GETTING KELLY COCHRAN INTO HPD TO TALK ABOUT CHRIS REGAN’S murder had been an uphill battle, demanding, not to mention incommodious. However, at the end of the day, Jeremy Ogden had gotten the job done. A cop’s greatest skills as an interrogator and an investigator who had to deal with a narcissist—and probable psychopath—had been put to the test.
So far, Jeremy Ogden kept the upper hand.
“Jeremy is the real deal,” Laura Frizzo said later. “His investigative skills are like nothing I have ever seen. He knows how to get people to talk. The first time I talked to him, I thought, ‘Thank you, God. Someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing.’ Not many like him. During those early days of playing cat and mouse with Kelly, and trying to find Chris Regan, as we fell in love, there were many times I actually tried to push him away because I didn’t feel I deserved him. I’ve never been so loved. It’s amazing now that I’ve accepted and embraced it. I had no idea how beautiful life really could be.”
As Ogden and a second detective sat with Kelly inside HPD, she began talking. At first, she was “vague about everything,” Ogden explained. She stuck to the “Jason shot Chris” narrative. She shirked responsibility onto Jason, which was what Ogden had pushed her into doing. Yet, if Ogden thought this was some sort of typical homicide, one that he’d seen many times as a Homicide detective, Kelly cleared that up with one sentence: “Jason dismembered Chris and we took him out into the woods.”
Lot of detail missing from that, Ogden knew. Still, it was a solid start. An opening. Kelly had admitted being party to a murder. She wasn’t going to be able to walk away from this now. Ogden understood that half of what she was saying at this point were lies. Just keep her talking. Keep her feeling as though she was in control. Keep her believing it was all on Jason.
This, mind you, while HPD built a case against Kelly for Jason’s murder.
The first story Kelly told placed the onus entirely on Jason.
His idea.
His plan.
His savage acts of cruelty.
“I was told what to do,” Kelly said. Then she talked about Chris coming to 66 Lawrence Street that night for dinner, October 14. Jason wasn’t supposed to be home.
A patent lie. Kelly had told the opposite story to the MSP in October, claiming she went over to Chris’s apartment to heat up lasagna. The evidence proved she had been lying about this, including phone records Chief Frizzo had obtained, placing Kelly at home.
Ogden knew Chris Regan had been lured to the Cochran house. There was no other explanation.
“Chris and I were having sex near the back door and Jason suddenly appeared,” Kelly claimed in this first interview about the murder. “Jason shot him and Chris fell on me, and we, the two of us, tumbled down the stairs into the basement.”
The way she described the scene, Jason stood at the bottom of the basement stairs, hiding in the shadows, his shotgun butted against his shoulder. He had his gun pointed up the stairs. He waited for Chris Regan to finish having sex with his wife. Then shot him in the head.
Kelly claimed Chris was doing her from behind, doggy-style, while standing on the landing area down into the basement by the open door. She faced the wall, her hands above her head bracing herself. Just after Chris ejaculated—“He waited for him to finish,” Kelly would later say—Jason fired one round.
Chris and Kelly then tumbled down the stairs together. Chris was dead.
Although this story would change later, Kelly said she immediately began giving Chris CPR to help revive him after getting up off the floor of the basement.
But it was too late.
Then Kelly told Ogden, “Jason downsized him.”
“He what?” Ogden looked at his colleague.
Downsized?
“Machete, knife, and chisel.”
Jason also took a SAWZALL—an electric reciprocating saw used for demolition, its jagged-edged steel blade pulsating in and out, able to cut through nails and metal and thick hardwood—and cut Chris Regan into pieces, which she was “made” to bag and carry upstairs.
“How long?” Ogden wanted to know.
“About an hour, hour and a half,” she guessed, referring to the amount of time it took Jason to dismember Chris Regan.
Ogden took a break from the interview, stepped out, and called Frizzo. He needed to make arrangements for Kelly to be brought up to Iron River to show Frizzo and the team where she and Jason dumped Chris Regan’s remains.
Inconceivably, while she was dating Chris Regan, Kelly had gushed, “I tried to pamper, treat him like he was the amazing man I was falling in love with . . . That anyone who was able to be in a relationship with Chris was very lucky because of how awesome of a guy he was, all the way around.”
Frizzo was quite taken aback. How awful. Where was the truth in all of it?
Ogden explained he felt Kelly was not sharing the complete story. It would come. But she wasn’t there. Still, within every lie a perp tells, there is a basis of truth. So there was no reason not to disbelieve the ghastly notion that Chris Regan had been dismembered.
Frizzo thought about the Cochran neighbors the Saylors. How Jason had borrowed the SAWZALL from them. Then, incredibly, all that fresh meat the Cochrans had on hand after October 14 and the three meals the Saylors had been invited over for.
“I will never forget that interview with the Saylors. Sitting in my chair, listening to them talk to each other. I think it’s highly probable they did this. On that day of the Saylor interview, I sat there thinking, ‘Oh, my God. They cut him into pieces. Possibly ate him. Could this be real? In Iron River?’”
That interview with the Saylors was the first time dismemberment had entered Frizzo’s mind, but now with the call from Jeremy, her worst fears were confirmed.
They might never find Chris Regan.
“Okay, we’re ready up here when you are, to begin searching,” Frizzo said.
They hung up.
After talking a bit more, Kelly displayed reluctance to drive with Ogden to Iron River and show them where Chris’s body parts had been dumped. So Ogden took out a piece of paper and slid it across the table. Plopped a pencil on top.
Kelly looked up at him.
“Draw me a map.”
Kelly bowed her head.
“I would have driven there by myself,” he said later. “Met Chief Frizzo and done what we could to try to find him. With or without her. I was going to find this man’s remains and return him to his family. He deserved nothing less.”
“The map’s not gonna work,” Kelly said.
“Okay. So what do we do?”
“I have to show you.”
Ogden ran home. Packed a bag. Took a shower. Another detective stayed with Kelly at HPD. It was after midnight by this time.
Before heading back into HPD to grab Kelly, Ogden wired the inside of his truck. A long trip. Kelly liked to talk.
For much of the six-hour trip, Kelly slept. To Ogden, the fact that she passed out and slept soundly was significant.
“This commonly occurs when somebody finally lets go of something so deep, so secret.”
About an hour outside Iron River, the sun showing signs that its existence was coming around for another day, Kelly opened her eyes.
“Where are we?”
“Almost there. About an hour.”
Kelly had something on her mind. She rubbed her face. Cleared her throat. Fired up a cigarette.
“Jeremy, look . . . listen. I . . . I need a letter of immunity or I’m not about to show you where he is.”
Ogden looked out his window. Shook his head. There was a gas station up ahead.
He pulled in. Parked. Shut off the engine.
Angrily, “Look, I’ll turn this truck around and I’ll take you right back to Hobart. I won’t even drive all the way in. We can be done with this—because, you know what, Kelly, I am not about to be going down this road with you.”
Kelly stared out the window. Took a pull from her cigarette.
“Continue,” Kelly said.
He drove to the Iron River PD.
As they pulled up in front of the building, Kelly demanded, “I want to talk to Chief Frizzo by myself. Just the two of us.”
Ogden was “concerned it would blow up between them.”
“All right. Let me see what I can do.”
He walked into the IRPD and pulled Frizzo aside. Told her what Kelly wanted.
“But I’m going to be in the room. You’re not going to be alone with her.”
Frizzo walked up to the front of the station house.
“Alone,” Kelly said to Frizzo.
Frizzo and Kelly went into the interview suite first and talked. She was mad-dog angry. Lashing out. Accusing the chief of tricking her and lying. Seething with that same old vitriolic spew Frizzo had been accustomed to by this point.
Ogden walked into the room. They were too close to finding Chris Regan to have it all implode.
“Are you going to leave me alone after this?” Kelly said to Frizzo.
Now I know for sure we’ve got you, Ogden thought.
“Kelly . . . ,” Frizzo started to say.
“You’ve been on my ass for a year and a half and I didn’t do anything. I didn’t kill anybody.... I want immunity. I do not want to be charged or connected to Chris’s death in any way.”
Kelly started in on that letter Walt had supposedly sent. She was worried about it incriminating her. It was as if Jason Cochran could testify against her from the grave.
“Can I see the letter?”
“Kelly, no. . . .”
There wasn’t much else to say.
“We need to leave now and go to where Chris’s remains are, Kelly,” Ogden suggested.
Kelly was backed into a corner. She’d admitted she knew where the remains of a missing man were located because she’d helped put his body parts into bags and dumped him there. That alone was enough to charge her with a serious crime. Why not lawyer up at this point and claim she wanted to consult with an attorney?
No one had read Kelly her Miranda rights. She wasn’t under arrest. She was, in fact, free to walk out of the IRPD and go where she chose.
“Okay,” Kelly said. “Pentoga Trail. Let’s go.”
61
DOWN A RABBIT HOLE
U.S. ROUTE 2 EAST OUT OF IRON RIVER TAKES YOU TO FIRST ROADSIDE Park, the town of Chicagon, past Chicagon Lake, before running into Route 169 in Crystal Falls, Michigan, near Indian Lake. From there, driving south, you come to the Pentoga Trail. This was a popular place of interest for Jason and Kelly: the rivers and streams, waterfalls and parks, memorial gardens and beaten paths, Native American burial grounds and trails, spread throughout acres of open and thickly settled countryside. The perfect place, sixteen miles east of Iron River, to dispose of body parts.
As Ogden drove, Kelly riding shotgun, Frizzo and several IRPD officers followed. Kelly sat slumped in the seat next to the detective, staring out the window, watching tall, arrowhead-shaped pine and white birch trees, bare shrubs, weeds and meadows, pass by.
Coming up “on a particular tree” along 169, Kelly sat up.
“That’s it . . . right there.”
“There?”
“Maybe . . .”
Suddenly she wasn’t sure.
They continued driving.
A few miles later. “That’s it. Right there. Yup. That’s it.”
Ogden pulled over. They were about a mile south, into the Pentoga Trail. The woods off the road were dense and impenetrable without the right tools and outerwear. A plus was it was early spring, so the trees were just budding. No leaves to block the view.
Ogden got out, approached Frizzo and her team. “She’s saying this is it here. The remains aren’t far, maybe eight to ten feet from the road in.” He pointed.
“Come on,” Ogden said to Kelly. “Stay right by me. Do not touch anything.”
Kelly stepped out of the truck and began walking.
The team followed.
After a time, Kelly headed back to the truck, opened the door, sat down.
According to Kelly, she and Jason emptied out the bags of Chris’s remains and took the bags back home to burn. The implication being they had spread Chris Regan’s body parts all over, in various locations in the general area where they now stood.
Yet Kelly was, most certainly, playing a game. She knew. Ogden was well aware that a person does not forget where she dumped a dismembered human being.
For several hours, dogs and cops and detectives and deputies searched the entire area, square foot by square foot. No sign of Chris Regan.
“Kelly,” Ogden said, trying to maintain his composure and patience. He needed to find Chris Regan. Now was not the time to lose it with Kelly. “Look, let’s go back to your house in Caspian. Give me consent to go inside with you and let’s do a videotape reenactment of what happened. Would you do that?”
Bringing her back to the crime scene might rattle Kelly into giving it all up. Perhaps they’d buried Chris in the backyard? Tossed him in the woods behind the house? Maybe dumped him in the Caspian Pit and the divers had missed it.
Kelly was feeling sick, she claimed. She’d not had any drugs with her, so mild withdrawal was settling in. Being awake and sleeping in the truck, the talking and searching, had strung her out.
“Kelly?”
“Yeah?”
“Can we do that? Go back to the house?”
62
LIFE AND DEATH
WHEN JEREMY OGDEN TOLD KELLY COCHRAN HE’D ALMOST LOST HIS life the year before, he was not lying. A K9 tore a fist-size chunk out of Ogden’s leg, thinking he was a suspect while the detective was actually serving a search warrant.
“I was conscious and walked away from the bite. They conducted surgery on me two days later. And I was back home recovering from the surgery.”
He seemed to be on the mend.
Twenty-six days later, a massive amount of blood filled both of his lungs. The top portion of each clotted.
“I went into the ER for the clots at ten-thirty p.m., and by eight-thirty the next morning, I was in surgery. [The doctor] saved my life with a [specialized] procedure. I was in ICU for three days after that.”
Ogden holds no resentment toward the K9. The dog was doing its job.
“I knew what to do during the attack, so it prevented me from being hurt worse. And the dog lived to keep working, it made a mistake.”
The incident changed his perspective. He looked at life differently.
“I started realizing what was important. I decided while I was in ICU that I would begin living life to the fullest. It really gave me new direction. I wasn’t focused on work so much anymore. When Kelly Cochran came along, a case I knew would be a challenge, it kind of revived my work energy.”
Ogden’s career began with the New Chicago Police Department, a small town in Indiana about three miles north of Hobart.
“I served on patrol for two years, working straight midnight shifts. I became a K9 handler later on . . . ran the unit until 2007. I was then promoted to corporal at HPD. I ran the ‘power turn,’ my crew worked eight p.m. to four a.m. That’s the shift with most of the action.”
In 2007, Ogden was placed with a DEA task force, where he worked high-level narcotics cases until 2012.
“During my time in patrol, we had a young man who was shot and paralyzed from his wounds initially, and then ultimately died from an infection. The case went cold for about a year. I began investigating it on the street and obtained information regarding a witness hiding out of state. I took the info to my chief and he sent detectives to interview the witness. It broke the case and the murder was solved. I continually pursued this suspect during our investigation. After he was incarcerated, my children’s lives were threatened and I had to move them for two weeks while we found the guys,” Ogden explained.
The life of a de
tective. The constant knot from the danger—not only to yourself, but to loved ones: “My first day assigned to the DEA, the leader of a large-scale gang tried to run me over while we were attempting to arrest him. I fired one round and killed him. This time, the gang threatened my family and we had security on my home for twenty days, around the clock. I went back to work seven days after the shooting, while officers watched my home.”
63
HORROR SHOW
A COLD, SLANTED RAIN FELL, WITH ICE, SNOW, AND SLEET MIXING IN, more late winter than early spring. The air was raw. Ogden pulled up to 66 Lawrence, Kelly Cochran sitting by his side. The front door was boarded up, the wood water-stained and rotting. The place looked abandoned.
“We’re here, Kelly.” She was half asleep.
Frizzo and her team continued to search that area of the Pentoga Trail where Kelly had sworn they’d dumped Chris’s remains.
Ogden and Kelly walked in through the back door, which was already open. A copy of an old search warrant sat on the floor. A second detective trailed behind and videotaped the walk-through (and their conversation). As he panned the camera down and away from his subjects, focused on the search warrant, a bug crawled across the page.
In previous talks, Kelly had told Ogden that when Chris came over on October 14, they went upstairs into her bedroom and had sex on her and Jason’s bed.
That was a lie.
Ogden and Kelly stood in the bedroom, the camera focused on them. He mentioned Kelly’s prior contention. They both looked toward the bed, which was pushed up on its side against the wall.
“Not that night,” Kelly said.
“On the fourteenth you didn’t?”
“No.”
“Okay, what happened?”
“He came in downstairs. We never made it upstairs.”
Ogden looked down in frustration at the lies spewing from this woman, but kept his composure.
They talked while standing in Jason and Kelly’s bedroom. Then Ogden said, in a more direct way, “On the fourteenth, when he came here, did you have sex at all?”
“No.” She shook her head back and forth.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
Where Monsters Hide Page 23