“Funny you called the prosecutor’s office after I was calling you all morning,” Frizzo said.
“Well . . .”
“When I spoke to Kelly last week, she said you two would submit to DNA, and I was calling to see when you two would be available for this.”
“I have been thinking about this and we spoke to a lawyer and we will not be doing this.”
“Why wouldn’t you be willing, Jason?”
“I’m tired of you harassing us. Our attorney says you need a warrant for our DNA.”
Frizzo rolled her eyes. “I will have a warrant, Jason. Don’t worry. So now you’re refusing to give up your DNA and you also refused a polygraph. I would say you both appear to be very uncooperative. I really would like to talk to you. I will say that you may not like the way things seem to be heading. It’s important for you to talk to me, Jason, and, you know, give me an explanation of certain things.”
“What number can I reach you at?” Jason asked.
Frizzo gave it to him.
“If I don’t hear from you by, let’s say, Friday, April twenty-fourth, I am going to assume you are not interested in talking to me.”
As the warrants were prepared, the K9s, along with Mike Neiger, conducted searches of the park-and-ride and woods nearby, as well as a wooded region around the Cochran house, the Caspian Pit, and several Googled locations investigators had extracted from the Cochrans’ home computer.
Frizzo read through the old MSP reports. Of interest to her were the neighbors, David and his uncle, Todd Saylor. They had spoken briefly to the MSP. Frizzo wanted to reinterview David and Todd and find out what more they knew. These were the closest people to Jason Cochran in Michigan. The night Todd Saylor reported hearing power tools, but nothing seemed to be refinished at the Cochran house, had always gnawed at Frizzo. She felt it was significant.
Frizzo called the Saylors and they agreed to meet her at the IRPD on May 14, 2015.
“Sit, get comfortable,” Frizzo said as they walked in and introduced themselves.
Todd and David sat. Both seemed nervous, but also cooperative and willing to share whatever information they could provide.
“Have you ever seen this vehicle at the Cochrans’ house?” Frizzo asked, describing Chris Regan’s car, showing them a photo.
Both said no.
“You remember that time in early October when Jason Cochran borrowed some of your power tools? Did he ever give them back to you?” Todd asked David.
The mere mention of power tools sparked a memory. Both talked about that week after Chris went missing, when Jason borrowed the tools.
“We even joked a few times,” David said, turning his attention to Frizzo, “about how, right after Chris Regan disappeared, the Cochrans invited us over to their house three times within one week and they had an enormous amount of meat, like kebabs one night, pizza with a ton of meat on it another, and then tacos. We couldn’t understand how they had all this meat, seeing that they were always so poor. Even their dogs’ bellies were hanging on the ground! We discussed the idea that maybe they cut up the missing guy and that we had eaten him.”
Frizzo looked down. Took a long, hard swallow. Horrific. The idea of this possibility made her lose herself in thought.
“You need to understand,” Frizzo later recalled, “this is after David tells me about the sawing he heard all night long. I thought, ‘Oh. My. God. Could this be true? Could they have cut him up?’”
Could they have fed Chris Regan to the Saylors?
Frizzo looked back up. The Saylors seemed to be joking about this in some respects, but it was, she now understood, a strong possibility.
“What kinds of tools did you have that you lent to Jason?”
David Saylor mentioned a SKIL saw (one of those round, circular saws carpenters use to cut plywood) and a SAWZALL.
Todd recalled an incident: “I could hear fighting one night going on outside and then I heard tires squeal.... This would have been right around the time Chris Regan went missing.”
Frizzo asked again about the night of March 5, when the search had been going on. Could they add to what they had already shared with the MSP?
Todd Saylor reiterated: Jason was acting quiet and seemed nervous.
“What did he say?” Frizzo asked.
“It was what I said,” Todd explained. “I told him that if the forensic lab is over at the house that they would find everything. They’ll go through your house with a fine-tooth comb, and if there is something there, they’ll find it. He got really nervous at that point. He said, ‘I didn’t know that.’ I couldn’t believe how red his face became. . . .”
They talked about how the neighbor / friendship developed over the time they knew each other. Todd said Jason warned him and David about Kelly, calling her a “big flirt.” He confessed to them that he knew she was cheating. He said she loved pills. Would take any opiate she could get her hands on. It didn’t seem to bother Jason much, Todd explained, that his wife was stepping out. They both claimed Kelly went “out of town” a lot, according to Jason.
“Jason was really interested in the pit, how deep it is. Like he asked specific questions. He wanted to know if there were any other pits around.”
This seemed weird to them.
Todd addressed David: “You remember when you helped Jason haul out that big freezer from their basement?”
“Yeah, it was sometime over the winter. They said they were selling it. It was empty, though.”
“How do you know that?”
“I looked inside.”
Those large meat meals they had eaten at the Cochran house came up again. Todd and David talked about how fat the dogs had gotten post-October. Both said they found it odd that Jason would come over all the time, pre-October 13. He’d show up alone for bonfires they had out in back of the house. Never with Kelly. But after Chris went missing, Kelly and Jason were inseparable. They never went anywhere alone.
In the days after Chris’s disappearance, both men said, they witnessed Jason leaving the house with a backpack, something he’d never done before. They thought it was strange.
Both Kelly and Jason “were paranoid about the search and definitely left town because of it,” the Saylors said.
Frizzo ended it there and said she’d be in touch during the coming weeks and months.
After the Saylors left, Frizzo called a dive team to set a plan for going out to the Caspian Pit and conducting an underwater search.
“I knew there was something there—I just needed to find it.”
45
DIVER DOWN
FRIZZO AND MIKE NEIGER, ALONG WITH A TEAM OF K9S, WENT TO work at the Caspian Pit. The dogs cleared the wooded areas around the pit as well as the south end. As they started sniffing around a specific area northeast of the pit, quite a ways back from the water, the K9s picked up a “line of detection.” It ran at an angle across a sandy region, heading toward the water.
“Over here,” someone yelled.
The dogs stopped at the water, were barking, and walking in circles. Neiger put a K9 and its handler in a kayak.
They set out.
Fewer than five minutes into the trip, the K9 hit on an area in the water located on the south side of the pit, near a dock, approximately ten feet from the end of the dock.
“Here!”
“That’s a precise and clear indication of human remains,” the K9’s handler said as the dog went wild. “But let me also say that this is not specific to the area and could mean there are remains within the area she’s outlined, if that makes sense.”
Frizzo understood.
While the dogs searched the pit, Frizzo went over to the Cochran home to look for anything they might have missed. She was interested in finding a saw or some other indication that the Cochrans had dismembered Chris Regan and—as ghastly and horrendous the thought—had fed parts of him to their neighbors and the dogs.
Mike Neiger helped. Together, they collected all of the ash f
ound in back of the house. As Neiger carefully picked up each shovel of ash and dumped it slowly into an evidence bag, he spotted something.
“Hold up.”
“What is it?” Frizzo asked.
It was a small SAWZALL blade, blackened from a fire, sitting in ash, entirely intact.
“Why burn the blade?”
They looked at each other.
Also inside that same portion of ash Neiger and Frizzo found the metal components from a pair of Old Navy jeans, same brand Chris Regan had pairs of inside his apartment. Buttons. A zipper. Two grommets.
“Oh, my . . .”
Standing, thinking about this, Frizzo felt a chill. The testimonial from the Saylors echoed. Now a saw blade. Remnants from a pair of burned pants.
Where was Chris Regan’s body?
They might never find it.
As the chief and Mike Neiger continued to sift through the ash, several other pieces of debris interested them. Wearing latex gloves, Neiger picked up something that resembled a small, chipped-off piece of rock.
“Looks like bone,” he said.
* * *
BACK OUT AT THE Caspian Pit the following day, May 19, 2015, a dive team headed into the water, utilizing sonar and visuals.
The pit was cloudy and murky. The bottom, it turned out, contained about an eighteen-foot-deep layer of silt, which made it difficult to see anything beyond it. If anything had been tossed into the water, with such a deep mud base, it was probably gone for good.
“We got something,” one of the divers came up and reported as Neiger and Frizzo waited along the shoreline.
“What is it?”
They found an area of the pit with no silt, about eleven feet off the shoreline, a shallow region along the eastern middle portion of the water.
“A barrel,” one of the divers reported.
An old, rusted fifty-five-gallon drum.
Frizzo and Neiger looked at each other.
After the barrel was taken out of the water, it was clear it had been used as a fire pit. It also had a clothesline attached. On the opposite end of the line was a cement block to hold it underwater.
Frizzo tracked down the Cochrans’ next-door neighbor, who had the exact same clothesline in her backyard: color, rope texture.
“Yeah, they had one just like it, but it’s gone now,” the neighbor said.
Frizzo had a quick look around the Cochran yard.
She found several cement blocks identical to the one used to hold the barrel underwater.
46
PUSHING FORWARD BACK
THE BURDEN ANY INVESTIGATOR FACES DURING A CASE THAT FEELS static is to stay resilient. Practice restraint as well as persistence. For any investigator searching for a missing person or murder suspect, there is an intensity of pressure—from the public, and the weight they place on themselves—to make something happen. A lack of progress can lead to an adverse effect on the lead investigator’s performance. An investigator is resigned to follow her instincts as far as she can, and then rely on the evidence to guide her beyond that. Resource allocation is something the greatest detectives understand, utilize, and employ. At some point in any investigation, this can end up being the key component to success. Which was why, as Laura Frizzo took in Upper Michigan’s bright June sun halfway into 2015, she felt the answers would be in breaking the Cochrans. Frizzo admittedly did not have much experience in this sort of cat-and-mouse game Kelly was playing. The chief had investigated murders, and was in the middle of a child killer case she’d taken on before Chris went missing. Yet, dealing with such a deceptive, sketchy, angry creature as Kelly Cochran was wearing her down. She needed help. She needed someone experienced with where the right opportunities existed to punch holes in the Cochrans’ stories.
As each new witness was interviewed, along with those who came forward, Frizzo persevered. A woman who lived down the block from the Cochrans reached out to the IRPD on June 12, saying she’d recalled an incident that might be of some importance.
“Bring her in,” Frizzo said.
The period in question, so claimed this new witness, was mid-October, the same time frame turning up under every rock. The woman recalled being “awakened by something that sounded like a gunshot coming from [the Cochrans’] residence” one night in mid-October.
“I got up and looked out my window. I heard a door slam, like from a house. There was a car parked outside the Cochran place, running, its headlights on.”
“Color of the car, ma’am?’ Frizzo asked.
“I couldn’t make it out.”
“I heard a woman in distress shout, ‘No! No!’ Then I heard a voice say, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’”
The car—and she was certain it was a car, and not a truck—backed out of the driveway and took off.
Was it Chris Regan’s?
The woman said she didn’t get to know the Cochrans until after October. She’d invited them over for Thanksgiving dinner. They were totally in love at that time, she said.
“Kelly and I got to talking about Chris Regan,” the woman explained.
“How so?”
“I asked her if she had ever been in Chris’s car and she said no. She told me that it was Chris who had fired her from her job. She told me she’d cheated on Jason, but would not say with whom.”
“Was there anything else?”
“I heard the boys,” she said, which Frizzo knew to be the Saylors, “ask them if they did anything to Chris. They both just said, ‘No!’ and that was it.”
47
HELP
HOBART, INDIANA, IS A SOLID SIX-HOUR DRIVE SOUTH FROM IRON River, Michigan. Even for a cop traveling well above the speed limit. The Hobart Police Department (HPD), on East Fourth Street, downtown, has a small waterway called “Duck Creek,” which ran north-to-south behind it. The police department is housed inside a redbrick, whitewashed building, along with the City and Community Center. The entire area has a small-town, Americana feel. Hobart gives a comforting sense of what Midwestern country living is truly like.
In early July, Frizzo made contact with the Lake County Sheriff’s Department (LCSD) and the Hobart PD, having no idea how vital HPD was about to become in the search for Chris Regan. Frizzo needed help in serving a warrant to the Cochrans for DNA extraction. During a meeting on July 24, 2015, it was decided that HPD would grab the Cochrans, haul their asses downtown, and swab their cheeks.
“As of now, we have been unable to locate their vehicle—they may have gotten rid of it,” the LCSD informed Frizzo. “That, or they’ve left the area.”
Great. One more hurdle.
Frizzo now worried the Cochrans were gone for good.
Back in Iron River, Frizzo found another one of Kelly Cochran’s conquests, a local man. Scouring through Kelly’s phone records, looking for numbers she frequently called, Frizzo found him.
“I met her at Mr. T’s Restaurant,” the guy explained. “Realized she was a freakin’ weirdo after a few weeks. I started to ignore her calls.”
Frizzo wanted to know more.
“Kelly told me Jason knew about all her affairs and that she was having ‘many’ affairs with coworkers at Oldenburg. [Jason] would go through her pockets and find all sorts of things connecting her to other men. She always seemed strung-out, like a druggie.”
“You think she used a lot of drugs?”
“She definitely had a pill issue. She preferred painkillers, but would take just about anything. She picked at her face, too, so she might have done heavier things.”
A meth head?
“Have you heard from her?”
“Just once. She called and said she left Caspian and was living in Indiana because you guys were harassing her.”
The man talked about how he’d once spoken to Kelly about knowing where Chris Regan was or what happened to him.
“Did you kill him?” he asked.
“No.”
“What about Jason?”
“No. He’s in a plac
e for crazy people. I’m done with him. He freaks me out and he puts me in the corner. He is abusive, controlling, and jealous.”
“That was it?” Frizzo asked after he outlined the brief conversation.
“Yeah, but I wondered about this crazy husband of hers I had never seen, and how she was always out and about.” If Jason was so dangerous, abusive, and controlling, how in the hell had she managed to leave the house every night of the week and sleep with so many men? “I have no idea if anything she ever told me is true.”
“She ever mention to you about her shoulder?”
“Yes. She said it was rotator surgery that did it.”
“Nothing about a car accident?”
“Nope,” he said. “It’s funny. She got a kick out of all the guys she was getting with at Oldenburg—it was a game to her. She called them her ‘conquests.’”
Another Mr. T’s employee walked over to Frizzo as she stood with the guy in his front yard. Frizzo introduced herself, and the woman explained that Kelly had been fired from the restaurant for stealing money.
“Throughout the time she was working there, she never talked about her husband. I never even knew she was married—she flirted with all the guys. Then, [in] the middle of October, she starts showing up at the restaurant with her husband.” The woman was taken aback by this: Kelly sitting with her husband, having the gall to show up and eat at the same restaurant she had stolen from. It showed how shameless, brazen and unfeeling she was, not to mention how deaf to the feelings of her former employer and the people she’d worked with.
“Thanks—we’ll be in touch.”
Frizzo headed back to the station.
* * *
DURING THE SECOND SEARCH WARRANT, in a pile of debris on the floor of the basement, the chief found an old photo of Jason and Kelly. It was one of those pictures many families have had taken at the local department store. Jason and Kelly stood in front of a mock celestial-type background, their two heads touching, cheek to cheek. The impression was that of a “normal” suburban couple. No doubt encouraged and staged by the photographer, Jason had one arm wrapped around Kelly’s waistline; Kelly had a hand on Jason’s chest. Kelly was noticeably heavier. They came off happy. Content. A couple celebrating some sort of special moment with a professional photograph.
Where Monsters Hide Page 18