Peter Van Sant and 48 Hours report on the murder of an aspiring model and beauty school student in an updated edition of 48 HOURS: "Secrets of the River" to be broadcast tonight, June 8, 2013 (10:00 PM ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
In February 2010, Mackenzie Cowell told her father they'd meet for dinner. Mackenzie never showed up for dinner, and hours later police called her father, Reid Cowell, and told him they found her car, abandoned, some 40 miles from home. Four days later, Mackenzie was found dead alongside the Columbia River. She had been strangled, beaten and stabbed. An unprecedented task force of FBI, state police and local authorities investigated the murder. They interviewed Mackenzie's boyfriend, who failed part of a polygraph, though had an airtight alibi, and her mother's boyfriend, with whom she had a strained relationship. And then a bombshell: an informant surfaced claiming to having seen the actual murder on videotape - shot by the killers - and she knew who they were. Yet the biggest break came eight months later, when a tip from a prison inmate led police to a fellow beauty school classmate. That classmate, Chris Wilson, was charged with murder and hired high-profile attorney, John Henry Browne, who is currently representing Sgt. Robert Bales through his guilty plea of murdering civilians in Afghanistan.Videos