Original subtitles

This was a flirtatious woman who was

used to getting her way with men.

She says that her and her husband entered into this pact

on their marriage night.

They agreed that if either of them ever cheated,

they got to kill that person.

I asked him about it,

and he said, "It's just sex."

Just a stranger to have sex with.

I think anybody that had anything

to do with them that got out alive

is lucky, including myself.

And she kept repeating, "He's going to kill me."

And he shoots my daughter.

That's about the only time in my career

that I just wanted to shoot him.

You can run, but you can't hide.

I feel very emotional when I come here.

That hasn't changed.

I can feel-- feel it in my heart.

And I can feel Christopher.

I feel like he's with me when I'm here.

Iron River is a very small community

in the Upper Peninsula, close to Wisconsin.

It's very beautiful.

And that's one thing Christopher liked

about this area.

He loved the outdoors.

Once the mines left, they left these big mine pits,

and they filled with water.

And no one really knows how deep the mine pits are,

but they're very murky and dark on the bottom.

It's a good place to lose somebody.

Jason Cochran was 37 years old.

And in all those cases

where somebody dies when they're that young,

even if they die at the hospital,

generally it gets looked at.

In this case, there was an indication, you know,

that maybe drugs were involved.

When we pulled up in the driveway,

it was snowing like you wouldn't believe.

Jason Cochran's wife, Kelly, comes walking out.

And I said, "I'm here to investigate

the death of your husband."

And she says, "Are you here for any other reason?"

And I said, "I don't understand the question."

She said, "Did you come here for another reason?

"Did you come here to question me about something else?

I said, "Should I be questioning you

about something else?"

I go, this is becoming very odd for me.

And she said, "No, I was just asking."

I came in on a Monday morning, and I answered a phone call

from the FBI tip line,

and they said that they had received

an anonymous call and that, you know,

we needed to take a closer look at Jason Cochran's death.

They said that, you know, it was a possibility

that Jason Cochran and Kelly Cochran had

been involved in a missing persons case

up in the Iron River.

Christopher and I met first back in the 1980s

in Marquette, Michigan,

and Chris was in the Air Force

at K. I. Sawyer Air Force Base.

And we were just friends.

But we got along wonderful.

And then he--he got married,

and he traveled all over with the air base,

and we lost touch.

We got back together through the internet

and we started chatting.

And he was divorced, and I was divorced.

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.

When Chris would look at me, I'd just--just melt.

He just made you feel like you were everything,

you know, that you were the only person in the room

when he looked at you.

We'd go out somewhere together.

He'd tell me, "You just make me so proud

having you on my arm," you know?

And he was just always--

little things he would say and do

that would just lift you up and make you feel magical.

He was very easy to fall in love with.

But Christopher kept a secret.

I was planning a trip to England,

and I went over to see Christopher

and found him making plans to meet up

with someone else when I was gone.

And I asked him about it, and he said,

well, I was going to be gone, you know, for a month,

and it's just sex, just a stranger to have sex with.

And I said, "You don't do that."

You don't-- and he kept telling me,

it doesn't make a difference.

I love you.

What--that doesn't matter.

And I had a real hard time with that.

And that's why we ended up breaking up.

I was just astonished, to be honest,

that Christopher had, like, this second life.

I still loved him, and 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.

On October 10th, Christopher told me he took a job

in Charlotte, North Carolina.

He asked me if we would try to, you know,

do a long-distance relationship.

That morning--it was about 6:00 a.m. in the morning--

he called me and told me that he was going

to be going the next day.

And we were going to make plans to go for--

and eat, and then I was going to help him pack.

That was the last time I heard from him.

I kept texting, messaging him,

and I got no response.

I drove by the apartment.

His truck was there, but his car was gone.

And one of my friends that he works with

told me he hadn't been at work for over a week.

And then I got panicky.

He had everything going for him at that time in his life.

He would have never taken his own life or just taken off.

Just fear, complete fear came over me

that something--

I knew something happened to him.

And I walked over to the police station,

and Detective Frizzo saw me standing.

I frantically said, my--

my ex-boyfriend's missing, and something happened to him,

and I haven't heard from him, and I need help.

We need to find him.

When we first started this investigation,

Terri had told me where Chris had been working.

And the human resources director told me

that, you know, Chris was--

he didn't really have a lot of friends there,

just a couple people that he really, you know,

would associate with, and that there was a woman

that he was allegedly having an affair with

that also worked there.

This woman was, you know, Kelly Cochran.

She would go to his apartment for them to meet.

And 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.

Right around the time of Chris's disappearance,

one of his coworkers spotted his vehicle parked

in a park and ride just east of Iron River.

My sergeant notices, you know,

on the front seat, flipped upside down,

here's a piece of paper with directions.

And as she reads me the directions,

it matches the directions that I had just gotten

from the deputy to Kelly Cochran's house.

So immediately I've got some red flags.

At that point I had told the sergeant,

you know, go up to that residence

and see if she might know where Chris Regan is.

So the sergeant called me after they made contact

at the Cochran residence that night,

and she had a bad feeling as well.

So the sergeant, she said,

when they went to the door, they asked for Kelly.

They were met by Jason Cochran, who seemed irritated

and told them that Kelly was not there.

The trooper had noticed a silhouette

in the upper window upstairs of the residence.

And as they're talking to Jason,

Kelly presents herself.

She admits that she'd been having an affair--

was 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 that--

but she claims that she hadn't seen him since.

One thing that the sergeant noted was, you know,

I asked Kelly if she thought it was odd

that Chris's car would be parked in the park and ride.

And Kelly's response to the sergeant was,

"Yeah, I'd find that very odd.

He loved that car."

Past tense.

At that point, I thought maybe Jason Cochran

did something to Chris Regan.

I knew the first thing that I wanted to do was

obtain a search warrant for Chris Regan's apartment,

for his vehicle, for his phone records.

Phone records indicated that his last conversation

was with Jason Cochran,

or with Jason Cochran's phone.

You know, he had fueled his car up around 4:00 p.m.,

had the phone conversations with Jason Cochran's phone,

and then he just disappeared.

So a plan was made

to interview the Cochrans at our department

the following morning.

Kelly was so-- 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.

Jason was completely the opposite,

how he immediately entered the interview room

and immediately, you know, 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.

Kelly and Jason Cochran both grew up

in, you know, the Hobart, Indiana area.

Both of them apparently lived

down the street from each other.

Kelly indicated that they were neighbors.

You know, she referred to him as the boy next door.

I met them in early 2013.

They're married for 12 or 13 years,

and high school sweethearts.

It sounded like any happy couple.

Jason was really quiet.

He was a nice guy.

We just really hit it off as--as friends.

We had good food, good times,

laughed, hung out.

On the surface, it really looks

like a good relationship.

But I think it was all part

of what they were trying to depict.

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--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.

Kelly had clearly portrayed at her workplace

that her husband was very abusive,

and that she felt very afraid of him.

She really had her coworkers

and her administrators thinking she was a battered woman.

And really, it wasn't until I got into their phone records

and started reading some

of their text messages to each other,

where I learned the story of who Kelly and Jason

really were, and what the story of their marriage was.

And it was quite the opposite

of what Kelly had described at work.

Jason, if anything, was a battered man.

She was very emotionally abusive to him.

He begged her nonstop to stay home and be his wife,

stop having affairs.

And she just continued to belittle him.

I would say that their marriage was--

was controlled by Kelly.

Their lives together were controlled by her.

She did all the cooking, the financing, the--

everything, the grocery shopping.

He didn't really do much of anything.

He just did what he could to keep her happy.

She ran the show.

I don't feel he ever really wanted to cross her.

I didn't see the--

the red flags that maybe I should have.

I was able to go back and look at text messages

between Kelly and Jason

around the time of Chris's disappearance.

Their communication was, you know, this--

him begging her, her, you know, belittling him.

And then, you know, come October 15th, October 16th,

two days after Chris was missing and gone, you know,

she's a completely different woman.

She's, you know, in love with her husband.

He's handsome, and he's, you know, turning her on,

and she wants to have sex.

And it's a completely different, you know,

atmosphere that I suspected the most likely scenario

is that, you know, Chris Regan made contact with the Cochrans

and something, you know, happened.

It was the first week of March,

and there was still snow on the ground.

And we decided we were going to go ahead and do

this first search warrant at the Cochran residence.

The Michigan State Police lab personnel comes

down from Marquette, collects evidence.

I got that text.

"Did Chris have a rabbit's foot?"

I just started crying.

It's like, yeah, he always carried a rabbit's foot

in his pocket for good luck.

Detective Frizzo had found a rabbit's foot

underneath the back porch at the Cochran home.

That was the first sign that-- you know,

of something of his at the Cochran home.

When we did a search warrant at the Cochran residence,

I thought we might be able to find Chris Regan's DNA.

We really, you know, felt positive that we were

going to have something.

We were going to have enough to hopefully

get these people arrested.

I'm waiting for the results, you know, from the lab

as far as the evidence we collected.

And I get the bad news that we got nothing.

I remember that moment because I was so sure.

You know, I had these big binders,

these big books of my case sitting on the back table.

And I got off the phone and I--

I just wanted to take them and toss them out the window

because I was so frustrated.

The following morning,

Kelly and Jason Cochran take off,

taking just what they could fit in their truck,

went to Indiana,

and would never return to Michigan.

And I remember saying,

something's going to happen down there.

You know, either he's going to kill her and kill himself,

or she's going to kill him,

but something's going to happen.

I eventually interviewed the neighbors,

who start talking about this particular night where

it's like 2:30 in the morning and they can hear power--

you know, power tools running over at the Cochran residence,

you know, describing saws and everything else.

And the one brother said, you know, that the next day

he went and talked to Jason outside,

and Jason said that he was doing some remodeling.

And he's like, you know, why would you be remodeling

at 2:30 in the morning?

And Jason's answer to him, so he says,

was "I can't sleep."

And that was really the first time where I kind of

sat back and thought, you know,

could they possibly have, you know, dismembered this guy?

I was afraid if Kelly ever found out

that I was the one who missed Christopher,

that I was the one that reported him missing,

I was afraid her husband might come looking for me.

I spent 26 years with the Michigan State Police

as a Detective Sergeant.

Ten of those years were spent in Detroit

and investigating major crimes in the state of Michigan--

bank robberies, bombings, murders,

multi-victim murders, homicides.

I live a couple of hours away,

and I'd heard that a person was missing.

And after, you know, it wasn't resolved right away,

I reached out to Chief Frizzo to see

if she needed any assistance.

He gives me his whole background,

tells me what he does, tells me how he wants to help me

at no cost to me, which was huge because, you know,

we're--we don't have a lot of finances in our department.

And I'll take all the help I can get.

And I became like a foot soldier for her,

doing what she needed to get done

that maybe she couldn't put someone else on

because they were busy.

Just to make sure, you know, we didn't miss anything

that down the way would be pivotal

on breaking this case open.

We searched all over Iron River

and surrounding the county,

just all kinds of areas.

We brought in K-9s and stuff searching in body dump sites,

seeing if we could find something.

At that point, you know,

we're just kind of at a standstill.

And I get a call from a detective in Indiana

who tells me that Jason Cochran is dead.

I'm thinking, I know exactly what happened.

I'm sure of it.

So there was a phone call on February 20th.

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 I feel-- my wife really feels

that I needed to let you know

that one of them died on Saturday.

I start the normal line of questioning with her,

and I go through everything with her,

and we're probably 20 minutes into the interview.

And so I told her, I said, look,

I said, you know, when I was in the driveway,

you asked me if I was there to interview you

about anything else.

And I said, I really wouldn't be a good detective

unless I found out what that other thing was.

And she kind of smiled and she said...

"If you want me to respect you at all,

you'll just say it like it is."

And I said, "Okay."

And I said,

"You know exactly what happened to Chris Regan."

And I said, by the time this is all done,

you're going to tell me.

This was a flirtatious woman who was

used to getting her way with men however she wanted,

and that she used them in whichever way she wanted.

It was like a game to her.

And I think that she really viewed it that way very much.

I just kept telling her,

I want to bring Chris Regan home.

I'm not going away.

He served his country for 20 years in the Navy.

It was important that somebody go the extra steps

for somebody who had always gone and done the right thing

for our country.

She knew that I was closing in on her.

Now we have to figure out, with one remaining person,

how do you get that one remaining person

in the conspiracy,

where the other one's already dead,

to tell you what happened to the man that's been missing

for the last 18 months.

I had jotted down in my notes this idea

of creating a fictitious letter

that Jason Cochran had made up prior to his death

in the event of his death.

I was also throwing around the idea of Walt Ammerman

presenting this idea on my behalf.

He said, I have an idea,

and I want you to call her on a recorded call

and--and I'd like you to tell her

that Jason mailed you a letter a while back and--

and wanted you to hold on to it in case something

ever happened to him.

And I was very apprehensive.

I didn't really think she was going to believe it.

Honestly, my first thought was,

this is never going to work.

You know, 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.

It was something along the lines of,

you know, if in the event something occurs to me,

if I were to die, please forward this letter

to the Iron River Police Department.

And I signed it "Jason" or whatever.

And he said, okay, well, we have to make some changes.

And I said, okay, 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, that's what he always called himself to me.

I said, okay, so we make it Quack Quack.

And he goes, okay, let's do it.

I felt like I was really sticking my neck out,

but I think somebody had to.

When there's a person, or possibly people,

that are that evil, somebody has got to stop them.

Walt's sitting in the truck, and he's shaking.

And he's--he's like, Jeremy, I don't know, you know?

And I said, Walt, be yourself.

Take a breath.

You know, your friend's dead.

He was your friend.

No matter what he did, he was your friend,

and that's the way I want you to think of him.

And he got on that phone, and it was incredible.

The note says, if something were to happen to me,

please send this in a few weeks,

and there's an envelope in there with no return address,

to the Iron River Police Department.

I was listening.

And there's this huge gasp for air by her.

And at that moment, I'm like, okay, okay.

Hang on, hang on. What's coming next?

It's like I'm supposed to mail this,

but I just wanted to tell you.

Please don't.

Her sigh and her cry and her "please don't"

are three things I'll never forget.

Please don't.

And for those 30 seconds, it was like I--

I had the biggest fish of a lifetime on,

because I knew that she had taken it all the way.

When she said "please don't,"

I knew that she was responsible for both deaths.

If there was any doubt in my mind

that she didn't have something to do with it,

it was all erased at that moment.

She did not see that coming.

She saw no way that we would be working together

to--to trick her.

I think Jeremy won that game.

I'm getting texts from Kelly,

"I have to talk to you right now."

And so I text her back and said, where are you?

I'll meet you.

When we went into the restaurant,

we sat down at a table, and we started talking.

I said, I would think that if there's a letter

that your husband wrote in the event

that something happened to him,

that this is something that you would want

to get out in front of.

You need to tell your side of the story.

She looked at me and she said, Jason shot him in the head.

Immediately I told her,

you're coming to the police station with me.

She plays the victim in the whole thing, basically,

as though she's forced to do it.

She says, you know, that Chris Regan came to the house.

She claims that Jason magically appeared

in the basement with a rifle

and shot him in the back of the head.

She says she had no idea that Jason was waiting

in the basement to kill him.

The chemistry between her and I changed at that point,

and she reveals something else.

She says that, you know, her and her husband

entered into this pact on their marriage night.

Kelly's story is they agreed on their wedding night

that if either of them ever cheated,

they got to kill that person.

I tell her, so that would mean

that you were responsible to kill Chris Regan?

Ultimately, she tells me that, you know,

Jason cut up Chris Regan and disposed of his body

and that he was put in trash bags,

and that she drove him out to areas where, you know,

they dumped the body.

So we go out on this, you know, field trip,

and she's going to show us different locations, you know,

where they put his body.

I ultimately took Kelly back into the house

so she could tell us, you know, how things happened,

kind of being there in person

and pointing different things out.

We were out in this, you know, wide--

widely wooded area, and she shows us an area

and tells us, you know, it's here.

So that would be when we found Chris Regan's skull.

I stood there looking,

and I had worked so long and so hard

that I just stood there and I, like, literally just--

I started to cry.

And I just kind of knelt down, and I got right down

on the ground, and I just looked right at his--

you know, at him.

And I just kept thinking in my head that, you know,

I finally found him, and I thought I never would.

And I didn't care about anything else at that point

except being able to let his family, you know,

have closure and know that we have an answer for them.

Indescribable moment of...

A long journey.

You can see there's more markings,

flags over here where they've done searching.

Kelly said that they buried the bags in different areas.

So the gate to come in is to the right.

And they found the skull about 100 feet in,

right here in the field.

There's a roadway, there's a small gate,

and that's where they parked.

And then they hauled his remains into the woods

and buried them.

But I get kind of--

yeah, gets teary.

When they found the skull, I felt as though

someone had ripped out my heart,

and that the nightmare that I was living through,

it just all came crashing down on me.

But that was--it was the key turning point in the case.

The state police had done a lot of work,

and the chief--Chief Frizzo had done a lot of work

on connecting up with search warrants

all of the digital evidence, like smartphones

and desktop computers.

And what I did is took a second look at all of those.

You gotta check everything out.

You know, it's a needle in a haystack kind of thing.

I mean, there's tens of thousands

of images and files on these--

like just on one computer.

And in the end, we ended up finding a satellite image

that zoomed right in several times,

focused in on the Caspian Pit,

on a specific piece of the bank of the Caspian Pit.

And that was relatively near the Cochrans' house.

And it ended up that's where the rifle was found.

And that was huge.

The key part of that was it showed premeditation,

because the data in the Google image

was prior to the date that--

I mean, Chris was still alive when they were

looking at this Google image.

So, you know, the prosecutor was able

to use that as, you know, premeditation, some planning.

There really was no smoking gun here.

There really was no evidence.

There was some circumstantial evidence.

The house was clean from any DNA in the basement

or anywhere else in the house.

Cadaver dogs were in there and they found no evidence.

So again, there was no real evidence

that any version of the story that Kelly was telling

was true.

Finally, she went to trial for Christopher's murder.

They brought her in.

The thing I'll never forget is her smirk.

She just showed no emotion.

The version that

Kelly put forth during her testimony was,

on the 14th of October, Mr. Regan came over

to Kelly's home.

They were engaged in intimate conduct.

While doing so, out of nowhere,

a shot came from the basement.

Kelly's husband that was in the basement with a gun

had fired a shot...

Which wounded Mr. Regan in the back of the head.

Kelly and Mr. Regan then toppled down the stairs.

Kelly was momentarily knocked unconscious,

came to, and saw that her husband was

in the process of dismembering Mr. Regan.

And she had no idea it was going to happen.

That she was basically engaged with her lover,

and then her husband, on his own volition,

assassinated that individual.

The hardest part, I think, was when they brought

his skull out as evidence.

Just listening to how things went down--

luring him into their house--

it was, in my mind,

how could somebody be so ruthless?

You know, the first time I saw Kelly was in the courtroom.

And she was sitting there just grinning.

She had this big grin on her face.

And I honestly felt like I was looking at the devil.

I could feel her eyes piercing through me.

And that was scary.

She's the devil.

I mean, truly, you could see it in her.

Was it absolutely a horrifying experience,

watching your husband murder your lover

right in front of your eyes?

Watching him cut him up was horrifying.

That's something I'll never get out of my head.

As we went to trial, I was most focused

on the lack of any evidence, any forensic evidence.

Now, there was speculation,

and it very well could have been,

that Kelly did an excellent job of cleaning up

a basement and disposing of any signs

of Mr. Regan being in that home.

Certainly something that we had to address was

the fact that Kelly had some forensic training.

Certainly not something that she was licensed in

or did as a profession, but it raised some eyebrows,

I'm sure, for the jurors,

and did help bolster the prosecution's point

as to why there would be no forensic evidence

found in the home.

We had to figure out if it was premeditated.

Was it him?

Did he make her do this?

I mean, she did have a big play in it,

but it was hard to fathom which way do you go.

It was tough.

It was tough.

Kelly was found guilty on all counts,

and, you know, was sentenced to life in prison.

We all made the decision that it was premeditated,

and she did get life in prison with no parole.

It wasn't just Jason.

It was both of them.

And she was probably the mastermind.

She's going away for life.

But...

I wanted her to hurt more than that.

I also wanted Jason in jail.

I thought he got off easy.

He went to sleep, and he never woke up.

But I'm glad Kelly can't hurt anyone else.

The one thing that helps bring a little peace

is that Kelly can't put

anyone else through what I went through.

At that point, she talks to us about killing her husband.

She looked at me and she said, "You know, I suffocated him."

I put my hands over his mouth and his nose,

and he was confused.

I could tell he was looking at me and he was confused.

He didn't understand why I was doing what I was doing.

I said, but it was important for you

that he knew that you were the one taking his life

and that you were the one killing him.

And she said yes.

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.

I think he wanted out.

I think he wanted to end what they were doing in life.

And she wasn't going to let that happen.

And she didn't let that happen.

I mean, she's definitely made it very apparent

that there's other victims.

She has sent Jeremy and I a letter playing a game,

you know, just kind of wants to start

the cat and mouse thing again,

taking responsibility for a homicide

that we can't name.

She wants to talk, and I think eventually she will.

Coming here makes me feel closer to Christopher.

He's here somewhere.

The rest of him, he's here.

He'll always be in my heart.

He just was such a wonderful person.

And Christopher didn't deserve this.

No one does.

Police say this surveillance video shows

a cunning killer on the prowl.

She's calm.

She has the appearance of a grandmother.

The U.S. Marshals Service today posted a $5,000 reward

for information about a fugitive grandmother.

Here we have the grandma killer.

She had a gambling problem,

and things spiraled out of control.

U.S. Marshals are actively involved

in a national search for this dangerous fugitive.

It is surprising to see somebody

immediately go off on a gambling jaunt

after they've killed two people.

Is she looking for another person

to befriend, the next victim?

My fear, who is this suspect?

Do we have a serial killer on our hands?