Where Monsters Hide

by M. William Phelps

  “Tomorrow?” Kelly said.

  “Hiking?” Chris sounded excited.

  Kelly suggested a nearby lake.

  When she started dating Chris, Kelly later said, “me and Jason were separated. We were living together, but we were separated.... We both agreed on [the separation]. But he wasn’t moving out. I ended up putting a lock on my phone. Jason wasn’t going back home [to Indiana]. He wasn’t going to show his parents he’d given up. . . . Things were getting rough at home. The . . . aggression was getting worse.”

  Jason would go through her phone any chance he could; this forced Kelly to change the password continually.

  “We were separated and agreed on seeing other people.”

  That first date with Chris at the end of June went well.

  “We met at a local lake.”

  They drove separately. Parked in a lot by the trail. Went hiking.

  Afterward, they sat on a picnic bench. Talked. This “led into more intimate actions,” Kelly recalled.

  They had sex that day. That one date led to seeing each other three times a week, after work, at night. Within a few weeks, it was four to five times a week.

  According to Kelly, they got along “really well. We respected each other’s privacy. A lot of the guys at work would give Chris hell. We’d been seen talking together. It was friendly. We’d never be intimate or anything like that at work. Never show affection. But we did joke around and talk.... Some of the guys said, we know you’re dating her, we know you have a relationship. He got upset because he was a supervisor there.”

  Not long after that, Chris sent Kelly a text.

  “He was mad. Really pissed.”

  He didn’t want anyone at work to know. He didn’t want to lose his job.

  Kelly claimed she said “sorry” and took the fall.

  Chris ultimately admitted to the guys at work that he was having an affair with Kelly, but only because they wouldn’t leave him alone about it.

  On most nights they got together, Kelly cooked dinner. They’d hang out at Chris’s apartment.

  “We’d eat. We’d have sex. We’d talk. We’d watch movies.”

  Then, one day, Chris stopped calling or texting.

  Kelly didn’t understand. According to her, she thought it had to be because she didn’t want to take off with him to North Carolina. She said Chris had asked numerous times and she was clear she would not leave Michigan.

  “There is no way that my father,” Chris Regan Jr. later said, “wanted her to move there with us. Absolutely, that is false and one of her lies.”

  * * *

  MANY REPORTED THAT JASON COCHRAN did not have an angry bone in him. Beyond his Where Monsters Hide outline, former friends and relatives said Jason’s demons were private. He didn’t stomp around, red-faced, full of rage. Yet, as Chief Frizzo dug into Jason’s life as part of her investigation, a different picture emerged.

  One source told a rather chilling tale. One day, Jason had explained to this man: “I was driving and was pulled over by a female cop.” Jason had a look of indifference about him. Like he had no feeling one way or another about it.

  “The whole time the cop was at my window,” Jason continued, “I was visualizing chopping her into pieces with the hatchet I kept under the seat.”

  This same source further claimed Jason was “very racist and talked about tapping into the water source and adding some chemical that would wipe out a huge area of blacks.”

  Another source told the chief Jason once explained that he “knew how to get rid of a body so only the teeth remained.”

  When Frizzo heard this, one thought entered her mind: Finding Chris Regan was going to be one of the most complex tasks of her career. She needed guidance. A source no one else had access to. And she had no idea then, of course, that it would be Christopher Regan Sr. himself.

  28

  PIECES

  FRIZZO NEEDED A BREAK. NOT A REST. EXTRA SLEEP WOULD BE NICE, obviously—but it wasn’t time for that right now. Instead, Frizzo needed some sort of boost to get her over the hump of questioning the Cochrans and the opportunity to search their house. There was something inside that house. Frizzo could feel it.

  For weeks, Frizzo had been trying to speak with Jason’s mother, Mary Cochran. She’d left messages. Tried phoning the residence at different times. No one ever picked up or called back.

  On November 19, as Frizzo left yet another voice message, a woman came on the line.

  “Yes . . . hello?”

  “Mrs. Cochran, this is Chief Laura Frizzo from the Iron River Police Department in Michigan.”

  “Yes . . . okay.”

  Frizzo explained—without giving away too much—why she was calling.

  “Yes, yes. I am Jason’s mother.”

  “When was the last time you spoke to your son, ma’am?”

  “Just this past weekend. He called me from his cell phone.”

  “Has Jason come to visit you [in Indiana] over the past couple of weeks?”

  “No, no. I don’t think so.”

  “What about during the month of October?”

  “Oh, yes. October,” Mary Cochran said. She recalled the visit specifically, without hesitancy.

  “Do you know if it was early in the month or later?”

  “I would say, around the second week. I think it was a Thursday. He stayed for the weekend.”

  Specifics, Frizzo noted. A Thursday, the second week of October, October 9. If Jason had stayed the weekend, that would have pushed it to October 10, 11, and 12. That made Jason available to be back home on October 14 and 15.

  “Thanks,” Frizzo said. “You’ve been helpful.”

  Frizzo got Jason’s phone cleared from evidence. She decided, strategically, to drive it back to him. This would allow her to feel the two of them out, see where they were at, maybe get another crack at asking a few questions. The chief’s evidence pointed in no other direction. Her colleagues at the MSP might have disagreed, but Frizzo was following the bread crumbs, trying to exclude the Cochrans. But everything she found included them.

  It was four o’clock when Frizzo and another officer arrived at the Cochrans’ Caspian home.

  “Here’s your phone, Jason,” Frizzo said after the big man answered the door.

  Frizzo was hoping to be invited in, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  “Can I get Chris Regan’s keys to his apartment from you, Kelly?” Kelly had come out of the house and into the foyer, where they all stood. The last thing Frizzo needed was Kelly and Jason Cochran having access to Chris Regan’s apartment. Moreover, based on that monotonous, time-consuming review of the text messages among the three phones, Frizzo realized Chris Regan had never actually given Kelly keys to his apartment.

  Kelly disappeared into the blackness of the house.

  Frizzo waited.

  “Here,” Kelly said when she returned, handing over the keys.

  “Jason, hey, was wondering when you last visited your parents in Indiana?” Frizzo tossed out in a casual manner, as if she’d just thought of it.

  “August,” Jason said.

  “Not in October?” Frizzo responded. She mentioned how she’d just spoken to his mother and she claimed it was the second week of October.

  “No. Look, my mother takes medications for rheumatoid arthritis and it affects her memory.”

  “Well, she seemed to recall speaking to you over the last weekend, so I think her memory might be all right, Jason.” To Kelly: “And how was it you got hold of these keys?”

  “Chris gave them to me about two months ago.”

  The impromptu interview was done. Clearly, Kelly was uncomfortable and did not want her husband saying anything more. Even clearer, she was finished talking.

  Frizzo and her colleague walked back to their vehicle as Jason closed the door. Before getting in, looking over the roof of the car, staring at the Cochran house, Frizzo said, “They are lying to us.”

  * * *

  BY DEC
EMBER, AFTER THE Thanksgiving holiday break, that same MSP detective stood again in Frizzo’s office.

  “Look, back off. You need to let it go. If you don’t, they are not going to cooperate anymore.”

  Kelly had called the MSP to complain about Frizzo harassing them.

  “Are you kidding me?” Frizzo snapped back.

  “You’re going down the wrong trail!”

  Frizzo was beyond frustrated. The evidence pointed toward the Cochrans. No one else. She’d gone through the phone records. Conducted interviews. Spent countless hours reading every piece of paper associated with the case. The Cochrans lied about small things. This was a problem. Murderers don’t get caught in big lies; they make their mistakes telling seemingly insignificant lies they easily forget.

  “Chris Regan had financial problems and other issues,” the detective told the chief, according to Frizzo’s remembrance. “And he just wanted to disappear. . . .”

  “I don’t know what records you’re looking at—but, um, he was not behind on any bill. He’s got a pension from the military coming in. He’s living in an apartment, working full-time. All his bills are paid up. He is very organized.”

  The detective dropped his head into his hands. “He disappeared because he wanted to, or he killed himself.”

  “No, no, no,” Frizzo said.

  Frizzo was not giving up. She knew the Cochrans had answers. She needed to find that missing piece to get them back into the station under a warrant.

  29

  HOME LIFE

  THE SUBJECT OF PETS HAD ALWAYS BEEN A FOCAL POINT WHENEVER Kelly Cochran talked about Jason’s violent tendencies. Kelly and Jason had bought a dog right after they married. A feisty little thing. It liked to get into the garbage. Nothing would deter the pooch from knocking the garbage over whenever they left the house. One afternoon, the Cochrans arrived home to find the dog had spread the garbage all over the floor.

  Jason walked in, stopped in his tracks, looked around.

  “He became infuriated and beat her,” Kelly claimed.

  Then Jason “put [the dog] inside the garbage can and beat her while she was inside . . . and then put the lid on it.”

  A few years later, there was a cat “in heat” and she kept coming around the house, Kelly said.

  “I guess it was bothering him. He ended up drowning the cat in a . . . [swimming] pool.”

  She told this same story two different ways: The second, later version had the cat bothering them one afternoon while they were putting in a swimming pool for a client.

  Oddly, Kelly showed no emotion as she talked about these brutal, violent episodes of animal cruelty. She described intensely graphic scenes of cruelty in a flat tone, without any emotion.

  For every story Jason’s spouse told of his punishing, maniacal behavior, there was a friend or relative of Jason’s to counter the claim. They testified that throughout his life, Jason had never shown any animosity, hatred, or anger toward animals or people. In most testimonials, Jason was a gentle giant. Sure, he’d gotten mad once in a while, but nothing to the extent of Kelly’s claims.

  One former friend spoke of Jason’s family having lots of farm animals. “Jason’s mom was really good about taking my daughter around to pet the horses and things, and it was a great time.” Jason was usually there. He appeared happy, this same friend added. Calm. There was nothing about his behavior then, or at any other time, to indicate Jason was—or could become—violent or fly off into a rage.

  However, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

  “There was no one at all who described Jason as violent or abusive, to us,” Laura Frizzo later said.

  Furthermore, when one reads through the available text history between Jason and Kelly, there was not a single instance where Jason spoke to his wife in a threatening manner. Additionally, Kelly never came across in responding texts as a woman in fear of her husband. To the contrary, her attitude proved she was the aggressor. And Jason’s replies to those same texts showed a man who was ridiculed and told what to do by a domineering spouse.

  When they moved to Michigan, Kelly made no effort to keep it secret that she was stepping out. Jason begged for her to come home after work and not spend the night with other men. His texts were pleading and passive, maybe pathetic. Never threatening.

  Kelly would turn around and tell him that his jealousy had “better end.”

  I’m sick of you going through my shit!

  They lived in Caspian under a dynamic that Kelly mandated, maintained, and controlled. She was out running around all day and night (after she stopped working full-time), monopolizing their only vehicle, with Jason trapped in the house, playing video games, smoking weed, overeating, taking walks, and napping.

  “You have to understand, Jason is not from Michigan,” Frizzo later said, speaking of that period before and after Chris Regan went missing. “He’s living six and a half hours from where he’s raised and his family is. She is . . . doing whatever she wants. He’s trapped inside. And his wife, who he has done all these things to show and prove his love to, is belittling him constantly—and there’s nothing he can do about it.”

  “You better knock this shit off,” Kelly would scream, pointing at Jason whenever he started looking into her life and asking questions.

  “You’re right, baby, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  In Jason’s home computer, during the summer and fall of 2014, he was Googling phrases such as How to stop being a jealous husband. It got to the point where Jason once told Kelly: “You will continue to fuck me over and I will continue to love you, anyway.”

  * * *

  ABUSING ANIMALS, BEING VIOLENT toward the neighborhood cats and your own dog, is one dark side of human behavior. But Kelly also claimed Jason exhibited these cruel and psychotic behaviors around people, too.

  “He’s threatened quite a few. One would be a friend of mine.... He had threatened [this guy] a couple of times, but I witnessed one.”

  Kelly had what she deemed a “friendship relationship” with this man. Entirely platonic.

  “Jason did not want me to talk to him. We went skydiving together and he was pretty jealous of that. [Jason] threatened him and said he would kill him if he didn’t leave me alone.”

  When they moved into the Lawrence Street house in Caspian, Michigan, in January 2014, those same lingering “issues” from Indiana followed. According to Kelly, it was Jason’s decision to move to Michigan. There was no talking him out of it. She said Jason “picked the state because he was able to grow marijuana and smoke marijuana legally [in Michigan]. He grew it at home in Indiana, but it was legal up [there]. I believe there are other reasons, but I cannot be sure of those.”

  “Look, Jason and Kelly had lots of farmland in Indiana and could have grown all the weed he wanted without ever being caught,” one Indiana law enforcement officer said. “That is not the reason they left Indiana. They were running from something.”

  “Jason was running from his own demons and his own mistakes,” Kelly said later about the sudden move. “There were a lot of things he was running from and, at the end, he just stopped talking to me about it all. A lot of it was to isolate me, though. He had seen the independence that I had started. My independence made him crazy. He tried to stifle every bit of it that I had.”

  Jason found a few homes on craigslist and sent Kelly up to Michigan to meet with a real estate agent. She soon found the Caspian house and bought it.

  Nothing changed, Kelly proclaimed. They were still fighting. Jason was smoking more weed than ever, and she was beginning to branch out and meet new men. It was a time, Kelly believed, when she leaned heavily on drugs just to get through the day.

  “I’ve used drugs a lot. There really wasn’t one certain kind of drug I used. When things got bad, I started using pills a lot. I was depressed a lot and took a lot of pills. I have experimented with just about any kind of drug you can think of.”

  Chief Frizzo became interest
ed in Jason’s back pain. The videos Frizzo viewed of Kelly and Jason frolicking around a waterfall in September 2014 proved to the chief there was perhaps a lot more about Jason Cochran they needed to learn.

  “He had some pain,” Kelly said. “But any man who can . . . lug a two-hundred-pound man . . . around and do the other things he did, is quite capable in body and mind, so . . . no. I never considered him disabled. I think he, I don’t know . . . I think he, um, he sought more attention for his injuries than he needed.”

  The reason Jason wanted to move to Michigan, Kelly claimed later, had nothing to do with a change of pace and the opportunities Michigan offered for Jason to grow his own weed legally. Jason, Kelly concluded, was feeling the heat back home. He’d done too much in Indiana. He needed to leave the state before authorities caught on.

  “He killed multiple people in Indiana,” Kelly told me during a telephone interview in 2017. “He also wanted to get me away from my family so he could control me easier.”

  30

  NEW BLOOD

  IN HIS YOUNGER DAYS, MIKE NEIGER HAD A RUGGED, OUTDOORSY LOOK to him. Salt-and-pepper, thick, mountain-man beard; red cheeks from windburn; small, curious eyes. Born in Petoskey, Michigan, which is part of the shoreline in Little Traverse Bay, on the very northern tip of the state, south of Lake Michigan’s Beaver Island, Neiger spent twenty-five years with the MSP. First as a road trooper. Then a long stint in forensics.

  Neiger was sixty-one years old when he and Frizzo first met. Neiger explained to Frizzo that he had recently retired from the MSP, where he had spent the final ten years of his career as a forensic specialist. Since retirement, he’d started a company, Michigan Backcountry Search and Rescue (MibSAR), which allowed him to volunteer his time in “select cases” throughout the Upper Peninsula, Lower Michigan, and certain locales in Canada. His main course of investigation was missing-person cold cases and unsolved homicides.

  “Evidence collection, direction and assistance, missing-person flyers . . . and tracking services for possible deceased bodies,” Neiger explained.