Three Words Carved in a Tree: The Kelly Cochran Case

0:00 There's a tree in a public park in Hobart, Indiana, with three words carved into the bark. A detective put them there on purpose because he had run out of every other option. And because the woman he was watching kept coming back to that exact spot, she read those three words and took off. By the end of that same night, she started finally telling the truth.

0:48 Kelly and Jason grew up next door to each other in Hobart, Indiana, a working town on the edge of Chicago's sprawl where the yards run together and everybody's mother knows everybody else's business. They were high school sweethearts in the most literal way. Two kids whose families were tangled up with each other before either of them could drive. Friends remembered Kelly as the talker, the one who ran the conversation, the one you noticed when she came through a door. Jason was quiet to the point where people had to pull words out of him with a crowbar. Kelly and Jason got married in 2002, right after Kelly finished high school. And they built a life servicing swimming pools. According to Kelly herself, on their wedding night, the two of them made each other a promise.

1:32 If either one ever had an affair, the cheater had to kill the person they cheated with. If the cheater couldn't do it, the other spouse would handle it. And handling it included handling the spouse. Two people barely out of high school say a lot of things at two in the morning. Kelly would later tell a courtroom the whole thing was just a joke. She never took it seriously. And I believe most couples who say something like that are being dramatic and should probably get some sleep to stop drinking or whatever you're doing because that's crazy. The promise came back around 12 years later and when it did, it came back as a plan. The swimming pool business ran on Jason's back and his back eventually quit.

2:17 Years of hauling equipment left him in chronic pain and reporting on this case indicates that he became dependent on opioids. Money got thin. Around 2013, they packed up partly chasing legal marijuana and partly chasing a reset and landed in Caspian, Michigan up in iron County. It's up in the upper peninsula. This is a stretch of country where the nearest anything is like 45 minutes away. Kelly took a factory job making parts for naval ships. Chris Regan worked at that factory. He was 53 years old, divorced, a father of two, and Air Force veteran from Detroit who had come north for his own fresh start. People at work seemed like him.

2:58 He was steady and easy to be around and he was seeing a woman named Terry O'Donnell on and off throughout that same time that he was seeing Kelly. He also had plans. He was talking about moving to Asheville, North Carolina and starting the next chapter of his life somewhere warmer. Investigators later came to believe that Kelly figured out that whatever she and Chris had, he had no intentions of making it permanent. Oh, by the way, Kelly was cheating on Jason with this Chris Regan guy. On October 14, 2014, Kelly invited Chris over to the house in Caspian and told him Jason was gone for the evening. Jason was in the house. He shot Chris with a 22 caliber rifle.

3:40 The two of them took him to the basement. They used a reciprocating saw and scattered what was left of him across Iron County, including a burn barrel and a stretch of woods off Pintoga Trail in Crystal Falls Township. You may have heard about the barbecue story. The claim that went around the neighborhood and then later went around the internet. It's that the Cochran's hosted a cookout soon after this happened and served meat that the guests found strangely chewy. That claim was never proven. The chief said that the theory came from the neighbors themselves rather than her investigation and no evidence ever supported it. It remains the single most repeated detail about this case where the confirmed facts the things that we do know about are already super strange.

4:24 Chris obviously did not show up for work. Terry noticed that something was off because Chris was a man who answered his phone and when she reported him missing late October, his car turned up abandoned and inside it was a handwritten note with directions to the Cochran House. Iron River's police chief was Laura Frisio, the first woman to hold that job there running a force of four officers. She had a missing man, a note pointing to a specific address, a married couple who came across all wrong in the interviews and an apartment small enough that answering the phone and running the investigation were frequently the same shift. She searched their house in 2015 and found what appeared to be blood along with a great deal of evidence that someone had cleaned up.

5:09 The biological material had degraded past the point of usable DNA. She had nobody, so she had no charges. The Cochran's left town the night after the search and went home to Hobart. Private investigators tracked them there while Frisio kept working on the case from 400 miles away. In December 2016, she was relieved of duty, a firing she attributed to gender bias and the attention that the case had brought and she later won a wrongful termination settlement. On February 20th, 2016, Kelly called 911 and she said Jason wasn't breathing. He was 37, everyone assumed heroin and for a little while that held. Then the autopsy came back and the medical examiner ruled the cause of death as fixation.

5:53 Kelly had injected him with a lethal dose and then covered his nose and mouth while he was there dying. The Jeremy Ogden of the Hobart Police Department called the case and the FBI handed him an anonymous tip linking the Cochran's to a disappearance in Michigan. He called Frisio. Then he did something you won't find in any training manual. Ogden spent more than 100 hours interviewing Kelly. Every minute of it, non-custodial, building an actual rapport with a woman that he already believed had killed two people. He noticed that she kept driving out to Jerry Pavise Park along Lake George and that she would sit by one specific tree. He then carved three words into the bark.

6:34 Chris is here. The night she read it, Ogden watched her come running out of the woods and tear out of the parking lot. At same evening, she told him for the first time that Chris Regan had been murdered. Her story kept moving. Frisio described the pattern as "ly, lie, lie, truth." First, Jason acted alone. Jason Kelly admitted that she was the one who lured Chris to the house. In April 2016, she ran, leaving messages meant to point everyone to the west coast. An investigators traced her to Wingo, Kentucky, where US marshals arrested her on April 29. She gave her full-est admission the following day. Then she took investigators to Chris.

7:16 They recovered a skull with a bullet hole in it. A pair of eyeglasses appeared to be his and pieces of the rifle. Kelly's trial in Iron County ran nearly three weeks in February 2017. She testified in her own defense and told the jury Jason was the killer and that she was a battered wife to frighten to speak. The prosecutor answered with evidence that Kelly ran that marriage. Text messages showed Jason pleading with her to end the affair and getting back the emotional equivalent of a shrug. Then there were jailhouse statements. Kelly had been telling people that she was a serial killer, that she and Jason had left bodies in four states, that she kept a bag of trinkets taken from victims.

7:58 The number kept sliding around. She told Ogden 9 at one point and 21 at another. Physio testified that she never found any evidence that trinket bag existed. And Ogden testified to the same thing and no additional victims have ever been identified. Prosecutors used those statements to show the jury who they were sitting across from. A woman running a game from inside a cell. The jury of eight women and four men deliberated for under three hours and convicted her on all five counts. On May 10, 2017, she was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. In April 2018, she pleaded guilty in Indiana to killing Jason and took 65 more years, consecutive.

8:42 She said on the record that she hated him, that it was revenge, that she evened the score. The Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the conviction in June 2019. Kelly is at Women's Huron Valley in Ibsolanti and she will die there. She still gives interviews and the story still changes. In recent years, she claimed that she was tied up while Jason killed Chris. A version Physio had never heard from her before and dismissed as more of the same game. Two other people walked out of this with something else entirely. Laura Frisio and Jeremy Ogden fell in love working on the case and they are now married. She goes by Laura Frisio Ogden now and in 2025, the two of them sat down together for a Fox Nation series and told the whole story side by side.

9:28 Chris Regan's watch is wallet, his keys, his phone and his necklace have never turned up in any search sense. Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, bingeable True Crime Stories. Hello, I'm Joe, I'm the host and here's an email, subject podcast question from a guy who is failing at podcasting. Joe, I'm 38 episodes in, averaging 11 downloads. 11. I'm pretty sure four of those are my mom on different devices. I've read the blogs, I've watched the YouTube guys who seem to be selling a course and I still can't tell if my problem is the content or the fact that nobody knows I exist.

10:11 I'm here in the top 1% of podcasters and I'm in the bottom whatever so you clearly know something I don't. Real question, if you were starting from zero today with no audience, what would you actually spend your first 90 days doing? I'm not looking for be consistent. I've been consistent for nine months and consistent is not working by itself. Also, if the honest answer is quit, I would respect that too. Appreciate anything you can give me. Marcus and Chattanooga Tennessee. Marcus, I feel for you man, podcasting as easy as it might sound is very difficult and I know that there are people listening to me right now that think what you're just talking and telling stories into a microphone. How hard could that be? The answer is extremely hard.

10:52 I happen to be a person who's been in the world of media since my adult years. I was 18, 19 years old when I started working in radio, did that for a decade, transitioned into TV and so I've been doing this for a very long time. Podcasting was never a thing until, you know, like back when the serial podcast came out and then everyone decided they wanted to be a podcaster. It took me until like the pandemic to decide, yeah, I should probably do that. But my point is I've got a background, I've got an education and I've got experience talking into a microphone. I've got experience creating content, writing scripts, all of those things. So it's not just something you can jump into without any knowledge or any know-how.

11:36 So let's assume, Marcus, that you do know what you're doing and when it comes to the content. If your content is good and you are being consistent, those would be the top two things, obviously I would tell anybody. But beyond that, I would look at how it sounds. Do you have a decent microphone? Does it sound like you're doing your podcast in a bathroom where it's all echoey? Nobody wants to hear that. If your sound is good, your content's good, you're being consistent, then think you've hit the nail on the head. It's just people don't know that you exist. And the way to do that is with your social media. You've got to push it out there to the point that you think that you're being obnoxious with it. You think, I'm putting too much stuff out there.

12:17 People are going to get sick of me. I just keep posting every day. Keep posting every day. People don't get sick of you. And if they do, it's easy just to scroll past. Now, I'm telling you all of that from the perspective of a guy that doesn't do enough social media stuff. I'm very lazy when it comes to actually promoting the podcast. Once I create the episodes, I just kind of put it out there and let people do with it as they will. So I'm terrible at the social media part of it, but that is the key to making your podcast known by people that aren't listening to it or don't know that you exist. I hope that advice makes sense. And trust me, it's coming from a place of someone that knows that it is very difficult to make a podcast work. Hey, if you're a brand new listener to this podcast, 10 Minute Murder, welcome.

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