The Beauty School Killer: What Really Happened in Wenatchee

In February 2010, 17-year-old Mackenzie Cowell disappeared from the Academy of Hair Design in Wenatchee, Washington, and four days later her body was found on the banks of the Columbia River. The homicide investigation that followed became the largest multi-agency case the region had seen in years, eventually drawing in the FBI and zeroing in on a 29-year-old beauty school classmate named Christopher Scott Wilson, a man with a Hannibal Lecter tattoo on his forearm and a history that made investigators stop and take a very long pause. What started as a missing person report in a small apple-farming town turned into a murder case full of fake informants, a high-profile defense attorney, DNA evidence on duct tape, and a conviction that still sparks debate online today. This is a story about a driven teenager with dinner plans, a man whose obsessions lived right out in the open, a community with a long memory about being burned by the law, and a plea deal that left everybody holding something that felt more like a question mark than an answer. He walked out of prison in December 2023. He still says he didn't do it.

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