In Russell's following article he tells about a Deputy Attorney General who wrote me saying evidence at the "homicide scene" was potentially jeopardized making it tremendously difficult to prosecute Mike's murder. And also about a Maine State Police Detective who told Reporter Russell that the case was a "travesty of Justice" and the details were etched into his memory. I wonder if the two statements could be called an oxymoron? One doesn't have enough evidence to prosecute and the other says it was a travesty of justice and the details are etched into his memory. What is etched in his memory? He refused to tell by not responding to further reporter's calls.
I also used parts of Russell's article in my book, "A Maine Murder"
Michael Cochran and his girlfriend, Linda Gray, hang out at a friend’s house in
the hours before Michael was slain in 1981. Photo courtesy of Leola Cochran
For six days, Michael Cochran's body lay hidden under charred debris. In the predawn hours of Feb. 18, 1981, a a spectacular fire destroyed a cabin in Dedham. Fire investigators didn't have a chance to get to the scene the next day. Or the day after. Or for the next [six] days. They were busy at another, much bigger fire scene nearby, and didn't know there might be victims in Dedham.
Cochran’s death was ruled accidental at first. He must have suffocated from the smoke, investigators figured. But details suggested otherwise. There was the man seen running from the cabin when firefighters arrived. There was the drug [sting] in nearby Holden. And there were the empty gas cans.
Leola Cochran’s son was already cremated by the time police reclassified his death as a homicide a few months later. The fire was intentionally set, she was told, and Michael may even have been killed before flames destroyed the cabin.
In the 36 years since Michael was killed, she has pored over every detail of the murder and the ensuing investigation. She has devoted more time than any of the many detectives who have been assigned to the case, which has long since turned cold. The hardest thing for Leola Cochran isn’t that she’ll never know who was responsible. She’s confident she knows who killed her son. Her worry is that detectives squandered their chance to charge his killers and bring her peace.
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Michael Cochran is one of about 80 unsolved homicides assigned to the Maine State Police's cold case squad. Most cold cases, though, stay cold. ... Sometimes police may have a good idea who did it but simply can't collect enough evidence to bring charges. Sometimes investigations are mishandled. Leola Cochran believes investigators grossly mishandled her son’s case, from failing to treat the fire as a crime scene to neglecting to interview people who might have been able to piece the events of that night together.
Kenneth MacMaster, a former Maine State Police detective who wasn’t assigned to the Cochran investigation but knew the victim and many of the people involved, agreed with the victim’s mother that the case was mishandled. In an interview last month, he called the case a “travesty of justice,” and said the details were etched into his memory. After MacMaster offered to share those details, though, he stopped returning a reporter’s calls and emails.
The Maine Sunday Telegram reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, some obtained by Leola Cochran through legal proceedings, as well as old newspaper clippings about the case. The Telegram interviewed Leola Cochran multiple times, as well as attorneys and detectives who were involved, some of whom would not speak on the record because they were not authorized to discuss an open case. That review revealed a murder investigation that was troubled from the beginning and got worse.
Michael's body wasn't found until six days after the fire, which means the the murder scene could have been disturbed in that time. His body was cremated, so there was no opportunity to conduct any forensic work, even years later. ...
Lt. Troy Gardner, one of the cold case squad’s two supervisors, declined to discuss any specifics of the Cochran case. 'There are challenges we deal with in any investigation,' he said. 'The age of this case and the fact that people involved may have forgotten things or passed away, that’s certainly a challenge.'
Leola Cochran hasn’t forgotten. While everyone else involved has largely moved on, she has been stuck in suspension. 'I’m never far from it, which means I’m never far from Michael,' she said. 'I’ve had people say to me, ‘You need to let go of all that.’ I can’t. I just can’t.'
Leola turned 81 this year [now 88] . She may not get any answers about her son’s death before her own. Over the last several years, she has written a book detailing everything she’s learned about her son’s killing and the 36-year aftermath. Lawyers are reviewing it for potential libel ahead of publishing. 'The only justice I’m going to get [for Mike] is by telling my story,' she said.
Michael Cochran was born Oct. 4, 1956, to Leola and Derald Cochran Sr. He grew up on a potato farm in Aroostook County with his parents, an older sister and an older brother. Michael was good-natured and respected his parents, but he struggled in school and then lost interest. Had he grown up in a different era, he might have received special help in school, his mother said. Instead he was ignored. He was teased about his learning disabilities, which made school even less appealing. He discovered drugs at a young age – 13, his mother figures and started stealing around the same time.
Michael attended Brewer High School in the fall of 1971 but didn’t last the year and never went back. He was 15. After that, he ran away often. He would hitchhike with a framed backpack carrying everything he needed. When he was 17, he made it all the way across the country to California. After his return, his mother found the cover of a San Francisco phone book.
That same year saw his first criminal conviction. He broke into a house and stole a bunch of coins. He was sent to a juvenile detention center facility, which his mother hoped might straighten him out. It didn't. He stole a blank check from his sister and tried to cash it for $50. He broke into his grandmother's house in Aroostook County and took her color TV as well as food from her freezer. [She had him arrested. He did a few months in Aroostook County jail.] At this point , Leola believed Michael's drug habit was fueling his crimes. She didn't how bad it had gotten until August 1976. When a friend of her son came to her house in a rage. Michael had stolen his drug proceeding and he threatened to kill him. Michael had fled the state again. He was eventually arrested in Nevada and extradited back to Maine to face charges. He was arrested again for trying to sell stolen items. He was sentenced to prison for 18 months.
He was caught in March 1980 with two others at an apartment in Brewer, where police found two pounds of marijuana, 350 amphetamine tablets and 150 tablets of LSD. MacMaster was one of the DEA agents who brought him in. [I am not condoning Mike but this was his only drug charge] While out on bail and awaiting sentencing, Michael returned to his parents’ home late one night to pick something up. His mother was awake. He admitted to her that he was addicted to cocaine and that he hated his life. Leola told him to get help and that she would support him, but he left.
In December 1980, Michael appeared at the Penobscot County Courthouse in Bangor to be sentenced on the drug charges. He was represented by a local attorney, Andrew Mead, now a Maine Supreme Court justice. Mead, through a court representative, refused to discuss the case.
His mother didn't attend the hearing, but Michael's then girlfriend, Linda Gray, was there. The judge handed down a lengthy sentence – five years. Before he was led away by a bailiff, though, Michael ran. He vaulted over the stairs inside the courthouse, injured his ankle during the landing and then hobbled toward the door. Gray later told Leola Cochran she heard a sheriff’s deputy call out to him, “Stop, or I’ll shoot.” Michael didn’t stop, but the deputy didn’t shoot, either. “Sometimes, I think that would have been a more humane death,” the mother said.
Leola Cochran didn't hear from her son after his escape and said she doesn't know where he went. A few days later, Gray delivered a hand written note from Michael. 'Mom, I know it was probably wrong to run, but I can't handle 5 or 7 years in Thomaston (Maine State Prison), and I will make it I promise,' he wrote. 'I love you and Dad a lot and I wish we could all be together, but I got to try and keep my freedom.' He left the state for a while with Gray, according to his mother, but eventually returned to stay close to Bangor.
R. Christopher Almy, who was a young prosecutor at the time said drugs were prevalent in Greater Bangor and fueled most of the crime. The drugs came into Maine the way they still do today – often by car up Interstate 95 from other states – but there was a local network of distributors. One of the leaders was a man named Lionel Cormier. Although Cormier had a lengthy drug history by the early 1980s, he also liked to steal. Specifically, he liked to steal from drug dealers. It was the perfect crime. No drug dealer would report a robbery to police. But Cormier had a violent side, too. He threatened to kill the family members of anyone who snitched on him. During one robbery, he cut off a victim’s ear. ...
Leola Cochran learned later that Percy Sargent and [Paul] Pollard were at the cabin the night before it burned, as was Gray, Michael’s girlfriend. But her son was the only one who died.
The night of the fire, a drug [sting] took place in Holden, the next town over. Percy Sargent, who had been with Cochran hours earlier, was arrested. A few hours before that, firefighters were alerted to a massive fire at an apartment building on Main Street in Bangor. Dozens of people were evacuated, but three people died from smoke inhalation. ...
No one was ever arrested, and the case is now closed. [I mistakenly thought that homicides were never closed.]
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The fire in Bangor tied up state fire investigators for [six] days. That's why Cochran's body wasn't found until almost a week later by State Fire Marshal Wilbur Ricker, who arrived in Dedham to inspect the remains of the cabin.
Leola Cochran has long fretted over that delay. She said firefighters must have known enough before then to suspect foul play. The fire was clearly intentionally set as evidenced by the intensity of the flames and the presence of gas cans at the site. And there was the revelation from Norman Herrin, who led the local volunteer fire department that responded that night. 'As I arrived on the scene, and being the first one on the scene, I did see an individual leaving the area through the woods,' Herrin said at the time.
Four years later [Paul] Pollard, who had a lengthy criminal history, admitted to police – during an investigation of another crime – that it was him, but he denied setting the fire or killing Cochran. Still, Leola has always wondered, why didn’t police take more seriously the fact that someone was running from the fire scene? “If firefighters had checked through the ruins as they do in a normal fire, the body probably would have been discovered,” Herrin said. But that wasn’t what happened.
Minutes after Ricker found the human remains, two men [Lionel Cormier and Percy Sargent] approached the property in a car and got out to survey the rubble. “I didn’t want them to know what I’d found, and so I just stepped right out from behind the ["the garage"] in uniform, and they looked like two deer got caught under a jack lantern or something, and they kind of froze there and all I had was the piece of a film case and my pen,” Ricker later said.
From the beginning, Leola Cochran always felt outside her son’s murder investigation.
Michael was a fugitive from justice at the time, and police weren't sure they believed Leola when she told them she them she didn't know where he was. 'If I had know where he was, I wouldn't have left him six days under a pile of fire rubble.'
Almy, the Penobscot County prosecutor at the time, said he still remembers how upset she was but he understood. “I think it was just one of those cases where (police) didn’t have a lot of evidence to go on,” he said.
Leola Cochran has always believed that police mishandled the case. Pollard was interviewed, albeit much later, but Cormier and Percy Sargent were not. She couldn’t understand why.
Early on in the investigation, she asked her son’s attorney, Andrew Mead, what he thought happened to him. His answer stunned her. “Stay away from that, Ms. Cochran,” she said he told her. But she didn’t. The circumstances of her son’s death consumed her. The more she thought about it, the less it made sense. Why didn’t they inspect, or fingerprint, the gas cans that were found at the property?
AS she learned more about her son and the people he associated with, police often kept her in the dark about their investigation. Nearly three years after the murder, surprisingly, a grand jury delivered indictments against three men for the murder of Michael Cochran: Richard Sargent, Roger Johnson, who went by “Bubba,” and William Meyers. All three were involved in the drug game in Greater Bangor. Sargent’s brother, Percy, was with Michael at the cabin the night before it burned. No one told Leola Cochran that suspects had been charged. She found out by reading the newspaper.
But that case quickly fell apart. The state’s case hinged significantly on the testimony of one witness, Sharon Sargent, the sister-in-law of Richard and Percy Sargent. A habitual drug user [petty criminal] and sometime police informant, Sharon Sargent told police that she was at a party the night of the Dedham fire and overheard plans to have Cochran killed. The three men suspected Cochran of being a snitch, she said, and were going to take care of him. It turns out that there was an informant for the drug [sting] that night, but it was not Cochran. It was Percy Cote, a low-level dealer who had been working with drug agents.
In June 1985 the state dropped the charges against the three men charged with Michael’s murder. Thomas Goodwin, who was a Maine assistant attorney general, said at the time the decision had to do in large part with Sharon Sargent’s inconsistent testimony. She is now deceased. Goodwin, who is now retired, said it’s unusual for a case to fall apart like that, especially a murder case. He also doesn’t dispute the opinion of MacMaster, the former state police detective who called the case a “travesty of justice.” “If he thought the case was mishandled, I’d be inclined to believe him,” Goodwin said.
Leola Cochran was devastated after charges were dropped against the three men. She was never convinced they killed her son, but either way she believes law enforcement failed. She wasn’t sure she’d ever find her son’s killer. But she kept reading the papers, looking for certain names. In 1986, she learned about a major robbery trial she hoped would shed light on her son’s case. That trial involved Cormier, Pollard and [Richard Sargent]. They were suspected of robbing, on two occasions, a drug dealer named Charles Dolan, who lived in the remote town of Corinth, northwest of Bangor. The crimes occurred over a three-month period between late 1980 and early 1981, overlapping the time Cochran was killed, according to court documents.
Between the two robberies, more than $50,000 in cash was taken. In the second, Cormier beat Dolan mercilessly as Dolan begged him to stop. “You wait ’til you see what I do to you now,” Cormier said, according to court documents. He then took out a knife and cut Dolan’s left ear off. The victim didn’t realize what had happened until Cormier dropped the ear on the floor in front of him. [He testified in court that he screamed in horror.]
Pollard testified as a state’s witness. He had initially been interviewed by Sgt. Barry Shuman, the lead detective in the Cochran murder, about that case but instead gave information about Cormier. During the trial, Cormier, likely as a way to get back at Pollard, “sought to introduce evidence that implicated Pollard in the murder of a Michael Cochran.” That led to Pollard admitting he was at the cabin the night of the fire and that he was the man seen running from the flames. But he said he had nothing to do with Cochran’s death. Cormier was found guilty of the robbery. Pollard avoided prosecution in exchange for his testimony.
Cormier’s robbery trial was illuminating, but it only confused Leola Cochran more. She was convinced she was close to the truth and couldn’t stop. At her own expense, she decided to sue Paul Pollard. She couldn’t allege murder in a civil case but she could allege wrongful death and claim that Pollard’s negligence contributed to her son’s death.
During discovery in the civil trial, Leola obtained tapes of conversations and statements from some of the people involved, including Percy Sargent. She has been told by police that they would not hold up in court in a criminal case.
The lawsuit also allowed her attorney to depose Linda Gray, Michael’s girlfriend. Gray said she had no memory of that night. She said she left Michael at the cabin because she had to get up early and go to work the next day.
Detective Shuman testified as well, although he effectively sided with Pollard. Leola said she doesn’t know why, although she suspects that police had given Pollard blanket immunity in the Cormier robbery case [including Mike's murder]
Although the standard of proof in a wrongful death suit – preponderance of evidence – is lower than the threshold for murder, Leola lost the case.
Shuman died in 2005. Ralph Pinkham, [Shuman's supervisor] another detective who worked on the case throughout the 1980's, is retired and lives in Hancock County. He did not return multiple calls for comment.
In 2002, more than two decades after the murder, Maine State Police assigned a new detective to the case, Gerald Coleman. Leola Cochran was reluctant to sit down with another detective. When they did meet, he told her the investigative file on her son’s case was thin. He then asked for her documents. She had amassed more intelligence than police by that point.
That same year, Leola Cochran’s younger son, Derald Cochran Jr., got a letter from William Stokes, then head of the Attorney General’s Office criminal division. Stokes explained the challenges and seemed to acknowledge that police knew who killed Michael but didn’t have enough prosecutable evidence. “If we bring a case to trial and we lose, that is the end of it,” he wrote. “Thus, there is a significant difference between solving a case in the law enforcement sense and being able to prosecute a case in a court of law.”
Stokes is now a judge. He declined to comment through a court representative.
Leola Cochran, however, said Coleman told her that he could have solved her murder on day one if he had been assigned the case then. He narrowed his focus to Lionel Cormier, who, even after spending time in and out of prison for robberies and other drug-related charges, hadn’t changed. Coleman couldn’t pin the murder on Cormier, but he did help put him behind bars for life. With Coleman’s help, federal prosecutors in 2003 charged Cormier, along with three others, with robbing a couple in Orland of their illegal drug stash, mostly prescription painkillers. When Cormier was sentenced for that crime in June 2005, a federal judge called him a predator.
Gail Malone, then assistant U.S. attorney, said at his sentencing that Cormier had bragged in the past about killing Michael Cochran. Cormier didn’t deny having a role in Michael’s death but accused Malone of “clouding the water,” according to an Associated Press story. “I’ve been in jail all my life,” he told the judge. “You think I need the government to throw their weight on me? That’s ludicrous. Just save a spot in the cemetery for me.”
The conviction of Cormier was welcome news to Leola Cochran, even if it wasn’t for her son’s murder. But she was never convinced he acted alone. Her son’s case remained open. Were others walking free?
In a Sept. 5, 2006, letter to Leola from Stokes in response to a letter she had written, the state finally acknowledged what she had known for years. “Detective Coleman has done outstanding work on this case but there remains tremendous difficulties with prosecuting this case particularly in view of the fact that the ‘homicide scene’ was not treated as such until a significant period of time after your son’s death, potentially jeopardizing important evidence in the meantime,” Stokes wrote.
After 25 years, the state’s top homicide prosecutor admitted that police had bungled the investigation from the beginning.
In 2007, Leola wrote to Cormier. He was in prison and in bad health. She thought if he was ever going to unburden himself, that would be the time. But the letter went unanswered. Cormier died in prison two years later.
Coleman ended his investigative career, too, and now works in the protective detail for Gov. Paul LePage.
By October 2011, Leola Cochran was dealing with another detective, Troy Gardner.
He told her that the case was still open and revealed that a detective was planning to travel out of state to meet with a woman named Karen Murray, Pollard’s girlfriend at the time of the murder, who had never been interviewed. Depending on that interview, Gardner wrote, police would consider re-interviewing Pollard. She doesn’t know if that ever happened [I never heard from Gardner again].
Pollard now lives in California. Messages left for him were not returned.
Attempts to find Percy Sargent, who was with Michael Cochran the night he was killed and she believes has answers about his death, and Richard Sargent, who was once charged in the murder, were unsuccessful.
The case has taken a toll on Leola. In 1982, about a year after Michael was murdered, she and her husband divorced. “He lived (Michael’s death) once,” she said of her ex-husband. “I live it every single day.”
Three years ago, Leola Cochran moved from Maine, where she had lived her entire life, to be closer to her youngest son, Shawn.
In April, Leola got a letter from Renee Ordway, the liaison for the cold case squad. It didn’t say much, other than that there were no new developments. Leola said she’s glad the state has put a spotlight on unsolved homicides, but she’s not hopeful it will make a difference in her son’s case. There is no possibility for DNA analysis. Old criminals are unlikely to have a revelation about a night nearly 37 years ago [now 43 years]. ..
Leola said she has found some peace by putting her son’s story – her story, too – in writing. she said, “but this is my struggle.”