Taylorlyn Nelson was a 21-year-old Caucasian woman from Phoenix, Arizona, who vanished on March 11, 2017, after being last known at the north Phoenix residence near 27th Avenue and Deer Valley Road that she shared with her boyfriend, Kodi Bowe. When her family could not reach her and learned she had argued with Bowe, they reported her missing a few days later, prompting Phoenix police to issue bulletins describing her and to note that her disappearance was highly out of character.
Long before she disappeared, those close to Nelson had repeatedly told authorities about escalating domestic violence. According to court records summarized in local reporting, Bowe had previously faced domestic-violence charges for beating her, but those charges were dropped in September 2016, months before her death. Family and friends later recounted numerous incidents in which Bowe allegedly choked her until she lost consciousness and suffered seizures, threatened her life while holding a gun to her head, and struck her so hard with a firearm that the imprint of the gun’s butt was visible on her head. Nelson reportedly confided that if she ever “disappeared,” it would mean Bowe had killed her and hidden her under their trailer. On the night she went missing, she is said to have told a friend that if she did not get back home quickly with heroin, Bowe would kill her, underscoring how trapped and terrified she felt in the relationship.
Investigators came to believe that the killing itself took place inside the couple’s trailer on March 11, 2017. According to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office and later court summaries, Bowe attacked Nelson inside the home, first striking her in the head with an object and then shooting her in the head, causing her death. When detectives searched the trailer, they found blood, a bullet hole and a 9mm shell casing, with DNA testing indicating the blood matched someone biologically related to Nelson’s mother. These forensic findings shifted the case from a missing-person investigation to a homicide in which Bowe quickly became the primary suspect.
Evidence later showed that, instead of reporting the death, Bowe enlisted the help of his younger brother, Maxx Bowe, and a family acquaintance, Kerrie Quaintance, in a cover-up. Witnesses told police they overheard the three talking about how hard it had been to get Nelson’s body into a paddle boat at Lake Pleasant. Another witness reported that Quaintance described how the brothers placed the body in a sleeping bag, secured it to the bottom of her paddle boat with ropes, then paddled out onto Lake Pleasant and cut the ropes to let the remains sink. According to court documents, Maxx later admitted that on March 14 he held Nelson’s shoulders while Kodi shot her and that he helped dispose of the gun, believing he could not be convicted if the body was never recovered.
Despite an early search of their residence and the use of cadaver dogs around Lake Pleasant, investigators initially failed to locate Nelson’s remains. On July 20, 2017, months after she went missing, a Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue dive team conducting operations at Lake Pleasant recovered a female body in the same general area where investigators believed Nelson had been dumped. Her mother expressed both sorrow and relief, saying the family was grateful finally to have her back after fearing they might never find her. In November 2017, the Maricopa County Medical Examiner formally identified the recovered remains as those of Nelson, confirming what the family and police had long suspected.
As the investigation progressed, multiple people were arrested and identified as suspects. On April 5, 2017, Phoenix police arrested Bowe for first-degree murder, abandonment of a dead body and tampering with physical evidence. His brother, Maxx, and Kerrie Quaintance were also arrested; Maxx was initially booked for hindering prosecution, and Quaintance for hindering prosecution and abandonment or concealment of a dead body. Later, prosecutors filed an additional kidnapping charge against Maxx after court paperwork stated that he held Nelson while Bowe shot her. Earlier in the case, police had also publicly named Tammy Lynn Compton as a person of interest because she was believed to be the last person to see Nelson before she vanished, but she was interviewed and not charged, and subsequent reporting on the prosecution centers on the Bowe brothers and Quaintance.
The criminal cases eventually concluded with significant prison sentences for the two brothers. Bowe pleaded guilty to murder in Nelson’s death and to an unrelated aggravated assault charge. In 2019, he was sentenced to 20 years in state prison for the murder plus a consecutive seven-year term for aggravated assault, for a total of 27 years. Maxx Bowe pleaded guilty to hindering prosecution related to helping dispose of Nelson’s body in Lake Pleasant and received a 10-year prison sentence. Quaintance, accused of helping transport and conceal the body and of hindering the investigation, faced charges for hindering prosecution and abandonment or concealment of a dead body, though public accounts focus less on her final outcome than on the convictions of the Bowe brothers. Together, the investigative findings, arrests, and sentencing records depict a case in which an entrenched pattern of domestic violence in Phoenix escalated into murder, followed by a calculated attempt to hide the crime by dumping the victim’s remains in a lake north of the city.
