Post by Graveyardbride on May 30, 2018 15:31:24 GMT -5
Couple May Have Served Murder Victim at Barbecue
Kelly M. Cochran (above), 35, already serving a life sentence in Michigan for the murder of Christopher Regan, her boyfriend, was sentenced May 16 to 65 years for the 2016 killing of her husband, Jason Cochran. She agreed to the prison term in a plea deal.
Laura Frizzo, chief of police in small-town Iron River, Michigan, didn’t know it then. But the October 2014 disappearance of Chris Regan, 53, a divorced father of two with plans to leave the state’s remote Upper Peninsula for a new life in North Carolina, eventually would lead police to believe Mrs. Cochran collaborated in his killing. She subsequently claimed to have murdered 21 people, including her husband.
Almost as bad as the murder itself – and even more depraved – Cochran and her husband may have dismembered Regan and cooked him up at a barbecue to which she invited neighbors. “You don’t just know your neighbors by the image they’re portraying,” Frizzo explained.
Detective Jeremy Ogden is convinced Cochran’s study of forensics and psychology in college gave her an edge that allowed her – with the assistance of her husband – to initially conceal Regan’s murder. That is, until she killed Jason himself, which landed her in jail. “I think they did a very good job of cleaning things up,” Ogden told People Magazine, explaining why he believed the pair may have killed others prior to Regan. “They were very thorough. Nobody’s that good the first time around.” It was Regan’s death that put police on Kelly Cochran’s trail.
She was convicted in Michigan and sentenced to life in prison for Regan’s murder in May 2016. She and Regan, who were co-workers, had been having an affair and she and her husband, Jason Cocharn, apparently conspired to kill him in order to end the liaison. According to court records, on October 14, 2014, Kelly invited Regan to her Michigan home. The two had arranged for Jason to catch them in flagrante delicto, at which point he shot Regan in the head with a .22 caliber rifle. The murderous duo then dismembered the man’s body and dumped some of the parts in the Upper Peninsula woods, where bones turned up near a spot to which she later led investigators.
Regan’s former girlfriend reported him missing on October 27, 2014, telling police he had been packing for the move to North Carolina where he was to start a new job.
Frizzo soon learned of the affair and questioned the Cochrans. Jason acknowledged his wife’s dalliance and said he’d reluctantly agreed to it to prevent a divorce after he was injured and became unable to work or engage in sexual activity. But Frizzo, who was initially suspicious of Jason, couldn’t otherwise crack the couple. “In the very beginning of all of this, there was a time when I actually thought [Kelly’s] husband did this out of jealously and anger,” Frizzo continued.
As law enforcement officers were slowly closing in on them, the Cochrans quickly pulled up stakes and relocated to Indiana. “They left everything behind when they fled,” Frizzo added. “The furniture was still in the house, food, everything was left. Jason’s marijuana plants – he left those behind.” Frizzo subsequently spoke with a neighbor who reportedly heard “all this sawing in the middle of the night.” When the neighbor asked Jason about it, he claimed he couldn’t sleep and filled the wee hours by working on a staircase. The neighbor found this explanation odd because he’d never seen any building materials around the house.
Chris Regan
Barbecue. Then another neighbor came forward and told Frizzo about the sudden, unprecedented dinner invitations from the Cochrans. “Like, three times in one week,” Frizzo related. “He recalled there was so much meat. There was no side dishes or anything like that – shish-kabobs, then pizza, then tacos.” When the neighbor went to wash his hands, he could find no towels and wondered what they’d been used for, she continued.
Suddenly, the horrific possibility dawned on Frizzo and the neighbor. “I’m thinking, oh my god, did they cut this guy up?!” Frizzo exclaimed. According to a recorded interview with the police chief, the neighbor turned to a relative and said, “Dude, we ate dude!”
Confession. However, the trail went cold for 16 months – until February 20, 2016, when Jason Cochran, 37, died at the couple’s Indiana residence from an apparent heroin overdose. That’s when Ogden received a call advising someone had tipped off the FBI that the Cochrans were suspects in the unsolved Michigan case. He immediately ordered a full autopsy that indicated Jason Cochran hadn’t died from an overdose, but rather from asphyxiation.
When questioned, Kelly Cochran was defensive and evasive and this raised red flags. With Frizzo’s notes on Regan’s murder in hand, Ogden conspired with the FBI tipster to make Mrs. Cochran believe her husband had left a letter confessing to Regan’s murder. As the dominoes began to fall, Kelly Cochran confessed her role in both murders. “She looked me right in the eye and said that Jason had taken the heroin that night and basically, she wasn’t going to wait for him to die, it was taking too long,” Ogden said. “She had the power and she wanted to show him that she had the power and she was in control.”
After being sentenced to life in prison for killing Regan, Cochran took a plea deal with a 65-year prison sentence in her husband’s case, admitting to giving him the heroin and then covering his nose and mouth until he died, the Merrillville Post-Tribune reported. The deal ensures she won’t be charged with any other crimes in the state of Indiana. She has appealed her Michigan conviction.
‘I Think There Are Others out There.’ “Jeremy and I both have discussed that we’re not done,” Frizzo, who has since left the Iron River police department for a job monitoring drug trafficking in Indiana, said. “Now our desire is to follow through” to seek out any additional victims of the killer. At one time she said that she had killed 21 people. On two occasions she told me that. I didn’t believe it. I think that she was stretching things, she was just trying to play a game,” the law enforcement officer continued. “She realizes that when she gives you 21 games, which she did, you’re going to have to take time to look into them. … It didn’t take long for me to realize that she was sending me on wild goose chases.”
No additional victims have turned up, still, Ogden admitted, “I think there are others out there.”
“Although we found Christopher Regan’s skull, of course, I am still bothered by the fact that I want to know where the rest of his body went,” Frizzo added. “I wish I could know that he didn’t suffer, and know that confidently, but I never will know that.”
Cochran admitted she murdered her husband at their residence at 7101 Mississippi Street in Merrillville, Indiana. “I still hate him, and yes, it was revenge,” she told Ogden in 2016. “I evened the score.” She also admitted she lacked feeling or emotion and made sure her mother-in-law, Mary Cochran, saw that her son was having difficulty breathing.
The sentencing came on the heels of an Investigation Discovery documentary that claims Frizzo investigated whether Cochran had killed as many as nine victims and may have served Regan’s remains to neighbors at a barbecue.
Ogden, now retired, told the court during sentencing he believed Cochran was intelligent and manipulative. He said he interviewed the woman for more than 100 hours, but still, there were unanswered questions.
Judge Salvador Vasquez raised a question concerning an unusual term of the plea agreement, i.e., that the Lake County prosecutor’s office agreed not to file additional charges against Cochran for any crime in Lake County. When he asked the prosecutors if Cochran was possibly involved in other homicides, the attorneys approached the bench. Following a discussion, Judge Vasquez announced the defendant claimed during an interview in Michigan that she had information about other crimes committed in Lake County, but there was no evidence to support her claims. He said it could be nothing more than “talk.”
Lake County Chief Deputy Prosecutor Barbara McConnell said through a spokesperson that Cochran was not suspected in other crimes, “however, she may have knowledge of other unspecified crimes.”
The family of Jason Cochran (above), described Kelly as a “very evil person,” who cremated Jason, despite his wishes to be buried, which they believed was because she wanted to hide evidence of murder.
Deputy Prosecutor Nadia Wardrip read a letter from the family to the court in which they insisted Jason was a loving person with many friends and Kelly was an attention-seeker, who just wanted to be in the spotlight. “If you couldn’t be the center of attention, Jason suffered,” the family wrote.
Kelly Cochran told the court she started dating Jason after high school and they began living together in 2001. She said he changed after they married in September 2002, claiming her husband was two different people: Sometimes he was the man she loved, but at other times she saw what she described as “the eyes of a monster” in him. “He took me to places so dark, I thought light would never shine,” she continued. She maintained she “forgave” Jason, but he left her with “horrible memories.” Still, she insisted she missed her husband. Weeping, she apologized to both her in-laws and her own family.
Following sentencing, Ogden told reporters Cochran attempted to blame her husband for everything rather than accepting responsibility. “I think she tries to control everything through statements,” he concluded.
Vasquez accepted the plea agreement, noting that even if Cochran’s Michigan conviction was reversed, she still would have to serve 48 years in Indiana, assuming she was released early for good behavior. The judge then ordered Cochran be returned to Michigan to begin her life sentence.
Sources: Steve Garrison, The Northwest Indiana Times, May 16, 2018; Jeff Truesdale, People, May 26, 2018; and Clerk of Lake Circuit Court, Crown Point, Indiana.
