Kelly never mentioned this.
Discussing their overall relationship, Kelly put herself into a hole. In her October 28 interview with the MSP, Kelly said she had never been inside Chris Regan’s truck and he owned only one kayak. Now, here, she told Frizzo she’d gone hiking and kayaking with Chris in his truck and that he had two kayaks.
“We spent most of our time indoors,” Kelly said. “Watching movies and having sex.”
Frizzo stared at Kelly.
Without being asked, Kelly said they didn’t have sex on that last night she saw him.
“We did have sex the time before that, but I cannot remember when it was.”
25
TROUBLED LIFE, TROUBLED WIFE
FROM THE TIME KELLY COCHRAN WAS A TEENAGER, HER MOTHER later explained, “I had issues with her doing drugs.” There came a point when Melanie Gaboyan decided she’d put up with so much of her daughter’s misbehavior, insubordination, and drug use that she instituted what Melanie described as a “tough love” policy. She believed she could only reach Kelly this way.
“When she was eighteen, I had to kick her out of the house.” Kelly and her friends routinely showed up “totally obliterated.” Melanie had “three kids to raise.” The last thing she wanted was for Kelly and her druggie friends to corrupt the other children.
Melanie, at fifty-eight, worked customer service at Home Depot. She wore brown-framed glasses against gray-streaked, brown hair, parted in the middle, cut just above her shoulders. She carried a Midwestern, motherly charm: pudgy cheeks, thin lips, large frame. Melanie had a sympathetic sincerity in her manner. She’d obviously given her daughter—maybe throughout their entire lives—repeated chances, probably overlooking the truth because she wanted her daughter to thrive. Once asked, Melanie said, “I would absolutely do anything for my daughter.”
Not long after instituting that attitude of tough love, Kelly’s grandmother, Melanie’s mother, died. Melanie felt depressed and lonely. During an admittedly vulnerable moment in her life, she told Kelly she could return home.
“But listen,” Melanie warned, “I cannot have that around here. You can come home, only under the condition that I can drug-test you anytime I want. If you refuse, you’ll have to leave.”
Kelly agreed.
Then Jason, living next door, moved in. Jason and Kelly were dating seriously by then and talking marriage. According to Kelly, “Jason was very violent” right away. She spoke of one particular day when she watched Jason place a litter of kittens into a burlap sack and beat the kittens until they were dead.
“That was before we even got married. I’m no cat fan, but I like animals. I like animals better than people most of the time.”
If you ask Melanie, her daughter’s behavior had gotten “worse” as time passed. So bad, in fact, Melanie tried convincing Kelly she needed rehab.
Kelly wanted nothing to do with it.
“My parents are amazing,” Kelly said later. “Been married almost four decades. Loving parents. Always supportive. Not the type of parents”—she smiled while adding this—“that you would expect to have a child like me.”
Kelly described herself as someone “always meant to be ‘out there,’ a free spirit. A social loner. Independent.”
Melanie saw that familiar pattern emerge all over again, but this time it came with a fast-paced, downward progression. Kelly was older. She was more set on not listening to anyone but herself. As a teen, Kelly dealt with her mother’s “rules” by running away from home, living on the streets, doing drugs and drinking. Caught, she’d stop using for a while, agree to mandated counseling, but then start the process all over again, once the pressure was off. Throughout this time, she’d been picked up and sent to a girls’ home.
“I put myself into the girls’ home,” Kelly said later.
“You need to quit that!” Melanie would tell her daughter. Kelly’s mother was scared for her child. She could see Kelly’s drug use escalating as each year passed. Not necessarily a situation where a teen decided to experiment with weed, graduated to snorting Ecstasy and cocaine, while hanging in the woods with friends and a six-pack of wine coolers. Kelly was using hard-core opiates—or, as she herself said, “Anything I could find.”
“I’m not on anything, Mom!” Kelly snapped back.
Melanie could tell when Kelly was high. They’d be eating dinner. Melanie would look over and, shaking her head in frustration and fear, watch as her daughter nodded out, “falling asleep in her food.”
* * *
KELLY COCHRAN WOULD TALK about this period of her life—a young teen abusing drugs and falling in love with Jason—as an evolving, ascending rocket she had boarded without necessarily knowing how fast she was going. She sketched herself as a scared, abused woman, living with a man she had known most of her life—a tyrant, intimidating and controlling her. Because of this pressure from her new husband, not to mention the anxiety of what he might do, Kelly said, abusing drugs became an easy and convenient way to numb the emotional pain. But she never considered that she could end the relationship and not marry the guy.
“With Jason, I knew him all my life,” Kelly said. “He had a pretty normal upbringing, his parents normal people. Good people.”
Kelly said she was so close to Jason, she missed a lot.
“I feel like there was a split in him.” Not multiple personalities, but two different people. “Just the way that he looked at me, the threats, some of what he did. Me waking up and him standing over me with a gas can. The look in his eyes.” There was a time, she added, she saw the “man I had fallen in love with. At other points, there was somebody completely different.” Kelly said she knew of no traumatic events in Jason’s life besides the loss of his best friend in high school, which had devastated and changed him. “I don’t know if that was traumatic enough to split him—to me, it’s not.”
Something that bothered Kelly was Jason’s “sexual preference.”
“I knew his secrets. In order for him to get off, he had to inflict pain. Choking, beating. I mean, the reason he had girlfriends, and why I was okay with it, because it gave me a break—a little reprieve for me.”
After they wed, living in Indiana as a couple, moving out of Kelly’s parents’ house, Kelly said, “Jason tried to tighten the reins even more. I guess that’s the best way to say it. He would monitor most things I did. It wasn’t as bad at the start as it was the last four or five years.”
“In the beginning, it was verbal abuse,” she explained. “I think that was the worst, at the beginning.” As the marriage became static and mundane, even bourgeois, she claimed, Jason began to “push and shove” her around. “I mean, he got mad. We had some times where we’d yell at each other.... There were a lot of times where he’d grab me, push me, shove, and it just got worse.”
Based on Kelly’s version, one had to consider if Jason had suffered from mental issues all his life, or had he developed the condition during the course of their marriage?
“I want to say . . . yes,” Kelly explained, regarding Jason’s mental status. “But, on the other hand, I think I was a little bit too close. It is my belief that I think he had some issues.”
In 2007, when things between them were volatile, they decided to separate.
“I’ll kill you!” Kelly claimed Jason screamed at her routinely, giving one reason why she felt compelled to consider leaving.
“If I ever wanted a divorce . . . he wasn’t going to let me go. He had thrown stuff. Slammed doors. Broke things . . .”
Later, while talking through—if true—traumatizing events for anyone, strangely, Kelly recalled many of these anecdotes with a half smile on her face. She sat with one leg crossed over the other, her arms folded on her knees. She never looked away. She’d shrug her shoulders once in a while out of nervousness, perhaps in contrast or even disagreement with what she was talking about. At least from her body language, Kelly Cochran seemingly wanted to give the impression she was scared.
&nbs
p; 26
CHAOS REIGNS
CHIEF FRIZZO AND KELLY COCHRAN STARED AT EACH OTHER. TO SAY that Kelly was contentious that day, Frizzo later explained, would be an understatement. Kelly was irate and upset, far beyond the point of being deliberately devious.
Kelly mentioned what a “worrier” Jason had become since they’d moved into town.
“Jason told me,” Frizzo said in response, “that he hasn’t gotten angry once since coming out of the hospital.”
“He doesn’t really show his anger toward me. We shout at each other. We both call each other names. I am sure he’s called me a slut, and whatnot.”
“Has he ever thrown things at you when he’s angry?”
“Not in the house.”
Frizzo asked for a second time about Chris Regan and the last time Kelly saw him.
Kelly explained that lasagna meal again. How she texted Chris the following day and, with no response, took a ride over to his apartment. She let herself in with keys Chris had given her.
“It looked like he had started packing—like leaving cabinets open. That job meant everything to him. I was weirded out, actually, by the way the apartment looked when I went back. I am surprised he didn’t make his drug test. He wanted his son with him in North Carolina. They had some bet that whoever arrived there first had to buy dinner.”
The chief brought up the subject of text messages as the interview seemed to come to a natural end. Frizzo had gone through most of the phone records by then: Chris’s, Kelly’s, and Jason’s. While conducting a tedious, careful examination of calls, Frizzo discovered an interesting set of facts, one of which Kelly needed to explain.
Frizzo found communication between Chris’s cell phone and Kelly’s cell phone on October 13, arguably the day before Chris went missing. Nothing of particular interest, essentially. But the next day, October 14, at three fifty-seven p.m., Chris texted Kelly’s phone. Chris was “probably” getting gas at the fuel station near his apartment (that CCTV video). Kelly did not respond to that text. Yet, about a half hour later, at four-thirty p.m., someone sent a message from Jason’s cell phone to Chris Regan’s cell phone.
Chris responded to it.
After that, a phone call was placed from Chris’s phone to Jason’s phone.
Seven minutes.
At five twenty-five p.m., about an hour later, “one final text message,” Frizzo explained, occurred “from Chris Regan’s phone to Jason Cochran’s phone.”
Why would Jason be communicating with Chris Regan on the day Chris allegedly went missing? Frizzo wanted Kelly’s thoughts.
“He wouldn’t be,” Kelly responded. “If anyone was using or texting from that phone to Chris, it would have been me.”
She explained that whenever her phone wasn’t working, she’d use Jason’s.
“But you’re going to text him while you’re with him?” Frizzo asked. The chief had established this with a timeline from Kelly. According to the times she had given the MSP, Kelly would have been at Chris’s apartment then.
Kelly became perturbed by the push back. “Yes . . . ,” she said. Then stopped herself. “Wait. What do you mean?”
“What was Chris wearing the last time you saw him?” Frizzo asked, changing the subject.
“I think he was wearing his Keen boots and jeans.”
Kelly was done.
Frizzo stood and thought about the cell phone calls. She knew from her investigation that Kelly’s phone had texted Chris’s phone on October 15, 16, and 17, but not at any time after that. What’s more: Kelly’s phone never called Chris’s phone at any time after October 14. And yet, she had told the MSP she “called and texted him for two weeks straight.”
* * *
NOT LONG AFTER THAT INTERVIEW, Chief Laura Frizzo sat in her office. An MSP detective popped in.
“You got a minute, Chief?”
“Yes? Can I help you?” By now, Frizzo was done with the MSP. To her, they were looking at only one side of the coin. Frizzo was taking the reins and running with the case in the direction she believed it should go.
“Listen, Kelly called us,” the MSP detective said. “She doesn’t want to talk to you anymore. Why don’t you just sit back and allow us to do this. You have too much on your plate, as it is.”
“What the f . . .” was all Frizzo could say.
“She says someone is following her, and, look, we . . .”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m getting ready to head out on Thanksgiving break,” the MSP detective said. “I am not going to be thinking about this case while I’m gone.”
“Well, hey, that is your choice—but I am!” Frizzo said.
The conversation ended with Frizzo more fired up than ever about Kelly Cochran. All Kelly did with that phone call was draw more attention to herself.
“I had to be the voice for Chris Regan, the victim in this case,” Frizzo concluded. “Because it was clear to me that no one else was.”
27
THE DARK SIDE
AFTER JASON COCHRAN STOPPED WORKING, KELLY COCHRAN EX plained to me, their relationship took on an even darker form than had existed previously throughout their lives.
“His issue was his back,” she said. “It . . . caused him not to be able to work. He wasn’t able to do anything. He was an invalid.”
Jason couldn’t move around much outside, especially. By that point, he’d filed for disability.
This made Jason even more miserable, Kelly added.
“Things got worse because . . . he was angry. He was jealous. I was always leaving the house, every day, working seven days a week. He became very jealous. Very angry. There was times when he threatened me. . . .”
Kelly spoke of a day when they lived on Mississippi Street, in Hobart, Indiana. It was 2008. Jason was in a rotten mood all the time. According to Kelly, he owned a “thirty-aught-six,” referring to the bullet, a .30-06 Springfield shotgun cartridge with a soft tip.
“Anytime we had guns in the house, they were loaded. We had a fight. At this time, there were no other relationships. I wasn’t seeing anybody. He put the gun to my head. We were screaming and yelling.”
They argued back and forth. Yelled. Screamed.
“I’m gonna do it!” Jason said, per Kelly’s recollections.
“Go ahead. . . .”
Without warning, Jason pulled the trigger.
“I don’t know if I was necessarily scared, I’m sure I was, but here he had a gun to my head and he pulled the trigger. Gun wasn’t loaded that time. It was the only time the gun wasn’t loaded.”
If Kelly’s walking-on-eggshells marriage was so volatile, brittle, violent, and dysfunctional, why hang around to see what the guy was going to do next? Why not move on? Get a divorce? According to Kelly, this sort of violence in the house had been going on ever since she’d started living with Jason.
Kelly talked about being raised in a family where parents stayed married. “I was taught that you worked it out. If something was broke, you fixed it.... Nothing is easy. If it were easy, there wouldn’t be a divorce rate like there is.”
Kelly thought moving to Michigan would help. Although it was mostly Jason’s idea from the start, Kelly supported it because she believed the relocation might do the marriage some good.
However, nothing positive happened after they got settled in Michigan. Jason became even “more jealous” and “had no intention of going to work.”
Kelly didn’t start a job for two months.
“I was in no hurry. We had money saved up.”
Her first job in Michigan was at Ace Hardware in Iron River. She worked the cash register. Stocked shelves. Made keys. From there, she went to work at Mr. T’s Restaurant, serving tables. Two part-time jobs took up most of her time.
Jason stayed at home. Took walks. Fished. Smoked and grew weed. Made friends with the neighbors. Played games for hours and hours on Facebook every day, while eating and smoking.
Applying at Oldenburg, Ke
lly said, gave her the possibility of doing what she loved: “Building things, making and fixing things.”
She stopped using drugs for a time so she could pass the screening.
“The last time I had used anything was probably six weeks prior to the test and that was marijuana.”
Working so much, she spent less time around Jason. Their problems seemed to dissipate because they rarely saw each other. This opened up an opportunity to seek out men for sex and companionship.
By the end of June 2014, Kelly was working forty to sixty hours per week at Oldenburg; her shift was five a.m. to three p.m. Mr. T’s fired her because (she first said) she kept calling in sick. She quit the hardware store. She was unable to maintain three jobs simultaneously.
According to Kelly, meeting Chris Regan just happened.
“I first met him on the day of my interview. He was one of six that did the hiring—that was the first time. I would see him in passing.” Military assembly, where Chris was team leader, was located “right behind electrical assembly,” the department where Kelly worked. They would stop when passing each other.
“Hi, how are you?”
“I’m fine,” Kelly would say, smiling, sensing a spark.
“We would make small talk. We ended up talking more, I’d say, in June.”
They planned—and blew off—several dates before hooking up.
“I was married. I was trying to . . . I knew it was wrong to be dating someone at work. I felt uncomfortable. Some of the things with my relationship at home made things worse.”
After making plans and not meeting, Kelly considered that the flirting would not turn into anything more than a mutual crush. While she was at the car wash one day, vacuuming out her truck, Chris called.
“Hey! Nice to hear from you,” Kelly said.
“Yeah, sorry about not being able to meet up.”
“We talked for, I’d say, forty-five minutes to an hour.”
By the end of the conversation, they finally had a plan in place to go on a date.
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