Meet, Marry, Murder - Season 1, Episode 1 - Cochran - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[music playing] WILL HANRAHAN: Terri O'Donnell knows these woods like the back of her hand.
She's been searching for signs of her former lover Chris Regan, who one day in 2014 simply disappeared.
Terri was expecting to help Chris move house that day. I kept texting, messaging him, and I got no response.
And normally, he would respond immediately or when he would have a break if he was at work.
I drove by the apartment. My parents own the apartments, and it was behind our grocery store.
His truck was there but his car was gone. So I thought he's busy. He had packing to do.
He had to find a place to live down in North Carolina. He had a lot of things to get done,
and I thought maybe he just needed a little space so he could get everything taken care of.
And a week went by, and I still hadn't heard from him. On October 27 of 2014, I met Terri O'Donnell,
who came to the police department as I was leaving for the day. She was shook up.
She was crying. That's when she told me that something was wrong. Her friend was missing.
She came into the office and explained to me what she found. She hadn't heard from him since October 14.
TERRI O'DONNELL: I was talking to people at work and I was-- you know, what should I do?
I can get a hold of him. Then I went up to the apartment, knocked on the door. There was no one there.
And everyone told me that I was being paranoid and that I should just relax. We weren't dating and maybe he found someone else.
She checked in with him pretty much daily. And that's why it was odd to her when she
couldn't make contact with him. TERRI O'DONNELL: I started asking people that he worked with.
And one of my friends that he works with told me he hadn't been at work for over a week.
She knew that he was going somewhere that night, but where is he? Why wouldn't he show up for his job,
and why wouldn't he say a last goodbye to her? And then I got panicky, and then he
told me that he saw Christopher's car at the park and ride in Bates. And so I drove out that evening to the park
and ride and his car was there. I couldn't get in the car. And I was afraid that he was in the trunk.
I knew something happened to him. I knew he wasn't coming back. LAURA FRIZZO: Terri had told me where Chris had been working.
And I happen to know the human resource director there very well and told me that there was a woman
that he was allegedly having an affair with that also worked there. So I asked her who that woman was.
This woman was Kelly Cochran. WILL HANRAHAN: Within days of hearing that Chris Regan was
missing, Detective Frizzo strongly suspected he'd been murdered. This woman, Kelly Cochran, was someone she needed to speak to,
a woman who police would one day also want to talk about the death of her husband Jason Cochran.
WALT AMMERMAN III: Well, there was a phone call on February 20, Kelly contacting me to say
that Jason had died that night. And immediately, my wife told me, well, she did it.
WILL HANRAHAN: But what had she done? One man missing, presumed murdered, another mysteriously dead and the common denominator,
Kelly Cochran. Did she kill her husband Jason to cover up the other murder? How had it come to this?
The then Kelly Gaboyan grew up on Mississippi Street in Merrillville, Indiana. By the late '90s, the eldest of three siblings
was living in what would soon be officially designated Hobart. Real estate agents call it sparse suburbia.
It's south of Chicago. Kelly's family raised animals on the broad, open fields adjacent to her home.
But she got bored, became quite the hell raiser. LAURA FRIZZO: I know that Kelly had gotten into trouble.
And this is based on what her mother reported. As a juvenile, she had a lot of troubles.
They couldn't keep her under control. She ended up in a juvenile facility. WILL HANRAHAN: When a teen, her mother
threatened to throw her out. She was using a lot of drugs, heroin, and so was her boyfriend.
Kelly and Jason started dating shortly after high school. WILL HANRAHAN: His name, Jason Cochran.
LAURA FRIZZO: Kelly indicated that they were neighbors. She referred to him as the boy next door.
From people that knew them, went to school with them, it sounds like Jason was a quiet guy.
WILL HANRAHAN: It was the year 2000. Graduation for Kelly was on the horizon, an important year
too for she and Jason. Walt Ammerman would one day become a friend to both Kelly and Jason.
High school sweethearts and married since she got out of school. And it sounded like any happy couple
is what it looked like on the outside and what I felt I was dealing with. WILL HANRAHAN: But from the start of the romance,
there were issues. CAROLYN CANVILLE: Were they a good match? Kelly's brother, Colton didn't think so.
He thought they were like oil and water. They just were so opposite and never should have gotten together.
And he really told them that they just never should have done it. LAURA FRIZZO: They ended up marrying.
Her mother says they had a nice church wedding for them and everything seemed normal.
But I think a lot of times her mother tried to see her as normal or make her seem normal.
And she always knew there was something not right. WILL HANRAHAN: Kelly's heroin use
had been so bad that her mother told friends she would only allow her daughter to visit if she subjected
herself to a drugs test. But Kelly and Jason's marriage seemed to have had a positive effect on them.
Maybe the marriage would be the making of them. Kelly's parents had been together for 40 years.
So she'd seen how it might work in the event the relationship had its ups and downs.
She says, Jason used to be the light of my life. It was so upbeat and happy, easy-go-lucky.
But then he started getting, kind of, dark. It's like I could see the devil in his eyes.
It just wasn't the same guy I married. MICHAEL SCHOLKE: Looking at their relationship,
it did not seem to be the strongest relationship. There were phone calls and texts that
went back and forth, somewhere rather demeaning from Jason to Kelly. WILL HANRAHAN: But as with most marriages,
there were two ways of looking at the couple's relationship. Laura Frizzo, a detective in the Upper Peninsula Michigan,
would spend a long time analyzing this marriage. It sounds like Jason was a quiet guy
and Kelly was more always a dominant, strong female. He would have dinner ready for her in waiting,
begging her to come home. WILL HANRAHAN: For Kelly, Jason became controlling, jealous, passive, and sometimes not so
passive aggressive. Jason's friends sketched a different picture of the couple as they lived out their early married life in Hobart.
I would say that their marriage was controlled by Kelly. Their lives together were controlled by her.
She did all the cooking, the financing, everything, the grocery shopping. He didn't really do much of anything.
He just did what he could to keep her happy. MICHAEL SCHOLKE: It's really hard to say who the dominant figure was in the relationship
between Kelly and Jason. Certainly, it can be inferred that Kelly was the dominant figure.
That was something the jury certainly believed. But when you look at the evidence
and looking at the texts and the tenor of some of these texts that were sent back and forth
and some of the messages, it doesn't necessarily lead me to the conclusion that Kelly was a dominant person.
WILL HANRAHAN: Getting to the truth of who ruled the roost in the Cochran household
was never easy. Walt Ammerman got to know Jason and sometimes Kelly too when they would play online video games.
WALT AMMERMAN III: I think I could use the examples of their relationship like we would be playing the game
and if I was playing the game and somebody came over, my wife or anybody came home, I would say,
hey, somebody's home. I'm going to have to go in a little bit. But with him it was, Kelly's home, I got to go
and he was gone. And you might not talk to him till the next day. It was like he didn't want to be doing anything fun without her.
It would be OK if she wanted to play the game and get online later. He would be back.
But he didn't really-- I don't feel he ever really wanted to cross her. WILL HANRAHAN: The couple did not have children
and in 2013 left the Hobart area for the Upper Peninsula. They suddenly turned up in an area
where they had no friends, no family. The reasons for the move was something of a mystery.
Kelly and Jason Cochran weren't from Iron River. They were some of those people that just showed up.
All of a sudden, one day they were here. WILL HANRAHAN: The reason they gave did not ring true with those who knew or would get to know them.
LAURA FRIZZO: Through my discussions with Kelly and Jason Cochran early on, I inquired as to why they moved
to upper Michigan from Indiana. And Kelly's response was, Jason's got medical issues and Michigan has the medical marijuana law now
so that he can smoke marijuana in Michigan legally for his medical issues. And that too was a red flag for me being that where they
resided in Indiana was only 40 miles or so from the Michigan border in lower Michigan.
So why would you move 6 and 1/2 hours into Michigan from Indiana? It didn't really make sense.
To me, they were running from something. WALT AMMERMAN III: He really wanted to be someplace warmer.
And he really wanted someplace oddly enough that he could smoke medical marijuana because he felt it
helped his back and his pain. And that was a better pain relief than the hard Percocet
type drugs. So they did find a place in Michigan which does have medical marijuana.
But it's not any warmer. In fact, it's much colder up there. It seemed right for them.
The money was right. They had two dogs. The only downside was the fact that it wasn't a warmer location.
But for something, it worked for them. MICHAEL SCHOLKE: I asked some statements as to why they moved from Indiana
to Iron River, Michigan. And they were just looking for new opportunities, it's my understanding.
It's a beautiful area. I'm not familiar with the part of Indiana that they're from.
I've been told it's not the greatest area in the world. And I think they were just looking to get a fresh start
and came to an area that they thought he could get a fresh start at. WILL HANRAHAN: Whatever or whoever you believe, in 2013,
Kelly and Jason from Hobart, Indiana were living a 9-hour drive away in the Upper Peninsula
and were about to embark on a highly unconventional lifestyle, one not usually associated
with married couples. I was having dinner with Jason and Kelly at a restaurant there in their town.
And oddly, she asked him, did you show Walt our friend? I had no idea what she was talking about.
And he showed me a picture of a half naked woman on his phone. And Kelly said, yeah, I found a friend for Jason and I
because I love him so much that I wanted to keep him happy. And that threw me for a loop.
WILL HANRAHAN: The couple were indeed occasionally a throuple-- Kelly, Jason, and whoever Kelly could
find for the man in her life to share sex sessions with, not necessarily a recipe for a happy marriage,
a desire to their lives, which was not about to keep everybody in Iron River happy.
Kelly talked about the affair she was having with Chris, and how Jason was aware of it,
and he was OK with it that they had an open marriage. WILL HANRAHAN: An affair with this man, Chris Regan.
They had met. They had married. But had the lives of the teenage sweethearts become so full of worldly intrigues
that theirs was a story about to end in murder? In the Upper Peninsula in 2013, Kelly and Jason Cochran
lived in this house. Kelly worked as a garden pool fixer. Jason complained that his back made
it impossible for him to work. Married for 12 years, the couple revealed to friends a bizarre pact that they
had made on their wedding day. If either took a lover, the other could kill that lover.
JEREMY OGDEN: She says that her and her husband entered into this pact on their marriage night.
And so she tells me about the marriage pact about killing each other's lovers or killing the lover.
WILL HANRAHAN: Around this time, Kelly did have a lover, his name, Chris Regan. He likes the Upper Peninsula.
It's beautiful, lots of rivers and lakes. And actually, that's one thing Christopher liked about Iron
River is he loved nature. He loved the woods. And so that part is beautiful. And the people are nice.
The people I work with are very kind. WILL HANRAHAN: His relationship with Terri O'Donnell
was a case of friends being reunited. They'd first met in 1980. Both had married then divorced.
Terri stayed in the UP, Chris had left. We got back together through the internet.
And we started chatting. And he was divorced, and I was divorced. And so we decided to meet up again.
And so we met up and wined and dined and just had a wonderful time and just started dating again.
It was awesome. It was wonderful, yeah. When Chris would look at me, I'd just melt. He was charismatic.
And he just made you feel like you were everything, that you were the only person in the room when he looked at you.
WILL HANRAHAN: Soon after Chris moved back to the Upper Peninsula, the old friends became an item.
But the relationship stalled when Terri learned that her charming man kept a guilty secret.
Christopher had an issue with pornography that I found out afterwards when him and I started
talking more about why he needed a little bit more alone time. He was hooked on things on the internet.
And I didn't agree with that. And that's why we broke up. I still loved him. And maybe that's why we stayed friends.
I kept in touch with him. He would still call or text, but we couldn't date. We couldn't be a couple because it just wasn't right,
at least for me. That wasn't right. WILL HANRAHAN: It was shortly after Terri and Chris had
split that she learned how Kelly Cochran had entered the picture. TERRI O'DONNELL: That's when him and Kelly hooked up.
CAROLYN CANVILLE: She winds at meeting Chris Regan on this job at a mine equipment company.
TERRI O'DONNELL: I think she gave him that part of his life, whatever he wanted to satisfy that need because it
wasn't love but it was sex. CAROLYN CANVILLE: Kelly wasn't exactly loyal to her husband.
She cheated on him. She'd had a number of affairs over the course of the marriage.
And this was an issue for Jason. Jason would get really depressed when she was having these affairs and even to the point
where he thought about committing suicide. It bothered him. But he was afraid of losing his wife.
So he tried to allow her to basically live her life and not interfere with it. But it was clearly driving him crazy.
WALT AMMERMAN III: When they were in the UP, I was aware that Jason had went to a mental hospital
for a few weeks. I want to say it was probably mentioned that there was a possible affair with somebody or the marriage
wasn't going well. CAROLYN CANVILLE: So Kelly's really liking this relationship with Chris.
She's having a good time. But Chris isn't liking the job. And he's got a bad knee, and he's
not going be able to continue this job for long. So he applies for this office job in Asheville,
North Carolina and he gets it. And he's really excited and Kelly is not. TERRI O'DONNELL: For his new job he had to have a physical.
And actually, that's the last day I spoke to him was October 14, 2014. That morning, it was about 6:00 AM in the morning,
he called me and told me that he was going to be going to Marshfield the next day.
And as long as everything came back OK with his physical that he would have the job and he
would call me when he got back. WILL HANRAHAN: There were now at least three people in the Cochran marriage.
And one of them didn't like it, Jason. Meanwhile, the Cochran's had their pact. Bizarre as it seems, if they were
to honor their secret wedding vow, Jason now had the right in the eyes of Jason and Kelly
to kill her lover. Ahead of leaving the UP for North Carolina, Chris Regan had asked his old flame, Terri O'Donnell,
to help him. We were going to make plans to go for and eat and then I was going to help him pack and move
things and store some of his things for him while he was in North Carolina. CAROLYN CANVILLE: So Chris Regan's really
excited about his new job. The day before he's supposed to leave Iron River to go
to the Carolinas and take this new job, Kelly invites him over for dinner. Come on over.
Have some lasagna. There might be something else in it for you too. So she figures some farewell sex.
That will lure him over. BRIAN HARRIS: So off he went to Kelly Cochran's house. When he arrived, they had their dinner,
and they had their embrace. And while embraced in each other's arms, their bodies
intertwined, Kelly's husband sneaks up onto Chris while Chris is still in the arms of Kelly.
And Kelly's husband pulls the trigger, a single shotgun blast to his head. And Kelly was in on it.
She knew how she held him there. She could see that shotgun being raised up and put to the head of Chris.
And a single loud explosion, there would have been blood, there would have been brains everywhere,
including on Kelly herself. She would have been covered in brain matter and blood
from somebody that she was just sexually intertwined with. CAROLYN CANVILLE: So now Chris is dead.
What do they do? They take Chris's body. They bring it down to the basement. They lie it on a sheet of plastic,
and they take an electric buzz saw, and they start carving up Chris Regan's body.
And they're using this electric handsaw. In fact, Kelly later admits that she had to go out and buy
a cord for this handsaw. And they're cutting his body. They're sawing it into pieces.
And they're dumping the parts into garbage bags. They take the garbage bags then they get the electric saw.
They take the plastic, they take it out. They have a burn pit in their backyard.
All of the evidence there and they burn it in the burn pit in their backyard. Then they take this burn barrel and they loaded
in their vehicle and they take it to a place called the Caspian Pit. It's this big mining area.
And that's where they bury the burn barrel, the evidence of their crime. Then they take the body parts to a remote field
and they just dump it in the woods. WILL HANRAHAN: Chris had told Terri about his illicit relationship with Kelly Cochran.
So Terri felt Cochran might know something about his sudden disappearance. The Caspian Pit is just a few yards
from the Cochran homestead. And in a macabre irony, Terri would walk near to where her former lover's
body had been discarded without seeing any trace of him herself. I kept looking and searching for Christopher.
I would walk back behind Cochran's home trying to find something. I was afraid if Kelly ever found out that I was the one who
reported him missing, I was afraid her husband might come looking for me. LAURA FRIZZO: So it would be not long after that my sergeant
makes contact with Chris Regan's vehicle in the park and ride and gains entry to it just to be sure that there's
not someone in the trunk or whatever and notices on the front seat flipped upside down
is a piece of paper with directions. And I just remember her saying, I can't make heads or tails
of these directions, but this is what's laying on the front seat of his car. And as she reads me the directions,
it matches the directions to Kelly Cochran's house. So immediately I've got some red flags.
WILL HANRAHAN: Laura Frizzo became convinced Chris Regan had been killed on the night that
he had gone to Kelly Cochran's. But she couldn't prove it. Meanwhile, Jason and Kelly Cochran
were claiming to know nothing. They got back on with being Mr. And Mrs. Cochran.
But they were suspects one and two in what would soon become a murder investigation.
JEREMY OGDEN: I tell her, so that would mean that you were responsible to kill Chris Regan.
WILL HANRAHAN: Chris Regan is missing. And suspected as having something to do with his disappearance, the married couple, Jason
and Kelly Cochran. State troopers go to the Cochran household. LAURA FRIZZO: They were met by Jason Cochran
and Kelly presents herself. They talked to her outside. She admits that she'd been having an affair with Chris.
She admits that she knew he was supposed to have shown up for a medical appointment for his new job.
But she claims that she hadn't seen him since around the 12th, 13th of October. WILL HANRAHAN: One of the reasons
that the detectives had pitched up to the Cochran household was the discovery of a yellow Post-it note with directions
on it to Kelly's home in Chris Regan's car at a park and ride. I asked Kelly if she thought it
was odd that Chris's car would be parked in the park and ride. And her response, Kelly's response to the sergeant was,
yeah, I'd find that very odd. He loved that car, past tense. And she found that to be very odd as well.
They haven't said anything that he's murdered or that he's missing. She's already referring to him in the past tense.
TERRI O'DONNELL: I knew that Christopher wasn't alive anymore. I knew something's happened to him, that somebody
did something to him. WILL HANRAHAN: Terri and the detectives felt certain that Chris had been murdered
and the Cochran's were probably responsible. They were right but had no proof and no body.
Enter Michael Neiger, a former cop himself. He and colleagues volunteer to offer
support in unsolved homicides in missing person cases. I got involved about three weeks
after Chris went missing and saw that they hadn't found him. And it may be that he wasn't around the park and ride,
that his body wasn't out there and they hadn't missed him. So I do a lot of double checking and stuff and looking at stuff.
By that time, the chief, Chief Frizzo had a good handle on the case. And I became like a foot soldier for her, doing
what she needed to get done. WILL HANRAHAN: Neiger found nothing. Almost at the start of the homicide hunt,
the trail had gone cold. But Jason Cochran was feeling the heat. LAURA FRIZZO: I remember during the interview
with Jason Cochran, how he immediately entered the interview room and immediately broke down,
began to cry about his health issues and his life. And it was just my opinion at that time
that people don't generally act that way, that that to me was a sign of guilt or nervousness or anxiety
or whatever it was. But to me, it wasn't normal. And to me, it was a huge red flag.
WILL HANRAHAN: As agitated as Jason was, Kelly was not. Kelly was just so calm and cool
and relaxed that anyone that would have met her for the first time would have thought there's no way she can
hold it together this well if she had taken part in something like this. The body language, she was able to control.
Jason was completely the opposite. Kelly said, oh, I stopped by and he wasn't home.
I didn't know where he was just like it was just another day. WILL HANRAHAN: Five months pass and still no sign of a body.
The Post-it note and the messed up relationship issues was all detectives had to go on, not
enough to get a guilty verdict. So the Iron River Police go for broke. It was the first week of March and there was still
snow on the ground, and we decide we're going to go ahead and do this first search
warrant that I finally have enough probable cause where I just need to do it. We conduct the search warrant, the Michigan State
Police lab personnel comes down from Marquette, collects evidence. And based on their findings, we really felt positive
that we were going to have something, we were going to have enough. WILL HANRAHAN: It turned up nothing.
They set up further searches of the Upper Peninsula. Where was Chris's body? MICHAEL NEIGER: Iron County is a very rugged area.
It's a historic area with a lot of old mining. So we have a lot of old mines and mining relics.
And we have a lot of calving grounds where old mine shafts and stuff have caved in
and then they fill them with water. So you have a lot of those types of areas which are common often
very easy to conceal evidence, to dispose of evidence, to hide evidence, a lot of places
for potential clandestine burial sites. WILL HANRAHAN: With an investigation in full flow,
it became clear to the Cochran's that it was time to leave the Upper Peninsula. Under suspicion of murder, yes, but with no evidence
and no body, Frizzo and her colleagues could do nothing to stop the couple heading back to Hobart.
LAURA FRIZZO: The following morning, Kelly and Jason Cochran take off. They completely leave, taking just what
they could fit in their truck and would never return to Michigan. WILL HANRAHAN: But the strain was
beginning to show inside the Cochran marital home. LAURA FRIZZO: And it was very apparent that he
had become somewhat suicidal at times and was falling apart. And she noticed that was happening.
And I think she became fearful that he may say things to get her in trouble. WILL HANRAHAN: To friends hearing
their story for the first time, it seemed an odd move. WALT AMMERMAN III: I didn't hear from them for close to a month.
And I guess it always bugged me that as soon as he called me, he told me that they just got their phones and computers back
because the police had took them and they think they're responsible for a person who's missing.
Now, he could have called me and told me that his internet was shut off and he didn't pay his electric bill
or anything for a month and I would have believed that. I knew they had some money problems,
but that seemed really odd to me that that would be the first thing he would tell me,
openly tell me that they're being investigated for a person that's missing. WILL HANRAHAN: By now, Walt Ammerman
was noticing how controlling of Jason that Kelly had become. WALT AMMERMAN III: I felt like he never really wanted
to make Kelly mad at anything. I felt like he was at times maybe-- I don't want to say afraid of her,
but I think that there was some apprehension there of some sort. On the other hand, Kelly was very controlling, very
wanting to control everything. WILL HANRAHAN: In 2016, two years after the disappearance
of Chris Regan, the relationship of the married couple now living in this house in Hobart had deteriorated as people
nearby heard of why Jason and Kelly had left the Upper Peninsula. WALT AMMERMAN III: So the word was out that they
were being investigated. And it's like the black sheep of the town, the new people that came to town, now somebody is missing.
And I think everybody had red flags up there more so than I did. WILL HANRAHAN: Largely friendless, with Kelly
working alone whilst Jason's continued back issues meant he was unable to help in the garden pool business,
carrying the burden of guilt of having murdered Chris Regan, still under suspicion, the Cochran marriage
was now in a bad place. And Kelly's behavior towards Jason just seemed to some plain mean.
My wife did not like Kelly from the minute she met her. She didn't trust her. I didn't believe it.
But I guess she felt vastly different about trusting either one of them, and especially Kelly.
WILL HANRAHAN: February 2016, and Kelly Cochran picks up a phone at their home. The couple was still using drugs,
heroin the narcotic of choice. CAROLYN CANVILLE: Kelly calls 911. He's not breathing.
His mouth, it's like he's not-- I don't know what's going on. It might be an overdose. I don't know what's wrong.
She's panicking. BRIAN HARRIS: The police arrive, and from all apparent appearances, it
looks as though Jason is a heroin user and Jason has overdosed on heroin. WILL HANRAHAN: Indeed, that was the preliminary conclusion.
Jason, like so many heroin addicts, had killed himself. Within hours, Kelly contacted the couple's mutual friend.
So there was a phone call on February 20, Kelly contacted me to say that Jason had died that night.
And immediately, my wife told me, well, she did it. So I contacted the FBI and I said
I knew Jason and Kelly very good and they had told me that they were being looked
at for this person missing. They have not told me anything about the fact that they did it or anything like that,
but my wife really feels that I needed to let you know that one of them died on Saturday
and this is Monday. And right away, the guy said, how did Jason die? I said, I didn't even tell you it was Jason.
He said, if one of them died, it was Jason, and we need to get on that. LAURA FRIZZO: I get a call from two the FBI agents
that I've been working with will tell me they got a call on their tip line saying that something was not right,
that they feel like Kelly was involved in Jason's death. They feel that there's something more to this Michigan case,
with the missing man. WILL HANRAHAN: With Frizzo now energized in the Upper Peninsula, a second season detective, Jeremy Ogden,
was about to get involved seven hours away in Indiana. I answered a phone call from the FBI tip line.
And they said that they had received an anonymous call. We needed to take a closer look at Jason Cochran's death.
And at that time, I didn't even know that he had died. They said that it was a possibility that Jason Cochran
and Kelly Cochran had been involved in a missing persons case up in the UP and that they
fled to Hobart, Indiana. WILL HANRAHAN: Walt Ammerman and his wife did not believe that Jason had died from a heroin overdose
and neither did Laura Frizzo or Jeremy Ogden. And Terri O'Donnell was certain that Chris Regan
had been killed by Jason or Kelly or both. The forces of law and order were getting serious.
Jeremy Ogden tells Kelly he'll pitch up to Jason's funeral. I had been standing in the back of the room watching her
before I ever walked up there. And she had sat there pretty silent and I hadn't seen her shed a tear.
She was just sitting there very quiet, and she looked angry almost. And so after I paid my respects, I walked up to her
and I gave her a hug. And I think it shocked her. She acted as though she was crying at that point.
She seemed like she was upset. And I just went on my way and I sat in the back of the room.
And I sat there. There's a cousin to the family who knew me from my law enforcement career.
And he followed me outside and he said, what are you doing here? And I said, I'm looking into Jason's death.
And he said, well, you're going to want to pay attention. I said, OK. WILL HANRAHAN: Ogden is told to dig deeper into what
had happened to Jason, the story of the one time teenage sweethearts who married to escape
the mess they'd made of their early lives had already ended in tragedy. Would it end with the discovery that Kelly
Cochran was a double killer? If so, detectives would need a confession and made use of a bold plan involving a fictitious letter.
I said, I need you to do something for me. I want you to be my confidential informant Walt looked at me
and he said, am I going to be in danger? WILL HANRAHAN: Both Laura Frizzo and Jeremy Ogden
became convinced that the key to getting Kelly Cochran to admit to the murder of her husband Jason
was to get to the bottom of where the body of Chris Regan was. I had to find out where Christopher
Regan was disposed of in order for Kelly to confess to killing Jason. I knew this from the very beginning.
And I knew that she would never confess to killing Jason unless I somehow got her to admit
what happened to Chris Regan. WILL HANRAHAN: The open spaces of the Upper Peninsula
meant that searching for the body of Chris Regan was truly like hunting for a needle in a haystack.
But in early 2017, Mike Neiger and his team got a breakthrough, what was then a relatively new system
of tracing where Kelly had been by tracking her phone proved that she had been at the same park and ride
where Chris Regan's car had been abandoned. Then by searching the Cochran's computer
hard drives detectives also discovered images of a particular place in the UP, one
where satellite imagery suggested bodies would be easy to hide. We ended up finding a satellite image,
Google satellite imagery, that zoomed right in several times focused in on the Caspian Pit on a specific piece
of the bank of the Caspian Pit. WILL HANRAHAN: The pit was near to the Cochran house.
Next came further revelations from the imagery on the hard drive. In the end, we were able to establish
that by looking at the date when that was downloaded from Google, it was prior to, in the end when we learned,
it was prior to when Chris was murdered. WILL HANRAHAN: When detectives visited the site,
they also discovered a burn barrel big enough to have been used to dispose of body parts,
and one whose shape fitted exactly a space in Kelly and Jason's gone. MICHAEL NEIGER: Chief Frizzo, using some state police divers,
found the barrel for the weapon that was used to kill Chris. And that was relatively near the Cochran's house.
It was just a couple of roads away. You could basically see that from their house almost
if it wasn't for some trees. WILL HANRAHAN: In Indiana, Jeremy Ogden began probing
Kelly Cochran in interviews. Why had that burn barrel turned up in the Caspian Pit?
Why was her car in the same car park as Chris Regan's the day he went missing? And then came the decision to set up a sting operation
involving Walt Ammerman. JEREMY OGDEN: And I sat down with Walt and his wife. I talked to Walt for all of about five minutes.
And I said, you are the kind of man that every detective hopes walks into his case.
And I need you to do something for me. I want you to be my confidential informant.
And I said I'd do whatever I could, but I don't know what I can do. And he said, I have an idea.
And I want you to call her on a recorded call and I'd like you to tell her that Jason mailed you
a letter a while back and wanted you to hold onto it in case something ever happened to him.
JEREMY OGDEN: If in the event something occurs to me, if I were to die, please forward this letter
to the Iron River Police Department Attention Chief Laura Frizzo. Do not open the letter that's contained within this manila
envelope, please. And I signed it Jason or whatever. And he said, OK, well, we have to make some changes.
And I said, OK, well, what do we need to change? And he said well he would never sign Jason to me.
He would sign Quack Quack. He goes, it's what he always called himself to me. I said, OK.
So we make it Quack Quack. So we fine-tune the letter and Walt added his two cents into it and made it very authentic.
And honestly, my first thought was this is never going to work. She is too smart.
She knows everyone's looking at her closely right now, especially with her husband dying.
There is no way she's going to fall for this. But I was willing to try anything.
WALT AMMERMAN III: I was very apprehensive. I didn't really think she was going to believe it.
He assured me that he could probably get a lawyer to do it in town, a local one and say Jason contacted him.
But he really felt that it would be more believable coming from me. JEREMY OGDEN: The letter brought things
along quickly because Walt Ammerman, he was so convincing. When Steve and I met with Walt and set him up and said,
OK, we're going to do this call, Walt sitting in the truck and he's shaken and he's like, Jeremy, I don't know.
And I said, Walt, be yourself. Take a breath. Your friend's dead. He was your friend.
No matter what he did, he was your friend I called her. And it was convenient that she was busy so it
was going to be a short call. I found out later she was at his parent's house. I just said I had this letter that Jason mailed me and told
me to hold onto another letter and said, if anything ever happened to him, I needed to send this on to the police
in the Upper Peninsula. Her sigh and her cry and her, please don't are three things I'll never forget.
It was incredible. I was sitting in the passenger seat, and I was listening. And as soon as he said Jason had sent him this letter,
there's this huge gasp for air by her. And at that moment, I'm like, OK, OK, hang on.
Hang on. What's coming next? And the next words are like, don't send it. Don't do that.
Throw it away, whatever it is that she uses. But it's to get rid of it. Distance yourself from it.
Distance me from it. Don't do this to me. And for those 30 seconds, it was like I had the biggest fish
of a lifetime on because I knew that she had taken it all the way. WILL HANRAHAN: Cochran's murderous game was up.
She took the letter as authentic. JEREMY OGDEN: They don't want to tell you until you catch them.
Once you catch a person like this, then they want to tell you. They don't want to tell anybody because they still
have that survival mode in their mind where they're protecting themselves and they don't want to go to jail.
And they don't want to be discovered. I think after you catch them, then they want to tell you because they want everyone
to know what they really are. LAURA FRIZZO: He just sent me an email, and I, of course, right away opened the email
and there's a copy of the recording in my email from this phone call. And I thought, oh, obviously, it didn't go well because he
would have called and told me. So I'm sitting in my office and I opened this recording.
And when I listened to it, I just about fell off my chair. And I thought, you know, he got her [chuckle]..
WILL HANRAHAN: Cochran was transported up to the Pentoga Trail after admitting that Chris Regan
had indeed been murdered near her home in the Upper Peninsula. LAURA FRIZZO: In end of the day, we go back to that marked area.
And it was myself and the cadaver dog and the dog handler. And within 10 minutes of being there,
we locate Chris Regan's skull. Another thing she showed us that day was where she
threw the gun, which the Michigan State Police dive team did recover. WILL HANRAHAN: Her story was that she
and Chris had been making out at the top of the stairs of the basement. Jason had come across them and killed Chris
with a single rifle shot to the head. Cochran later claimed in court that she was angry
that Jason had shot Chris and that was what fueled her involvement in Jason's death.
WALT AMMERMAN III: Her story is she sat on Jason's chest and held her hands over his nose and mouth
as he was trying to throw up from the heroin overdose that she gave him. And she wanted him to see her and know
that she did that, I think. And I can't wrap my head around that. I don't think any normal person can.
WILL HANRAHAN: A juror at Kelly Cochran's trial remembered a turning point in her own thinking
about what had actually happened to Chris Regan. The hardest part, I think, was when they brought his skull up
as evidence, just listening to how things went down, luring him into their house.
In my mind, how could anybody do that? That's all I had in my mind. How could somebody be so ruthless?
WILL HANRAHAN: Perhaps it was part of the wedding day pact that the Cochran's had entered into.
Their marriage pact was that if one of them had an affair with somebody, they would kill that person,
whether it be her or Jason. So if Jason had an affair, the person just an affair with
would get killed and vise versa. TERRI O'DONNELL: These are the woods where Kelly and Jason had
brought Christopher's remains. The marks that are on the ground right now is where they were searching.
I got shivers, not because of the cold, just because of where I am right now. When I came out here on October 14
for Chris's five-year anniversary of his death, I just got chills. And I could feel him, and it was just real eerie, eerie feeling.
And knowing that parts of him are still not found, only his skull has been found.
WILL HANRAHAN: They had met as two troubled young people who saw each other as offering a way out of their problems.
They had married with high hopes and dreams of a lifetime together. But their complex, drug-fueled sex lives created conflict.
And Kelly Cochran's cold blooded willingness to kill had claimed the lives of two men, one her husband.
In May 2017, Kelly Cochran was sentenced to life in prison without parole at a hearing in Iron County in Michigan.
She was found guilty of murder, larceny, conspiracy to commit dead bodies, concealing the death of an individual,
and lying to a police officer in relation to the murder of Chris Regan. She also accepted a sentence of 65 years as part of a plea deal
for the 2016 murder of her husband Jason in Hobart. [music playing]

Kelly and Jason Cochran made a pact to kill anyone who came between them. Jason had no idea Kelly would get a taste for murder.

Though wedded couples vow to stay together until death do they part, this new true crime series looks at what happens when a groom or bride causes their beloved's death.

Brief Summary

Terri O'Donnell searches for her missing lover Chris Regan, leading to the discovery of a murder involving Kelly Cochran and her husband Jason.

Key points

Terri's Search for Chris. Terri O'Donnell recounts her desperate search for her missing lover, Chris Regan.
The Bizarre Marriage Pact. Kelly and Jason Cochran had a shocking pact regarding infidelity that would later haunt them.
The Shocking Murder. In a twisted turn of events, Kelly's husband Jason murders her lover Chris in cold blood.
The Cochran's Denial. Jason and Kelly Cochran claim ignorance despite being prime suspects in a murder investigation.
The Affair's Admission. Kelly admits to having an affair with Chris Regan, raising suspicions further.
The Emotional Breakdown. Jason Cochran breaks down during an interview, raising red flags for detectives.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I knew something happened to him.

Terri O'Donnell's realization about Chris Regan's disappearance.

2:52WatchJun 8, 2022

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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