“There’s nothing there,” the MSP told Frizzo when she broached the notion of the Cochrans needing more scrutiny. “We can’t allot any more resources to this case if you feel that you want to keep pursuing Jason and Kelly Cochran.”
Frizzo could do nothing more than throw up her hands.
“You need more evidence if you want us to assist with traveling and collecting DNA. We just cannot do it.”
Frizzo had requested the MSP’s help in the investigation, to begin with, and here she was now, hopeless and irritated they did not want to support her. Over the past week or so, Frizzo had spent hours watching the MSP interviews with Kelly and Jason, becoming more irate and annoyed by the lack of follow-up.
“That’s a red flag!” she’d shouted at the monitor more than once.
“If I had been doing those initial interviews,” Frizzo said later, “and this is just me, I mean, but I would have had a lot more follow-up questions.”
Kelly’s injury, for one. When Kelly talked about her shoulder and the accident she was allegedly involved in, she was clearly lying. Otherwise, she would have had a clear-cut explanation. Her account would never change. Add to that what Tim Huntley had said about Kelly having different stories. At least, Frizzo felt, there needed to be some sort of investigation into the accident itself to confirm what she’d said.
“If I was in that room and she was talking about this injury,” Frizzo added, “I would say, ‘Tell me more about it. Who were you with? Where were you going? Where did the accident actually happen?’ And none of those questions were asked.”
Staring at the monitor, watching Kelly talk about her injury, Frizzo had thought, I know this is a lie. I know it didn’t happen that way.
The injury was significant. Had Kelly hurt herself during a fight with Jason? Maybe a confrontation with Chris Regan? What if Kelly killed Chris—had she injured her shoulder during the course of that crime or covering it up?
Kelly should be pressed on the issue.
And what about Jason? Frizzo considered. During his interviews with the MSP, Jason had talked about walking into town, a three-mile journey one way, and just happening upon Chris Regan’s apartment, recognizing his and Kelly’s truck parked in the lot near a truck with a canoe strapped on top. He had just happened to “realize” it must have been “this Chris guy’s” apartment.
What the hell?
Had anyone considered that Jason was complaining about his back and other injuries, which he claimed had kept him confined to home for the most part, and yet here he was walking back and forth into town? And just happened to run into his and Kelly’s truck?
“And they don’t follow up with any questions,” Frizzo explained. “Incredible. Why don’t they ask him what would lead him to walk in the direction of Kelly’s boyfriend’s apartment, anyway? He had said clearly, several times, where he preferred to walk. That route was in the total opposite direction. He would have had no reason to walk three or four blocks west, in another direction. And if he did, let him tell us about it. But nobody asks.”
The chief felt a definite connection between the Cochrans and Chris Regan’s disappearance. MSP detectives did not want to believe one or both could have been involved.
It was time, Frizzo decided, to crank the vise closed on these two and see what they had to say.
* * *
TURNING ONTO LAWRENCE STREET in Caspian, Frizzo drove slowly. The road had not yet been plowed. Conditions were slick, with a fresh, however thin, layer of snow covering everything. Under different circumstances, Frizzo would have appreciated the beauty of it all.
Frizzo parked in front of the Cochran house. She took her time walking up the wooden ramp, being careful not to slip. Her plan was to get Jason into the IRPD first. Sit him down, alone. Something indicated—or perhaps just a detective’s instinct—that this would be the last time the chief got a legit crack at the two of them. Kelly did not want anyone in law enforcement to be alone with Jason. Frizzo had to tread lightly. A door slammed in her face would only prove to be another roadblock she’d have to jump.
She controls him, Frizzo told herself. She’s the strength. She’s the mastermind in the family. She tells him what to do. Whatever it is he did, Jason was under her direction.
When she’d shared this theory with MSP colleagues, however, according to Frizzo’s recollection, she was told: “You’re way off base. You do not know what you’re talking about.”
The chief strode from her car to the door. She was dressed in her IRPD black fatigues, duty belt strapped to her waist, with her 9mm Glock 17 holstered, and a pink Ruger .380 fastened (hidden) to her ankle. She wore a bulky winter jacket with a ruglike furry collar and heavy black boots. Sewn into the outer biceps of her coat sleeve was the IRPD emblem of a gold eagle, its wings spread, and a red, white, and blue flag with five stars covering its body.
Knocking on the Cochrans’ door, Kelly and Jason’s dogs started barking.
Kelly had a cigarette in her mouth and wore a blue hoodie. She seemed surprised and flustered after opening the door to the chief of police.
“Hi, Kelly. I’m Chief Laura Frizzo, with the Iron River Police.”
They shook hands.
Frizzo asked Kelly to put the dogs somewhere so she could come in for a brief chat.
Kelly beckoned Frizzo into a foyer area, which was closed off from the rest of the house. Frizzo stood for a moment as Kelly grabbed the dogs and told Jason, who belatedly stepped into the picture, to put them upstairs in one of the spare rooms. The door leading into the house had what appeared to be a hole just off center, duct tape covering it. Looked like someone punched a fist through the door from the inside.
Frizzo stood in the kitchen. Kelly scrambled around, picking things up, not really making eye contact. She was off her game, for sure. Fidgety, like a woman whose house was a mess and company had stopped by uninvited.
“You want to just have [Jason] come in here, too?” Frizzo said, giving the visit a more serious, professional tone.
Jason appeared. He and Kelly sat down on the living-room couch. Frizzo stood in front of them, a piece of paper in her hand.
The chief explained she had spent the weekend reviewing the MSP’s investigation. In light of everything Kelly and Jason had told detectives thus far, she wanted to know if they had any issue coming into the IRPD to sit and talk. Clear up a few things that seemed to be—although she never said as much—nagging at the seasoned investigator.
“Again?” Kelly asked, discouraged. Both Kelly and Jason looked stunned. Shoulders dropped, jaws hanging. Why in the world are we being summoned into the IRPD again?
“Yeah,” Frizzo said, almost apologetically.
“And that is in regard to the same thing?” Kelly asked.
“Yes,” Frizzo said, reiterating her point of having several questions and “follow-up” to do. “You have only one vehicle, right? So I was wondering if one of you would be willing to come down with me now, and the other come down in about a half hour?”
Jason and Kelly took a moment.
“So?” Frizzo asked.
Jason agreed to go first.
Kelly Cochran’s husband stood, stared at Frizzo momentarily, before stepping out of the room to get dressed.
21
CAT AND MICE
WITH ONE HAND ON THE STEERING WHEEL, LAURA FRIZZO PULLED A Marlboro Light out of her front breast pocket and popped it into her mouth.
“You mind if I smoke, Jason?”
“No, go right ahead.” Jason spoke with a soft, slow, upper-Midwestern inflection, a bit of Canadian influence there.
Frizzo fired up her butt and cracked the driver’s-side window.
The drive to the IRPD from the Cochran house was slow because of the storm. Frizzo and Jason chitchatted about everyday things. Fishing. Hunting. The landscape. Weather. Jason even mentioned where he generally took his walks as they drove by a trail leading to “the pit” area, noting what type of fish—small and largemouth bass,
trout, northern pike—he put his line into the water, hoping to catch.
At five minutes before noon, Jason sat inside the IRPD’s interview suite, a small, nondescript, whitewashed room. Jason had his arms in front of himself on his lap. He wore large-framed glasses, a gray T-shirt, his white-and-gray goatee neatly trimmed. Kelly Cochran’s husband seemed rattled and anxious, his face and head Valentine’s Day red, his body movements fidgety.
Frizzo made him wait for ten minutes before walking in, carrying a yellow legal pad of questions. She sat down at a round table, opposite Jason. Although the chief was friendly, Laura Frizzo felt Jason Cochran knew what had happened to Chris Regan, either because he was involved and Kelly was protecting him, or participated in the crime under Kelly’s direction.
With a strong belief that truth is immutable and one does not have to recall it, Frizzo had a difficult time shaking the fact that Jason had staked claim to several (different) versions of the same events during his MSP interviews. Many of which did not add up.
“He’d changed just a few minor details,” Frizzo recalled.
Which was where the truth lived. In between those minor inconsistencies—that blurred area.
The chief reintroduced herself. Then: “Like I said, I have reviewed the interviews you had with the detectives. And I did some checking with other witnesses. So I just wanted to go over a few things with you.”
Jason looked at the investigator. He took a long, hard swallow, before nodding nervously in the affirmative, letting the chief know he understood.
“It’s my understanding you moved here from Indiana?” Frizzo asked.
“Yes.”
“And how long did you live in Indiana?”
“Ah, my whole life.”
Prompted by the chief, Jason laid out the same narrative he’d dictated the past few weeks while MSP investigators were poking around, asking questions: how he and Kelly met, how he was once arrested on a warrant for not showing up in court on a medical debt, how he knew about his wife’s infidelities. He explained they’d been separated the past several months, though still lived in the same house, along with how he’d been dealing with physical and mental issues since moving to Michigan that past February.
As Jason described his current medical crisis, he painted a picture of a man who could barely get out of his own way, someone who once had kidney cancer on top of a host of back issues. He repeated that he was unable to work, which had been devastating, he said, to his overall demeanor and attitude about life.
“I really do miss working . . . it gave me a feeling of purpose.”
Regarding the strain on their marriage, Jason blamed himself, saying he couldn’t have sex because of the stress it put on his back. He took Flexeril for it, but the drug had only helped so much.
They discussed Kelly’s schedule while employed at Oldenburg. Kelly punched out around three-thirty p.m. every weekday. She’d walk through the door. Change. Then claim she had “errands” to run or friends to see, before leaving. She wouldn’t return home until eight or nine on those nights. Jason knew she was going out to see men.
“In July, it was two times a week,” Jason explained, adding that he’d often question Kelly when she came home: “What were you doing?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kelly would respond. “You’re just being nosey.”
“I picked up her phone one day and saw a message from a guy named ‘Ken,’” Jason told Frizzo. “The message said something about ‘a date.’”
“Why would you have to go out with other men and not me?” Jason had asked his wife.
“Ken took it the wrong way,” Kelly had said, minimizing the message. “We’re just friends.”
Regardless, Jason added, this episode made him sad. He recalled crying that night after she left. He knew what was going on, but couldn’t do anything to stop it. The impression Jason gave, without coming out and saying as much, was that he didn’t feel like a “real man.” He could not perform the duties a husband should, and this convinced him to allow Kelly her time to go out and get what she needed elsewhere.
“It wasn’t long after that we started discussing divorce.”
Pressed for a time frame by Frizzo, Jason dated this period “July”—the same week he saw the Ken message. Jason realized “she was seeing other men, too,” noting he found the names “Chris” and “Curtis” on her phone. So he confronted Kelly about it. But she wrote it off, saying, “You have nothing to worry about.”
In August, Kelly went to Jason and, he said, she talked about being “close to divorce.”
“I’m just staying with you because you cannot take care of yourself, physically or financially,” Kelly had told her husband.
“I had withdrawn from friends and family by then,” Jason told Frizzo. “I was really depressed.”
By September, Jason was having trouble sleeping and eating. He’d lost forty-five pounds in forty days.
“I was crying all the time. I thought frequently about how to kill myself. I planned to walk out into traffic or walk off a bridge. But couldn’t think of a large enough bridge in walking distance from the house. I did actually walk into traffic a few times.”
As the depression grew more intense, and he told Kelly how he was feeling, Kelly admitted she was seeing other men, which only intensified his feelings of worthlessness.
“I had racing thoughts in my head, which were yelling the whole time. I had to go to the hospital.”
By then, Kelly was going out “four or five times” weekly. They had stopped communicating. Jason claimed he’d be dead now if he hadn’t gone to the hospital.
“I told Kelly I wanted to kill myself.”
“Did you also tell her you wanted to kill her?”
“No,” Jason insisted.
Kelly visited him only once while he was in a hospital psych ward. Doctors prescribed Zoloft, Zyprexa, and lorazepam. Heavy-duty psychiatric drugs. The combination of drugs helped Jason build self-esteem and feel better. When he returned home, Kelly was still running around, but Jason said he could deal with it in a healthy manner.
As Frizzo listened, she kept track of the dates. Jason talked about his time in the hospital beginning “on or about September eighteenth.” He returned home five days later. After being released, Jason told the chief, he felt less affected by his surroundings and Kelly leaving every night of the week, unquestionably seeing other men. Yet, Frizzo knew he was lying: After all, Kelly had told her boss at Oldenburg days after Jason’s release from the hospital that Jason had threatened to kill her.
“Were you going over to the neighbor’s for bonfires?” Frizzo asked.
“Yes, I was.”
That neighbor, David Saylor, a guy Jason’s age, lived up the road. Frizzo had spoken to Saylor and his grandmother, with whom David lived. Whenever Jason felt “low,” he’d pop over to talk to David or his grandmother. They’d cheer him up. Make him feel better.
“Kelly and I were starting to talk, too, near this time,” Jason said. “We were eating dinner together once in a while.”
So, Frizzo thought, staring at Jason Cochran, at the same time Chris Regan goes missing, here they are getting along a little better....
22
NIGHT WORK
IT WAS STRANGE WHEN HE LATER THOUGHT ABOUT IT: THE NOISES. The banging and sanding and sawing. In the middle of the night. Two, three, four hours of power tools running for three nights in a row.
Who remodels their home when the rest of the world is sleeping?
“Like eleven o’clock, all the way up to three in the morning,” David Saylor later said. This would have been, he guessed, in October. Definitely near October 14, David was certain, but no later than that.
“Sawing and sanding,” David told Frizzo.
David met Jason near the end of September 2014, Kelly a few weeks later. David, along with his uncle, Todd, lived with their grandmother. David and Jason ran into each other outside one day, hit it off, and started hanging out “e
very day,” David recalled. Kelly was never around much. David would see her from time to time, but not for long periods of time. Kelly was in a constant hurry to be anywhere but by her husband’s side.
“Jason told David Saylor not to trust me because I was having relationships with other men,” Kelly later explained.
Jason would stop over, or David would stop by the Cochran house. They’d play cards or roll dice. There were times, David said, when he and Jason were kicking it and Jason would abruptly blurt out that he needed to sleep. It seemed a strange way to act, David thought.
At other times, Jason would stop what he was doing and suddenly announce that he needed to go for a walk.
Always alone.
He’d be gone two hours or more.
David was in the Cochran house one afternoon. He looked toward the stairs leading up toward the second floor.
“What are you doing up there?” David asked a day after hearing those noises. They were in the Cochran living room.
“Remodeling,” Jason said. “I couldn’t sleep. I was working on the stairs, refinishing them.”
Funny thing, David later told Frizzo, “I never saw him either bring in construction materials or bring out anything to indicate construction work.”
Besides, the house had been remodeled upstairs before the Cochrans had moved in—and those stairs Jason said he refinished?
David glanced at them.
No work had been done.
23
VOICES CARRY
CHIEF LAURA FRIZZO STARED AT JASON COCHRAN. HE SQUIRMED IN his chair. Fiddled with his hands. Looked down, to the side, hardly ever making eye contact. When he did look in Frizzo’s direction to answer a question, Jason seemed unsure of what he was saying—as if he knew he could not lie to this investigator and get away with it.
Frizzo moved on to the subject of Kelly’s truck parked at the apartment complex where Chris Regan lived. She asked how Jason just so happened to stumble upon it while out walking one afternoon. Seemed like an incredible coincidence.
Jason mentioned “ending up on the M-189” and how he’d always had great vision. He happened to look to his right as he walked by the apartment. Lo and behold, there it was, in front of him.
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