Lipstick on the Windshield: The Murder of Zebb Quinn

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

May 28, 2026

Zebb Wayne Quinn was 18 years old, working in the electronics department at a Walmart in Asheville, North Carolina, when he disappeared on the night of January 2, 2000. He had plans to go look at a car for sale with a coworker that evening, plans that ended instead with a strange phone page, a minor traffic accident, and a goodbye that turned out to be permanent. His own car eventually turned up abandoned with a stranger's puppy locked inside and a mocking pair of lips drawn in lipstick across the back windshield. It would take twenty two years, an entirely unrelated dismemberment case, and a guilty plea before the law finally, officially recognized that Zebb had been murdered. His body has never been recovered.

A Naive, Well-Liked Teenager

Zebb was born May 12, 1981, and grew up in Asheville, where he had participated in ROTC at T.C. Roberson High School and was attending Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College with strong grades at the time of his disappearance. He carried an unspecified learning or organizational disability, and those who knew him described him as naive and unusually close to his family, the kind of young man whose disappearance struck everyone around him as completely out of character.

A Car to See in Leicester

On the night of January 2, 2000, Zebb finished his Walmart shift around 9:00 p.m. and met a coworker, Robert Jason Owens, in the parking lot. The two had plans to drive separately out to Leicester so Zebb could look at a car that was for sale. Security camera footage captured both of them stopping at a nearby Eblen Citgo gas station around 9:15 p.m., where they bought sodas before continuing on toward Long Shoals Road in their separate vehicles.

The Page That Changed Everything

Near T.C. Roberson High School, Zebb signaled to Owens with his headlights and explained that he had just received a page and needed to find a payphone to make a call. He drove off alone, and according to Owens's account, returned roughly ten minutes later appearing frantic. In that state, Zebb rear-ended Owens's truck, apologized for the accident, told Owens he could no longer go look at the car as planned that evening, and then drove away. No one who knew him ever heard from him again.

A Second "Accident" That Was Never Reported

Hours later that same night, Owens sought hospital treatment for fractured ribs and a head injury, which he attributed to a second, separate accident he claimed to have been involved in later that evening. No police report was ever filed for this supposed second collision, an inconsistency that would draw scrutiny from investigators once Zebb's disappearance became a formal case.

A Familiar Voice That Wasn't Right

Zebb's mother filed a missing persons report the following afternoon. Two days after that, someone claiming to be Zebb called his workplace to say he was too sick to come in, but the voice on the line sounded unfamiliar to those who took the call. Investigators traced that call to a Volvo manufacturing plant where Robert Jason Owens worked. When confronted, Owens admitted that he had, in fact, been the one to make the call, claiming that Zebb had personally asked him to do it.

A Car With a Puppy Inside

On January 6, 2000, Zebb's light blue Mazda Protege was discovered abandoned in the parking lot of a Little Pigs Barbecue restaurant on McDowell Street, situated next to an Asheville hospital. What investigators found inside and around the vehicle was almost impossible to make sense of. The car's headlights had been left running. Someone had drawn a large pair of lips and two exclamation points on the rear windshield using orange pink lipstick. Inside the car sat a live black Labrador mix puppy, roughly three months old, along with several empty drink bottles, a jacket that did not belong to Zebb, and a plastic hotel key card that investigators were never able to trace to any specific hotel. The driver's seat, notably, had been adjusted to fit someone considerably shorter than Zebb himself. Zebb's mother came to believe the car's location, positioned right next to the hospital where family members worked, had been chosen deliberately so that someone connected to the family would be the one to find it. The abandoned puppy was eventually adopted by one of the investigators working the case.

A Love Triangle Theory

Investigators turned their attention to a young woman named Misty Taylor, someone Zebb had been romantically interested in. Taylor's boyfriend at the time, a man named Wesley Smith described as abusive, had reportedly threatened Zebb after learning about his connection to Taylor. Both Taylor and Smith denied any involvement in Zebb's disappearance, and investigators were never able to establish confirmed connections between them, Owens, and whatever had actually happened that night. A separate witness who reported seeing Zebb's car being driven through downtown Asheville after his disappearance helped police create a composite sketch of the driver, a sketch that investigators noted bore a striking resemblance to Misty Taylor herself. Phone records further complicated the picture, tracing the original page Zebb had received to the home of his own paternal aunt, Ina Ustich, who denied making any such call and separately reported that her own house had been broken into that same night, with items inside rearranged but nothing actually stolen. Ustich claimed she had been dining that evening at the home of Misty Taylor's mother, a gathering that, according to her account, included both Misty and Wesley Smith.

Owens's Own Dark History

The investigation into Zebb's disappearance took an entirely unexpected turn in March 2015, when Robert Jason Owens was arrested in connection with a completely unrelated case: the deaths of Cristie Schoen, a former contestant on Food Network Star, her husband J.T. Codd, and their unborn child. Owens admitted to accidentally running the couple over and pleaded guilty to dismembering their remains afterward, ultimately receiving a sentence of 60 to 75 years without the possibility of parole in 2017. During the investigation into that case, authorities searched Owens's property in June 2015 and discovered fabric, leather materials, and unidentified hard fragments buried beneath a layer of concrete, along with an unknown white powder, metal pieces, and bags that appeared to contain either lime or mortar mix. No confirmation ever emerged connecting these discoveries specifically to Zebb Quinn or his remains, but the parallel to a case involving dismemberment and concealment reignited scrutiny of Owens's account from fifteen years earlier.

A 2018 Disclosure and a 2017 Indictment

On July 10, 2017, seventeen years after Zebb vanished, a Buncombe County grand jury indicted Robert Jason Owens for first-degree murder in his death, a development attributed directly to years of persistent investigative work by detectives who had never let the case go entirely cold. The following year, in 2018, Owens told investigators that a family member of his had actually killed Zebb, then dismembered and burned his remains, potentially in an area known as Bent Creek Experimental Forest. The resulting trial faced repeated delays connected to personnel changes within the prosecuting office and pandemic-related court suspensions.

The Guilty Plea

More than twenty two years after Zebb disappeared, on July 25, 2022, Robert Jason Owens pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, accessory after the fact to first-degree murder. In his account offered as part of that plea, Owens claimed his uncle, Walter "Gene" Owens, who had died in 2017 before ever facing prosecution, had been hired by Wesley Smith to kill Zebb over the love triangle involving Misty Taylor. According to this version of events, Robert and Zebb had both been unknowingly lured out to Pisgah National Forest under false pretenses, expecting to meet Taylor there, only to find Gene Owens waiting instead. Gene, according to Robert's account, shot Zebb with a .22 caliber rifle before dismembering and burning his body, with Robert assisting in covering up what had happened afterward. Prosecutors expressed open skepticism toward this account, noting there was insufficient physical evidence directly tying Robert Owens to the actual killing itself. The court nonetheless accepted the plea deal, a legal resolution that formally established, for the first time, that Zebb Quinn had in fact been murdered, even in the complete absence of his recovered remains. Owens received a sentence of twelve and a half to fifteen and three quarter years, to be served concurrently with the effectively life-length sentence he was already serving for the Schoen family killings.

What's Left Unresolved

Walter "Gene" Owens, the man Robert Owens named as Zebb's actual killer, died in 2017 without ever facing charges connected to the case. Wesley Smith, accused in Robert's account of ordering the killing over a jealous dispute involving Misty Taylor, has never been arrested. Zebb Quinn's body has never been found, and while his murder is now a legally established fact rather than merely a working theory, the full and complete circumstances of what actually happened to him on that January night in 2000 remain only partially understood, resting largely on the account of a man already serving a life sentence for an entirely different set of killings.

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