I came across the story of Zebb Wayne Quinn years ago, and it has never left me. It begins like an ordinary evening in Asheville, North Carolina, in January 2000, but unravels into something dark, strange, and unsolved in all the ways that matter.
Zebb was eighteen, working in the electronics department of Walmart, enrolled in ROTC, and talking about buying a car. He was shy, close to his family, and careful with money. On January 2, he clocked out of work and met his friend and co-worker Robert Jason Owens. That decision changed everything.
The two had plans to check out a car for sale in Leicester. They left in separate vehicles. Cameras placed them together at a gas station at 9:15 p.m., each buying a soda. That was the last time Zebb appeared on film.
Owens later told police that Zebb flashed his headlights, pulled over, and said he had received a page. After making a call from a payphone, Owens said Zebb returned frantic, canceled their plans, and sped off. He clipped Owens’s truck on the way out. Hours later, Owens showed up at a hospital with fractured ribs and a head injury, claiming he was in another accident. No police report exists.
By the next afternoon, when Zebb didn’t come home, his mother, Denise, reported him missing. She knew right away something was wrong. He wasn’t the kind to vanish, and he didn’t leave without telling her where he was going.
Two days later, Walmart received a phone call. A man claimed to be Zebb, saying he was sick and wouldn’t be coming to work. A co-worker knew instantly it wasn’t him. The call was traced to the Volvo plant where Owens worked. Owens admitted to making it, insisting Zebb asked him to.
The more investigators dug, the stranger it got. Zebb had recently been seeing a nineteen-year-old woman, Misty Taylor. She had a boyfriend, Wesley Smith, who was known for being controlling. Zebb told friends he had been threatened by Smith. Misty and Wesley both denied involvement.
The page Zebb received that night was traced back to his aunt’s house. He barely spoke to her, and she denied sending it. She said she was at dinner with Misty, Wesley, and Misty’s mother at the time. That same night, her house was broken into. Nothing was stolen, but picture frames and objects were moved.
Then came the discovery that turned the case into something surreal. On January 6, four days after Zebb was last seen, his car appeared in a barbecue restaurant parking lot near the hospital where his mother worked. A nurse who knew the family spotted it and called Denise.
Inside the Mazda were bizarre items. The headlights were left on. On the back windshield, drawn in pink lipstick, was a pair of lips and an exclamation point. A live black Labrador puppy sat inside. There was a plastic hotel key card, several drink bottles, and a jacket that didn’t belong to Zebb.
Police collected evidence, but nothing tied directly to a suspect. The puppy was adopted by an investigator. Zebb’s mother believed the car was left there deliberately so she or his grandmother or sister would find it. That detail makes my skin crawl.
Years passed with no resolution. Owens remained the last known person to see Zebb alive, but there was no body, no weapon, no confession. A couple claimed they saw someone driving Zebb’s car after he disappeared. The composite sketch resembled Misty Taylor. But leads went nowhere.
The case lay dormant until 2015. That year, Jason Owens was arrested for something else: the murders of Cristie Schoen, her husband J.T. Codd, and their unborn child. He admitted to killing them and dismembering their remains. Suddenly, every detective in Asheville thought again of Zebb Quinn.
Police searched Owens’s property. They found fabric, leather, and hard fragments buried under concrete, along with bags of pulverized lime. Investigators refused to confirm if the fragments were human remains, but it was enough to shake the case loose again.
In July 2017, seventeen years after Zebb vanished, a grand jury indicted Owens for first-degree murder. For his family, it was confirmation of what they had long suspected. But Owens never faced trial for murder.
In 2022, Owens reached a plea deal. He admitted guilt not to murder but to accessory after the fact. Through his attorneys, he told a story. He claimed his uncle, Walter “Gene” Owens, had been hired by Wesley Smith to kill Zebb. Owens said he and Zebb were lured to Pisgah National Forest, supposedly to meet Misty. There, Gene shot Zebb with a .22 rifle. Owens claimed his uncle dismembered and burned the body, and that he helped cover it up.
Gene Owens was dead by then, so the account could not be tested in court. Smith was never charged. The district attorney said the story was shaky, but they lacked the evidence to convict Owens of murder. He received twelve to fifteen years for accessory, to be served alongside his much longer sentence for the Schoen-Codd killings.
The plea legally established that Zebb was murdered, though his body has never been found. For his family, it was an answer but not the answer.
The details still haunt me. The staged car with lipstick scrawls. The page traced to his aunt’s home on the night of a break-in. Owens’s injuries and false phone call. The puppy left alive in the car. Each piece seems like it should fit into a picture, but the picture never resolves.
I keep circling back to the cruelty. Parking the car near where his mother worked feels deliberate, like someone wanted her to be the one to find it. That level of malice tells you something about the mind behind the crime.
Even now, more than two decades later, the case leaves more questions than answers. Did Owens invent the story of his uncle to shield himself? Was Wesley Smith really behind it, or was that just a convenient theory tied to a teenage relationship? Why go to the trouble of staging the car at all?
Legally, the file is closed. Emotionally, it’s not. Zebb was declared dead in 2017, at the age of thirty-six. He would have been in his forties today. Instead, all that’s left is a story that begins with a teenager leaving work and ends in uncertainty.
Asheville has grown since 2000. Tourists fill its breweries and galleries, but locals still remember. They tell you about the boy with the easy smile and the life ahead of him. And they remind you that for some families, closure is only a word.
That’s why I keep returning to this case. It is a reminder of how justice can falter, how evidence can twist into riddles, and how a single night can change everything. Zebb Quinn didn’t make it home, and the reasons why remain locked in the silence of people who never told the full truth.
