Friends said Rhapsody Ziemann and her husband, Mark, seemed to be a happy couple. But on Monday, Mark Ziemann stood in a Lancaster County courtroom accused of killing his wife.
LORI PILGER / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Monday, December 17, 2007 6:00 pm
Friends said Rhapsody Ziemann and her husband, Mark, seemed to be a happy couple.
They helped celebrate Salvador Nollora’s birthday the night of Dec. 9.
Salvador and his wife, Marina, snapped pictures of the guests who filled their Belmont apartment. One snapshot caught Rhapsody smiling at Marina’s left.
Rhapsody had brought Mark a plate of food. He was laughing and happy, the Nolloras said a week later.
“I don’t know what happened,” Salvador Nollora said early Monday afternoon.
Minutes after Nollora spoke, Mark Ziemann stood in a Lancaster County courtroom accused of killing his wife, a Filipino who moved to the United States about four years ago and married him soon after.
Ziemann — who until Monday had only three traffic tickets to his name — stood in front of a judge on a first-degree murder charge, a charge that carries a possible life or death sentence.
When asked if he understood the charge, he said, “Yes, I do.”
Ziemann, his wrists and ankles bound in chains, said he couldn’t afford an attorney, but the judge said she couldn’t appoint an attorney for him after he told her he had nearly finished paying on property valued at $100,000.
Ziemann’s percentage bond was set at $1 million; his next court date is Jan. 14.
To Salvador and Marina Nollora, it was all so shocking.
“Rhapsody is a nice girl, respectful,” Salvador Nollora said.
He and his wife last saw her a day after the party, at about 9 p.m. Dec. 10. The couple had watched her 5-year-old daughter while she worked a 3-to-9 shift.
Rhapsody had come to pick her up. Her little girl already was sleeping, and freezing drizzle was coming down, Salvador Nollora said. So she decided to let her stay at the Nolloras.
Mark would pick her up Tuesday morning, she’d told them.
But Tuesday came and went.
No word from the Ziemanns — Mark or Rhapsody.
“Then I told my wife maybe she’s scared to drive in the snow. Maybe she’ll come tomorrow,” he said.
Marina kept trying to call Rhapsody, but no one answered.
First it just rang and rang.
Then nothing.
Rhapsody’s cousin was trying to reach her, too.
By Thursday, they all started to suspect something was wrong and called police to report the 30-year-old missing.
That same day, an officer went to Ziemann’s apartment at 3341 Holdrege St., and called her husband to get permission to check the apartment.
She wasn’t there.
The next day, police interviewed Rhapsody’s husband.
He told an investigator he’d been out of town and didn’t know his wife was missing until police called him, according to court records.
He’d said his brother could verify his story. But when police talked to him, the story began to unravel.
Ziemann’s brother, Brent, said he wasn’t with him the day Rhapsody disappeared, but his brother told him to say he had been, if police asked.
On Friday, Mark Ziemann allegedly had told his brother he was going to the trailer near Daykin “to be with his wife.”
That night about midnight, he went to the Saline County Sheriff’s Office, allegedly telling deputies he knew “you could get the death penalty for killing your wife” and wondering if they would send him to the Philippines so Rhapsody’s father could kill him.
At 3:35 a.m. Saturday, deputies and a Lincoln police investigator found Rhapsody Ziemann dead, lying on a bed in her brother-in-law’s trailer.
Court records say she had blood around her mouth “and appeared to have marks on her neck.”
“She appeared to have been in the trailer for some time,” Investigator Matthew Franken wrote in the affidavit for Ziemann’s arrest.
Police suspect she was killed at her apartment and moved to the vacant trailer near Daykin, 65 miles southwest of Lincoln.
Reach Lori Pilger at 473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com.