The Beauty School Killer: What Really Happened in Wenatchee

0:00 She told her classmates she'd be back in 15 minutes. She walked out to her car on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in a town where everybody knew everybody and she never came back. What investigators found over the next eight months in an apartment on a piece of duct tape on the forearm of a man who sat next to her in class is one of the most unsettling true crime stories to come out of Washington State. [Music] When Atchie Washington is tucked into a valley carved out by the Columbia River on the dry eastern side of the cascades.

0:52 It's about 150 miles from Seattle and it might as well be a different country from Seattle. This is agricultural country, fruit country specifically and the people there are not shy about it. They call themselves the Apple Capital of the world, which is a level of civic commitment that I find pretty impressive. The hillsides are covered with orchard, the economy runs on fruit and the people who grow it. And it's the type of community where a teenager going missing registers across the whole city within hours, not because of any formal alert system, but because that's just how 30,000 people work when everybody is somebody's neighbor. And then across the Columbia River and Douglas County, there is Orondo, which is not even a town.

1:37 It's an unincorporated community of maybe 2,000 people, no traffic light, orchards in every direction and you mostly drive through it because you're headed somewhere else. That is where McKinsey Cowell grew up. McKinsey was born on April 1st, 1992, a senior at Wenatchee High School, a dancer on the school's dance team and the type of person who danced in the hallways between classes because that's just how she moved through the world. She was a light. She was also studying cosmetology at the Academy of Hair Design in Wenatchee and doing some modeling on the side. And her dad read described her schedule as unreal, which tracks because she was juggling morning high school classes, afternoon beauty sessions, dance practice, and still coming home for dinner with their father most nights.

2:24 She was 17 and she was trying to build a life for herself, build a future. Her parents divorced when she was young, but she had worn relationships on both sides and was especially close to her dad. She had a boyfriend named Joaquin and friends who loved her. The one real friction in her life at that moment was with her mother's boyfriend, Joey Fisher. In the day before she disappeared on February 8, 2010, she and Fisher had a serious enough argument that she turned to her mother and said flat out, "It's him or me." That ultimatum was sitting in the air the next morning when she woke up, followed her routine, went to school, and headed to her afternoon session at the hair academy.

3:06 At around 3 in the afternoon, Mackenzie asked a classmate at the Academy of Hair Design whether she needed to sign out if she was only going to be gone about 15 minutes. She was told no. She grabbed her things, walked across the parking lot, got in her car, and drove away. Surveillance cameras caught it. Her classmates assumed that she was going out to grab a coffee or snack, a completely normal Tuesday afternoon thing that nobody would think twice about. The last message she ever sent was to her boyfriend Joaquin. "Hey, what's up?" After that, nothing. By 5.40 that evening, her father could not reach her, and by 8 o'clock, she'd missed her curfew without calling, which was not something Mackenzie did.

3:47 Her family started working through her contact list. Later that same night, a homeowner near a mission ridge in remote Chilin County, about 40 miles from Arondo, called police to report an abandoned car in his driveway. The registration came back to read cowl. Inside, where Mackenzie's purse and some clothing, her phone and debit card were gone. Outside in the dirt, walking away from the car, there was one single set of footprints. The search went aerial immediately, with helicopters covering the terrain around mission ridge, with the community mobilized on the ground and investigators posting a $40,000 reward. On February 13th, a passerby found a body on the bank of the Columbia River near Crescent Bar.

4:32 It's a recreational area, about 20 miles south of Wannatchee. She was fully clothed, feet partially in the water. It was Mackenzie. Without going into great detail of what the autopsy showed, because that's not what this story is about. What was done to her was brutal and deliberate, and evidence suggests that she'd been killed somewhere and brought to that riverbank afterward. The Mackenzie Cowell homicide task force assembled quickly, pulling in four jurisdictions and the FBI. After the following eight months, detectives interviewed more than 800 people, making it the largest coordinated homicide investigation the Wannatchee area had seen in years, if not ever.

5:13 Investigators naturally started with the people closest to Mackenzie. Her boyfriend Joaquin agreed to take a polygraph, was told he failed on one question and was cleared when his alibi held and no physical evidence connected him to anything. And again, that's a good example of why I say never take a polygraph. Here's a guy who's innocent, dealing with the loss of someone that he loved, and he failed a question and no doubt they hammered down on him because of that one failed question, but his alibi cleared him. Joey Fisher, her mother's boyfriend, got the same treatment and the same result. Then the investigation took a long, wrong turn. A woman named Liz Reed, a former drug dealer, turned police informant, came forward saying that two men named Sam Cuevus and Emmanuel Soros had killed Mackenzie.

6:00 That they thought she was a snitch, thought Mackenzie was a snitch, and murdered her to keep her quiet, and that Reed herself had personally watched a snuff film of the killing. What made investigators take her seriously was that she was accurately describing the murder weapon before it had been publicly released. She also produced a ring she claimed belonged to Mackenzie. Mackenzie went into chasing this down, and then it all fell apart. Cuevus and Soros had solid alibis backed by phone records and multiple witnesses. Mackenzie's parents didn't recognize the ring. Reed admitted that she'd never actually seen any snuff film. How she knew that weapon detail remained unexplained to this day.

6:41 In August of 2010, the real lead arrived in the form of a letter from a man named Theo Keys, who was sitting in jail on an indecent exposure charge. Keys wrote that investigators should look at a beauty school classmate of Mackenzie's named Christopher Scott Wilson, 29 years old, who had a documented fixation with death, dead bodies, and serial killers, and a tattoo of Hannibal Lecter on his forearm, a history of working at a funeral home, and an active presence on online serial killer forums. An investigator started asking around, classmates confirmed all of it, and added that Wilson had once walked up behind a female friend at a party, choked her from behind for no apparent reason, and then walked away as if nothing had happened.

7:28 Wilson had come to Wenachi partly to help with his mother's salon. His close friend, Danica Steven, described him as gentle and bookish, a guitar player who wore black eyeliner and chopped thrift stores, a little alternative in a mostly mainstream town. One version of him was probably real, and also on the record from November 2009, three months before Mackenzie disappeared, he had been charged with second degree assault for allegedly choking a woman named Catherine Hall. That case fell apart when the victim could not be located before trial, but the charge existed and the behavioral pattern existed right alongside it. When detective search Wilson's apartment with Lumenall, a chemical that makes blood residue glow under UV light, the carpet lit up, testing confirmed it was Mackenzie Cowell's blood.

8:16 Both her DNA and Wilson's DNA were found on a single piece of duct tape recovered near her body at Corescent Bar. Three witnesses placed a man matching her description near where the car had been abandoned. Wilson had left the beauty school shortly after she did on February 9th and was arrested on October 6th, 2010. His defense attorney was John Henry Brown, who had previously represented Ted Bundy and the barefoot bandit Colton Harris Moore. Brown agreed that the blood volume in the apartment was inconsistently small for killing that violent, that a second unidentified DNA profile appeared on the duct tape and that Wilson's DNA was not on the murder weapon.

8:57 His argument was that the blood had been planted, and here is where when Ache's own history makes that argument harder to dismiss than it might otherwise be. In 1994 and 1995, a local detective named Robert Perez launched an investigation that ended with 43 adults arrested on nearly 30,000 fabricated charges of child sex abuse. Poor families, Sunday school teachers, a pastor, many without private legal counsel pressured into guilty pleas for things that never even happened. Every conviction was eventually overturned. When Brown stood in a chilling county courtroom suggesting police had planted evidence, he was not asking people to imagine something implausible.

9:39 He was asking them to remember something that had actually happened in their very own city. When jury selection began in May of 2012, questionnaires showed that between 80 and 85 percent of prospective jurors already believed Wilson was guilty or had knowledge of suppressed evidence. When Ache had been living inside this case for a couple of years, on May 23rd, 2012, Wilson accepted a plea of guilty to first-degree manslaughter and kidnapping with a sentence of just over 14 years plus community custody and a lifetime no contact order with the Cowell family. He tried to withdraw the plea in 2013, arguing he had taken the deal only because a fair trial was impossible.

10:22 Both the trial court and the Washington Court of Appeals rejected that. On December 11th, 2023, Christopher Scott Wilson walked out of Monroe Correctional Center at 43 years old, still saying he had not killed Mackenzie Cowell. What we're left with is a 17-year-old who told her classmates she'd be back in 15 minutes, whose blood was in someone's apartment whose case never reached a jury and whose father said she was just on the verge of being grown up. Read Cowell has carried that for 15 years. Mackenzie had dinner plans with him on the night she disappeared. Whatever happened between 3 o'clock on February 9th and the banks of Columbia River four days later, only one person fully knows, and as of December 2023, that person is living free.

11:16 Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, Bingeable True Crime Stories. I'm Joe, I'm the host. Hello. And here are a couple of emails from those of you that listen. Hey Joe, my husband and I drove from St. Louis to the Smoky Mountains a few weeks ago, and I decided to finally give your podcast a try after hearing about it from a friend. By the time we got to Knoxville, we listened to so many episodes that we were debating which cases were the most memorable over dinner. Needless to say, you've got two new regular listeners, Rachel and St. Louis Missouri. And here's another one. Hey Joe, I just got back from a family road trip from Dallas to Santa Fe and wanted to tell you that your podcast was one of the highlights of the drive.

11:56 The 10 Minute Format is kind of perfect for road trips. Every episode feels like it's own little chapter. Before we knew it, we'd listen to more than 30 of them. My teenage son started requesting specific episodes, which I honestly didn't see coming. David in Plano, Texas. First of all, thank you both for listening, and second, I could read, I could make a whole episode just reading emails from people who have started listening to the podcast on a drive for summer vacation just this year. There's so many of you, apparently, taking road trips and heading different locations. Most of them to the beach, by the way. Neither one of those families were headed to the beach, but the majority of them, they're in a beach vacation, decided to check out 10 Minute Murder, started binging, and before you know it, they've listened to a whole bunch of them.

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