A former Webster County man convicted of killing his fiancee and her unborn child in 1998 has lost another court appeal.

In an opinion released Wednesday, the Iowa Court of Appeals rejected claims filed by Randy A. Zaabel, who remains in a state prison.

Zaabel was convicted of second-degree murder and nonconsensual termination of a human pregnancy in the March 29, 1998, death of Michelle Gibson and her unborn baby. He is serving a 75-year prison sentence.

In the opinion, Court of Appeals judges wrote that Zaabel’s claims were too late and also insufficient to get his conviction overturned. Appeals he filed in 2001 and 2004 were previously rejected.

“I’m grateful that the decision was upheld,” Webster County Attorney Jennifer Benson said Wednesday afternoon. She was not the county attorney when Zaabel was tried and convicted.

Efforts to reach Zaabel’s attorneys, Kevin Fors, of Harcourt, and Leonard Holland, of Dayton, were unsuccessful.

Gibson, 22, died of major head injuries, Dr. Dan Cole, the Webster County medical examiner, said in 1998. Her body was found slumped alongside Zaabel’s pickup, which was parked on Mining Boulevard near Riverside Trail, early on the morning of March 30, 1998.

That morning, Zaabel, who was 26 at the time, told Webster County sheriff’s deputies that he and Gibson made a late night trip from their home on Kansas Avenue near Gowrie to Fort Dodge. He said that when they turned onto Mining Boulevard, they saw three men standing near what he thought was a broken down vehicle. Zaabel claimed that the men attacked him and Gibson.

Zaabel told investigators that he was beaten unconcious. He said when he woke up, he walked a mile to a house to call for help.

However, he was arrested on April 12, 1998, after investigators searched his Kansas Avenue property and found, among other things, a piece of lumber stained with blood. A splinter found in Gibson’s hair was matched to the piece of lumber. Blood and skull fragments from Gibson were also found there.

His attorneys requested a change of venue, so his trial was held in 1999 in Wright County. He was convicted, and on April 16, 1999, he was sentenced to 75 years in prison.

In the most recent appeal, Zaabel’s current attorney, Clemens Erdahl, of Cedar Rapids, argued that the work of Fors and Holland during the trial was ineffective.

He also argued that new evidence in the form of a statement from a witness who claimed that another man had information about the muder had been obtained.

In the opinion released Wednesday, the judges wrote that it was too late to file an appeal for ineffective counsel or the discovery of new evidence. They wrote that appeals based on either claim must be filed within a three-year limitations period to assert post-conviction claims.

The judges added that even if the claim of ineffective counsel was filed in a timely manner it would not be successful because Zaabel could not prove that his trial attorneys “breached an essential duty.”

The witness statement that was the basis for Zaabel’s claim that new evidence had been discovered would be “inadmissible hearsay,” the judges wrote.