Something is off here.
In the bedroom, on the bed, two suitcases sat with the lids opened, nothing packed inside. Tucked on the side of Chris Regan’s bed, in between the box spring and bed frame, easily accessible to the person sleeping on that side of the bed, was an aluminum baseball bat.
In the living room, Barrette found several phone chargers plugged into wall sockets.
A large box was in the kitchen, positioned in front of the stove. She noticed one cabinet drawer full of miscellaneous household items; it was pulled all the way open and appeared to have been rummaged through. On the counter above the drawer were a few small notebooks, one opened. A pen. A pair of prescription eyeglasses.
A handwritten calendar Barrette located had a few interesting notes, which Terri O’Donnell confirmed were written by Chris: resign sketched into the date of October 14; last day of work penciled in on October 23.
Barrette stopped and stared at the kitchen counter a moment.
“Toothbrush and toothpaste are in here?” she said aloud. Then turned toward the door into the apartment.
He walks out the door, no doubt planning to return . . . but never comes back.
A ceiling fan was still on in the living room. Barrette walked over to a window. Pulled the blinds to one side.
“Was this window left open?” she asked Terri.
“Window was open . . .”
They wandered around the apartment. Terri worked her iPhone to search for Chris’s kids on Facebook. Couldn’t come up with anything right away.
“It’s just creepy,” Terri said at one point.
“Yeah,” the sergeant agreed. Then: “Let’s go down and look at the truck.”
“Yes. Let me show you the truck. . . .”
They worked their way out of the apartment.
As they walked, Terri said, “It’s amazing what you know about somebody when you really start thinking, eh?”
“Oh, sure, honey, sure,” Barrette said as they shared a brief moment of laughter in an increasingly tense situation.
The small white Mazda pickup Chris owned was parked on the north side of the apartment building lot, a kayak strapped to the top of the vehicle. It appeared to have been sitting in the same spot for a long time.
“So he hasn’t drove this for a while?”
“No . . . ,” Terri said.
“So what was he going to do with it if he took the insurance off?” Barrette wondered.
Terri said the truck was for winter use only. Chris was likely going to sell it anyway, seeing that he had the other vehicle he was driving to North Carolina.
“Oh, yeah. Okay.”
Barrette found nothing within the truck.
From Chris’s apartment, Barrette said she was heading out to the park-and-ride to have a look at Chris’s car. Terri said she’d meet her out there.
Terri arrived first. As Barrette pulled in, Terri was talking to a guy whose car was parked near Chris’s Genesis.
“Been here for a long time,” the man said to Terri.
“Have you seen anyone around the car or anything like that?” Terri asked.
“No.”
Barrette stepped out of her cruiser, flashlight in hand. She noticed Chris’s Hyundai parked on the north side of the lot, its front end facing north. It wasn’t as though whoever was driving the car had been in a hurry to park it. Quite to the contrary, actually.
Shining her flashlight inside the vehicle, Barrette walked around, looking for anything out of place.
“There were a couple of water bottles in the console,” Barrette said. “A hat and pair of gloves kind of wedged into the seat.”
Then something else.
“Is that his knee brace?” the sergeant asked Terri, shining her flashlight beam on it.
“Yup.”
“Does he normally wear the knee brace?”
“Yup.”
Suicide, Barrette thought, standing, staring out into a wooded area directly in front of the car. She pictured Chris parking, finishing up whatever business he had, stepping out, walking into the woods, blowing his brains out.
“It had to be considered because that sort of thing happens,” Barrette recalled.
“Will you be opening up the trunk or anything like that?” Terri asked. An autumn chill was in the air. Terri had her arms folded, hugging herself to stay warm.
“Is there any way to open the trunk from the interior?” Barrette asked.
“Yeah.”
“Let me see then if I can get in there.”
Barrette decided the suspicious activity surrounding Chris Regan’s so-called disappearance justified taking out her Slim Jim. This is a long, flat, and flexible metal apparatus cops use to shimmy down a vehicle’s window, inside the door, and pop the lock open.
After a few tries, the little button on the car door gave—and set off the alarm, subsequently securing the latch to the trunk.
Inside, they both looked around.
Terri came up with a Post-it note, turned over, on the seat. She picked it up and handed it to Barrette.
The sergeant looked at the note; it appeared to be directions to a house.
424 lft
Stop sign left
Thru 4way stop
Lft on side st to yield sign
Left over creek rt in alley
Brown house
Who writes down directions anymore? Why not GPS the address with a cell phone?
“Listen,” Barrette told Terri, “can you make contact with Chris’s kids on Facebook and see if they have had any contact or know where their father is?”
“I can.”
It was time to head back to the office and make a few calls, Barrette felt.
Along the way, the sergeant phoned Chief Frizzo and explained what she’d found inside the car. “Handwritten directions, on the front seat of Chris’s car. A Post-it note. That and the knee brace and water bottles were about it.”
“Directions?” Frizzo asked, curious.
“Yeah,” she said, explaining what the Post-it said.
Turned out to be the same directions Frizzo had been given by the deputy she had spoken to earlier that same night: Kelly and Jason Cochran’s Caspian house.
8
QUESTIONS
AN AMERICAN FLAG HANGS FROM A POLE OFF THE CORNER OF THE Iron River municipal building. The textured, redbrick, four-story structure on the corner of North First Avenue and West Genesee Street in downtown Iron River stands tall in front of three city park benches, its front doors underneath a half-moon-shaped contemporary glass enclosure. City Hall takes up most of the space inside the building, with the IRPD entrance located around the corner, on the east side, the precinct strategically positioned on the lower level. Iron River was once a major mining hub, today relying more on skiing and snowmobiling, hunting, fishing, and biking.
“You wouldn’t believe all the crime,” said one former resident. “And the drugs. Oh, yeah. The worst types. You betcha. Most of it coming up from Milwaukee.”
Late on a Monday evening in October, sitting inside her office, an adult missing-person case gnawing at her, was the last situation Sergeant Cindy Barrette expected to be in. Mondays were not what you would call busy around the IRPD. However, once working as undersheriff earlier in her career, along with serving in various agencies statewide, Barrette was not naive where it pertained to a working law enforcement environment: “Anything can happen at any time.”
The only way to exhaust all options when looking into an adult missing-person case is to follow the evidence, while using your investigative instinct and common sense to guide you. Knowing Chris Regan was a military veteran, Barrette phoned the VA hospital in Iron Mountain at seven-eighteen that evening to see if Chris had checked himself in. Or perhaps someone had brought him there for treatment he did not want anyone to know about.
“Let me check,” a VA officer said.
Barrette waited.
“Nope, no one under that name is in our entire
system.” Which meant across the entire country, in any VA hospital.
“Thank you.”
Barrette entered the official missing person’s report, UD-E3, into the two national databases that law enforcement uses. She called Chris Regan’s son, Cameron, and his other son, Chris Jr. Both calls went straight to voice mail.
Her next call was to Iron County dispatch. “Get hold of Verizon wireless for me,” Barrette said. “See if they can do call-pinging for us.”
“I’m on it, Sergeant.”
Barrette sat at her desk and thought about what she’d learned over the course of the past several hours. Kelly Cochran, she’d found out from Chief Frizzo, had shown up for work on October 3, several days after an Iron County sheriff’s deputy conducted that wellness check. She had since left the job for good, but on that specific day, human resources generalist Laura Sartori had asked Kelly Cochran if she was still worried her husband was going to kill her and himself.
“Sorry, yeah, everything’s fine,” Kelly had said. She did not seem concerned anymore.
“Okay, then,” Sartori responded.
What’s more, the Michigan State Police (MSP) had gotten involved in the wellness check and Kelly had contacted the investigating trooper by phone on October 3, the day she returned to work.
“I’m fine,” Kelly’s voice mail had said. “I appreciate you checking up on me.”
Still, something didn’t feel right. There appeared to be so much more to that story.
Barrette and Sartori discussed the connection between their missing man and Kelly Cochran. Then hung up.
Sometime later, Barrette heard from dispatch regarding Chris Regan’s phone.
“The last time it was used, according to Verizon, was October fourteenth. However, they were unable to locate where, due to the amount of time that has elapsed since.”
Barrette stared at the Post-it note she’d taken from Chris’s vehicle. It felt significant. Chris Regan was missing. Here was a note with directions to an address. The address and Kelly Cochran meant something to him. This wasn’t trumped-up gossip inside a large factory; coworkers whispering in the break room about two people hooking up. Here was a direct connection between Chris and Kelly. Not to mention an indication that the last location Chris Regan seemed to be heading was Kelly Cochran’s home.
The IRPD staffed seven full-time officers, including the chief. At one time, the town wanted to disband the entire force and leave patrolling up to the state police and local sheriff’s department. But that did not sit well with the majority of taxpayers.
Still, with a department so small, the IRPD relied on outside help whenever it faced a case growing beyond the scope of its own personnel power. So Cindy Barrette contacted the MSP and asked if they could send a trooper to meet her at 66 Lawrence Street in Caspian, Kelly and Jason Cochran’s address. The evidence led to this address. Here was the place where, Barrette decided, she could possibly begin to find out where Chris Regan was or what had happened to him. Still, when she thought about it, Chris’s car in that park-and-ride lot, those woods around the lot, suicide kept creeping back up into the veteran investigator’s mind.
Frizzo reassured Barrette it was a smart move to head over to the Cochran house and ask a few questions.
“Just call me back and let me know how it goes,” Frizzo said.
“Okay, then. You bet.”
Ten minutes later, Barrette and an MSP trooper were standing on the porch of Jason and Kelly Cochran’s modest, run-down country home.
* * *
LAWRENCE STREET IN CASPIAN is a rural road: Two-story, country-type Colonial homes built in the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps further back, sit on green lawns, with a few contemporary homes scattered about the area. Pine trees and maples and oaks dot the yards along what is a tarred road with spiderweb cracks, weeds shooting up like exploding fireworks. Kelly and Jason Cochran had no kids. They had been living in Michigan for about ten months. They’d relocated after Kelly found a job in Iron River at the Ace Hardware. Kelly was the oldest of three siblings. She graduated from Purdue University with a bachelor’s in liberal arts. Her majors were psychology and sociology, with a minor in forensics.
Kelly was raised in Hobart, Indiana. “We grew up with a pretty basic upbringing. We raised animals and had a fairly” common life, she said. “That’s pretty much it.”
In Indiana, Jason and Kelly had been neighbors for what seemed like forever: “I’ve known him pretty much all my life. Our families talked together. We had cookouts.”
Due to their four-year age difference, Kelly and Jason did not hang out as kids.
“When I turned fifteen, sixteen, we’d sit by bonfires and stuff.”
They started officially dating in 2000, after Kelly graduated from high school.
“We hung out a little bit before that, went to some concerts, but nothing really ever intimate. He did have a girlfriend at that time.”
By May 2001, they’d ratcheted the relationship up a notch and Kelly said she started “staying over at Jason’s house quite a bit.” By September 14, 2002, Kelly Gaboyan and Jason Cochran were married. Kelly was twenty.
“The first eight months were great,” she explained. Jason “was perfect.... He was, like, my soul mate. We could finish each other’s sentences. We did a lot . . . um . . . we did everything together.”
Gradually, however, things changed. After that eight months, Kelly said, the relationship behind closed doors became more abrasive and difficult.
“He would get angrier, easier. There was, like, this second side of him. He still had his good points. He still was ‘good,’ but there was still a little more to him—this bad side.”
Kelly described herself as “strong, stubborn, independent, and feisty.” From an early age, she learned how to “strive to be independent.” Jason, on the other hand, “I don’t know if he really liked that [part of me] much. He . . . I really don’t think he liked that [independence of mine] at all.”
In Caspian, the Cochrans lived in a two-story, dark brown house with white trim, a rotting, ragged handicap wooden ramp leading up to the front door. Trees and overgrown brush hid most of the house from the road. Out back was a fire pit, an old garage with a busted door, some junk and garbage spread about the perimeter of the garage, as well as inside. Tall weeds had grown over and around just about everything. Some attempt had been made to keep up with maintaining the house and yard, but a fruitless effort nonetheless.
Sergeant Cindy Barrette stared at the front of the Cochran house as she and an MSP trooper walked up the wooden ramp. Before reaching the door, the trooper pulled Barrette aside.
“Someone just looked out the upstairs window.”
Barrette glanced in that direction and noticed someone was watching them from behind a curtain.
After Barrette knocked on the Cochrans’ front door, Jason walked out and greeted them on the porch, the door closing behind him: “Yeah—what do you want?”
Jason Cochran came across as standoffish. His body language—rigid, his chest sticking out—gave away how irritated he was at having two police officers standing on his front porch. At five-nine, 265 pounds, Jason was an obese, but clearly powerful and solid, man.
“Sir, good evening,” Barrette said.
“Yeah?”
“You must be Mr. Jason Cochran?”
“I am.”
“Is Kelly Cochran your wife, sir?”
“Um, what’s this about? Yes, she is. But she ain’t home right now. She’ll be back in an hour or so.”
“Is anyone else inside the home right now, sir?” the MSP trooper asked.
“No.”
“Can you tell me where we can find your wife, sir?” Barrette said.
Jason kept looking at the two of them. Eyeing each. He would not say where Kelly was. Then: “If you come back in an hour, she should be home.”
Barrette and the trooper looked at each other for a brief moment. Barrette knew Jason Cochran was lying.
Just then, as Barrette contemplated her next move, the front door opened and Kelly walked out.
“Why did you lie to us?” Barrette asked Jason.
Kelly piped in, “Listen, he . . . he just . . . probably thought I was in trouble.”
That minor obstruction somewhat settled, Barrette explained she was investigating the disappearance of Christopher Regan, adding, “We were wondering when it was you last had contact with him?”
Jason faded back a little from the group, but stayed in earshot. Kelly stepped forward. She was not in the least bit nervous. One might say she was composed. Barrette was under the impression Kelly wanted to help.
“We had a relationship,” Kelly admitted, looking at the sergeant.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“It was, oh, on or about October fifteenth. I tried calling and texting him.”
Barrette kept an eye on Jason, who had no reaction whatsoever to this part of the conversation.
“Did you get in touch with him?”
“No. No answers back. No contact.”
“Ma’am,” Barrette said, “any indication where Christopher Regan could have gone off to?”
“I think he might have left already for North Carolina. To get down to his new job.”
It was hard to tell one way or another how Kelly was feeling about a subject, or get a good read on the thoughts banging around inside her head. Because anything Kelly Cochran talked about was articulated with the same flat effect: an analytical manner or blatant sarcasm. Even monotone. Whether talking about a missing lover or lying to her husband, Kelly had an unemotional sense about her.
Sizing up the situation, knowing what can happen when a love triangle ensues, Barrette came out with it: “Does your husband know about your relationship with Mr. Regan, ma’am?”
Kelly did not hesitate: “He was okay with it.”
Now was no time to judge; it was about gathering information. Barrette looked at Jason, who clearly heard what his wife had said.
Besides pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and taking a deep breath, the big man revealed zero response.
Where Monsters Hide Page 4