The mother of four children, Cochran had no special knowledge of the legal system before her son, Michael, then 24, was killed in an arson fire in Lucerne in February in 1981.
At first, she was a passive spectator as homicide indictments were brought against three men in connection with Michael’s death. But when the indictments were dropped, Cochran swung into action. She hired a special investigator to dig up evidence. She took a paralegal course to learn how to file motions in court. And she later hired an attorney to argue her civil case in federal district court. After all that, she still lost in a jury trial last year. And state investigators say they have
no new suspects in the case.But other families with murdered relatives have made Cochran their unofficial spokesman, and she is not shy about taking up the mantle. ‘I’m not asking anyone to care about Michael’ Cochran she says. ‘But they should care about why his murder isn’t solved. If they can murder once, they can murder again. Maine isn’t such a big state that any murder should go unsolved for long.
The tone was set, however, for what has become a decade of adversarial relations with state and local police. Among her complaints are that authorities bungled the initial investigation, letting her son’s body lie undiscovered in the charred ruins of a burnt cabin for nearly a week.
Later, they won indictments of three men for the murder, only to have to throw out the indictments when a star witness recanted. When Cochran wanted to question another prime suspect [Paul Pollard] whom she would later name in her lawsuit, police refused to tell her where he was, and to this day there is no record that police have questioned two other key figures [Percy Sargent and Lionel Cormier] about the events surrounding her son’s murder.
‘They just don’t seem that interested in solving this murder,’ says Cochran. ‘Totally false,’ says Det. Sgt. Barry Shuman, the state police officer who handled much of the case from the start. ‘There are no new suspects, but we are willing to pursue all reasonable leads.’
PIECING TOGETHER WHAT HAPPENED
At first, Cochran had to piece together what happened on the night of Feb. 17–18, 1981, from newspaper accounts. Along with a major fire in downtown Bangor, along with a drug [sting] in Holden and the fire in a cabin in Lucerne, Which police thought initially was unoccupied. At first, the three events seemed unrelated. But Cochran and the police now believe the last two were linked to Bangor's drug underworld. The drug [sting] went bad and someone blamed Michael, says Cochran. But why would he stick around the cabin if he had snitched?'
Evidence gathered at the scene pointed to a gasoline-fueled conflagration that burned much of the flesh off the body of Michael Cochran, who was staying at the cabin with Percy Sargent and Paul Pollard on the night of the drug bust and fire. While Sargent left to make the ill-fated deal, Cochran stayed behind with Pollard, who was later seen by firefighters fleeing the scene as they arrived at the blaze.
It would be three years [and 10 months] before prosecutors would obtain and then drop indictments, none of which involved Sargent or Pollard. In the meantime, Bangor's drug dealers had fallen to fighting among themselves leading to enough robberies, burglaries and violent assaults [one victim had his ear cut off] to put most of them in prison for the rest of the decade. The exception was Paul Pollard, who dropped out of sight after being given immunity by prosecutors in exchange for testimony about [two armed robberies] in which he drove the getaway car.
Cochran began interviewing acquaintances of Pollard’s who were doing time because of his testimony, in some cases taping their phone conversations. She learned that Pollard had returned to the cabin with two other men [Percy Sargent and Lionel Cormier] to search for her son’s body before it was found by authorities, and that he had a .357 magnum pistol the night of the killing.
Ironically, Pollard was employed as a paralegal when Cochran tracked him down in 1986, and it was two years before she felt she had enough evidence to bring a civil lawsuit against him for the death of her son. She says state police did not pursue an indictment after Pollard passed a second polygraph test. ‘The polygraph was just one of the things we relied on,’ says Shuman of the state police, adding that ‘police must prove a murder in criminal court beyond a reasonable doubt, while Cochran had only to prove her case by a preponderance of evidence. [But usually they don't have the lead detective on a homicide case testify for the defendant] Pollard was at the scene of the fire, but there is nothing that ties him to the murder.’
GETTING HER DAY IN COURT
Cochran finally had her day in court in [May] 1990, but she felt her case was doomed from the start when her attorney resigned a week before opening arguments to accept a job with the state Attorney General’s office. A stand-in from the same firm was not as familiar with the case, and the jury overheard Pollard mention the results of his polygraph tests, even though the judge did not allow them as evidence. The jury also did not hear key testimony about Pollard’s return to the crime scene the next morning to search for the body. [And Det. Shuman, lead detective on Mike's murder, was allowed to testify for Pollard.
'That boy should have been in jail for something, but the evidence just didn’t support murder,’ says Greg Stokes of Levant, the jury foreman. ‘That this boy would run away through the woods in the middle of February with one shoe missing and not be hiding something doesn’t make sense.’ When the jury returned a verdict in Pollard’s favor, Cochran was $35,000 poorer and no closer to holding her son’s murderers accountable.
Shuman of the state police as well as Attorney General Michael Carpenter, who has agreed to review the Cochran case personally, say they welcome participation by family members in murder cases. Cochran simply disagrees with his conclusions about who should be a suspect in her son's murder.
'She's pursued avenues that we've told her up-front we have already looked at [and dismissed]' says Shuman. ‘Paul Pollard was once a suspect, but he is not now. We’re willing to consider all new evidence though.’