Who killed a Madison lady named Jean Zapata?
When Jean Zapata vanished from her home in Madison, Wis., in 1976, she left behind her daughter Linda, two other children, a lot of friends, and a mystery that would take more than 30 years to solve. “I spent my whole life from age 11 just telling people when they asked, ‘My mom abandoned me,'” Linda remembers. She only knew what her father had told her when on the day her mother disappeared. “At age 11, when my dad said she took off because she was stressed out, it was cemented in my head. She took off and she’s raising another family somewhere.” Had Jean really taken off and left her family and friends behind? As Richard Schlesinger reports, a set of new detectives would take a fresh look at the case decades later, and try to solve the question everyone wanted to know: what really happened to Jean Zapata? Jean’s best friend, Peggy Weekly, never believed that Jean would simply abandon her family. “Because she could not have walked out on her children because of the way she was raised.
