Junior pulled out that last-ditch effort.
“Pedal! Pedal! Pedal!”
Sometimes Dad would even catch up to his boy on the trail and literally push him up a steep hill with one hand on his back, the other on the handle bars of his bike.
“You got this. Come on, son. You can do this!”
* * *
MEMORIES CAME FLOODING BACK to Junior as he thought about what to do. His father had completely fallen off the radar. They were talking four or five times a day about moving and the life ahead of them in Asheville. Then, overnight, nothing.
Not a word.
Chris Jr. hadn’t re-signed his lease. He was working his final few days at a cycle shop in Upper Michigan.
“Everything was in my car. I’m ready to go.”
Senior was going to beat him down there and win the bet, Junior knew, because Junior, it turned out, could not leave until November 2. He knew his father was starting work in Asheville on November 1.
“So excited,” Senior had said that last time they chatted. It was getting cold in the Upper Peninsula, so it was really slow at the bike shop. Bored, Junior would often call his father to just shoot the breeze and wax about Asheville.
“Yeah, Dad. So many trails. Lakes. Camping. The mountain biking we will do.”
But all he heard now was silence—and it became deafening as each moment passed. Louder, in fact, than anything Junior had ever heard in his life.
4
PARK-AND-RIDE
LAURA FRIZZO WAS ON HER WAY HOME. SHE HAD NOT THOUGHT TOO much about the fact that Chris Regan had been missing now for two weeks—and how significant that time span alone could be. Frizzo was focused on getting home to her son. Putting dinner on the table. Unwinding.
It had been a long, exhausting Monday.
“It just didn’t register with me at the time,” Frizzo recalled. “I just turned it over to Cindy, thinking Chris Regan probably told someone where he was going—and that he would eventually turn up. That would be the end of it.”
Still, as part of her daily routine, Frizzo reviewed each of her officers’ daily logs from the previous night / afternoon, read through all of the reports generated during the day, and followed up with whatever needed to be done. She communicated with her officers mostly through e-mail, mandating a face-to-face interaction with the staff at least twice a month. Another task Frizzo put on herself as chief was writing police policies and procedures. “Because,” she said, “there were absolutely none put in place by prior chiefs. . . .”
Doing all of that allowed Frizzo to keep a fairly accurate pulse on the happenings within the department—and crime in general—at all times. And as she considered the name Chris Regan, and thought more about it that night on her way home, hearing from Terri O’Donnell where Chris had worked, an internal bell went off.
Frizzo lit a Marlboro Light. Took a drag.
I know that name . . .
In fact, before arriving home, after turning the case over to Cindy Barrette, Frizzo had heard from her sergeant about the car. “Listen, I’m going to take a ride over to Bates Township on my way home to check it out. I’ll also call Lake Shore,” Frizzo said. “I know the director there very well. I’ll make a couple of other calls, too. If I have anything, I’ll get hold of you when I get home.”
“Okay,” Barrette said. “I will follow through here and we’ll talk later.”
As Frizzo drove toward Bates, she kept going back in her mind to Lake Shore, where Chris Regan worked. Frizzo had taken a call from the director of Lake Shore the previous month. Something about an employee who was scared of her husband and had not shown up for work. Lake Shore asked if the IRPD could take a drive by the woman’s house and conduct a wellness check.
Something told Frizzo the two were connected: Chris Regan and this call the previous month.
Pulling into the park-and-ride, Frizzo spotted Chris Regan’s two-door gray Hyundai Genesis.
The chief drove up. Parked. Got out. Took a quick walk around the vehicle, shining her flashlight, peering inside.
“Right away,” Frizzo said, “I knew something was off. I felt Chris Regan had not parked this car himself.”
She also had the feeling that the car had been there for a while.
5
MESSING AROUND
THROUGHOUT THE PREVIOUS WEEKEND, OCTOBER 25 AND 26, LEADING up to that Monday evening, October 27, when Terri O’Donnell drove to the IRPD, Chris Regan’s former girlfriend worked her contacts at Jubilee Foods to see if she could get into Chris’s apartment to have a look around. Terri spoke to the manager of the store, Zach, and her father, who managed the apartments. Zach told Terri he would get hold of the local locksmith, Willard, who promised to make a spare key so they could get into Chris’s apartment. Meanwhile, Terri called and texted Chris several times; she received no response again.
Going back a few days before that, on Thursday, October 23, Terri spoke to one of Chris’s coworkers.
“Have you heard from Chris at all?” Terri had asked.
“I have not. But I did see his car parked in Bates at the park-and-ride.”
“I’m worried about him.”
Chris’s coworker snapped his fingers, “Hey, you know what? Now that I think of it . . . he’s been romantically involved with someone at work. Her name is . . . um . . . Kelly. I believe Chris said she’s estranged from her husband.”
Earlier on that Monday, October 27, Terri heard from Willard in the form of a text: Key is ready.
“So after work,” Terri explained to Sergeant Cindy Barrette as they continued filing the missing person’s report, “I got hold of my mother and we went over to Chris’s apartment.”
Terri tensed up. Just the thought of what they had seen inside the apartment upset her.
“It’s okay, ma’am,” Barrette consoled. “We’ll get this figured out. Please continue.”
Terri explained how she had driven directly from Chris’s apartment to the IRPD on that Monday night, October 27, now convinced more than ever something was wrong.
“When we first entered, I saw a folder on the floor. The apartment is very disheveled. Cabinet doors open. Dirty dishes. Things lying around. It all alarmed me.”
“Why?”
“Chris never kept his apartment like that. He kept things very neat. His dishes were always done. Things were always put away. He is very organized.”
Sergeant Barrette studied Terri for tells—any type of involuntary body movements indicating how she was feeling.
Mystified was about all Barrette came up with: “She was concerned and upset.”
“You indicated he was leaving soon for a new job in North Carolina,” Barrette asked Terri. She also wanted to know if the boxes and messy apartment were perhaps an indication of Chris packing for that trip.
“There were suitcases on his bed and boxes in the front room,” Terri explained. “So he had started to pack. But things were very, very messy.”
Her sense was the mess had nothing to do with Chris packing.
“What makes you suspicious something’s off here, Miss O’Donnell?”
“The car. Chris would never leave that car of his in that lot for days at a time. He loves that vehicle.”
Terri O’Donnell believed the inside of Chris’s apartment spoke of something having happened to him. It felt as if he had been plucked from this environment in the middle of going about his life. Terri was certain this was not the way Chris would have left it. She had, in fact, helped Chris pack once when he moved from his house in Suttons Bay not long before. He’d packed one room at a time and had kept everything “very organized,” she told Barrette.
Barrette asked about the folder on the floor. What did it contain, and where was it in relation to Terri walking into the apartment? She had actually pushed the folder out of the way with the door when she first walked in. The folder contained medical documents. She took a look inside. She found information about Chris taking Percocet—he’d suffered a k
nee injury that past August and his doctor had put him on the drug—and the drug screening he had to undergo for his new job.
Walking in, looking around, seeing dirty dishes “crusted over,” as Terri put it, cabinets opened, various personal items everywhere—it was out of character for Chris.
“I knew something happened to him.”
The gut speaks—and rarely lies—of what is and what is to come. Terri O’Donnell, who knew Chris Regan better than most of the people in his life then, stood inside Chris’s apartment on October 27, 2014, and had a sinking feeling she was never going to see Chris Regan again.
Terri told Sergeant Barrette one more thing.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve heard rumors Chris is messing around with a married woman from his work.”
Barrette asked Terri to sign the UD-3E. Then requested if she would mind taking a ride over to Chris’s apartment.
6
WHISPERS
CHIEF LAURA FRIZZO WAS ONE OF THOSE COPS WHO COULD NOT LET things go. She’d heard a few new details from her sergeant, Cindy Barrette, about Chris Regan’s sudden disappearance. She’d stopped at the park-and-ride to check out his vehicle. Call it a cop’s intuition, but Frizzo had a bad feeling about the way in which Chris’s car was positioned.
Heading home, Frizzo thought again of that incident she had gotten involved in the month before, late September. It involved another employee at Lake Shore, thirty-two-year-old Kelly Cochran, the same married woman Chris Regan was allegedly seeing. Kelly Cochran was an electrical assembler working on the manufacturing line. A rough-around-the-edges type, Kelly had a series of butterfly tattoos (various sizes and shapes) along both arms, up onto her shoulders. She had black hair cut just below the neckline, with a rugged, beefy, power lifter’s frame, broad, thick shoulders, and pronounced trap muscles. Kelly and Chris had met at work and started secretly hooking up not long after Kelly was hired in May 2014. For Chris, seeing Kelly was a “step down,” someone close to both of them later observed: “Chris was a bit more of an upstanding guy in the community. He did not want anyone knowing he was dating Kelly Cochran. They were from two different worlds. She was married.”
Kelly and her husband, Jason Cochran, a very overweight, bald-as-a-knee thirty-six-year-old, had moved to Iron River earlier that year from Hobart, Indiana. Jason was the tough-looking, outdoorsy type. Hunter. Fisherman. He had a reserved gait about him. A lot more seemed to be going on behind the large-framed glasses he wore than he would ever let out.
After walking in the door of her home, tossing the keys on the counter, Chief Frizzo recalled the name Kelly Cochran. Then a second name: Laura Sartori, who, with twelve years on the job, was Lake Shore’s human resources generalist. Frizzo remembered how, back in late September, the IRPD had been called to do a “wellness” check on Kelly Cochran at her home after Kelly had called work to say she feared for her life. Kelly and Jason Cochran lived in Caspian. Five minutes south of Iron River, past the Iron River Country Club, Caspian was just out of Frizzo’s jurisdiction, so the chief turned the wellness check call over to the local sheriff. Sartori had phoned Frizzo and explained that on September 27, 2014, Kelly called work and explained her “husband threatened to kill [her] and then kill himself.” That next day, September 28, Kelly failed to show up for work. A report was generated on September 29.
“I cannot reach her by telephone,” Laura Sartori had explained during her initial call into the IRPD about Kelly. “I’m worried about domestic violence inside the home.”
“Why is that?” the responding officer asked.
“Because Kelly has come to work in the past with marks consistent with a domestic assault. I’ve also heard of her husband making comments about harming her if she ever left him.”
An officer took a ride over to the Cochran house that afternoon, September 29. Knocked on the door.
A dog barked from inside, but no one responded.
The officer took a walk around the property and noticed a light on, no vehicles in the driveway. Bending down on one knee for a closer look, he could tell “there were fresh tracks leaving the driveway.”
He then went in search of a few neighbors to talk to.
“I saw Jason leaving earlier this morning,” said the guy next door. “Probably going fishing. I have not seen Kelly.”
* * *
LAURA FRIZZO GOT SETTLED inside her home on the evening of October 27. Thinking more about that September 29 incident report, she called Laura Sartori.
Sartori knew Chris Regan well, she said. He’d worked at Lake Shore / Oldenburg since December 13, 2013. As an air force veteran, Chris had a job that was high pressure, with major responsibilities. He was team leader for military assembly, overseeing all aspects of the company’s larger military projects.
“He’s very dependable,” Sartori said. “He dots his i’s and crosses his t’s. . . .”
A guy like that, Frizzo thought, would not just disappear on his own without letting someone know.
The fact that on October 16 Chris did not show up for work confused her, Sartori explained to Frizzo. Chris had put in for October 15 off. Yet, when he failed to show on October 16, didn’t call or tell anyone he was taking the day off, Sartori developed a whisper of concern.
No one had seen or heard from him since—and that whisper turned into a mild scream.
“It didn’t make sense to me,” Sartori said.
As Frizzo thought about it, she wondered: Have Chris and Kelly run off together?
Sartori explained how she got hold of the sheriff who had done the wellness check on Kelly Cochran back in September and he reported back to her that no one had been found at the Caspian address where Kelly Cochran lived. The house was empty.
“Allegedly,” Sartori told Frizzo, “Chris Regan and Kelly Cochran were having an affair.” Still, that information, Sartori warned, was from the rumor mill of a large workplace environment.
Since a few different sources reported Chris and Kelly were an item, Frizzo now felt it was likely true.
But what did it mean, actually, in the scope of a missing person’s investigation? Affairs happen. Especially in the workplace.
Frizzo called the deputy who had conducted the wellness check and asked him for Kelly Cochran’s address. Maybe Chris was living with her? Perhaps Kelly had tossed her husband out and Chris had moved in? Maybe they had taken off together? Was Kelly Cochran planning to move to North Carolina with Chris? Affairs brought out the worst in people. Lives were turned upside down. People did things they wouldn’t normally do. How one reacted to his or her life imploding underneath the weight of an extramarital affair was not predictable. Add a jealous husband into the mix and, well, motive for violence rises to the surface.
“I don’t have the address on me,” the deputy said. “But I can explain how to get there.”
7
ABSENCE OF MALICE
CINDY BARRETTE AND TERRI O’DONNELL DROVE TO CHRIS REGAN’S apartment at 514 North Fourth Avenue in Iron River on the night of October 27, 2014. It was five forty-five p.m. when Terri let the sergeant in with the keys she’d gotten from the locksmith.
After having trouble finding a light switch, Terri walked the sergeant into the kitchen, found a light over the sink. Turning it on, looking around, Chris Regan’s ex-girlfriend said, “This doesn’t look like Chris’s apartment at all—you know, it’s all . . . it’s all disheveled.”1
“When I first entered,” Barrette explained later, “it appeared that there may have been some packing going on. There were boxes in the living room area and in the kitchen and in the dining room. There were notes pertaining to, like, a to-do list for moving.”
The apartment was disorganized. Personal belongings everywhere. Chris had left himself reminder notes all over the place. Most referenced the move to Asheville and what he needed to bring with him.
A detail-oriented guy.
Terri pointed to a bottle of medication sitting on the stove. “This is
just one,” she explained. “I’ll show you his meds for his heart and stuff.”
They walked toward the bathroom, stopping in the dining room.
Barrette took out her digital camera and snapped photos of anything she felt might be significant. As she did that and Terri explained items they were looking at, Barrette noticed Chris’s laptop was still powered up and sitting open on the table. A coffee cup and several other items one might use during the course of daily life—calculator, stapler, highlighter markers, clipboard, magazines, hand creams, a candle—were next to it. The chair was pushed out from in front of the laptop, as if the person sitting had stood up and left.
The sergeant found an e-mail Chris had recently received from his future employer about a drug-screening appointment. He’d printed it out. Didn’t say much, other than when and where. It seemed, from the available information, that maybe Chris Regan decided to leave for North Carolina early without telling anyone. In truth, Chris did not owe anyone an explanation regarding how he conducted his life, when he was taking off, or where he was going.
“He did plan on one of his sons moving down to North Carolina with him,” Terri said as they walked through the apartment.
Terri found a cell phone on the table. Plugged it in. Barrette looked through it. Got the numbers for both of Chris’s kids, along with additional contact info.
Making it into the bathroom, after Terri opened the medicine cabinet, she noticed at least eight prescription medications inside, sitting on the shelves.
Barrette photographed each one. Staring at it all, she became even more concerned.
Why would a man leave without taking his medications?
Seeing this quashed the early-move theory. Chris Regan’s meds—some of them necessary for keeping his blood pressure in check, which he needed to take every day—were still in the cabinet.
Barrette slid the shower curtain to the side, looked down. In the bathtub was a scrub brush and what appeared to be a dried, crusty brownish-red covering of scum near the drain.
Where Monsters Hide Page 3