The voice on the other end of the phone sounded wrong.
It was January 4th, 2000—just two days after eighteen-year-old Zebb Wayne Quinn had clocked out of his shift at the Walmart electronics department in Asheville, North Carolina—and someone claiming to be him had just called in sick to work. The co-worker who answered the phone froze, receiver pressed against her ear, listening to words that should have been familiar but somehow weren’t. The cadence was off. The tone felt hollow. And beneath the excuse about illness, there was something else: a quality she couldn’t name but knew in her bones wasn’t Zebb.
“That’s not him,” she whispered after hanging up, though no one wanted to believe her.
By then, Zebb’s mother had already filed a missing persons report. By then, the Asheville Police Department had already begun asking questions that would stretch across more than two decades without answers. And by then, somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina, a young man who’d dreamed of serving his country through ROTC had already been swallowed by a darkness that would take twenty-two years to name—and even longer to understand.
This is the story of what happened when Zebb Quinn left work to look at a used car on a cold January night. It’s a story written in lipstick and lies, punctuated by a puppy that shouldn’t have existed and a phone call that came from the wrong place. It’s a story about the boy who wanted to do the right thing, and the people who made sure he never got the chance.
The Boy Everyone Trusted
Zebb Wayne Quinn was born on May 12th, 1981, into a world that seemed built for goodness. At eighteen years old, he stood five-foot-nine with brown hair and blue eyes that his mother Denise Vlahakis would later describe as “always seeing the best in people”. He worked steady hours in the electronics department at the Hendersonville Road Walmart, pulling shifts that helped him save money for the future he’d been planning since high school.
That future had a clear shape. Zebb had enrolled in an ROTC program with dreams of military service—a path that required discipline, consistency, and the kind of moral compass that doesn’t bend when no one’s watching. His co-workers knew him as reliable. His friends knew him as loyal. His family knew him as the kid who still wore a gold chain necklace because his grandmother had given it to him, and Zebb wasn’t the type to take off something that mattered.
He had scars between the ring and middle fingers on both hands from childhood accidents that never quite healed right. He wore contact lenses because he needed them to see clearly, though later, when they found his car, the lenses would be gone—a detail that would haunt investigators for years. He had an organizational learning disability that made some tasks harder than they should have been, but it never stopped him from showing up, never stopped him from trying, never stopped him from being exactly who he’d promised himself he would become.
On the night of January 2nd, 2000, Zebb was wearing a white logo T-shirt beneath a plaid button-up shirt, either Tommy jeans or khaki pants, and that gold chain around his neck. He was two days into a new millennium that everyone had been worried would collapse under the weight of Y2K computer failures. Instead, the world had kept turning, and Zebb had kept working, and nothing about that Sunday evening suggested his life was about to stop completely.
The Last Normal Moment
At 9:00 PM on January 2nd, Zebb clocked out of his shift at Walmart. The fluorescent lights of the store behind him. The parking lot ahead. And waiting there, leaning against a truck, was Robert Jason Owens—a co-worker Zebb had known from the store and from occasional pool games they’d play together. Owens was older, less defined by the kind of future-forward thinking that drove Zebb’s days. But on this night, he had something Zebb wanted: information about a car.
A Mitsubishi Eclipse. For sale in Leicester, just outside Asheville. The kind of upgrade an eighteen-year-old with steady work and military dreams could justify. Owens had told him about it, offered to drive out and show him where it was. So the two men left the parking lot separately—Zebb in his own Mazda Protégé, Owens leading the way in his truck.
At 9:15 PM, surveillance cameras at a nearby Eblen Citgo gas station captured them both pulling in. The footage shows Zebb and Owens entering the convenience store, purchasing sodas, moving through the mundane choreography of a Sunday night errand. There was nothing remarkable about the scene. Nothing to suggest that within the hour, one of these men would be gone forever, and the other would spend the next seventeen years lying about why.
They left the gas station and continued driving. Separate cars. Same destination. Until somewhere near TC Roberson High School, Zebb flashed his headlights—the universal signal for “pull over”. Owens would later claim he didn’t know why. That Zebb had simply flagged him down, frantic and urgent, saying he’d received a message on his pager and needed to return a call.
There was a payphone nearby. Zebb walked to it, picked up the receiver, and made a call that no one has ever been able to trace. Whatever he heard on that call changed everything. When he returned to the car, Owens said, Zebb was “frantic”—a word Owens would use multiple times in his initial statement to police, as if repetition could anchor the lie.
Zebb told Owens he had to cancel their plans. Something had come up. Something urgent. And then, in a moment that Owens described as accidental but investigators would later view as impossible, Zebb sped off—and rear-ended Owens’s truck.
He apologized. Quickly. Desperately. And then he drove away into the North Carolina night, taillights disappearing around a curve, time-stamped by surveillance and witness accounts at 9:24 PM. That was the last confirmed sighting of Zebb Wayne Quinn alive.
The Hours That Followed
What happened in the hours after Zebb drove away from Robert Jason Owens is a story written in injuries, phone calls, and silences that scream louder than words.
Hours after Zebb vanished, Owens showed up at a hospital emergency room with fractured ribs and a head injury. He told doctors he’d been in a second car accident that night—an unrelated crash, separate from the minor rear-ending with Zebb. But when police later checked, no accident report had been filed with any local department. No witnesses came forward. No physical evidence of a second collision ever materialized.
The injuries were real. The explanation was not.
And then came the phone call—the one that opened this story, the one that still haunts everyone who heard about it. On January 4th, two days after Zebb disappeared, someone called the Walmart electronics department claiming to be Zebb Quinn. The voice said he was sick and wouldn’t be coming to work. But the co-worker who answered knew immediately: this wasn’t Zebb.
Police traced the call. It hadn’t come from Zebb’s home, or a friend’s house, or anywhere the missing teenager might logically be. Instead, the call originated from a Volvo plant in the area—a place where Robert Jason Owens worked his other job.
When confronted, Owens didn’t deny making the call. He admitted it freely, with the kind of confidence that comes from having already prepared the lie. He said Zebb had phoned him and asked him to call in sick on his behalf—a favor between friends, nothing more. But the explanation raised more questions than it answered. If Zebb was alive and able to call Owens, why couldn’t he call his own workplace? Why would he trust Owens to impersonate him? And why did the co-worker who knew Zebb’s voice better than anyone insist the call hadn’t sounded like him at all?
Owens had no good answers. And after giving his initial statement to police, he stopped cooperating entirely. He hired a lawyer. He went silent. And while Asheville detectives scrambled to piece together what had happened to Zebb Quinn, Owens returned to his life as if nothing had changed.
But something had changed. Something had been taken from the world on January 2nd, 2000. And two weeks later, when police finally found Zebb’s abandoned car, the proof of that theft would be written in lipstick on a rear window—and sitting in the backseat, whimpering softly, would be a living creature that had no business being there at all.
The Discovery
January 16th, 2000. Fourteen days after Zebb Quinn drove away from Robert Jason Owens and vanished into the night. Fourteen days of his mother filing reports, calling hospitals, driving through Asheville with flyers that showed her son’s blue eyes and brown hair and that gold chain necklace he never took off. Fourteen days of silence from everyone who should have known something—and deafening noise from the one person who knew everything.
That’s when police found Zebb’s Mazda Protégé in a restaurant parking lot, headlights still on, battery drained dead. The driver’s seat had been adjusted for someone shorter than Zebb’s five-foot-nine frame. Empty drink bottles littered the interior. A plastic hotel key sat on the dashboard—but no one could trace it to any local hotel. A jacket lay crumpled on the seat, fabric worn by someone else’s shoulders.
And in the backseat, alone and frightened and far too young to have been weaned from its mother, was a black Labrador puppy—maybe three months old, with dark eyes that reflected the confusion every investigator felt when they opened that car door.
The puppy wasn’t Zebb’s. His family confirmed it immediately. Zebb hadn’t owned a dog. Hadn’t been planning to get a dog. Had never mentioned wanting a puppy to anyone who knew him. The jacket wasn’t his either. Neither were the hairs forensic teams collected from the seats—hairs that didn’t match Zebb’s DNA, hairs that suggested someone else had been driving his car after he disappeared.
But the most haunting detail—the image that would define this case for decades—was scrawled across the rear windshield in orange-pink lipstick.
A pair of lips. Drawn carefully, almost artistically, as if someone had taken time to get the shape right. And beside those lips: two exclamation points, bold and unmistakable, punctuation for a message no one could read.
What did it mean? Was it a signature? A taunt? A clue left by someone who wanted to be caught—or by someone who knew they never would be? The lipstick wasn’t a brand Zebb’s mother recognized. The style wasn’t one Zebb’s girlfriend used. And the symbolism felt deliberately theatrical, as if whoever left that mark wanted the discovery to feel exactly as unsettling as it did.
Police collected everything. The puppy. The jacket. The hairs. The hotel key. The lipstick. Every piece of evidence that might explain where Zebb had gone and who had driven his car to that parking lot and why they’d staged the scene like a riddle designed to torment. Forensic teams processed the vehicle for days, lifting prints, analyzing fibers, searching for the single thread that would unravel the mystery.
But the car gave up no clear answers. Only more questions. Only more silence where Zebb’s voice should have been.
And somewhere in Asheville, Robert Jason Owens—who had been the last person to see Zebb alive, who had called in sick on Zebb’s behalf from a workplace Zebb had never been to, who had shown up at a hospital with unexplained injuries the night Zebb disappeared—refused to say another word.
The police had their suspicions. The evidence pointed in one direction. But suspicion isn’t proof, and pointing isn’t conviction. Without a body, without a confession, without a single piece of physical evidence that could tie Owens definitively to Zebb’s disappearance, there was nothing prosecutors could do except wait.
They would wait seventeen years.
And in those seventeen years, the case would grow cold. The lipstick would fade in evidence storage. The puppy—adopted by a police officer on the investigative team—would grow old and eventually pass away, taking with it whatever secrets it might have witnessed that January night. Zebb’s mother would age under the weight of not knowing, her son’s face frozen at eighteen in every photograph, every memory, every nightmare that woke her in the dark.
But the truth doesn’t disappear just because time passes. It waits. It festers. And sometimes, when the person carrying it can no longer bear the weight, it erupts in ways no one expects.
The Girl With The Dangerous Boyfriend
Her name was Misty Taylor, and she was nineteen years old when Zebb Quinn decided she needed saving.
They’d met just weeks before he disappeared—at Quinn’s family restaurant, where conversations happened easily and strangers became friends over plates of food and the kind of small talk that sometimes turns into something deeper. Misty had a smile that lingered. Zebb had a heart that couldn’t ignore when someone was hurting. And according to everyone who knew him during those final weeks of 1999, he talked about her constantly.
“That’s all he talked about was this girl,” one friend would later recall, the memory sharp even years afterward.
But Misty wasn’t single. She had a boyfriend named Wesley Smith—a man whose name came attached to words like “abusive” and “violent” and “threatening” whenever people spoke about him. Zebb had learned about Smith’s treatment of Misty, and in the way of young men who still believe the world bends toward justice, he’d decided to help her. He offered friendship. Support. A listening ear when she needed to talk about the relationship that was suffocating her.
Smith found out. Of course he found out. In a town the size of Asheville, secrets don’t stay buried long—especially secrets that involve another man talking to your girlfriend.
The threats came quickly after that. Smith and his friends made it clear: Zebb needed to stay away from Misty, or there would be consequences. One of Quinn’s father’s friends would later tell Spin magazine what those consequences sounded like: “They were threatening Zebb to stay away from the young lady. [Quinn] and this guy had had some confrontation, and that’s when a threat got back to Zebb—what Wesley and some of his buddies might do”.
But Zebb didn’t scare easily. He was eighteen and invincible in the way young people are when they haven’t yet learned that not every story has a hero’s ending. He kept talking to Misty. Kept offering her a way out. Kept believing that doing the right thing would somehow be enough to protect him from the darkness gathering on the edges of his life.
It wasn’t enough. And on January 2nd, 2000, when that page came through to Zebb’s beeper—the urgent call that sent him running to a payphone in the middle of a car-shopping trip—it would be traced back to a location that tied all these threads together in the most disturbing way possible.
The Phone Call From Nowhere
The page that changed everything came from 704 Clarissa Drive in Asheville—the home of Ina Ustich, Zebb’s paternal aunt.
When police traced the call, they expected a simple explanation. Maybe Ustich had needed to reach her nephew urgently. Maybe there was a family emergency. Maybe the message that made Zebb “frantic” enough to cancel his plans and rear-end Robert Jason Owens’s truck had been legitimate.
But when investigators knocked on Ustich’s door, she told them something that unraveled every simple explanation they’d constructed.
She hadn’t made the call. In fact, she hadn’t been home that evening at all.
Ina Ustich explained to police that on January 2nd, she’d been having dinner at the home of her close friend Tamra Taylor—Misty’s mother. And present at that dinner, sitting around the table while Zebb Quinn received a mysterious page from Ustich’s empty house, were two people who had every reason to want him out of the picture: Misty Taylor and her boyfriend, Wesley Smith.
The coincidence was too perfect to be accidental. Too deliberate to be explained away. Zebb’s aunt—someone he barely had contact with—just happened to be out of her house the exact night someone used her phone to lure him away from safety. And she just happened to be with the mother of the girl Zebb was trying to help escape an abusive relationship. And that girl and her violent boyfriend just happened to be present when the call was made.
But the story got stranger. Because when Ina Ustich returned home that night, she found her house had been broken into.
Nothing had been stolen. No valuables taken. No signs of typical burglary. Instead, picture frames had been moved. Items shifted around. The kind of disruption that suggested someone had been there—someone who wasn’t interested in theft, but in something else entirely. Someone who needed access to a phone. Someone who knew Ustich wouldn’t be home. Someone who wanted to send a message that would pull Zebb Quinn away from Robert Jason Owens and into a trap.
Police questioned both Misty Taylor and Wesley Smith. Both denied any involvement in Quinn’s disappearance. And without physical evidence—without a confession, without witnesses, without anything more substantial than suspicious timing—there was nothing investigators could do. The lead went cold. The break-in remained unsolved. And the question of who paged Zebb from his aunt’s house hung in the air like smoke, visible but impossible to grasp.
The Woman In The Car
While police struggled to connect the dots between Zebb Quinn, Misty Taylor, Wesley Smith, and that mysterious page, witnesses began coming forward with a detail that would haunt the investigation for years.
They’d seen Zebb’s car. After he disappeared. Being driven through downtown Asheville by someone who definitely wasn’t Zebb.
A couple contacted police to report the sighting, their description specific enough that investigators asked them to work with a sketch artist. The resulting composite image showed a woman—young, distinctive features, the kind of face that stuck in memory. Police studied the drawing. Compared it to photographs. Ran it against their mental catalog of everyone connected to the case.
And when they did, they realized something that made the entire mystery tighten like a noose: the composite bore a striking resemblance to Misty Taylor.
The same Misty Taylor who had been present at Tamra Taylor’s house when someone broke into Ina Ustich’s home and used her phone to page Zebb. The same Misty Taylor whose boyfriend had threatened Zebb for getting too close. The same Misty Taylor who denied knowing anything about what happened the night an eighteen-year-old boy drove off into darkness and never came back.
But resemblance isn’t evidence. Composite sketches aren’t photographs. And no matter how many pieces seemed to point toward Taylor and Smith, the physical proof remained frustratingly absent. Police couldn’t place either of them in Zebb’s car. Couldn’t prove they’d touched the lipstick on the rear window. Couldn’t explain how they would have gotten their hands on a three-month-old black Labrador puppy to leave in the backseat.
The case had suspects. It had theories. It had a web of connections so tangled that pulling on any single thread seemed to tighten knots elsewhere. But what it didn’t have—what it desperately needed—was proof.
And so the investigation stalled. Years passed. Zebb’s mother continued searching, distributing flyers, calling anyone who might have information. The puppy from the car grew into an adult dog in the home of the police officer who’d adopted it, a living reminder of the mystery no one could solve. And somewhere in North Carolina, Robert Jason Owens went about his life, working his jobs, maintaining his story, refusing to say another word to investigators who kept circling back to the same question: What really happened after Zebb Quinn rear-ended your truck?
The answer would come. But not for seventeen years. And when it finally emerged, it would be wrapped in another horror—one so brutal and senseless that it would force police to excavate Owens’s property looking for bones beneath concrete, searching for the boy who’d been missing since the millennium turned.
The Murders That Broke The Case
March 17th, 2015. Fifteen years after Zebb Quinn vanished.
Robert Jason Owens was arrested for murder—but not for the crime that had haunted Asheville police since 2000. This time, the victims were Cristie Schoen Codd, a contestant on Food Network Star, her husband J.T. Codd, and their unborn child. All three had been killed by Owens in an incident he would later describe as an “accident”—running over the pregnant woman and her husband, then making the deliberate choice to dismember their bodies rather than call for help.
The brutality of the crime shocked everyone who’d known Owens. But for detectives who’d spent fifteen years trying to prove he’d killed Zebb Quinn, the arrest was something else entirely: an opportunity.
Within weeks of Owens being taken into custody, Asheville Police obtained a warrant to search his property in connection to Quinn’s disappearance. They’d received a tip—one of those leads that investigators pray for but rarely receive—about a “fish pond project” Owens had started on his land shortly after Quinn went missing. The project had been abandoned quickly, left unfinished, covered over with concrete as if Owens had suddenly lost interest.
Or as if he’d finished what he really needed to do.
When excavation teams tore up that concrete, they found fabric. Leather materials. Unknown hard fragments that might have been bone. In another area of the property, they discovered plastic bags filled with what appeared to be pulverized lime or powdered mortar mix—substances used to accelerate decomposition, to erase evidence, to make a body disappear.
Police wouldn’t confirm whether they’d found Zebb’s remains. The investigation was ongoing, they said. Evidence was being analyzed. But everyone understood what those materials suggested: that beneath Owens’s property, buried under years of dirt and concrete and lies, might be the answer to where Zebb Quinn had gone after rear-ending a truck on a January night in 2000.
The Indictment
July 10th, 2017. Seventeen years, six months, and eight days after Zebb Quinn disappeared.
A Buncombe County grand jury returned an indictment charging Robert Jason Owens with first-degree murder. The Asheville Police Department released a statement that spoke volumes in its careful phrasing: “This indictment is the result of years of investigative work and persistence by detectives of the Asheville Police Department, as well as ongoing partnerships with members of the Quinn family and the Buncombe County District Attorney’s Office”.
Years of work. Years of persistence. Years of Denise Vlahakis waking up every morning not knowing where her son’s body lay, years of following leads that went nowhere, years of watching Robert Jason Owens live freely while her boy remained frozen at eighteen in every photograph, every memory, every nightmare.
But now there was an indictment. A charge. The legal machinery of justice finally grinding forward after seventeen years of stalling.
Owens was already serving what amounted to a life sentence for the Codd family murders—between sixty and seventy-five years without possibility of parole. The Quinn case wouldn’t change his freedom; he would die in prison either way. But it would do something more important: it would give a name to what happened. It would say legally, officially, that Zebb Wayne Quinn had been murdered. That his absence wasn’t a choice or an accident. That someone had taken his life deliberately.
Still, proving murder beyond a reasonable doubt without a body is one of the most difficult challenges in criminal prosecution. Prosecutors had fragments beneath concrete. They had suspicious timing. They had a fish pond abandoned right after Quinn vanished. They had Owens’s lies about the phone call, his unexplained injuries, his refusal to cooperate.
But they didn’t have remains they could definitively identify as Zebb’s. They didn’t have witnesses to the actual killing. They didn’t have the smoking gun that would make conviction certain.
The trial was delayed multiple times—first by personnel changes, then by COVID-19 restrictions that suspended jury trials across North Carolina. Months became years. The case that had already waited nearly two decades waited longer. And then, in July 2022, Owens’s attorneys approached the district attorney with a proposal: a plea deal.
What Owens offered in exchange for a reduced sentence was a story. A narrative that explained everything while conveniently placing blame on someone who could never be prosecuted. And what he said, when he finally broke his twenty-two years of silence, was somehow both more complicated and more horrifying than anyone had imagined.
The Story Owens Told
According to the account Robert Jason Owens gave to investigators in 2018—four years before he would finally plead guilty—Zebb Quinn’s murder wasn’t his crime at all.
It was his uncle’s. A man named Walter “Gene” Owens, who had conveniently died in 2017, just months before the murder indictment was handed down.
Robert’s story went like this: Wesley Smith, jealous and violent over Zebb’s relationship with Misty Taylor, had hired Gene Owens to kill the teenager who wouldn’t stop trying to rescue his girlfriend. Gene had orchestrated the entire plan, using Robert as an unwitting accomplice. The car-shopping trip to Leicester was a setup. The page from Ina Ustich’s house was a lure. And when Robert and Zebb met after that mysterious phone call, Gene was waiting in Pisgah National Forest with a .22 rifle.
Gene shot Zebb. Dismembered his body. Burned the remains. And Robert—shocked, terrified, implicated simply by being present—helped his uncle cover up the crime. That’s why Robert had shown up at the hospital with fractured ribs and a head injury: not from a second car accident, but from the violence of that night in the forest. That’s why he’d called in sick for Zebb two days later: because Gene had ordered him to, to buy time. That’s why he’d refused to cooperate with police for seventeen years: because admitting any part of the truth meant admitting all of it.
It was a story that explained everything. That tied together Wesley Smith’s threats, the mysterious page, Robert’s injuries, the phone call, the years of silence. It was a story that fit the evidence while placing ultimate blame on a dead man who would never face trial.
And prosecutors didn’t believe a word of it.
But belief and proof are different currencies in a courtroom. The physical evidence linking Robert directly to Zebb’s death remained circumstantial. Gene Owens was dead and couldn’t confirm or deny the story. Wesley Smith had never been charged, never been definitively connected to any murder-for-hire plot. Without Zebb’s body, without witnesses, without that final piece of incontrovertible proof, taking the case to trial was a gamble.
The Courtroom Twenty-Two Years Later
July 25th, 2022.
The courtroom in Buncombe County was packed with people who had waited more than two decades for this moment—journalists who’d covered the case since Zebb’s Mazda was found with a puppy in the backseat, investigators who’d spent careers chasing leads that evaporated like morning fog, and family members who’d aged twenty-two years while their boy remained frozen at eighteen in every photograph.
Robert Jason Owens sat flanked by his two veteran capital defense attorneys, Vicki Jayne and Sean Devereux—a tag-team pair known for their skill in navigating impossible cases. Today’s proceeding wasn’t about guilt or innocence in the traditional sense. The plea deal had been struck months earlier, negotiated in the quiet spaces where prosecutors calculate odds and defense attorneys measure what can be salvaged from wreckage.
District Attorney Todd Williams had made the offer. Owens had accepted it. And now, after seventeen years of indictment delays caused by personnel changes and a pandemic that suspended jury trials across North Carolina, the legal system was finally ready to speak Zebb Quinn’s name in a sentence that included the word “murdered”.
“The court will accept the plea,” Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Grant announced, her voice carrying the weight of legal finality that twenty-two years of investigation had been building toward.
Robert Jason Owens pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact to first-degree murder. Not the crime itself, his attorneys were careful to emphasize. Not pulling the trigger. Not dismembering the body. Just helping afterward. Just covering up. Just knowing what happened and choosing silence for more than two decades while a mother searched for her son’s bones.
The sentence: twelve and a half to fifteen and three-quarter years in prison. It would run concurrently with the effective life sentence Owens was already serving for murdering Cristie and J.T. Codd and their unborn baby. Judge Grant stated plainly what everyone in the courtroom already knew: Owens would likely spend the rest of his life behind bars.
But those years weren’t why people had gathered. They’d come for something more valuable than additional prison time. They’d come for the truth—or at least whatever version of it Robert Jason Owens was willing to tell.
The Story No One Believed
Through his attorneys, Owens repeated the account he’d given investigators in 2018—the narrative that placed all blame on his uncle Gene, the man who’d conveniently died in 2017, just months before the murder indictment came down.
Attorney Sean Devereux explained that Owens had taken a polygraph test where he’d been asked directly: Had he witnessed Gene Owens shoot and kill Zebb Quinn? His answer was yes. And according to Devereux, his client passed the test—though everyone in that courtroom understood that polygraph results aren’t admissible in court precisely because their reliability is questionable at best.
But this wasn’t a jury trial. The rules were different. And in this space, Owens’s attorneys were free to present the story their client wanted told.
Vicki Jayne laid it out methodically: Owens had met with Asheville detectives and told them Gene had murdered Zebb in Bent Creek Experimental Forest, then burned his remains. Jason had asked his uncle why he’d shot the boy. Gene’s answer, according to Owens’s version: a love triangle. Zebb had a crush on Misty Taylor. Her boyfriend Wesley Smith was jealous and violent. Gene knew Smith and was asked “to do something” to keep Quinn away from her.
The remedy, Owens claimed Gene chose, was murder. But Jason himself had played no part. He’d only witnessed it. Only helped clean up afterward. Only kept silent for twenty-two years because—the implication hung unspoken—what else could he have done?
District Attorney Todd Williams’s skepticism was barely concealed. Prosecutors didn’t believe Owens’s account. But Judge Grant acknowledged the hard reality facing the state: without strong physical evidence linking Robert Jason Owens directly to Zebb’s death, securing a murder conviction from a jury would be extraordinarily difficult.
The searches of Owens’s property had yielded fabric, leather materials, and unknown hard fragments. Police had excavated the fish pond project Owens started and abandoned shortly after Quinn vanished. They’d torn up concrete. Analyzed soil samples. Brought in cadaver dogs and forensic specialists.
But they hadn’t found Zebb.
Based on Owens’s statements, investigators had conducted extensive searches in Bent Creek Experimental Forest—blocking forest roads, treating the popular hiking area as an active crime scene, following every detail Owens provided about where Gene supposedly burned Quinn’s body. For weeks they searched. For weeks they excavated. For weeks they prayed for the breakthrough that would bring Zebb home.
They found nothing.
No human remains. No evidence corroborating Owens’s story. Just trees and dirt and the echo of lies that might contain fragments of truth, or might be nothing but a final manipulation from a man who’d proven himself capable of horrific violence.
A Mother’s Statement
Before Judge Grant accepted the plea, Denise Vlahakis stood to address the court.
Twenty-two years. That’s how long she’d waited to hear someone say officially that her son had been murdered. Twenty-two years of filing missing person reports that went nowhere. Twenty-two years of distributing flyers with Zebb’s face—blue eyes, brown hair, gold chain necklace—to people who couldn’t help. Twenty-two years of waking up not knowing where his body lay, whether animals had scattered his bones, whether rain had washed away the last traces of the boy she’d raised to see the best in people.
The details of her statement weren’t widely reported, but the image of her standing in that courtroom—broadcast across North Carolina news stations—said everything words couldn’t capture. Grief that had aged into something harder than sorrow. Exhaustion that came from two decades of searching. And perhaps, beneath it all, a sliver of relief that at least now there was a legal acknowledgment: Zebb Wayne Quinn had been murdered.
District Attorney Williams emphasized that the plea deal had been discussed extensively with both Denise and Zebb’s sister, Brandi Quinn, and had been approved by them in advance. “It was always the hope of investigators and the DA’s Office that more facts and details would be uncovered with regard to Zebb’s disappearance,” Williams stated in his official remarks. “While we may never know the full truth these many years after Zebb’s disappearance, my sympathies are with the family and all who have suffered as a result”.
The statement concluded with a request that felt almost like a prayer: “It’s my hope that anyone wishing to sensationalize today’s plea will respect the family’s desire for peace and privacy”.
But peace and privacy are difficult to maintain when so many questions remain unanswered.
The Mysteries That Endure
The plea deal legally established that Zebb Quinn was murdered, but it explained almost nothing about the details that had haunted this case for twenty-two years.
The black Labrador puppy. Three months old. Found in Zebb’s car two weeks after he vanished. No one—not Owens, not his attorneys, not investigators—has ever explained where that dog came from. Who brought it? Why? Was it meant as a distraction, a red herring to send police searching for puppy breeders instead of murderers? Or was it simply a bizarre detail in a case already overflowing with inexplicable elements? The puppy lived out its life in the home of the police officer who adopted it, and when it died years later, it took those answers with it.
The lipstick mark. Those carefully drawn lips and two exclamation points scrawled across the rear windshield in orange-pink lipstick. Was it a signature left by the mysterious woman witnesses saw driving Zebb’s car through Asheville? Was it Misty Taylor, as the composite sketch suggested? Or was it someone else entirely—a person whose role in this tragedy has never been uncovered? The lipstick sits in an evidence locker somewhere, preserved but meaningless without context.
The woman in the car. Multiple witnesses reported seeing a young woman driving Quinn’s Mazda after he disappeared. A composite sketch was created. It resembled Misty Taylor. But Taylor was never charged, never definitively placed in that vehicle, never legally connected to Zebb’s death. If Owens’s story is true—if Gene Owens killed Zebb in Bent Creek Forest—then who was driving the car afterward? And why?
The break-in at Ina Ustich’s house. Someone entered Zebb’s aunt’s home on January 2nd, 2000, while she was at dinner with Tamra and Misty Taylor and Wesley Smith. Someone moved picture frames but stole nothing of value. Someone used her phone to page Zebb with a message urgent enough to make him abandon his car-shopping trip. If that someone was Gene Owens, as Jason’s story implies, how did Gene know Ustich wouldn’t be home? How did he know her phone number? How did he know Zebb would respond to a page from that specific address?
The injuries. Owens showed up at a hospital emergency room hours after Zebb vanished with fractured ribs and a head injury. He claimed a second car accident, but no accident report was ever filed. In his later account, he said the injuries came from the violence of that night in the forest. But if he was merely a witness, as he claims, why was he hurt? What happened in those woods that left him injured but alive, while Zebb Quinn was shot, dismembered, and burned?
These questions don’t have answers. They likely never will. Gene Owens is dead. Wesley Smith was never charged. Misty Taylor has never spoken publicly about the case. And Robert Jason Owens—the one person who knows exactly what happened—has given a story that explains everything while conveniently ensuring no one else can be prosecuted.
What We Know For Certain
In the end, after twenty-two years of investigation, after searches of properties and forests, after polygraph tests and plea deals and courtroom proceedings, here is what can be stated as legal fact:
Zebb Wayne Quinn was murdered. The court has established this beyond legal dispute.
Robert Jason Owens was involved in covering up that murder. He pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact.
Zebb’s body has never been found. Despite extensive searches based on Owens’s statements, no human remains have been recovered.
The full truth of what happened on January 2nd, 2000, may never be known. District Attorney Williams acknowledged this explicitly in his statement.
And perhaps most importantly: Zebb Quinn would have been forty-three years old in 2024. He would have had a full life—military service perhaps, or a career built on that steady reliability his co-workers remembered. Maybe a family. Maybe grandchildren for Denise Vlahakis to spoil. Maybe a future that bore no resemblance to the one he’d imagined at eighteen, but was his nonetheless.
Instead, he has a case file. Evidence boxes. News articles. Podcast episodes. And a mother who still doesn’t know where to lay flowers, because there’s no grave to visit, no marker to prove her son existed beyond the photographs that show him frozen at eighteen forever.
The Legacy of Lipstick and Lies
The case of Zebb Wayne Quinn has become one of those American mysteries that refuses to fade—not because it’s unsolved in the legal sense (it isn’t; there’s been a conviction), but because the resolution answered almost nothing about what actually happened.
True crime enthusiasts still debate the evidence on forums and podcasts. Investigators who worked the case still wonder about the details that never quite fit. And somewhere in North Carolina, a mother still searches for answers that a plea deal couldn’t provide.
The lipstick mark on the rear window has become symbolic—a piece of evidence so theatrical, so deliberately strange, that it feels like a message in a language no one can translate. Was it meant to taunt? To mislead? To communicate something important to someone who would understand? We don’t know. We likely never will. But it remains the most memorable image from a case full of haunting details: those carefully drawn lips and two exclamation points, preserved in evidence photos, silently screaming truths that twenty-two years of investigation couldn’t make them speak.
Robert Jason Owens will die in prison. That much is certain. Whether he dies carrying the full truth of what happened to Zebb Quinn, or whether his uncle Gene really was the triggerman, or whether the story is even more complicated than either version suggests—those questions will likely die with him.
What remains is this: On January 2nd, 2000, an eighteen-year-old boy who’d dreamed of military service and was saving money for a car drove away from a gas station in Asheville, North Carolina. He rear-ended a truck. He apologized. He drove off into the darkness. And he never came home.
Twenty-two years later, the legal system could finally name what happened to him. But naming isn’t the same as knowing. Conviction isn’t the same as justice. And for Denise Vlahakis, who stood in that courtroom in July 2022, the plea deal that closed the case couldn’t answer the only question that really mattered:
Where is my son?
The lipstick on the window offered no reply. The puppy in the backseat kept its secrets. And somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina—beneath concrete, or scattered in a forest, or hidden in a place no search has yet uncovered—Zebb Wayne Quinn waits to be found.
His mother is still looking. After twenty-two years, she’s still looking.
And perhaps, in the end, that persistence—that refusal to let silence have the final word—is the only justice left to claim.
Epilogue: If You Know Something
The Asheville Police Department continues to accept tips related to Zebb Wayne Quinn’s disappearance. If you have any information about what happened on January 2nd, 2000, or know the location of Zebb’s remains, please contact the Asheville Police Department at (828) 252-1110 or your local law enforcement office.
Somewhere, someone knows something. Somewhere, the full truth exists—not in plea deals or polygraph tests or theories, but in actual fact. And somewhere, a mother waits for the phone call that will finally tell her where to bring flowers for the son she lost when the millennium turned.
Twenty-two years is a long time to wait. But for Denise Vlahakis, the waiting isn’t over.
It won’t be over until Zebb comes home.
