Indiana police has captured 34 year old Kelly Marie Cochran believed to
have killed multiple men, including her husband, and a boyfriend.
Rolling Stone magazine reports below...
According to reports, on October 13, 2014, Cochran and
her husband, 37-year-old Jason Cochran, came up with a diabolical plan:
the next night, Cochran would lure 53-year-old Christopher Regan,
Kelly’s coworker and boyfriend, to her home with the promise of sex and
Jason would kill him. The plan worked, and when Jason “caught” Regan
with his wife, he shot him in the head with a .22 caliber long-barrel
shotgun.
The Cochrans then set about dismembering Regan’s body – Kelly later
admitted to getting a cord for an electric hand saw, known colloquially
as a “sawzall”, so Jason Cochran could cut up his corpse. They then
divided Regan’s body between garbage bags, and threw the bags into the
woods around the Iron River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Regan was reported missing a few days later, and his car was found
abandoned at a park-and-ride lot four miles east of Iron River,
Michigan. According to the local Daily News, police honed in on Cochran
because she was one of the last people to see Regan. When police
searched her home with the FBI in March, 2015, they found nothing – but
Cochran was spooked and she and her husband packed up and moved to Lake
County, Indiana.
Police continued their investigation with Kelly listed a person of
interest, but a year passed and still they had nothing. Then, in
February 2016, Jason died of an apparent heroin overdose. Kelly held a
memorial service, writing on Facebook that his death was “the hardest
thing I will ever have to deal with.” But police weren’t buying it. Nine
weeks after Jason died, Michigan authorities charged Kelly Cochran with
Regan’s death – and she fled Indiana. The U.S. Marshals Service
eventually tracked her down in Kentucky, where she was arrested on April
28th and taken into custody. According to court documents, she spent
her time in her jail cell turning her glasses into shanks and
threatening violence against anyone who came near her. She was
extradited to Michigan where she is now in custody awaiting trial.
Following her arrest, Cochran was interrogated by both Michigan and
Indiana police for almost 70 hours. According to the northwest Indiana
Post-Tribune, she was able to direct investigators to a desolate stretch
of Michigan woods where they discovered evidence of Cochran’s alleged
crimes, including a human skull with an apparent bullet hole, bones and
bone fragments. Police also recovered a .22 caliber rifle, a .22 caliber
bullet and a pair of glasses at the scene.
While Cochran was in custody, police also questioned her about the
death of her husband. They had grown suspicious when Cochran’s version
of what happened the night that Jason Cochran died kept changing.
Paramedics had been called to the house that Cochran shared with her
husband in February, but the EMTs found Jason unresponsive and were
unable to revive him. At first glance it looked like he had died of a
heroin overdose, but the Indiana Lake County Coroner discovered that
Jason had actually died from asphyxiation, not heroin. That’s when
suspicion turned to his wife, who had been “disruptive” while EMT were
working on her husband’s body.
The Post-Tribune reports Cochran told police that she delivered an
overdose of heroin to her husband and proceeded to put her hands on his
neck, nose and mouth, until he died less than a minute later.
In an interview with detectives in Hobart, Indiana, Cochran finally
gave police a motive for her brutal crimes-–her decade-plus marriage
needed saving. According to the Post-Tribune, Cochran told police that
the night before the murder, she and her husband had argued – perhaps
about Regan – and her husband wanted to know how “she was going to fix
things.” The answer they stumbled on, apparently, was to kill Regan. In
interviews, Cochran said she blamed her husband for Regan’s death and
for “taking the only good thing I had in my life.” The Post-Tribune
notes that in court records Cochran said, “I still hate him (her
husband), and yes, it was revenge. I evened the score.” There was a
brief moment before Regan’s death, she had reportedly considered killing
her husband instead of her boyfriend. Instead she ended up killing them
both, waiting 16 months to exact her revenge on her husband.
In Indiana, Cochran has been charged with the death of her husband;
in Michigan, she faces charges related to Regan’s death, including
homicide, assisting her husband to “mutilate, deface, remove or carry
away a portion of a dead body” and concealing the death of an
individual. Cochran pleaded “not guilty” to all the charges. While she
initially claimed that she wanted to defend herself, she eventually
relented and asked for assistance from a public defender.
While Cochran is charged with two murders, Iron County prosecuting
attorney Melissa Powell thinks there may be more bodies buried in
Cochran’s past. According to her court filings, Cochran has “claimed
responsibility for the deaths of other individuals, which, if true,
makes her a serial killer.”
