Mackenzie Cowell

0:00 Hi, I'm Rich and I'm Tina. If there's one thing we've learned in over twenty years of marriage, it's. That some days you'll feel like killing your husband, and. Some days you'll feel like killing your wife. Welcome to Love Mary Kill. Hey you, Tina, Hey Rich. How are you today? I'm good? How are you? I am doing good. I'm happy to be in the recording studio here with you for the next two or three hours. Yeah, it takes longer than people think. It's fun, though we could spend quality time together.

0:40 I haven't seen you yet today. You look good. You're looking good, you have good color. Thanks, you look good. At your face. Light blue shirt on. Well, I really like your yellow shirt. You're looking very bright and spring like, even though it's not that spring like outside. It's a nice no, it's a lovely spring day. Yeah sixty three. Yeah, you're right, yesterday was a little dreary. But before we go any further, we've and remiss in congratulating the champions of our Love Mary Madness NCAA tournament. It was done a while ago. We talked about it. It was fun. It's May. Yeah. Yeah, but we should give a shout out to our winners. Our women's bracket winner was Jennifer H. Men's bracket winner was Zachary M and our overall winner. The best overall score for both the men's and women's was Philip A. Congratulations.

1:23 Truths that we have some male listeners or were these husbands of our email listener? I don't know, I know we Well, how about the worst bracket? They deserve a call out too, Okay. I didn't. I didn't want to embarrass anybody, but the. Most anyone has anything to be embarrassed. The most disastrous bracket for the women's was Luisa L. And the most disastrous bracket for the men's was Brittany H. Congratulations. We went on a little adventure yesterday to Irish Hills, Michigan. So on the bonus episode that we recorded a few days ago, we talked about Irish Hills because the couple involved were from there. It's about forty five. Minutes from us, exactly forty five minutes from yes. Little kind of touristy sort of town. I used to go there all the time as a kid, and it was a lot of fun. They had like miniature golf courses and kind of these cheesy roadside attractions. It's kind of become a little bit of a ghost town over the last several years. But we talked about the mystery spot and how you had never been to a mystery spot.

2:20 And because every time we drive by a mystery spot, you're like, oh, we don't need to stop, we need to keep we need to keep going. Exactly, we've got time to make it to our destination. But our dear friend Adrian sent us a note and said the mystery Spot in Irish Hills is for sale. Yeah, and we were like, well, we got to go, we got to go check it out. Maybe we should buy it. Right, you were very serious about potentially buying the mystery Spot, which is not called the Mystery Spot, it's. Called the Mystery Hill. Yeah, there is mystery spot is the one up in northern. Michigan, but by Mechanos City. So we drove out there and it was closed. Yeah, but we broke in. Yeah, here's a question for you. Would you have broken And if I didn't insist we broke in, I think.

3:02 I would have because it was pretty like there weren't a lot of people around. There was it wasn't hard to get out, it was just walking, stepping over a you know chain across the gate, you know, of the parking lot. And it wasn't like an indoor attraction. It was sort of most of it was kind of outdoors. So we walked through it, and. We did walk through the Mystery Spot, which was really fun. I was kind of surprised how fun it was. It only it only takes like literally five minutes. But there was a museum of curiosities. We didn't get to go. We didn't. I peeked in and it looked kind of like what you see a lot and. But the but the house itself was like you know, it's like built all like tilted, and it gives you this weird sense of like you're you can't stand up straight. Really, it was cool.

3:45 I think it's because we're old, but I was. It was. We were laughing a lot because we literally could not see straight and stand up straight. Yeah. I don't think we're going to buy it. I don't think we're going to buy it, sadly, I mean, if it was a good investment, it was actually in pretty good shape. But yeah, it was a fun little detour. Yeah, and then we went to the Big Boy for dinner. Yeah, we had a dinner at the Big Boy. Yeah, I think that's about all. I don't We did it. It was a fun day. Was glad that we did that. I have a snack for you. Would you like my snack? Yeah? Of course? All right. Well, today where our case is takes place in Wenatchi, Washington, which is the apple capital of the world, So of course I had to make something with apples in it. I found her a little recipe on the Pioneer Woman website for basically an apple tart but made with a puff pastry. Really, it's super simple.

4:31 Okay, I love It's Reed Drummond, right, I don't know, I don't know. It's Pioneer Woman. Yeah, I love the Pioneer Woman. She's a redhead. Oh okay, cool? And so I made that, and I made some caramel sauce, some butter milk carme yep, I made the one that you make all the time. And so that's one of my favorite recipes. So sure if you've never made it's like the buttermilk syrup. Is that what it is? The exact same recipe. We'll post the recipes, Okay. Yeah, I highly recommend you make it. All right, should we give this a try. Yeah, how did you like the apple tart? It was quite tasty. Oh good, I'm glad you kind of apples did you use? I used the honeycrisp apple for it. Super simple recipe.

5:13 It's just a frozen puff pastry, an apple, some brown sugar, and some lemon juice. I would probably give it like a seven and a half out of ten. It doesn't have a ton of flavor, but the caramel syrup I would give a ten out of ten. Yeah, that's my favorites. Thank you so much. Sure, you're such a good little cook. I do my best. Today. We're going to tell the story of Mackenzie Cowl. Before I start. This episode contains descriptions of violent crime, including graphic details of the murder of a minor. Please listen with care and this is a recommendation from Sarah from Sioux Falls. Thank you Sarah for the recommendation. On the afternoon of Tuesday, February ninth, twenty ten, a seventeen year old girl named Mackenzie Cowl told her classmates at the Wenatchi Academy of Hair Design that she was stepping out for a fifteen minutes. She gathered her things, walked out to the parking lot, got in her car, and drove away. She never came back.

6:07 What followed was one of the more disturbing cases in the recent history of Washington State. A murder that was brutal even by the standards of violent crime, an investigation full of dead ends and false leads, a mysterious informant whose story was almost too strange to believe, and a suspect who had been hiding in plain sight for years. Mackenzie Cowell was born in April nineteen ninety two, the youngest of three children, and by every account, a young woman who packed more into a day than most people could manage in a week. That year, her schedule would have exhausted most adults. High school until noon, cosmetology classes until five, dance rehearsals, and workouts squeezed into whatever time was left. Her father, Reid, described her as driven, vibrant, a strong young woman who was on the verge of being a grown up, and then she vanished. I want to start by talking about the city of Winatchee, Washington.

7:00 It's a small city, only about thirty two thousand people. At the time of Mackenzie's disappearance, but the years before Mackenzie's disappearance saw a number of events that led the Los Angeles Times to call it the little town of Horrors in a nineteen ninety five article, So I thought it was worth going down a little bit of a rabbit hole. Whenachie sits at the geographical center of Washington State, in a valley carved out by the Columbia River, flanked on both sides by the Cascade Mountain Range, It's apple country. In fact, it's referred to as the apple capital of the world, with orchards running up into the hills. Many of the same families have farmed the same land for generations. There's a main street and a diner, and a brick courthouse, and a feeling that things don't change much here. In nineteen ninety a publication called The Raiding Guide to Life in America's Small Cities named Wanatchi the fourth best micropolitan area in the entire country. A few years later, it was on the cover of USA Weekend magazine as the winner of Make a Difference Day. Hundreds of volunteers painting buildings, picking up trash along the river, lawyers rolling up their sleeves alongside service club members. The Chamber of Commerce printed up tourists brochures. The slogan they landed on was Winatchi Land of Dreams. Sounds pretty idyllic, right, But then in the summer of nineteen ninety four, a series of events hit the valley so fast and so hard that the local paper eventually ran a headline that said, simply bad news beyond imagination. First, a wildfire burned nearly two hundred thousand acres of the Wenatchee National Forest and destroyed thirty

8:32 nine homes. Then eleven people were killed in a single highway collision two miles north of town. Then two twelve year old boys shot and killed a migrant farm worker on the banks of the Columbia, firing eighteen rounds into his body after he threw a rock at them. Soon after that, Rita Huffman and her fifteen year old daughter Mandy were brutally stabbed, killed, and mutilated in East Winatchie by a man who was obsessed with werewolves. Obsessed with werewolves? Does this have anything to do with Twilight. Not that I know of. I think it's just a sick man who he said he wanted to be the world's greatest serial killer. And I think he just killed those two people and then he got caught. But he saw himself. He said he saw himself as a werewolf stalking his prey.

9:16 Well, that is crazy. And then in the spring of nineteen ninety five, what would become one of the most controversial criminal investigations in Washington State history came unraveling into the open. It started when a detective named Robert Perez drove his thirteen year old foster daughter around town in his patrol car while she pointed out houses and buildings where she claimed children had been abused. Perez had recently been assigned to investigate sex crimes after a brief training course. He had a prior performance review noting that he likes having power over people. On their drive around town, which locals would eventually call the Parade of Homes, Perez's foster daughter identified twenty two locations where she said that children had been abused. What followed was a catastrophe. Forty three adults were arrested on nearly thirty thousand charges involving sixty children. The accused were overwhelmingly poor, many with intellectual disabilities. Confessions were later found to have been coerced. A pastor who publicly criticized the investigation, was arrested five days later, accused of hosting child sex orgies in the church basement. He was eventually acquitted, with one juror saying it wasn't a difficult decision at all.

10:28 Dona Perez ultimately recanted, saying her foster father had pressured her convictions were overturned. The last person imprisoned was finally freed in two thousand and the city paid out millions in settlements. So there was no voracity whatsoever to that claim. Apparently not Wow. A forensic psychologist later called it perhaps the worst example ever of a state coercing children into falsely accusing their parents and neighbors of crimes that they didn't commit. So this is crazy, and this town is you know, like I said, thirty some thousand people. All of these things had happened in the last fifteen years before this case. But it just seems like an overwhelming amount of tragedy and horrific crimes.

11:09 That reminds me of the McMartin preschool trial that we talked about. In the Susan and Felix Polk case, a couple of years ago. That's a wild episode first off, if you haven't listened to that one. But just the preschool trial was insane, one of the longest trials in US history, and it went on for years and years. But I'm similar to your case. Winacchi had been through things before, and with Mackenzie's disappearance it would go through things again. Mackenzie Nicole Cowell was born in April first, nineteen ninety two, the youngest of three children. She grew up splitting her time between two homes, her father, Read's place in Rondo, a small community just north of Winatchi on the Columbia River, and her mother, Wendy's home in Winnatchi itself. That arrangement was the result of a difficult divorce when Mackenzie was seven years old, contentious enough that her pa parents had taken out restraining orders against each other at one point.

12:03 It wasn't an easy childhood dynamic, but by all accounts, Mackenzie didn't let it define her. She was a kid who threw herself into things. She danced seriously, not just as a hobby. She was a member of the Appaulettes, the dance team at Winachi high school, and she trained on top of that at two independent dance studios. She also modeled and worked out regularly at the gym. She started dating her boyfriend, Joaquin Vilasano. Do you think that's right? Nop? When he was fifteen when she was fifteen. Her father Reid, described her as driven and vibrant, a strong young woman who was at seventeen, just on the verge of figuring out who she was going to be. That sense of purpose showed up in her schedule too. She had enrolled in a voccasional cosmetology program that let her earn high school credits through real job training, which is how she ended up spending her afternoons at the Weinachi Academy of Hair Design. A typical day started with high school classes at seven thirty in the morning, running through noon, and then continued at the salon until after five. After that there was dance, the gym, and everything else she had going on. It was a lot, deliberately so. Her home life had one significant source of tension. Her mother, Wendy, had a boyfriend named Joey Fisher, and Mackenzie couldn't stand him, and the feeling was mutual. The night before she disappeared February eighth, twenty ten, the two of them got into a massive argument. Mackenzie gave her mother an ultimatum it was him or her. The next afternoon, she went to

13:33 cosmetology class and never came home. Tuesday, February ninth, twenty ten, was a normal afternoon at the Wenatchee Academy of Hair Design. Students were at their stations working hard. Mackenzie was there doing what she did every weekday, putting in her hours towards a cosmetology license. In a future she had already started planning out. So she planned to be a hair stylist, I believe so. At around three o'clock, she told her classmates that she was staidy upping out for fifteen minutes. She didn't give any reason. She gathered her things, walked out through the front of the building to the parking lot, got in her car, and drove away at three oh one pm. All of that was captured on surveillance video. The only sign of Mackenzie that came after that was at three twenty six pm when she sent a text to her boyfriend Joaquin. It just said hey, he replied.

14:21 At three forty two with the same and that was the last recorded activity on her phone. By early evening, a rancher noticed a red Sedan sitting abandoned near his driveway in the remote Pitcher Canyon area, several miles outside of town. He didn't think too much of it at first, but by eight o'clock the rancher called the police. So it's February, so by eight pm it's probably quite dark. Yeah, definitely. A little before ten, an officer ran the license plate and contacted Reid Cowell, who said that his daughter was missing. Reid and Joqueen drove out to the scene together. Mackenzie's purse was in her car, along with her gym, clothes, her keys and cell phone were gone. On investigators noted something else at the scene, a single set of footprints leading away from the vehicle and heading down Pitcher Canyon Road in the direction of town. I should have mentioned this earlier, but when you were talking about Joey Fisher, that was the name of her mom's boyfriend, right. Was Joey ever violent with Mackenzie or Wendy, Not.

15:19 That I read about. I never read about any incidents where the police came out or anything like that. From what I could gather, it was just that Mackenzie and he just hated each other and kind of went at it, But I don't think there was any violence. For four days, nobody knew where Mackenzie was. Search efforts got underway, and Mackenzie's disappearance rippled through Wanatchi the way these things do in smaller cities. People talked and they worried. Her family was frantic. Read Cowell and Joaquin were out looking, and the police were following the few leads they had. Then, on the afternoon of February thirteenth, a passerby walking along the banks of the Columbia River near Crescent Bar made a horrible discovery. Crescent Barr is a small resort community near the city of Quincy, about twenty five miles southeast of Winatchi. It sits right on the river. The passerby spotted a body in the shallow water near the shoreline.

16:13 It was Mackenzie, fully clothed, still wearing her beauty school uniform, her feet in the water. Her body was partially submerged roughly fifty to seventy five yards from a vacant house that was listed for sale. The autopsy told a brutal story. Mackenzie had been manually strangled, she had suffered blunt forest trauma to the head, and her throat had been slashed. The official cause of death was determined to be a combination of manual strangulation and the deep stab wound to her neck. And if that wasn't bad enough, whoever killed her had attempted to amputate one of her arms after she was dead, an effort that was unsuccessful. The murder weapon, a kitchen knife, was found lodged in her shoulder. The autopsy confirmed that she had not been sexually assaulted and that there were no drugs or alcohol in her system.

16:58 Near her body, Investigators collected several items, including a piece of duct tape containing blood matching Mackenzie's, as well as an unidentified male DNA profile and a second kitchen knife, part of a limited cutlery set sold at a store in Whanatchi called stans Mary mart. Police quietly held the murder weapon information back from the public, keeping it in reserve to help weed out false confessions. There was also a plastic bag that ultimately yielded nothing useful. Mackenzie's keys, cell phone, and debit card were never found. That is such a brutal, heartbreaking crime. And to take place in the city where it sounds like it was like where we live, a nice, quiet town, and I can't imagine how devastated the community must have been.

17:42 Absolutely and just you know, a young girl seventeen, I think she was close to being eighteen, and just you know, on the verge of adulthood and starting out her life just so so tragic. It sounds like Mackenzie had a really good head on her shoulders and she knew what she wanted out of life and was willing to work hard to get it. We'll be bad after a break. The investigations started close to home. That's just statistics. The people most likely to have harmed her are the people already in her life. So in the days and weeks after Mackenzie's body was found, police turned their attention to the men closest to her. The first was Joaquin Villisano, her boyfriend of nearly two years. He was interviewed and at some point he was polygraphed twice. In fact, he failed one specific question on the second test, whether he knew who had killed Mackenzie or knew what had happened to her. That's not a small thing, and investigators took it seriously. But when they dug into his alibi, it held up completely. Joaquin had been at work all day on February ninth. His coworkers confirmed it, and so did his phone records. Police cleared him one hundred percent. I wasn't able to learn a lot about Joaquin and his relationship with Mackenzie. All I know is they were dating for about two years, going back to when they were like fifteen or sixteen. He was in the forty eight Hours episode that I watched for the show, and he seemed like a very nice young man. He seemed like he really was worried about her when this happened, and

19:12 was really doing everything he could to try to find her. The failed polygraph question is kind of interesting. We do know that live detectors aren't one hundred percent accurate, so it's possible that he was just nervous. You said he had to take it twice, but you only mentioned a failed question on this second test, So why did he have to take it twice? You know, I would imagine they still had doubts and that he, you know, he was the closest person to her, so I'm sure they were very suspicious of him in the beginning, or. Maybe the first test was inconclusive. That could be as well. Yeah. The next person on the list was Joey Fisher, the boyfriend of Mackenzie's mother, the man that Mackenzie had told her mother she couldn't stand the argument the night before her disappearance. Made him an obvious early candidate, and he did have a minor criminal history, which didn't help his case. The police searched his home in Winatchi and took some items in for testing, but Fisher, like Joaquin, had a verified alibi. He had been at work miles away on the day that Mackenzie was murdered. There was no physical evidence connecting him to the crime, and three independent witnesses had reported seeing a thin, dark haired man walking away from the area where Mackenzie's car was abandoned that afternoon. Fisher was light complexed with blonde or reddish gray hair, he didn't come close to matching that description. Mackenzie's other family members, her parents, her brothers, were looked at briefly and ruled out just as quickly.

20:36 Their whereabouts confirmed by alibis, phone records, and witness statements. By the time Spring arrived, the people closest to Mackenzie had all been cleared. Investigators had a body, a brutal crime scene, and no real suspect. They were going to need something else, and that something else arrived in the form of a woman named Liz Reid, identified in court documents as confidential Informant One's zero zero two. Reid was a college student, a self described former drug dealer and prescription pill user, and notably a police informant with a track record. She had previously helped the DEA take down four narcotics traffickers in the Seattle area. When she came forward with information about Mackenzie Cowle's murder, investigators had reason to take her seriously. Her story was detailed and specific.

21:25 She claimed that two local drug dealers, Emmanuel Buddha Seros and Sam Kuavs, had killed Mackenzie in a case of mistaken identity. According to Reed, the men believed that Mackenzie was a police informant from the drug world and had decided to silence her. She described the attack in granular detail, four men overpowering Mackenzie, getting into her car driving away while others followed in a green jeep Cherokee. She said they took her to a bluff overlooking Crescent Bar, choked her and put her body in the river, and then she mentioned the snuff film. Reid claimed the men had filmed the murder and that she had personally seen the footage.

22:05 That alone would have been extraordinary, but what really got investigator's attention was something else. Reid was able to describe the murder weapon before that information had been released to the public. She also led police to a secluded bluff near Crescent Bar, where she said that she had found a silver ring that she claimed had belonged to Mackenzie. She said that Saros had sent her to the murder site to find the ring. So where to believe that four drug dealers killed Mackenzie using knives from Stan's marry mart yep. That is Liz Reid's story in a nutshell. And you said that there was one eyewitness who saw a man with dark hair, but only one man with dark hair.

22:46 There were three witnesses who saw somebody walking on the road like away from where her car had been found. We don't know if that person was connected or not, but that yes, they saw one person walking away and there was one set of footprints coming from her car as well. So yeah, the story that Liz told was on the surface, a remarkably compelling tip, but it didn't hold up. Detective John Cruse said, I personally took that ring that she found. I showed it to Read Cowl, I showed it to Wendy Cowell. I showed it to Mackenzie's boyfriend. None of them recognized that ring at all. Testing found no DNA on the ring. Saros and Kuavis both produced solid alibis phone records and witness statements, placing them at work in Winatchi at the time of the murder.

23:33 Investigators tapped their phones that had Reid call them repeatedly, fishing for anything incriminating, but they got nothing, and Reid herself began to unravel. She recanted the snuff film story. Then she said her story about the murder was true, but the film didn't exist. Then she changed her mind again and said it did exist. Within a few months of coming forward, her credibility was in tatters. There was one odd footnote. Investigators collected cigarette button at the bluff where Reid had led them, and the DNA on those butts did match Sam Quavis. That was never explained, But a man smoking at a spot near a river isn't evidence of murder. And by the summer of twenty ten, the police had moved on. They were back to square one.

24:17 And then six months after Mackenzie's murder, a letter arrived. The cigarette butt seems like hard evidence to dismiss. I agree, But at the same time, it was not at the site of Mackenzie's body. It was on a bluff overlooking the river, so it was nearby, but it wasn't right at the site. And I'm sure this is an area that people would hang out at and smoke cigarettes, and Liz led them to that site, saying that, you know, it might have had some importance to Liz, like maybe she had been there with these guys before or something like that. So that's the only thing I can think of. But you're right, it is a little bit pausible. The letter that gave police a break in the case came from Oregon. It came from a man named Theodor Keys THEO to the people who knew him. He was serving time in an organ prison when he decided to write to investigators working the Cowl case. He had a former friend that he thought they should know about. That friend was Christopher Scott Wilson. Keyes had several things to tell them. Wilson, he wrote, had been attending the Winatchee Academy of Hair Design at the same time as Mackenzie. He had a deep, consuming fascination with death, dead bodies, and serial killers. Not the casual, morbid curiosity that a lot of people have, but something more intense and more deliberate than that. And then there was something that had happened at a party a few weeks before Mackenzie disappeared. Wilson had, without warning or apparent reason, grabbed a female friend by the throat and choked her. Then he let her go and acted as if nothing had happened. Investigators took the letter seriously,

25:49 in part because the choking incident could be verified. They tracked down the woman who confirmed the story. That corroboration mattered. It meant that Keyes wasn't just spinning a tail. When they went back through their files, they found something else. Earlier in the investigation, an anonymous tip had come in from an employee at the beauty school. That tipster had told police that Wilson once said he had enjoyed working at a funeral home because, and this is a direct quote, he got to cut people up. At that time it hadn't risen to the top of the pile, but now read alongside Key's letter, it landed differently. In August twenty ten, investigators brought Wilson and a number of other beauty school students in for interviews. They said it was routine. They were just talking again with everyone who may have known Mackenzie.

26:37 Wilson was cooperative. He sat down with detectives and, at their request, provided a voluntary DNA swab. The swab went to the state crime Lab, and when the results came back, they found that Wilson's DNA profile was consistent with the unidentified male DNA that had been recovered from the duct tape found near Mackenzie's body. Six months after McKenzie was found in the Columbia River, investigators finally had a suspect. Was this Wilson guy at the beauty school on the day of Mackenzie's disappearance. He sure was, But did he leave when Mackenzie left? We will talk about that inn just a minute. Christopher Scott Wilson was twenty nine years old at the time of Mackenzie's murder. He had grown up in the Seattle suburbs, the son of a single mother named Kathleen Zornz, who worked as a flight attendant, a business owner, and a hairstylist. His biological father was never in the picture.

27:30 When Chris was young, his mother married a man named Rick Wilson, who adopted him. By all accounts, it was a stable, loving arrangement. Then, when Chris was around sixteen, Rick died in an accident. Kathleen would later say that it was seeing his stepfather's body that first sparked Chris's interest in the funeral industry. Whether that's the whole explanation or just part of it, something seemed to shift in him around that time. He spent his teenage years in Shellan, Washington, a small town on the lake of the same name, about thirty miles from Wenatchee. His mother owned a local skate and bike shop, and Chris was deep in the skateboarding scene. In his early twenties, he joined the military, but received a medical discharge not long after. A period of his life that he didn't talk about warmly. He drifted through jobs, spent time working at funeral homes in the Wenatchee area, and by his own admission, didn't really know what he wanted to do with himself. He dreamed somewhat vaguely of being in a band. His colleagues at the funeral homes remembered him as unsettling. At least one employer let him go for what he described as inappropriate behavior that made people uncomfortable.

28:39 I should say that this funeral director said that Wilson didn't do anything explicitly really bad, but obviously he made him uncomfortable enough that he let him go. Is there any implication there that it had something to do with the bodies? Yes, I believe so. Then there was an anonymous tip that had come into police early in the investigation that Wilson had told a coworker he enjoyed the funeral homework because he got to cut people off. Whether he said it as a joke or meant it seriously, it wasn't the kind of thing that was easy to forget. His interest outside of work ran in a consistent direction. He spent significant time on Internet forums dedicated to serial killers. He loved dark art, and horror films, and was devoted to the television show Dexter, a show about a forensic blood spatter analyst who moonlights as a serial killer. Chris also had a tattoo of a fictional serial killer, Hannibal Lecter on his forearm. What is a disturbing set of facts, isn't it?

29:37 It is? I think his family In the episode of forty eight Hours I watched, they tried to portray him as just, you know, someone who didn't fit in with kind of the small town someone who's a little more like Emo maybe, and just you know, he was just kind of an odd guy that didn't fit in. But a lot of these things are pretty seen when you. Grab them all together. But sure, there's plenty of people who have Sure, I was going to say tattoo of Hannibal Lectu, that's. Probably that's a choice. Yeah, we watched Dexter and we liked it. There were two incidents involving mannequins that people who knew him tended to remember. While working at a good will store in Ellensburg, he retrieved a discarded mannequin from a dumpster, took it home, dismembered it, painted it to look like a murdered body, and posted photographs of it online. Some friends offered a different version of events. They said he had found it already in that condition and called the police. Bought the story stuck to him regardless. Why would he call the police if he found a mannequin?

30:34 I don't know, you know, I hadn't thought of that. That's a really good question. The second incident happened at the Academy of Hair Design during a Halloween styling contest. While other students decorated their mannequin heads with creative hair and makeup, Wilson used a straight razor to peel the skin off his mannequin's face. A classmate who witnessed it said it deeply disturbed her. I'm not sure what the mannequins that you use in hairstyling school what they really look like. If it feels like real skin, I'm picturing my Barbie head that I had, yeah, you know, back in like third grade. But do you think it must be kind of like real skin if you. I really don't know. It must have some sort of layer on it that could be peeled off. But whatever it was, it was disturbing to his classmates. Understandably.

31:17 So. Yeah. By his late twenties, his mother had bought a hair salon in Wanatchi, and Wilson had enrolled at the Academy of Hair Design, one of only three male students in the program. That was how he ended up in the same classroom as seventeen year old Mackenzie Cowell. His interest, as you've described them, seem like he's more interested on like the funeral side of things and working in a funeral parlor. Was his interest in doing hair to do them of the deceased? You know, it's a good question. It could be, but it sounds to me more like his mom bought a hair salon, and so it sounded to me like he had been a little bit lost and sort of drifting without direction. So this maybe he saw this as an opportunity, like, Hey, my mom's got this hair salon. If I graduate and become a hairstylist, I could work at her. Swan So that would be my guest, But it's a good point.

32:06 He may have envisioned that for himself as well. When Christopher Wilson sat down with investigators in August twenty ten and handed over a voluntary DNA swab, he was calm, cooperative, even there was nothing in his demeanor to suggest that he was particularly worried about what that swab might show. In September twenty third, twenty ten, the State Crime Lab delivered its findings. Wilson's DNA profile was consistent with the unidentified male genetic material recovered from the duct tape found near Mackenzie's body at Crescent Bar. It wasn't a definitive match, as the profile was partial, but it was pretty close. One out of every one forty seven Caucasian men possessed the profile that was found. Christopher Wilson was now the prime suspect in the murder of Mackenzie Cowell.

32:53 So there's one out of every thousand or so men Caucasian men in a city of thirty thousand, So that means there were at most thirty people that could have matched that profile in that town. Obviously could have been somebody from outside, but that gives you an idea of the odds. Untill there were thirty people that could have matched that DNA profile, Investigators went back and looked at everything they knew about his movements. On the afternoon of February ninth, with fresh eyes. What they found was troubling. Wilson had been at the Academy of Hair Design that afternoon. Surveillance footage showed him leaving the building at three o two pm, just seventy two seconds after Mackenzie had walked out to the car. He had exited through a different door, which is why it hadn't initially raised any flags. A traffic camera had captured Mackenzie's car heading west on Kitta Tasks towards Wilson's apartment. After three o two. Wilson never returned to class. His whereabouts for the rest of the afternoon were entirely unaccounted for. His mother tried to fill in part of the gap. She told investigators that Chris had swung by her house that afternoon to pick up a plate of cupcakes, But that was over six months ago, and it accounted for all only a few minutes at most.

34:01 It didn't come close to constituting an alibi for the hours that followed. Between three h two and three thirty three that afternoon, Wilson had sent four text messages to his on again, off again girlfriend, Tessa Shyloman, and from three thirty three to three point fifty his phone went unanswered. It's unclear who was actually trying to call him during this time, but the articles I read said that, you know, people had tried to call him and he didn't answer during that time. Shortly before four o'clock, he called a friend to ask if he could borrow their car starting at four pm, despite the fact that he had his own vehicle. The friend said that he could borrow his car until five, but Chris said he needed it longer than that. Ultimately, it's not clear whether he actually borrowed the car or not.

34:44 None of that proved anything on its own, but taken together, it painted a picture of a man who had left the same building as Mackenzie within seventy two seconds of her departure. He had no alibi for the hours that followed, and had behaved in ways that were difficult to explain innocently. On October sixth, twenty ten, police to ask Wilson to come in for another interview. They asked him a direct question, had he ever been to Crescent Bar. He said no. They arrested him on the spot. Detective John Cruz noted that Wilson showed no emotion when the cuffs went on. He stared blankly and said quietly that he needed a lawyer. He was charged with second degree murder and held on one million dollars bail. Why second degree murder and not first I.

35:29 Don't know for sure, but I think in a lot of cases that police start with a lower charge because you only need probable cause to make an arrest, whereas you need reasonable doubt to have a conviction. So they might have started with just second degree murder while they continued to investigate to see if they had enough evidence to really raise it to a more serious charge. Gotcha, we'll be back. After a break. With Wilson in custody, investigation turned their attention to the people around him, and the person who kept coming up was Tessa Shyloman, is on again, off again girlfriend twenty two years old, who had been woven into the events of February ninth in ways that were hard to ignore.

36:14 The phone records alone were striking between three h two and six pm on the afternoon Mackenzie vanished. Tessa and Wilson had been in contact eight separate times, calls and texts back and forth during the precise window when Mackenzie had disappeared and Wilson's whereabouts were unaccounted for. That evening, at around nine ten pm, Tessa called her current boyfriend, not Wilson. She was seeing someone else at the time, a man who lived in Quincy, not far from the Crescent Bar, and she called him. She was in a panic. Something really, really bad has happened. She told him, please pray for me. In the days that followed, people who saw Tessa noticed something off about her. She briefly visited an ex boyfriend's home to pick up some belongings, and he described her as agitated and fidgety. She left after twenty minutes without actually taking anything. When investigators later interviewed her about all of this, Tessa told them she had no memory whatsoever of anything that had happened between February ninth and February thirteenth. But the most disturbing evidence involving Tessa didn't come from interviews or phone records. It came from Wilson's computer. When investigators examined the hard drive, they found photographs and videos that stopped them cold. There was a photo of Tessa lying on the floor of Wilson's apartment, posed as if she were dead, positioned right next to a brownish stain on the carpet. When asked about it, she gave two different explanations at different times, once saying she had passed out drunk, another time saying that Wilson

37:46 had simply asked her to lie there for the picture. Then there were the videos recorded in late June twenty ten, several months after mackenzie's murder, around the time that Wilson was moving out of his apartment. The footage showed Tessa and Wilson walking through the empty space together, the camera periodically zooming in on the stain on the carpet. At one point, Wilson asked if the room looked clean. Tessa's response, caught clearly on the recording, was clean for considering what's happening, Yes, I think it's clean. In December twenty ten, Tessa Shilman was arrested in Tumwater, Washington, and charged with misdemeanor criminal assistance, making false statements, and obstructing a public officer. However, the charges weren't related to McKenzie's case. It was a completely separate case in neighboring Grant County. When she came in for her initial police interviews, she arrived, accompanied oddly by Wilson's grandfather. I wasn't able to find details about this other case, but whatever was going on in Tessa's life, this was apparently not her first time being on the wrong side of the law.

38:54 Was she a suspect in Mackenzie's murder. They believed that she at least had a part in cut it up, but they didn't really have enough evidence to prove anything, which is I think why they arrested her on this other charge, which again I don't have the details of, but I think they had enough to at least bring her in so that they could question her. Gotcha with Wilson arrested and Tessa arrested on an unrelated case, investigators needed to build their case. The partial DNA match on the duct tape was significant, but it wasn't airtight. They needed more, and they believed that Moore was sitting in Wilson's former apartment at the Burkhill Complex, the studio he'd been living in at the time of the murder, and that he had quietly vacated in June twenty ten, right around the time he and Tessa were filming those videos.

39:41 There was a problem, though, When investigators first executed a search warrant after Wilson's arrest, they went to the wrong address. Wilson had since moved into the basement of his mother's salon, and that's where they searched first. They found blood in a stairwell, which briefly raised hopes until testing reveal that it belonged to a painter who had cut his hand on the job. It had nothing to do with Mackenzie. They realized their mistake, regrouped, got a new warrant, and went to the Burke Hill apartment. When forensic investigators sprayed the carpet with luminol, the stain lit up the same brownish patch that had appeared in the background of Tessa's photographs. The same stain the camera had slowly zoomed in on in those June videos was glowing under the light. Investigators cut out a section of the carpet and the pad beneath it, and sent both to the state crime lab.

40:33 The results came back conclusive. The blood in the carpet of Christopher Wilson's former apartment belonged to Mackenzie Cowl. It was a significant development. Mackenzie had bled in that room whatever had happened to her, whatever the first terrible thing that had been done to her, some part of it had happened there. The blood evidence was enough to bring Tessa back into focus too, but despite the photographs, the videos, the panicked phone, and the convenient amnesia, investigators ultimately couldn't place her at the scene of Mackenzie's murder in any provable way. She was ruled out as a contributor to any of the DNA found near Mackenzie's body, and a thorough search of her car came up empty. Without physical evidence tying her directly to the crime, the DA decided not to pursue charges against her. Tessa walked, and as soon as Wilson's case was resolved, she legally changed both her first and last name and left the area Entirely where she went, nobody said publicly. In April twenty eleven, prosecutors upgraded the charge against Christopher Wilson from second degree murder to first degree murder. The argument was premeditation at the seventy two seconds, the borrowed car, the phone, behavior, the duct tape, all of it pointed to a man who had planned what he was going to do. Wilson's defense was led by John Henry Brown, a high profile Seattle attorney with a reputation for takeeking on difficult cases.

42:02 Brown had defended Ted Bundy and other high profile defendants like Colton Harris Moore, better known as the Barefoot Bandit. Brown was not someone who shied away from a fight, and he came in with an aggressive strategy. The centerpiece of that strategy was planted evidence. Brown intended to argue that local law enforcement couldn't be trusted, that the small amount of blood found in Wilson's apartment was inconsistent with the sheer brutality of Mackenzie's murder, and that someone had put it there. He pointed to the local police force's history, including the false child abuse arrests in the late nineties. Brown also planned to point the finger at Emmanuel Saros and Sam Kuavas, the drug dealers that Liz Reid had accused early in the investigation. The judge ruled that the defense would be permitted to present evidence implicating those men at the trial. The judge handed the defense another victory that was arguably even more significant. All of the evidence relating to Wilson's macabre interests. The funeral home history, the hannibal lector tattoo, the serial killer forums, the mannequin incidents.

43:09 They were all ruled too prejudicial to be admitted. The jury would never hear any of it on paper. At least, Wilson was going to trial as a regular person who happened to have his DNA on a piece of duct tape and the victim's blood in his carpet. The most damning portrait of who he was would never be painted for the jury. I don't like where this is headed. It looked going into the spring of twenty twelve like Wilson might actually have a fighting chance. Then jury selection began. As prospective jurors filled out their written questionnaires, Wilson and his lawyer read through them carefully. What they found was stark. Somewhere between eighty and eighty five percent of the jury pool either already believed that Wilson was guilty or had been exposed to the very evidence the judge had ordered suppressed.

43:58 The prejudicial material had got out through press coverage and word of mouth, the way that these things travel in a community the size of winatche Chris's lawyer Brown ran the numbers. If they went to trial with a jury pool like that, Wilson was looking at a near certain conviction and a sentence of at least twenty years. Wilson had previously rejected a plea deal. Prosecutors had offered roughly six and a half years for first degree manslaughter, and he had turned it down, saying he wanted to go to trial so that the truth could come out. But the truth, as he now saw it, was that he wasn't going to get a fair hearing. On May twenty third, twenty twelve, just before opening statements were set to begin, he accepted a new deal. He pleaded guilty to first degree manslaughter, first degree robbery for taking Mackenzie's cell phone, and second degree assault for the unrelated choking incident at the party weeks before the murder. Shelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges sentenced him to fourteen years and three months in prison. When the media asked District Attorney Gary Reason why he had offered what some saw as a lenient deal for such a brutal crime, Reason was candid.

45:09 The case had weaknesses. There was no clear motive, and while Mackenzie's blood was in Wilson's apartment, and his DNA was on the duct tape near her body. His DNA had not been found on the murder weapon itself. It wasn't the ironclad case that it might have appeared to be from the outside. Wilson maintained his innocence even as he entered the plea. He later said from prison that during the hearing he had wanted to look Red and Wendy Cowell in the eye and tell them directly that he hadn't done it. But the moment passed and then it was over. Almost immediately after arriving at the Clllam Correctional Facility, he filed a motion to withdraw his guilty plea, arguing that he wouldn't have been able to get a fair trial. A judge denied the motion in June twenty thirteen.

45:55 He had made his choice. Now he had to live with it. He must have regretted that because he was originally offered six years, which is ridiculous. Yeah, and then I mean fourteen years is still ridiculous. Christopher Scott Wilson was freed from the Monroe Correctional Center on December eleventh, twenty twenty three, after serving just over eleven years of his sentence. He was released on parole with three years of reporting requirements to a community custody officer. Beyond that, there's very little on the public record about where he went or what he did next. To look on your head, my jaw is like on the desk here. But yeah, crazy to me that you let him out early. I know, yeah, he has a pittance of a sentence and then you let him out early.

46:41 And such a horrible crime that, Yeah, it just doesn't it's not justice for McKenzie. When Acchi Washington was back in the national news just a year ago for another horrible crime, we talked about this yesterday, So I think you know that I'm referring to the murders of Peyton, Evelyn and Olivia Decker, ages nine, eight to five, by their father, Travis Decker, whose remains were later found. We talked about that case last summer when it was going on. Yeah, really heartbreaking case. Several days after Mackenzie's body was found, on February twenty fifth, twenty ten, eighteen hundred people gathered at the Town Toyota Center in Wenatchi for a memorial service in her honor. Eighteen hundred people in a city of thirty thousand. It was a remarkable turnout, a community showing up to support Mackenzie's family, to grieve and to process an unimaginable loss. Reid Cowell believed that the right person had been convicted, even if his sentence wasn't what it should have been. He told the press that Mackenzie was the kind of person who would never have gone anywhere with someone she didn't trust, which meant he believed that Wilson must have found a way to earn that trust before he used it against her. It's hard to say that justice was done in this case, though, A plea deal for manslaughter, not murder of fourteen years a man who walked out of prison in twenty twenty three and went on with his life. For a family that lost a seventeen year old girl in one of the most violent ways imaginable, it's not easy to make peace

48:13 with that. Mackenzie Nicole Cowell would have turned thirty four years old last month. She was, by every account, someone who was just hitting her stride. A dancer, a student, an athlete, a young woman with a packed schedule and a clear sense of where she was headed. Her father called her driven, vibrant, on the verge of growing up. Sadly she never got that chance. Rest in peace, Mackenzie. So we already talked about it, but clearly justice not done in this case, and it's so frustrating. It does seem like they were willing to make a deal because the case wasn't ironclad. But it doesn't seem like it was a bad case either. I mean, they had her blood in his apartment. They had his DNA, even though it wasn't one hundred percent match, but they had his DNA at the I'm seeing, it seems like even just with those things, that was probably enough to get a conviction.

49:05 But I don't know, what do you think? Do you think it made sense for the prosecution to make a deal. Well, a lot of the evidence sounded like it was going to be excluded, like his character and the things that you know, showed that he was maybe obsessed with death right, you know, I don't know. I feel like fourteen years or eleven years, it is just really sad because Mackenzie's life was worth more than that sentence, and. He's still relatively young, and he is, you know, free and free to live the rest of his life. Chilling to know that a person like that is out on the streets, and the likelihood that he could kill again, yeah, I'm sure is pretty big. Yeah, And the fact that the judge excluded those things, to me doesn't make sense because assuming he did this crime, which I believe he did, his motive was that he was obsessed with death, and so all of those elements to his character all seem very relevant to me, because that really is what his motive was is to you know, he wanted to experience killing someone.

50:04 Well, I think you said seventy two seconds after she walked out, he walked out after her. Right, It's just really I mean, bad planning on his part because you know, he was going to be a prime suspect no matter what happened. So it kind of shows that he was that obsessed with with killing someone. It was like, you know, on his brain that he made that, you know, it kind of stupid decision. Right, What do they think happened? You know, it's a good question actually, because I think I don't know how he lured her to his apartment, Like, I. Don't know, so they think that she was killed in his apartment. It sort of seems that way. But even that is a little bit questionable because there wasn't a lot of blood, right, But.

50:46 You said he was obsessed with Dexter, so maybe he had like Ezechtor style like saran wrap. Yeah, yeah, invest scares were speculating that that could have been a possibility that he had learned from watching Dexter how to kill someone without you know, a lot of blood. But we'll never know, unfortunately what actually happened, but it is Yeah, it does make you wonder how how did he actually you know, pull this off? Did he just think it was a crime of opportunity? Were they friends? That's what I don't know. I don't know if they were or not. You know, I wasn't able to find any information about whether they had any kind of relation. And obviously they went to the same hair academy, but I don't know beyond that if they had a friendship.

51:26 But it seems like there must have been something there that caused her to go to his apartment without you know, questioning it. And we don't know why McKenzie left class that day, right, And there were no text messages between those two that you know of, No. No, really nothing One interesting thing about this case is this whole Liz Read story. This is the young woman who came forward said that she knew the two guys that did this, and in fact, that they had filmed the murder and that she saw the film. It's just such a strange thing because they, you know, they ended up not believing her at all, although there was a little bit of evidence. Right, So she said that she knew the knife that was killed, like she recognized it or was able to describe it. And they also found a cigarette butt with DNA from one of these guys, you know, on a bluff overlooking the river, not far from where the body was found. But what do you like, what do you make of that whole story. It seems pretty clear to me that Christopher Wilson did this. But why did this person come forward?

52:26 Why? I don't understand why someone would do that if it wasn't there wasn't some truth to it. Maybe it was a rumor. Maybe you know, it was just something that was floating around town. Because she sounds like she had a pretty established relationship with the police. They trusted her in these drug cases. Yeah, so maybe she did hear a rumor. Yeah, It's just so strange that she would come forward and say, oh, I saw it. I saw a film of this, I saw them. Yeah. Maybe she has an addiction problem and maybe she thought she saw something. Yeah I don't I really could. Yeah. I mean, there's no way to know. But it's just an odd sort of footnote. Yeah, this whole and that's a good point. That did distract from the investigation for several months. Yeah. What do you think about Tessa Shiloman So? She was on again, off again girlfriend of Christopher Wilson. There was obviously communication going on between them that afternoon. She had called a boyfriend at the time and said, you know, it sounded like she was panicked, like something crazy had happened.

53:24 Do you think they should have let her off the hook or do you think that there just wasn't enough evidence there to do anything. I think if there was enough evidence, they would have arrested her to right. Well, you said that she changed her name and left town. Mm hmm. Do you think that's some sort of admission of guilt there. I'm not sure whether it was an admission of guilt, but certainly her name was tied to this case. In this relatively small town, So I'm sure in her mind it was just like, yeah, I can't. I can't stay here anymore. I can't be the same person. The last thing I wanted to ask you about is we talked at the beginning about when ATCHI it's had. It seems to me like way more than its fair share of really horrific crimes and other events. I'm reading the book yet right now by Stephen King. I'm right in the middle of it, and it's sort of about a town that is kind of cursed, like it has like the town itself has sort of evil built.

54:13 In And I don't it take place in Dairy. It takes place in Dairy, Maine. But I just you hear about stuff like this, and you're like, is this city like cursed? Does it have? Is there something about it that causes things to happen like this? Well you described this as the town, but do they have like a math problem right now? Like is it a town where you know, like the apple industry is there, but the apple industry is shrinking, and you know people are having a hard time because a lot of time that's what happens. Yeah, when you know a place has their economy is going downhill. You know, that's when a lot of problems happen. Is that the case in. What I I don't get that sense. And I don't think like any of the incidents we talked about don't seem like any of them were driven by like any kind of you know, meth addiction or anything like that.

55:00 So I don't know, maybe just coincidence. But I do also feel like in the Pacific Northwest it seems like there are a lot of serial killers. Talk about this before. I believe it's linked to, you know, the lack of the sun and thermware crimes in places where it's somewhat dreary. Yeah, I don't know what causes that, but it's just it's a strange thing that this town of Winacchi has had. That said, I think the Pacific Northwest is a beautiful We're not implying that, you know, it's not a lovely place to live. I just seemed like this, this Winacchi has had its unfair percentage of crimes. Yeah. So do you think that Christopher's motive was just that he wanted to kill someone?

55:41 I believe so, just based on what we know of his background, his obsession with death, some of the allegations about his funeral home behavior. It sure seems like that is the only motive I can I can think would make sense. I haven't said this in a while, but I believe that one of the ways that you can keep your family safe is to check the sex offender registered in your area every six months, especially if you have young kids that might be walking or taking the bus or whatever that they're out of your eyesight. But this Christopher is we know that he has this fixation on murdering and death. There's no registry for like people that have committed a first degree or secondargrey murder or even you know, assaulting st.

56:23 Yeah, and are now living next door or down the road from you. Yeah, so your neighbor. That's kind of chilling, right, It is a little bit. Yeah, you would think I would. I would want to know if I was living down the street from this guy. I mean, people have every right to start their life over and you know, yeah, but in this case, I mean, he was convicted of a pretty gruesome murder. Yeah, pretty disturbing. You talked a little bit about the judge, or not the judge, but the jury and how when they were polled was it like eighty percent of them or whatever had a preconceived notion of Christopher. Yeah, because it's a small community and they'd read the newspapers, and you know, they they thought that he was already guilty. Do you think in that situation, if there was a trial here and you were serving as a jur that you would be able to separate what you'd heard in the news to what you would hear in the trial. I think it would be really hard thing to do.

57:15 I think it would be a hard thing to do too, if you already have a preconceived notion of somebody before you walk in. I mean that's why they moved trials to different locations, which I didn't read anything about any motion to move the trial or anything like that, But yeah, it would be hard as a juror in a small town if you already heard about the case. In small knit communities, you just feel closer to your friends and neighbors, and even if you don't know them, you would want justice or Mackenzie. Right before we wrap up, I thought we would continue our apple theme, and I want to you love a theme. I do love a theme, but I wanted to do a blind apple taste testy. So I have brought five apples, and we're gonna both taste them blindly and try and decide which ones we like in order and try to figure out which one is which. So I brought a Honey Crisp, a Fuji an Envy, a Cosmic Crisp, and a pink lady. Okay, all right, are you ready?

58:21 I'm ready. All right, we can take a little break and do this off air, and then we'll come back and rank them. Okay, all right, okay, so you just tried the five apples. Okay, So, first of all, I have extreme testing anxiety. If you say the words test or quiz, I instantly get Well, there's no pressure. I'm pretty sure I got none of them. Right. Well, it's more about what's your favorite and least favorite. But you were just quizzing me because I really wasn't thinking, Oh which am I enjoying? I am curious. I would say, out of the ones I taste, did like number three, I was like, oh, this one's really mushy.

59:03 So I'll tell you what. I what I I didn't rank them in my preference at all. Okay, Number one, I guess, Envy, two, Honey Crisp, three Pink Lady, four Cosmic Crisp, and five Fuji. Okay, but here's the thing. If you're taking like a taste test of something, a lot of times you would use an apple as a palette cleanser. Yeah, and I had no palate cleanser, so it was just kind of like putting like something that's slightly you know, sweet, And it really hard. Which one would you say was your favorite? Though? If you had one thing, I don't know if I could say, because honestly, I was just trying to identify them. I mean, honey Crisp is probably my favorite apple, so I guess, uh, two and four might have been my preference.

59:45 I don't know, but none of them were I don't know. So tell me how they did on the quiz. You got the Pink Lady right, that was the one you got right. Interesting only when. I got right when you got right. So that's that is my history with test. Interesting that What I found most interesting here is you thought the food was a honey crisp. I know you love honey crisp, but you're not a big Fuji fan. But the Fuji you you identified as a honey crisp. Okay, I was actually the Fuji was number two. I had a Fuji or Honey Crisp down actually, and then I tasted it again. I said, Honey Cris'm a horrible test taker. That's all I'm going to say. I hate quizzes. Please never make me take another one again, because it makes me instantly feel insecure in that I was a fine student. I'm not saying like, you know, I, but I honest.

1:00:28 I didn't really, I really really didn't mean to put you on the spot. It was more about like which ones do you like best and least? But yeah, I guess I should have made that a little more clear. Yeah, but yeah, I did horrible. That's just that's just. That's okay. All right. So now you were going to. Yes, now you can give me a sample. Would have had a heads up, and I would have made this trickier in some way. Oh that's okay. All right, Let's take a piece of bologney in here or something. Let's take a quick break and I will do a blind taste test. Now, I like to eat, eat, eat apple. I like to eat. As Okay, Well, I had a clear favorite. My favorite one was number two, and I think that was the Envy.

1:01:12 You're correct, Okay, that was really good. I had number one down. As you know, I think, I like, we're obsessed with apples. But a few months ago, it was probably in the fall, you made a proclamation that Envy was your new favorite apple. So that is interesting that you got that correct. And I wasn't sure if I was going to stick with that or not, but I really think it was. I had number one down as a cosmic Crisp, number three as a Fuji, four as a honey Crisp, and five as a pink Lady. So not surprisingly, out of the two of us, you are a much better test taker. Doesn't mean that you're more intelligent. I need to point out this test taking is a skill, and you got one on the test. Also, if you know me, I would be more likely to put the apples in alphabetical order. So did you know that I put the apples in alphabetical.

1:01:57 Did not occur to me until you said that. But also, I'd like to plan out that that early May late April is not the best time to be tasting apples. I thought of that too, but I was like, well, we're doing a case on Winacchi. The apple capital of the world. We have to do apples, so I but I agree it's not the perfect time. And if our voices sound very clear and really good right now, it's because a lot of times if you read how do I have a better voice for podcasting, they will say eat apples or drink apple juice. Yeah, usually they say to eat a sour apple, like a green apple or something like that. But still either way. Yeah, so your your favorite was the envy definitely.

1:02:38 I know. Honestly, I just had to I seriously get test anxiety because I don't like anything in life that makes me feel stupider. I'm not a stupid You're. Totally I should have positioned it a different way, because really it was more about finding out what your favorite apple was. Yeah. Okay, well you're right. That was a fun little detour. And I love doing blind taste tests. Yeah, I think in general blind taste tests are are really fun. Sometime we're going to do a blind taste test of bottled water brands. Oh okay, that's all. These are really compelling for listeners. People that are listening and you can't see I would like to do a taste test with you with like diet pepsi. You've seen like people do like, oh, this diepe pepsi is from McDonald's and this one is from the gas station and blah blah and whatever, because you drink a lot of diet pepsi and I.

1:03:27 Have a very discerning palate when it comes to soda. Do you think you would be able to tell the difference between I don't think you would be able to be like, oh, this one from this from McDonald's or whatever. But I think you might be able to say this one's from a can, this one's from a bottle, this one's from a fountain drink. Maybe I feel like I could say this is diet pepsi and this is diet coke. Beyond that, yeah, I'm not so sure. Oh, by the way, did you get the mail yesterday? Yeah? We hadn't gotten it a few days. There was a lot of stuff in there. No, it wasn't for Taylor's. We wasn't. Oh that's disappointing. Thought it would come by now. So we know that Taylor Swift is listening to our podcast, of course, and I think that that would be I would be okay with doing a face reveal for Taylor Swift's wedding, Like we could go as the hosts of Love Mary Kill, Taylor Swift's favorite podcast. So you're listening, Taylor, don't feel like you can't invite us because we don't want to show our faces. But it's not that we are ugly. We just you know, have chosen to keep our faces private. And I think that would be a great time to think if you.

1:04:27 Use your wedding as a face reveal for the Love Mary Kill host that would really get your wedding on the map, Like people would really start to pay attention to it. Yeah, but then that would take away from the bride, and we don't want to take away from them. Maybe that's why we haven't gotten to save the day. Yeah, probably, So we're just kidding. I don't think we're going to care and invite, but I would go. I would totally go. And Taylor, if you are listening, we're happy to have you as a listener. You never know who's listening, you never know, you never know. And maybe wait, what's his name? Her husband from Travis. So that's why you're not going to get us invited because Travis Kelton. Maybe Travis is a listening he's a foot like seriously, yeah, probably, I'm a little ashamed of you right now.

1:05:10 I got I came up with it. It just took me a couple of seconds. I get him and his brother mixed up. That's why. Well, what's his brother's name? Jason? Okay, all right, I'll give you that. Have you ever listened to their podcast? Of course, I'm a regular listener. You don't listen it. You listen to zero podcast. I'm pretty sure. Tell me if I'm wrong. It's rare. Every once in a while. I will listen to something, but not very often. Usually it's because I force you to. Sometimes we're when we're on a road. Might but I listen to a lot of podcasts, not really true crime, although I do listen to datelines sometimes to go to sleep. Yeah, I listen to our own podcast enough that I don't have room for other podcasts. You have listened to our own podcast. Nothing beats it that the.

1:05:51 Bar is set so high that it would be hard for me to really enjoy and appreciate another podcast. Speaking of our podcast, it was such an eloquence segue, wasn't it, Yes, very much, So I just wanted to thank anyone who has commented on Reddit and shouted us out, because that really is so kind and generous and it really does help new listeners find the show. Yeah, it really does. We appreciate you so much. I think you said the other day that on the house cleaning subreddit someone shouted us out. So it just makes me happy when I know that people are listening to us while they're working. Yeah, maybe we're making keeping them entertained. And well, there was another one. I think it was just yesterday. I didn't tell you about it yet, but it was on some subreddit about like relationship advice, and someone was talking about how their boyfriend cheated on her and then he wanted her back and she didn't know what to do. And somebody comment and said, oh girl, I've read about that. I've heard too many stories on Love Mary Kill that don't end well, so please be careful.

1:06:51 So it is nice when people. That makes me happy, because if there's one mission that I personally have during the podcast is making not just women but people, you know, more informed about red flags and relationships. And totally, I know it's easy to say end that relationship, and I know not everyone can walk away that easily, and cleanly, but you know, by educating people, it just makes me happy if we can even save one person from a bad relationship. Well, thank you all so much for listening. Please rate, review, follow and subscribe, find us on social media, or send us an email at Lovemarykill at gmail dot com. So the other day I made a playlist of all of the songs that we have on Patreon. When we start our Patreon episodes, we do it a little different because I think you were throwing me a bone because I don't like our theme song and you do. So when we do our Patreon episodes, we just play a song.

1:07:40 And I made a playlist and it made me realize that we have like thirty five episodes full length episodes over on Patreon. So please consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon dot com slash Love Mary Kill for five dollars a month you get early and help me out earlier episodes, and a monthly benne a monthly until next time. Don't kill your husband and don't kill your wife. M