Linda Zapata

I needed to see him say I killed her.

The deal was done.

Eugene Zapata, who had lied to all his children, broke his silence and told his story to Detective Statz.

He told me that he had gone over to the house.

And shortly upon entering the house, an argument broke out.

It turned violent in the kitchen, he said, when he grabbed a paperweight and hit Gene in the back of the head.

She fell to the ground.

Was she still alive at that point?

Yes, she was.

So what did he do?

He strangled her.

How did he strangle her?

He told me that he didn't have an actual memory of his hands on her throat, but he had a memory of his hands and his forearms hurting a lot.

He got a cord, a tent cord, and wrapped that around her neck to make sure that she was dead.

So he basically strangled her twice, you believe, once with his hands and once with a cord?

Once manually and once with a ligature.

According to Zapata, he cleaned up the kitchen and began a grisly 30-year odyssey with Jean's body, burying it, exhuming it, and reburying it.

He claims his wife was never in the crawl space.

He says for 25 years she was buried in a vacant lot he bought right after the murder.

Then he says he moved her to that storage locker where she stayed until April 2005 when Eugene heard the case had been reopened.