade in this city, I'm still enthralled by Las Vegas, evocative, alluring and incomparable. "There are so many more people caught in our town without the bells or cameras, but accused just the same of crimes of the most despicable sort outside of Southern Nevada. Like Eugene Zapata.
"Are you familiar with him? He, Zapata, a calculative and meticulous man, was arrested at his Henderson home just off the 95 and Horizon Ridge Parkway on Monday, August 28, for some nefarious deed authorities in Madison, Wisconsin, say he did up there 30 years ago.
"Yep: 1976. Madison detectives say he and his wife of 17 years, Jeannette (but all her friends just called her Jean), with whom he had three kids, two girls and a boy, were having some irreconcilable problems. Their marriage had been disintegrating like ice under a sudden sun, and like half the problems in this world it all stemmed from sex: She thought he was a perv—acting strange in bed, bringing home male third parties, snapping explicit photographs of her and sending them off to swingers magazines—and he was convinced that she was an adulterer. Both had hard proof to corroborate their claims, and the bottom line was that they had not had sex together since 1974.
"By October of 1976 they were no longer living together—she had obtained a restraining order against him, for she said she feared her husband—and divorce papers were in; and on account of Jean's inflexible attitude the couple was set to legally split by February of the next year, despite Eugene's many pleas to reconcile. She would tell him no, she was having too much fun acting single again, and according to the diary Eugene kept in those days, she said it with so much impassibility that he felt crushed.
"At 8 o'clock on the morning of Monday, October 11, Jean, an aviator, sat emotionless at the breakfast table while her three kids—16, 14, and 11, of whom she had primary custody—took off for school, and when they returned that afternoon she was gone—"
Our waitress appeared, apologized for interrupting, and then asked if we wanted more nachos. Of course, we said.
"Which was strange," I said, regaining the thread, "because her car was still there, as was her purse, and even her most recent paycheck from the aviation school she taught at. And Eugene was there, too, in that house from which he had been banished. He told his kids that he had come to speak to Jean about their freefalling grades, which he attributed to Jean's parental neglect. Or, to be more specific: her rendezvous with new men.
"Detectives spent the next two weeks interviewing people who knew Jean Zapata, a woman with Midwestern good looks and a great body regardless of era, who had grown up in a broken home, met and married the man who soothed her childhood sores, and was now nowhere to be seen, reported missing not by her husband but by her co-workers after she failed to show up or answer her phone for successive days. They all said they couldn't imagine Jean forsaking her kids, or Madison, for that matter.
"Each and every path the detectives took seemed to return to Eugene, whose statements in the weeks following his wife's disappearance often contradicted themselves, or proved untenable. But there was still no smoking gun nor body, and so with nothing more than circumstantial evidence that wouldn't stand a chance in any court, authorities surrendered Jean's vanishing to the cold case file. The Madison police were certain, one officer would say 30 years later, after the case was reopened and Eugene Zapata was arrested in Henderson, that Eugene did it, that they just didn't have enough evidence to prove it back then.
"The unsolved mystery hit hard in Madison, both in 1976 and last week. That's what Ed Treleven and Stacy Cullen, two reporters for Madison.com, told me when I spoke to them last week about their diligent and thorough account of the Zapatas' story. They said it wasn't only because Jean, one of the only female aviators during that time, was well-known, but also because it happened in Madison, a city of 300,000 where on average there are fewer than 15 homicides a year, and the big news in October was usually the forecast for that year's winter, whether the cold would usurp the city or not.
"The kids continued to live in the same house, but now with their father, and in 1977 Eugene met a new woman, differing in name from his estranged wife by only one letter—Joan—whom he would marry as soon as divorced from Jean. He sold that house in 1997 (his kids had dispersed), and left with Joan to a new house in Madison, which he would sell in 2001, and move to Henderson.
"It came to pass that one of Jean's friends from high school e-mailed the Madison police department to inquire about Jean's case, and in December 2004, the police delved back into the unsolved disappearance of Jeannette Zapata. They sicced a canine trained in detecting remnants of human cadavers on Eugene's former two houses in Madison, and the dog started barking in remote nooks in both houses. After being informed of the reopened investigation, Eugene left Joan in Henderson and made a solitary trip back to Wisconsin, where he rented a Camry, bought cleaning supplies on his credit card, emptied the contents of a storage space he had rented since 2001, and dropped off 60 pounds of unidentified matter into a landfill. Afterward, Madison police sicced the canine on Zapata's car and storage unit, and the dog indicated that it detected vestiges of decomposed human flesh.
"Amassed with other circumstantial evidence (but still no smoking gun nor body), the Dane County District Attorney's office believed it was enough to persuade a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, and so they called on the Henderson police to apprehend Zapata at his home, which is what happened on August 28th, without incident.
"(Two days later, in Judge George's courtroom at the Henderson Justice Center, Zapata waived extradition. And so now he's waiting at the Henderson detention center for Madison authorities to have him sent back to Wisconsin.)"
Before Eugene, there had been several other low-profile, out-of-jurisdiction arrests in Las Vegas this year. For example, there was Santana Baca, a man accused of shooting two men, and hunting down and shooting another, in New Mexico; there was Anthony Martinez, of Seattle, whom the U.S. Marshals Service had been tracking for the rape of a child; and Shamvoy Smith, an elder of the Bloods gang wanted for binding, burning and killing a man in Baltimore.
In all, the Las Vegas division of the U.S. Marshals Service made 70 arrests for out-of-jurisdiction warrants in 2005, and this year they are on pace to make 90, according to Chief Deputy Fidencio Rivera. And those numbers are just for felony investigation operations, and they do not include arrests made by the FBI, or by Metro (which has arrested 10,448 fugitives on out-of-state warrants of all kinds since 2001), without the Marshal's assistance.
David Saretz, chief legal counsel for the Las Vegas FBI, says:
"I'm not so sure it's a trend, fugitives from out of town coming to Las Vegas. We're just sensitive because we live here—these criminals are entering our neighborhoods—but you can go to Boston or New York, or even a place like Spokane ... and you'll see the same things.
"But," Saretz continues, "Las Vegas is an attractive city for several reasons."
One is that Las Vegas has become a sort of suburb of Los Angeles, says Rivera, and thus many people who commit crimes in California, where the three-strikes law stirs great fear in miscreants, think they can escape the heat by migrating east, to Southern Nevada. "I'd say about 25 percent of the people we arrest are from California," says Rivera, the purpose of whose agency is to give assistance to local agencies, which cannot traverse jurisdictions.
Another is that, with so many new people moving into Las Vegas each year, family ties here are becoming commonplace for people around the nation.
"But from what the people we arrest tell us, the comments they make, the two biggest reasons are that they come for a good time—they want one last hoorah—and that Las Vegas is a moving community: It's transient, it allows for anonymity and it's a place where people think they can start over fresh," says Rivera.
With the nachos long eaten, and still under McMullan's sunless atmosphere, Justin said: "I bet Jeffs was working on the anonymity factor, but I wonder why Zapata moved all the way out here."
I said: "The hell if I know. Rivera told me the U.S. Marshals Service fields over 250 credible tips a year for fugitives hiding, residing, or passing through our town, and I'm sure there are any number of reasons they seek out Las Vegas. Zapata, as far as I've looked into it, never gave a reason. Perhaps he just wanted relief from Wisconsin's icy winters."