Zebb Quinn

Two days after Zebb Quinn disappeared, his car turned up in a restaurant parking lot near a hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.

It hadn’t been there long. The headlights were on. And when police looked inside, they found a collection of items so bizarre that, more than two decades later, people are still trying to make sense of them.

There was a live puppy in the car, which nobody in Zebb’s family recognized. There were drink bottles, a jacket that wasn’t Zebb’s, and a plastic hotel room key card. And on the back window, someone had drawn a pair of lips in lipstick, and an exclamation point.

Zebb Quinn was eighteen years old. He was never seen again.

Zebb

Zebb Quinn lived with his mother, Denise, in Asheville, in the mountains of western North Carolina. He was a recent high school graduate, working in the electronics department of the local Walmart and enrolled in an ROTC program. Friends described him as a good-natured, responsible young man who loved his family.

On Sunday, January 2, 2000 — the second day of the new millennium — Zebb finished his shift at Walmart at around nine o’clock at night. A co-worker named Robert Jason Owens had asked him to come along that evening to look at a car Owens was thinking of buying, in the nearby town of Leicester. The two young men left Walmart in separate cars, with Zebb following Owens.

Owens’s Story

According to the account Owens later gave police, the two drove a short distance and stopped at a gas station. Zebb then received a page on his pager. He went to a pay phone to return the call. When he came back, Owens said, Zebb seemed upset. He told Owens he had to go, and that they’d look at the car another day.

Owens said Zebb then drove off in such a hurry that he rear-ended Owens’s vehicle. He didn’t stop. That was the last time Owens said he saw him.

Owens later went to a hospital with injuries that he said were from the accident. He also admitted that he had called Walmart the next day pretending to be Zebb, and told them Zebb was sick and wouldn’t be in.

The Page

When police traced the page that Zebb had supposedly received, they found something deeply strange.

The call had been made from the home of Zebb’s aunt, Ina Ustich. But Ina said she hadn’t been home at the time. She’d been at dinner with a friend. She had no idea who could have made the call from her house. Later, she reported that her home appeared to have been broken into, though nothing was taken.

Who was in Ina Ustich’s house that night, and why did they page Zebb Quinn?

The Car

On January 6, Zebb’s Mazda Protegé was found in the parking lot of a barbecue restaurant, near a hospital. The lipstick lips. The exclamation point. The puppy. The key card. The jacket.

Investigators were never able to explain what any of it meant. Some suggested the items were meant as a message, perhaps a taunt. Some thought they were meant to confuse investigators. The lips on the window were never matched to anyone.

The Long Wait

For many years, there was no break in the case. Zebb’s mother, Denise Quinn, pushed constantly for answers, and believed from the start that Robert Owens knew more than he was saying. Owens was questioned several times. He was never charged.

Then, in 2015, Robert Owens was arrested in connection with the deaths of a couple in Asheville, Kenny and Ashley Ward. In 2017, he pleaded guilty to those murders and was sentenced to life in prison. During that investigation, police searched his property.

On July 10, 2017, a Buncombe County grand jury indicted Owens for the first-degree murder of Zebb Quinn.

The Plea

The case never went to trial. On July 25, 2022, Owens pleaded guilty to a lesser charge: accessory after the fact to first-degree murder. As part of his plea, he claimed that his uncle, who had died in 2017, had killed Zebb at the request of another man. Prosecutors expressed doubt about his account. Owens was sentenced to additional prison time, to run alongside his existing life sentence.

No one else has been charged in Zebb’s death. His body has never been found.

The plea meant that, legally, it was established that Zebb Quinn had been murdered. But it left almost every question about that night unanswered. Who paged Zebb from his aunt’s house? Why? What happened after he left the gas station? Who left his car in that parking lot, with the lipstick, the puppy and the key card? And where is Zebb?

A Mother’s Fight

Denise Quinn spent more than twenty years fighting for her son. She kept his case in the news. She pushed investigators to keep looking, long after the headlines faded. Families like hers are the reason so many cold cases are ever solved at all.