The Beauty School Killer: What Really Happened in Wenatchee

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She told her classmates she'd be back in 15 minutes.

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She walked out to her car on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in a town where everybody knew

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everybody and she never came back.

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What investigators found over the next eight months in an apartment on a piece of duct tape

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on the forearm of a man who sat next to her in class is one of the most unsettling true

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crime stories to come out of Washington State.

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[Music]

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When Atchie Washington is tucked into a valley carved out by the Columbia River on the dry

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eastern side of the cascades.

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It's about 150 miles from Seattle and it might as well be a different country from Seattle.

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This is agricultural country, fruit country specifically and the people there are not

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shy about it.

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They call themselves the Apple Capital of the world, which is a level of civic commitment

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that I find pretty impressive.

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The hillsides are covered with orchard, the economy runs on fruit and the people who grow

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it.

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And it's the type of community where a teenager going missing registers across the whole

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city within hours, not because of any formal alert system, but because that's just how

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30,000 people work when everybody is somebody's neighbor.

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And then across the Columbia River and Douglas County, there is Orondo, which is not even

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a town.

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It's an unincorporated community of maybe 2,000 people, no traffic light, orchards in every

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direction and you mostly drive through it because you're headed somewhere else.

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That is where McKinsey Cowell grew up.

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McKinsey was born on April 1st, 1992, a senior at Wenatchee High School, a dancer on the

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school's dance team and the type of person who danced in the hallways between classes because

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that's just how she moved through the world.

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She was a light.

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She was also studying cosmetology at the Academy of Hair Design in Wenatchee and doing some modeling

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on the side.

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And her dad read described her schedule as unreal, which tracks because she was juggling

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morning high school classes, afternoon beauty sessions, dance practice, and still coming

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home for dinner with their father most nights.

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She was 17 and she was trying to build a life for herself, build a future.

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Her parents divorced when she was young, but she had worn relationships on both sides

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and was especially close to her dad.

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She had a boyfriend named Joaquin and friends who loved her.

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The one real friction in her life at that moment was with her mother's boyfriend, Joey

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Fisher.

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In the day before she disappeared on February 8, 2010, she and Fisher had a serious enough

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argument that she turned to her mother and said flat out, "It's him or me."

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That ultimatum was sitting in the air the next morning when she woke up, followed her

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routine, went to school, and headed to her afternoon session at the hair academy.

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At around 3 in the afternoon, Mackenzie asked a classmate at the Academy of Hair Design

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whether she needed to sign out if she was only going to be gone about 15 minutes.

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She was told no.

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She grabbed her things, walked across the parking lot, got in her car, and drove away.

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Surveillance cameras caught it.

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Her classmates assumed that she was going out to grab a coffee or snack, a completely

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normal Tuesday afternoon thing that nobody would think twice about.

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The last message she ever sent was to her boyfriend Joaquin.

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"Hey, what's up?"

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After that, nothing.

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By 5.40 that evening, her father could not reach her, and by 8 o'clock, she'd missed

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her curfew without calling, which was not something Mackenzie did.

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Her family started working through her contact list.

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Later that same night, a homeowner near a mission ridge in remote Chilin County, about

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40 miles from Arondo, called police to report an abandoned car in his driveway.

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The registration came back to read cowl.

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Inside, where Mackenzie's purse and some clothing, her phone and debit card were gone.

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Outside in the dirt, walking away from the car, there was one single set of footprints.

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The search went aerial immediately, with helicopters covering the terrain around mission

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ridge, with the community mobilized on the ground and investigators posting a $40,000 reward.

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On February 13th, a passerby found a body on the bank of the Columbia River near Crescent

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Bar.

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It's a recreational area, about 20 miles south of Wannatchee.

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She was fully clothed, feet partially in the water.

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It was Mackenzie.

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Without going into great detail of what the autopsy showed, because that's not what this

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story is about.

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What was done to her was brutal and deliberate, and evidence suggests that she'd been killed

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somewhere and brought to that riverbank afterward.

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The Mackenzie Cowell homicide task force assembled quickly, pulling in four jurisdictions and

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the FBI.

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After the following eight months, detectives interviewed more than 800 people, making it the

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largest coordinated homicide investigation the Wannatchee area had seen in years, if not

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ever.

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Investigators naturally started with the people closest to Mackenzie.

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Her boyfriend Joaquin agreed to take a polygraph, was told he failed on one question and was

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cleared when his alibi held and no physical evidence connected him to anything.

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And again, that's a good example of why I say never take a polygraph.

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Here's a guy who's innocent, dealing with the loss of someone that he loved, and he failed

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a question and no doubt they hammered down on him because of that one failed question,

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but his alibi cleared him.

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Joey Fisher, her mother's boyfriend, got the same treatment and the same result.

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Then the investigation took a long, wrong turn.

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A woman named Liz Reed, a former drug dealer, turned police informant, came forward saying

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that two men named Sam Cuevus and Emmanuel Soros had killed Mackenzie.

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That they thought she was a snitch, thought Mackenzie was a snitch, and murdered her to keep

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her quiet, and that Reed herself had personally watched a snuff film of the killing.

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What made investigators take her seriously was that she was accurately describing the murder

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weapon before it had been publicly released.

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She also produced a ring she claimed belonged to Mackenzie.

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Mackenzie went into chasing this down, and then it all fell apart.

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Cuevus and Soros had solid alibis backed by phone records and multiple witnesses.

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Mackenzie's parents didn't recognize the ring.

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Reed admitted that she'd never actually seen any snuff film.

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How she knew that weapon detail remained unexplained to this day.

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In August of 2010, the real lead arrived in the form of a letter from a man named Theo

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Keys, who was sitting in jail on an indecent exposure charge.

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Keys wrote that investigators should look at a beauty school classmate of Mackenzie's

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named Christopher Scott Wilson, 29 years old, who had a documented fixation with death,

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dead bodies, and serial killers, and a tattoo of Hannibal Lecter on his forearm, a history

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of working at a funeral home, and an active presence on online serial killer forums.

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An investigator started asking around, classmates confirmed all of it, and added that Wilson

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had once walked up behind a female friend at a party, choked her from behind for no apparent

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reason, and then walked away as if nothing had happened.

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Wilson had come to Wenachi partly to help with his mother's salon.

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His close friend, Danica Steven, described him as gentle and bookish, a guitar player who

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wore black eyeliner and chopped thrift stores, a little alternative in a mostly mainstream

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town.

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One version of him was probably real, and also on the record from November 2009, three months

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before Mackenzie disappeared, he had been charged with second degree assault for allegedly

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choking a woman named Catherine Hall.

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That case fell apart when the victim could not be located before trial, but the charge

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existed and the behavioral pattern existed right alongside it.

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When detective search Wilson's apartment with Lumenall, a chemical that makes blood residue

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glow under UV light, the carpet lit up, testing confirmed it was Mackenzie Cowell's blood.

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Both her DNA and Wilson's DNA were found on a single piece of duct tape recovered near

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her body at Corescent Bar.

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Three witnesses placed a man matching her description near where the car had been abandoned.

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Wilson had left the beauty school shortly after she did on February 9th and was arrested

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on October 6th, 2010.

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His defense attorney was John Henry Brown, who had previously represented Ted Bundy and

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the barefoot bandit Colton Harris Moore.

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Brown agreed that the blood volume in the apartment was inconsistently small for killing

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that violent, that a second unidentified DNA profile appeared on the duct tape and that

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Wilson's DNA was not on the murder weapon.

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His argument was that the blood had been planted, and here is where when Ache's own history

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makes that argument harder to dismiss than it might otherwise be.

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In 1994 and 1995, a local detective named Robert Perez launched an investigation that ended

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with 43 adults arrested on nearly 30,000 fabricated charges of child sex abuse.

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Poor families, Sunday school teachers, a pastor, many without private legal counsel pressured

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into guilty pleas for things that never even happened.

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Every conviction was eventually overturned.

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When Brown stood in a chilling county courtroom suggesting police had planted evidence, he was

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not asking people to imagine something implausible.

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He was asking them to remember something that had actually happened in their very own city.

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When jury selection began in May of 2012, questionnaires showed that between 80 and 85 percent

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of prospective jurors already believed Wilson was guilty or had knowledge of suppressed evidence.

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When Ache had been living inside this case for a couple of years, on May 23rd, 2012,

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Wilson accepted a plea of guilty to first-degree manslaughter and kidnapping with a sentence

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of just over 14 years plus community custody and a lifetime no contact order with the

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Cowell family.

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He tried to withdraw the plea in 2013, arguing he had taken the deal only because a fair

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trial was impossible.

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Both the trial court and the Washington Court of Appeals rejected that.

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On December 11th, 2023, Christopher Scott Wilson walked out of Monroe Correctional Center

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at 43 years old, still saying he had not killed Mackenzie Cowell.

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What we're left with is a 17-year-old who told her classmates she'd be back in 15 minutes,

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whose blood was in someone's apartment whose case never reached a jury and whose father

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said she was just on the verge of being grown up.

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Read Cowell has carried that for 15 years.

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Mackenzie had dinner plans with him on the night she disappeared.

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Whatever happened between 3 o'clock on February 9th and the banks of Columbia River four days

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later, only one person fully knows, and as of December 2023, that person is living free.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, Bingeable True Crime Stories.

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I'm Joe, I'm the host.

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Hello.

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And here are a couple of emails from those of you that listen.

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Hey Joe, my husband and I drove from St. Louis to the Smoky Mountains a few weeks ago, and

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I decided to finally give your podcast a try after hearing about it from a friend.

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By the time we got to Knoxville, we listened to so many episodes that we were debating which

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cases were the most memorable over dinner.

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Needless to say, you've got two new regular listeners, Rachel and St. Louis Missouri.

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And here's another one.

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Hey Joe, I just got back from a family road trip from Dallas to Santa Fe and wanted to tell

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you that your podcast was one of the highlights of the drive.

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The 10 Minute Format is kind of perfect for road trips.

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Every episode feels like it's own little chapter.

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Before we knew it, we'd listen to more than 30 of them.

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My teenage son started requesting specific episodes, which I honestly didn't see coming.

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David in Plano, Texas.

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First of all, thank you both for listening, and second, I could read, I could make a whole

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episode just reading emails from people who have started listening to the podcast on a drive

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for summer vacation just this year.

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There's so many of you, apparently, taking road trips and heading different locations.

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Most of them to the beach, by the way.

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Neither one of those families were headed to the beach, but the majority of them, they're

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in a beach vacation, decided to check out 10 Minute Murder, started binging, and before

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you know it, they've listened to a whole bunch of them.

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And I really do appreciate it.

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If you're a brand new listener to this podcast, welcome.

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Make sure you hit subscribe.

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You can go to 10minuteMurder.com to get listen links, also links to where you can follow the

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show on social media, and where you can, like they did, send me an email.

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That's at 10minuteMurder.com.

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If you want longer episodes, if you aren't satisfied with the 10 Minute Format of 10 Minute

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Murder, I do a longer podcast.

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It's called True Crime Blueprint.

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It's available in most places that this one is, not all, but most.

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So check it out True Crime Blueprint.

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And that's going to do it.

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That's your episode for today.

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Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder.