Kelly Cochran was born in 1983 in Maryville, Indiana which is about an hour away from Chicago. Her husband, Jason Chochran was born in 1981 and also in Maryville, Indiana.
Kelly and Jason grew up next door to each other. They were polar opposites in personality – Kelly being very outgoing and talkative and Jason being very quiet and introverted. But you know what they say, opposites attract! After high school, they decided to get married. They started a healthy life and marriage and even decided to start a business together, servicing swimming pools.
They worked in their business for 10 years before Jason’s back gave out and he could no longer help in the business. Have you ever had really bad back pain? In 2009, I was stopped at a stop light and a drunk driver rammed into me going more than 50 miles an hour. To this day, I still have back pain if I stand too long. It’s TERRIBLE – damn near like labor in your back. Jason was in constant, agonizing pain. Kelly ended up having to take care of the bills, the house, taking care of Jason, and everything else.
In 2013, Kelly and Jason decided that they should make a move; maybe to make a change or to save their marriage but definitely in part to get access to legal marijuana to help with Jason’s pain. In any case, they moved to Iron River, Michigan. Kelly got a manufacturing job at a factory for Naval ships. She worked, came home and took care of Jason. Worked, came home and took care of Jason. Worked, came home and took care of Jason. One day, while at work, she met a 53 year old man named Christopher Regan.
Chris was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1930. After highschool, he joined the Air Force and when he retired, he moved to Traverse City in Michigan to be next to his current girlfriend – school teacher Terri O’Donnel.
Because Kelly and Chris hung around each other a lot, the town began spreading rumors that they were having an affair with each other. Chris and Terri decided to call their relationship quits and Chris got a job in Asheville, North Carolina. Because of this he needed to move and started planning for that move.
Although Chris was leaving, he and Terri decided to try and work on rekindling their relationship. Now, on the morning of October 14, 2014 Chris texted Terri so they could talk about spending the weekend together and make plans for Thanksgiving and December.
10 days later, Terri had not heard from Chris so she reported him missing to the Iron River Police. Police came out to search his home. When they entered, it looked like someone had ransacked it; Chris was normally a very neat person so they knew the messiness was not his doing. They also noticed that his phone was missing and so was his car. Police began a search for either him or his car, but they found the car first. It was outside of town on the side of a road. When they inspected the interior, they found a sticky note with directions to Kelly and Jason Chochran’s house. Interesting. Of course, police then went out and spoke with the Chochrans. Kelly was very talkative, helpful, and outgoing whereas Jason just stood off to the side, was uncooperative, and was kind of “emotionless”. Kelly said that the last time she’d heard from him was 10 days ago. Sergeant Cindy Barrette was suspicious of Kelly’s behavior and even more of Jason’s but her suspicions were more of a gut feeling than anything concrete to base them on.
As the police were investigating Chris’ disappearance, they came to find out that Kelly and Chris had been having an affair. Now they have a motive. So they bring Kelly and Jason in for questioning, and she admitted that yes, they were having an affair BUT it’s only because her and Jason were in an open relationship so when you think about it – I wasn’t really having an affair. Right? Right? So they went to question Jason after this and he gave a different story. Jason was very angry that Kelly was having an affair. He did not appreciate Kelly dating around but went along with it because it was an alternative to divorce and he thought it had the potential of making their marriage stronger. He said, “I had to accept it or let it go.”
In March of 2015, police went and searched Kelly’s house, looking for any evidence in the disappearance of Chris. Instead, they found two .22 guns, a baseball bat in the living room, and a hammer hanging in the living room. They also found a book that Jason was writing where he talked about going on killing sprees and getting revenge against a person. They thought that the person he described in the book was a close representation of Chris. In my opinion, this is more of a suspicion and less of evidence. Anyone can write anything – and some people use journaling or story writing to work through their frustrations so that’s all this could be. So basically, everything they found was not evidence, but items of interest.
During the investigation, Kelly and Jason decided to pick up and move back to Indiana.
A year later, on February 20, 2016, Kelly called 911 in a panic. She said her husband, Jason, wasn’t breathing. She said, “His face is like, blue. He’s breathing barely. I don’t know what’s wrong. He’s throwing up, he’s sweating. I need an ambulance right away.” Emergency personnel were dispatched and when they arrived, they saw that Jason was already dead and Kelly was in hysterics. Paramedics checked Jason over and determined that he died from a heroin overdose, which Kelly informed them he was doing because of his back pain.
However, when Jason’s friends heard the news of his death and how he died, they thought it was strange. They said he would never use anything harder than marijuana.
So now police have their radars up. After the Hobart Medical Examiner did an autopsy, they found opiates, morphine, and codeine in his body. They also found out that he didn’t, in fact, die of an overdose; he died from asphyxiation from strangulation. Now his manner of death was changed from overdose to homicide.
Over the course of two months, Kelly was brought in to the police station for constant questioning, but towards the end of April 2016, Kelly moved out to the west coast. Because she was under investigation for the death of Jason and even the death of Chris, a warrant was issued for her arrest by both police departments – the Iron River and the Hobart.
Police searched for Kelly and texted her repeatedly hoping that she would reply and they could get a gps fix on her. Finally, on April 28, 2016, they found her living with her cousin in Kentucky and arrested her. Wow, she was on the lam for what, 2 days. That’s some horrible hiding there Kells.
When cops brought her in, she confessed to everything. She said that when her and Jason got married, they’d made a pact on their wedding night that if one of them had been cheating on the other, they would kill the person they were having an affair with. If they did not kill that person, then the other had to kill him/her for them. (for instance if Kelly did not kill Chris, then Jason would have to kill Chris.) Kelly then told them that Jason was not, in fact, in agreement with an open marriage and that he was angry about her affair with Chris. She said that Jason forced her to invite Chris over to their house, and while she was having sex with him, Jason shot him in the head from behind. According to Kelly, after Jason shot Chris, he dismembered him. Wouldn’t Kelly have been in some sort of horrible shock from this? I mean his brains had to have been all over her at the time. Like wow!
Kelly then confessed that she had been angry with Jason for killing Chris because she said this was “the only good thing I had in my life” so she decided to kill Jason. She said, “it was revenge. I evened the score.” She said that the night that Jason killed Chris, she thought about killing Jason right away but didn’t. She thought about it everyday for 16 months until she finally went through with it. She told police she injected Jason with an overdose amount of heroin and then put her hands on his neck, nose, and mouth until he died less than a minute later.
Anyway, she disclosed the location of where Chris’ body parts had been dumped. They had her show them the exact place, which she did – she walked them over to the exact location. When the police excavated the location, they found a skull with a bullet hole in it and a pair of glasses that had belonged to Chris. Kelly confirmed everything they found in front of the police. They then sent off the skull for analysis and found that the teeth matched Chris Regan’s.
In 2017, Kelly went on trial for the murder of Chris. She wasn’t tried as the murderer, she was tried as an accomplice. Guess what she pled? Not guilty. In court, neighbors testified that they had heard a gunshot coming from the direction of Kelly and Jason’s home around the time of Chris’s disappearance and then heard power tools running in the middle of the night. Neighbors and some friends said that Kelly and Jason seemed to be particularly strange and off-putting. Their friends even said that they were invited over for a barbeque, which never had happened before. They said they were served hamburgers and about $150-$200 worth of meat.
It was revealed in court that it’s believed that Kelly suffers from severe psychopathy. According to NCBI’s website, “psychopathy is a neuropsychiatric disorder marked by deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, and poor behavioral controls, commonly resulting in persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behavior. It’s symptoms include Impulsivity and lack of empathy.” Based on Kelly’s desire to murder and her ability to instinctly lie show that she could be a psychopath.
She was found guilty on five counts:
- life imprisonment without parole for first degree murder
- 2.5-4 years for larceny in a building
- 6-10 years in prison for conspiracy to mutilate body
- 3-5 years in prison for concealing the death of a person
- 2.5-4 years in prison for lying to a police officer
When the time came for her to go to trial for the murder of Jason, she decided not to go to trial and instead pled guilty to the murder. In April of 2018, two years after she was arrested, she was sentenced to an additional 65 years in prison.
While in custody, Kelly claimed that her and Jason had killed more people. Prosecuting attorney Melissa Powell said that Kelly “claimed responsibility for the deaths of other individuals, which, if true, make her a serial killer.”
Per the provisions in Kelly’s plea deal, the state of Indiana can never charge her for the additional murders even if they happened so if Kelly chooses, she can provide locations about her victims without any penalty. She claimed to have other “friends” in Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, and Minnesota but the identifies and specific locations of these other victims remain a mystery to this day. It is thought that there could be up to nine more bodies hidden somewhere.
Kelly’s own brother, Colton, claimed to be afraid that her sister was a serial killer.
Today, Kelly is alive and serving her life sentence, Jason is dead and Chris is dead – and possibly 9 other people are dead as well.
And that’s the story of Kelly Cochran.
So what do you all think of this story? Do you think they murdered 9 other people or she was just lying again? Do you think they actually served Chris’ body parts in a barbeque or this is just rumor? Let us know
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