Ah, just like that, you say. I don’t think so, Frizzo thought, watching Jason twist in his chair.
Jason said he spied the truck with the kayak on it, put it together that Kelly had once said she and this guy Chris went kayaking together. It all made sense in the moment.
“And how long ago was this?” Frizzo wondered.
“Oh, a month and a half ago, maybe.”
The chief asked, why had Jason walked down that specific road? Frizzo reminded him that he’d maintained there were only certain places he would—and could—walk to from his home. And that direction, where Chris’s apartment building was in town, had never been part of those discussions.
“So now you’re changing that,” Frizzo suggested. “I’ve actually seen [closed-circuit security] video of you walking around the apartment.”
Was Jason stalking his wife and her lover?
After a conversation regarding where Jason walked, and how it was actually in the opposite direction of Chris Regan’s residence, Jason had no explanation.
Frizzo moved on.
She wanted to know what he said to Kelly that night when she got home. According to Jason, he now had solid proof she was inside another man’s apartment. He had seen the truck. Had Jason called his wife out when she walked through the door?
“I didn’t say anything to her,” Jason claimed. “I didn’t want to know.”
The weak link, Frizzo told herself. While sitting, listening to Jason lie, Frizzo felt Kelly was the puppeteer, in total control of this man.
“Even though I have to check out all possibilities, and I never lose sight of that,” Frizzo said later, “there is no doubt in my mind—at this moment of that interview—that these two people are involved in Chris Regan’s disappearance. She is the mastermind. Whatever Jason did, he did under her direction.”
It was one thing to theorize, quite another to prove. Especially, Frizzo knew, without a body, a crime scene, or any tangible evidence.
Frizzo asked Jason if they had ever talked about Chris Regan’s disappearance. Chris was a guy Kelly dated. Someone Jason admittedly wanted out of the picture. What were they saying about him inside the Cochran house?
“We don’t talk about it,” Jason said.
“You don’t talk about it?”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“This is a guy she’s had contact with since July. He’s missing. And you do not want to talk about it?”
“I don’t want to know. I thought he would come home after a few days. I’m hoping he comes home soon so this will all be behind us. . . .”
Frizzo asked Jason about his anger.
Jason said it was “different” before and after his hospital stay.
“I was suffering from delusions. I do not remember threatening Kelly. I was seeing people who weren’t there. I was having trouble. . . hearing voices.”
Frizzo wondered about the voices.
“They were telling me to kill myself—that everyone would be better off without me around.... The urges would get very strong at times.”
Jason teared up as he talked about his parents in relation to his possible suicide. He would never want to put them through losing a child. He felt like a disappointment.
“Nonstop,” he said of the voices. “Every day—before going into the hospital.”
The chief asked Jason his thoughts about taking a polygraph.
Jason babbled on about his medications and how he would need to okay it with a doctor first.
He paused.
Silence.
Then, thinking it through: “I’ve changed my mind. Why should I? It’s not something I want to do.”
“It’s just a tool to determine if you’re being honest.”
“I feel I am being harassed.”
Ignoring that, turning the tables, Frizzo said: “It’s a great tool for someone who is innocent.”
Frizzo could sense Jason was getting anxious and wanted to end the interview. She mentioned how the sequence of events since Jason had been released from the hospital, on top of the discrepancies in some of what he had told investigators, made it appear as if he had things to hide. She was doing her job, trying to clear up any confusion. And a polygraph, the chief reiterated, would help in that regard.
“I’ll take that into consideration,” Jason said.
Yeah, right.
Frizzo stood, walked out of the room. When she got to her desk later on, thinking about it, she recognized several areas in which Jason did not want to go. He’d changed the subject several times. Totally avoided certain topics.
All red flags.
“I also knew,” Frizzo concluded, “that that particular interview was likely the last time I would speak to him in this manner.”
24
DETAILS
KELLY COCHRAN WAS FULLY PREPARED, FRIZZO COULD TELL A FEW moments after entering the interview suite and looking at her. Kelly had her game face on. She knew how to sit in the chair. How to focus her demeanor for a police interview. How to come across as the suspect being unfairly accused of a felonious crime. She was composed. She understood, completely, the complexities of being seen as the suspect, as opposed to a witness.
“She knew just how far to take you,” Frizzo said later. “Kelly would take you to a certain point and no further.”
Frizzo needed to change that. However, the chief had to be careful. As a cop, one ran the risk whenever involved in the meticulous scrutiny of a suspect that cherry-picking and finding whatever it is you’re looking for might force you to miss important information. Frizzo also knew that without a body, without some sort of clear evidence of involvement, all Kelly had to do was answer the chief’s questions and withstand the pressure. She could then walk out and not look back. In the scope of the investigation, what did Frizzo actually have on Kelly or Jason other than a gut feeling and a few inconsistent stories?
Another concern was the certainty that she was only going to get one last chance under these confined, controlled conditions. Kelly would not likely sit down again within the four walls of the IRPD to talk about her missing boyfriend and extramarital affairs.
After Kelly gave Frizzo the dates of them moving into the state, when she started working, and when she was “terminated,” Frizzo brought up Kelly’s shoulder. This was important to the chief. A potential answer to Chris’s disappearance lurked within this so-called “accident.”
“It’s an old injury,” Kelly said. “A car accident years ago I reinjured in an accident [recently].”
“Where?”
“Probably Wisconsin.”
“Probably Wisconsin?” Frizzo stressed.
“I don’t know.”
“When?”
“September twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh. I do not know.”
“Who was driving?”
“A guy named Mike. But I don’t know his last name.”
“How do you know him?”
“He was going to pick up a vehicle. I met him through friends.”
“Which friends?”
“What do you mean?” Kelly asked.
“Who connected you? How do you know him?”
“Actually, I cannot remember.”
“Is there any record of the accident, Kelly?”
“The police came, there was another vehicle involved.... We were in a pickup truck. Green. A Dodge, I think. The accident happened as we were coming back. Mike had to switch vehicles in Green Bay. I have no idea why he had to pick up the vehicle. I have no idea where he lives, in Iron River or . . . I haven’t seen him since the accident.”
“Where’d you guys meet up to go on the trip?”
“He picked me up at my house.”
“Where did the accident happen?”
“Another vehicle ran into the driver’s side of the vehicle I was in and it was like on U.S. 141 somewhere.”
Vague, Frizzo thought, staring at Kelly. Details that cannot be checked out with any sort of comprehensive investigati
ve examination. She’s lying.
Frizzo stared at Kelly.
Where, the chief considered, should I take this interview next?
* * *
WHEN SPEAKING TO HER, Kelly Marie Cochran can sometimes come across as an intelligent, well-spoken, well-educated woman. She “hates TV, personally.” Instead, Kelly explained, she opts for reading authors such as “Voltaire, Patterson, Dickens, Shakespeare.” She loves “poetry, history, psychology, medical studies, and forensic books.”
At least, that is one side of this complicated, aloof, guarded woman.
“You have to understand Kelly,” Laura Frizzo later said. “She is well-rehearsed. She was definitely prepared with her body language, how to sit in the chair during this particular interview, her eye contact with me. When I spoke to her that day, November tenth, something told me this was not the first time—I mean, like, the first time this has happened. I always thought, from the very beginning, that Jason was starting to have psychological issues when he did because he wasn’t as strong mentally as Kelly—and the things they had done together were starting to catch up with him.”
Frizzo believed Jason had done “heinous things for his wife,” and because of that, his mind was unraveling.
Was he in the midst of a psychological breakdown?
Kelly, by contrast, was settling in, enjoying the ride. Able to conduct herself in a seemingly rational, calm, unremorseful manner, even after what Frizzo was about to discover were the most horrific things imaginable that one human being could do to another.
Jason’s biggest fear, Frizzo had recognized while interviewing him, which could be utilized at some point, was getting caught, going to jail, letting his family down.
“Her thought process was completely different,” Frizzo added. “She thought, ‘I’m never going to get caught. I’m too good at this. I’m smarter than you and everyone around you.’ Where Kelly does not have a conscience, Jason, well, he struggles because he has a conscience.”
Frizzo was describing, at least with Kelly, the psychological wiring of a serial killer. Remorselessness, narcissism, grandiose thinking, glib superficial charm, impulsiveness, a shallow affect. The pathological foundation and framework of a psychopath capable of the worst.
* * *
PART OF WHAT MOTIVATES Kelly, she explained in a series of letters and conversations, is a desire to “study people and pick apart their brains.” It fascinated her to think “what the brain is capable of.”
Kelly used the word surprisingly—strangely enough—as a qualifier, before saying, “Surprisingly, I like animals.”
Surprisingly, I like animals.
What was Kelly implying? Was she trying to crush the common cliché that a majority of serial killers torture and maim animals?
“Yes,” Kelly said during a telephone interview. “Serial killers generally dislike animals and torture them. I like animals, that’s what I’m saying.” She laughed.
And Jason?
“My husband hated animals. . . .”
Kelly claimed she endured an “impossible marriage.” At first, she did not elaborate. She simplified it: “I was told that a psychopath and sociopath could not live together and carry on for over thirteen years.”
Asked later what role she played within that logic, Kelly replied: “The sociopath. Jason was the psychopath.”
Jason Cochran’s wife was someone, Kelly went on to explain, who “seeks out answers for everything.” Although, she added, she understood “some things were meant not to have an answer.”
This particular letter, one of many over the course of one year, was signed, Sincerely, Awesome.2
* * *
CHIEF FRIZZO DECIDED TO stay on point—the accident—as that November 10, 2014, interview carried on. After, that is, Kelly explained how she’d torn a tendon in her shoulder long ago and the recent accident likely reinjured it.
“Would you mind if I asked what doctor you saw?”
“Is that necessary?” Kelly snapped back.
“It is not.”
The fact that she wouldn’t answer such a basic question was significant and all Frizzo needed to hear.
Kelly talked about being fired from her job.
“Tell me about the issues you were going through with Jason at the time.”
“Do I need to?”
Frizzo encouraged Kelly to explain.
“He had severe depression. He went into the hospital. They diagnosed him and then released him with treatment.”
The straightforwardness of her answers was telling in and of itself.
Lies are not easy to recall.
“Your employer and other people at Oldenburg told us that you were saying he was going to hurt you. Have you seen a change in that anger since he’s been released from hospital?”
“I’ve noticed the anger is gone. He is tired all the time, though.”
“Do you think he could ever carry out on those threats you told others at your work about?”
“I was never really afraid of him. . . . He didn’t really get to that point”—severe depression—“until the end of July, after he lost a close friend on his birthday.”
“When did he threaten to kill you and then kill himself?”
“He threatened suicide.”
“Yeah, but he threatened to take you with him. . . .”
“He would have never taken me with him.”
“When had he made the threat, Kelly?”
“Just before going into hospital.”
“Did he mention anything about hearing voices in his head to you?”
“He said he ‘thought’ he heard voices in his head, but he never went into detail about it.”
Frizzo noticed the underlying theme within every word Kelly uttered: Are we done yet? This is really starting to annoy me. Her answers were contrived, thought out and constructed around what information she believed the chief had.
“She was cocky and arrogant,” Frizzo said later. “Very sure of herself and very irritated with me for bothering her with all of this.”
Frizzo looked for the opportunity to inject Chris Regan into the conversation. Kelly’s answers to the questions Frizzo asked about Chris and her relationship with him were what mattered most. What Kelly had to say regarding times, dates, what they did, the last time she saw and spoke to Chris, was going to determine Frizzo’s next move.
Reiterating the subject of Jason and his mental disabilities and status, Kelly said, “I never planned on leaving my husband.”
As Frizzo listened, she knew this to be a blatant lie. In looking through Kelly’s cell phone—after the MSP collected hers and Jason’s phones under that warrant—Frizzo read texts Kelly had sent to her sister while Jason was hospitalized. “And she told her sister that Jason has been acting crazy bad lately. She told her that she was going to drive an hour to the hospital to break things off with Jason and that she had a breakfast date in the morning. Come to find out, she had breakfast at Chris’s apartment the following morning.”
But Kelly never mentioned it. Why not tell an investigator looking into the disappearance of your boyfriend these important details about interaction with him? Why hide anything? Why wasn’t Kelly interested in helping the chief find Chris Regan?
“How do you think it made Jason feel when he got out of the hospital, came home, you were still seeing these other men?”
“It would have bothered him,” Kelly said, adding that when Jason finished his “treatment plan,” he was a “different person.” She saw a marked change.
“Then how could you continue seeing other men, knowing what it would do to him?”
“They were relationships I already had.” She hesitated. Looked away. “I love Chris. I wound up telling Jason about the extent of the relationship with Chris.”
More contradictory information.
“Jason told me that the two of you never discussed those details because Jason didn’t want to know.”
Kelly said nothing.
She and Chris met at work, Kelly said. Started a more intimate relationship about a month after (same as she’d told the MSP). “We’d go on walks at Lake Ottawa. Go see the loons at Iron Lake. Go hiking. His knee would bother him, though. He liked to hike, ride his bike, or just relax.”
“Had Chris ever been at your house?”
“Maybe two occasions,” Kelly said.
“When?”
“The last time was, oh, maybe a month ago. Or before that. The last time I was at his place was the day after we had dinner together and he didn’t return my texts. He was supposed to go for his drug-screening test the following morning.”
A date would be helpful, but Kelly said she was having trouble. She’d talked it through with the MSP detectives, who “were trying to help me figure out a date, but it’s hard to remember.”
Focusing on a timeline, Frizzo asked Kelly to think about the day and what they did.
Kelly recalled bringing lasagna over to Chris’s. She arrived at about “four or five p.m. He was sitting in his chair. . . .” She’d brought the meal over on a plate and used the microwave to reheat it, never mentioning that large box in the kitchen in front of the oven and microwave.
Frizzo asked about the texts Kelly said she’d sent to Chris the following day.
“I sent him a text and he didn’t respond. I told him I hoped he was feeling better.”
Chris’s text to Kelly on October 13, Frizzo knew, had said he was “over that illness and no longer sick.”
Another—however small—contradiction.
As they talked about that last night Kelly claimed to have seen Chris, Frizzo stuck to specifics. For example, Kelly said she made garlic bread in a skillet on the stove. But Frizzo knew the stove had not been used, hence several household items left on top. In addition, no skillet was found in the sink.
“Did you wash any of the pans—I don’t recall seeing any evidence of lasagna for dinner left in the apartment. . . .”
“I brought it on a plate, washed the plates, took them home.”
Chris’s sink, Frizzo knew, was full of clean plastic containers he was washing and boxing up. No one, far as she could tell, had used the sink in some time.
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