Zebb Wayne Quinn

Case background and investigation

Zebb Wayne Quinn was an 18-year-old from Asheville, North Carolina, working in the electronics department of a local Walmart. On the night of January 2, 2000, Quinn finished his shift around 9:00 p.m. and had arranged to travel to Leicester with a coworker, Robert Jason Owens, to look at a car Quinn was interested in buying. The two met in the Walmart parking lot and drove separately.

Surveillance footage captured the pair at a nearby gas station around 9:15 p.m. buying sodas. According to Owens, after leaving the station Quinn flashed his headlights to signal him to pull over, saying he had received a page and needed to return the call. Owens said that after using a payphone Quinn returned appearing frantic, told him their plans were off, and sped away, rear-ending Owens's truck in the process. That was the last confirmed sighting of Zebb Quinn.

Days later, Quinn's car was found abandoned in a restaurant parking lot under bizarre circumstances: its headlights had been left on, a live puppy had been left inside, and a drawing of a pair of lips and an exclamation point had been scrawled in pink lipstick on the rear window. Around the same time, a caller impersonating Quinn phoned his workplace to say he would not be coming in, deepening the mystery. The strange details generated intense interest but few answers for years.

The case broke open only after Owens drew law-enforcement attention in a separate matter: in 2015 he pleaded guilty to murdering and dismembering a pregnant neighbor and her husband, Cristie and J.T. Codd. On July 10, 2017, Owens was indicted for the first-degree murder of Zebb Quinn. On July 25, 2022, he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of accessory after the fact to first-degree murder. Through his attorneys, Owens claimed his uncle, Walter "Gene" Owens, who had died in 2017, was the one who killed Quinn.

Owens received a sentence of roughly 12 to 16 years for the accessory charge, to run concurrently with the life sentence he was already serving for the Codd killings. Zebb Quinn's remains have never been recovered, and the person Owens accused of the actual killing, his uncle Walter "Gene" Owens, was never charged and had already died in 2017. As a result, while the case finally produced a conviction after more than two decades, many of the exact circumstances of Quinn's death remain unresolved, and prosecutors and Quinn's family were left without a full accounting of what happened or the recovery of his body. The bizarre details surrounding the disappearance, from the lipstick-marked car to the puppy left inside it, have never been fully explained, and Quinn's mother continued to seek answers throughout the long investigation.