Lorraine Hunter is currently on California Death Row for the murder of her husband in order to collect the insurance money. According to court documents Lorraine Hunter took out two additional insurance policies worth over three quarters of a million dollars in the weeks preceding the murder.
On the night of the murder Lorraine Hunter and her daughter Briuana Hunter, who was fifteen at the time, went with the victim to his semi truck where he would be shot twice in the head and twice in the back. Initially police believed the murder was related to a robbery however they would soon figure out the awful truth.
A death sentence was handed down Friday, Dec. 8, for a Moreno Valley woman who fatally shot her 56-year-old husband to collect more than $1 million in life insurance proceeds.
A Riverside jury in August convicted 62-year-old Lorraine Alison Hunter of murder in the slaying of Albert Thomas in 2009 and ultimately recommended that she be put to death.
Riverside County Superior Court Judge Mac Fisher agreed with the jury’s recommendation, rejecting a defense plea for Hunter’s sentence to be reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Along with first-degree murder, jurors in her two-month trial found true special circumstance allegations of lying in wait and killing for financial gain.
The prosecution’s key witness was Hunter’s now-23-year-old daughter, Briuana Lashanae Hunter, who confessed to plotting with her mother to kill Thomas.
Briuana Hunter pleaded guilty last year to three counts of attempted murder and one count of voluntary manslaughter. She’s slated to be sentenced Wednesday to 18 years, nine months in state prison.
The young woman, who’s being held without bail at the Indio Jail, testified that her stepfather was a “calm, quiet person,” who was “never overly aggressive” in the seven years that she and her mother lived with him in Moreno Valley.
The witness stated that he held down two jobs — one as a short-haul trucker and another as a clerk at a Moreno Valley Auto Zone.
According to Hunter, her mother frequently argued with Thomas about not having enough money to spend. Deputy District Attorney Will Robinson described the elder Hunter as “money hungry” and not interested in holding down a job to contribute to the household
Briuana Hunter said she aided her mother in filling out at least three life insurance applications, naming her stepfather as the insured party and Lorraine Hunter as the principal beneficiary. The woman forged Thomas’ name on each application.
Hunter took out a $750,000 policy, as well as a $10,000 policy, Robinson said. A third policy apparently lapsed before Thomas was killed.
Thomas additionally had a $450,000 policy through the trucking company for which he worked, according to court papers.
In the two months before he was killed, Lorraine Hunter planned to shoot Thomas three other times — twice on walks through their neighborhood in the area of Day Street and Eucalyptus Avenue, and another time outside the victim’s workplace — but each time, the presence of too many witnesses foiled the plots.
Briuana Hunter admitted being there on each occasion, knowing beforehand what her mother had planned.
On the evening of Nov. 3, 2009, Thomas and the defendants left their apartment and strolled to his big rig, where he wanted to grab a sweatshirt that he had bought for Briuana Hunter, who was 15 at the time, according to trial testimony.
The three of them climbed into his truck, and Thomas ducked into the rear sleeper compartment to find the shirt, while Lorraine Hunter and her daughter sat in the front seat. Robinson said Lorraine Hunter pulled a small-caliber handgun she’d stolen from a member of her church and shot the victim point-blank in the back of the head twice, then shot him twice in the upper back as he knelt in the compartment. Sheriff’s deputies found him dead in a kneeling position.
Hunter and her daughter fled the scene with the help of a relative, and the case went cold for two years, until the same relative confessed everything she knew to investigators after being arrested herself for an unrelated offense.
Robinson theorized during Hunter’s penalty trial that she was a sociopath with blood on her hands when she married Thomas.
The prosecutor argued to jurors that she had masterminded, and probably carried out, the slaying of her previous husband, Allen Brown, who was gunned down in what appeared to be a random act of violence in Inglewood in 1996. The circumstances were eerily similar to Thomas’ death, with Brown shot in the back, and like Thomas, the victim was a truck driver.
No charges were ever filed in the case, which remains unsolved.
This is the second death sentence in Riverside in one week. On Dec. 1, San Jacinto gang member Raymond Alex Barrera received a death sentence for three slayings in 2013.
Michelle Sue Tharp is on Pennsylvania Death Row for the murder of her seven year old daughter. According to court documents Michelle Sue Tharp daughter Tausha Lee Lanham who was under twenty pounds when she died in 1998. Michelle Sue Tharp would be convicted and sentenced to death.
Michelle Sue Tharp 2022 Information
Name
Name Type
MICHELLE S THARP
Also Known As
MICHELLE SUE THARP
Commit Name
MICHELLE SUE THARP
True Name
Parole Number: 983CU Age: 53 Date of Birth: 01/20/1969 Race/Ethnicity: WHITE Height: 5′ 02″ Gender: FEMALE Citizenship: USA Complexion: LIGHT Current Location: MUNCY
Permanent Location: MUNCY Committing County: WASHINGTON
Michelle Sue Tharp More News
From the beginning, Washington County District Attorney John C. Pettit asserted that Michelle Sue Tharp’s starvation murder trial was just as much about her dead daughter as it was about her.
It was Tausha Lee Lanham’s story, he told jurors.
Now, that story has an ending.
Jurors yesterday found Tharp guilty of first-degree murder in the death of the tiny 7-year-old girl, ending a weeklong trial filled with the sordid details of Tausha’s hungry life and the bizarre moments surrounding her premature death.
“God rest her soul. Tausha, we love you,” her father’s sister, Rhonda Lanham, tearfully told reporters outside the Washington County courtroom moments after the verdict. “I just want everybody to know, please, when you go home, hug and love your children. No child deserves to be treated bad.”
The jury of seven men and five women, most of whom have children, delivered their verdict about 3:30 p.m. after deliberating for less than three hours. They also convicted Tharp, 31, of Burgettstown, of endangering the welfare of a child and abuse of a corpse.
On the third and final verdict on the murder charge, Rhonda Lanham punched the air, cried out and doubled over in tears.
Police arrested Tharp on April 19, 1998, a day after she reported Tausha missing from a mall in Steubenville, Ohio.
Investigators quickly learned that Tharp and her live-in boyfriend, Douglas Bittinger Sr., had invented a story that the girl had gotten lost in the mall to hide the fact that they left Tausha’s corpse atop a large bush in the West Virginia woods.
Tharp had found Tausha dead in her bed the previous morning after what Pettit said was a long period in which she had been starved deliberately. Tharp testified that she did not call for help because she was panic-stricken that social workers would take her other children away. Instead, she and Bittinger took Tausha’s body on a long, strange series of errands in his car before leaving the body, wrapped in a sheet and stuffed into garbage bags, in the woods.
Bittinger also faces a homicide charge in the case, but no trial has been scheduled. He testified against Tharp.
Tharp’s attorney, Glenn Alterio, said he was disappointed by the outcome. He is now setting his sights on today’s sentencing, when jurors will choose between the death penalty or a life sentence without parole.
Alterio, who is the county’s public defender, said his client had prepared for a possible guilty verdict and was handling the situation well. Tharp left the courtroom red-eyed and appeared to be on the verge of breaking down as deputies handcuffed her. She wore the same green jacket and skirt she wore during the first day of the trial.
Pettit said the case had been more emotional than most for him, saying that when he thinks of Tausha, he feels guilty after eating.
Using the same sets of facts, the attorneys presented vastly different portraits of Tharp. Was she a conniving, wicked mother who deliberately starved her middle daughter to death? Or was she simply a bad parent who loved her children but was overwhelmed by their health problems and her own dysfunctional relationships?
Jurors ultimately chose to believe the former.
With his client facing the possibility of the death penalty, Alterio reiterated his argument that Tausha’s death from malnutrition occurred because of long-standing health problems — specifically a “failure to thrive” — that prevented her from growing and developing properly.
“She ate. She just didn’t grow,” Alterio said in his his closing.
Tausha was born prematurely and had numerous ailments, including genetic abnormalities and problems with her breathing, blood, glands, nervous system and gastrointestinal tract.
She weighed 2 pounds, 5 ounces at birth, and died nearly eight years later at less than 12 pounds. An autopsy revealed that she had not eaten for days before her death.
Witnesses testified that Tharp starved Tausha, keeping food from her for a day or more at a time. They said she confined her daughter to her room at night to prevent her from searching for any available morsel in the kitchen, where she ate from the garbage can and retrieved scraps from pet bowls. They also said she treated her son and two other daughters better than she did Tausha.
Tharp’s possible motives were never discussed in court, but Pettit said in an interview that Tharp might have been acting out of spite against Tausha’s father or anger that that her child needed extra attention.
Other witnesses told of a mother who cared for all her children, who neither denied Tausha food nor abused her.
Alterio pointed out that Tausha was so sickly that the federal government opted to provide her with monthly welfare checks of $539 for the rest of her life after merely reviewing her medical records.
In a pitch for sympathy, Alterio asked jurors to consider that Tharp endured a difficult childhood and a series of abusive romances. She had no transportation and no telephone and lacked support from the four fathers of her five children. Alterio noted that one of Tharp’s children, Benjamin, was put up for adoption instead of being aborted.
“What does that indicate to you about her feelings toward children?” Alterio asked.
With little help from anyone, Tharp had limited resources with which to care for her daughter. It was no wonder, he told jurors, that she did not show up for all her appointments with various social service agencies.
Nevertheless, Alterio said, she tried. When told in 1998 that she could stay on welfare a little while longer because she was caring for an infant, she chose to receive job training and go to work instead. And no social service agency ever considered Tausha in such a precarious situation that they needed to strip Tharp of her child, Alterio said.
Despite Alterio’s best efforts, the last impression left with the jury was by Pettit, who delivered an impassioned hour-long closing argument using photographs as props.
Pettit told the jurors that Tharp systematically defeated the attempts of agencies, such as Washington County Children and Youth Services, to aid Tausha, thereby engineering a “pattern of deception.” She missed appointments, refused to answer the door when they called and hid Tausha from them, Pettit said.
Tharp defeated even the efforts of doctors to help Tausha because she stopped taking her daughter for check-ups after October 1993, he said.
Pettit referred to damaging testimony from several witnesses, including a high school classmate, who recalled Tharp telling her that Tausha belonged “six foot under in a body bag,” and Tharp’s father’s estranged wife, who testified that Tharp once told her, “I hate [Tausha] so bad that I could just kill her.”
And once again, he outlined the shocking series of events that led Tharp, upon discovering her daughter’s dead body, to put Tausha in a car seat, hop into Bittinger’s car, visit her grandmother’s to call off work and drop off laundry, swing by a nearby lake, and buy garbage bags before leaving the corpse in a remote area.
Standing before the jury, case pictures and his legal pads resting on the wooden rail separating prosecutor and jury, Pettit called Tausha a “fighter” who overcame abuse, neglect and a lack of love.
But, he told the jury, in the end, the plucky little girl could not survive a mother who tried to kill her.
“Tausha was indeed a fighter, and she overcame all of these things. But she could not overcome the act of all food, all nourishment being withheld from her for several days,” Pettit said.
During his last words to the jury, Pettit showed a photograph of the refrigerator in the Tharp home on which hung a saying: “Home is where the heart is.”
“There was no heart in that home when it came to Tausha Lanham,” Pettit said.
A woman convicted of fatally starving her child has appealed a Washington County judge’s order that a jury should re-hear the death penalty phase of her case.
Michelle Sue Tharp, who will turn 50 later this month, last had a local address in Burgettstown.
She has been on death row since being convicted in 2000 for the first-degree murder of Tausha Lanham, 7.
In December, Tharp took her criminal case to the state Supreme Court for the second time hoping that a decision by Washington County President Judge Katherine B. Emery can be overturned.
The state Supreme Court in 2014 upheld Tharp’s conviction but decided instead to grant her a new proceeding in which a Washington County jury would decide if her penalty should be life imprisonment or death.
Washington County President Judge Katherine B. Emery heard testimony and argument on Tharp’s behalf, but was not swayed by her attorneys’ arguments that the passage of time and deaths or unavailability of witnesses made it impossible to present an adequate case.
The judge said prior testimony or depositions could be read into the record for the new jury to consider.
Lacking from the trial in 2000 before then-judge Paul Pozonsky was testimony on Tharp’s mental state that might have resulted in a punishment other than the death penalty, her attorneys contended.
In Pennsylvania, only a jury, not a judge acting alone, can impose a death sentence.
The information about Tharp’s latest appeal came to light Friday in a teleconference convened before Judge John DiSalle while Emery is on medical leave.
DiSalle noted Tharp’s filing with the state Supreme Court does not stop the case from proceeding on the county level.
However, attorneys James McHugh and Elizabeth Hadayia won’t be representing Tharp if her case eventually goes before a jury.
‘”I think we need to get Ms. Tharp counsel,” McHugh said via speakerphone. “We’re not going to go forward with the matter.”
McHugh recommended that a Philadelphia lawyer who is qualified to try a death penalty case be appointed by the court.
DiSalle said another telephone conference, not yet scheduled, would include the attorney that McHugh mentioned.
Assistant District Attorney John Friedmann said his office is answering Tharp’s petition filed with the Supreme Court, but when the Supreme Court might decide Tharp’s latest appeal is unknown.
“Trial counsel needs to be appointed,” Friedmann said. “I don’t think we can ever be too early on that.”
In ordering the new penalty phase in 2014, Justice Max Baer called the evidence of Tharp’s guilt “overwhelming,” writing she not only denied Tausha meals but physically restrained the child so she could not feed herself and asked others to perpetuate the same abuse.
Emery noted in her six-page opinion that Tausha, who weighed only 11.77 pounds at age 7, lacked fat in parts of the body where it normally accumulates, and had extreme wear on her teeth from grinding.
Tausha was falsely reported to have been abducted from a mall in Steubenville, Ohio, on April 18, 1998, when she actually died in bed at home.
According to trial testimony, Tharp feared Washington County Children and Youth Services would take away her other children, so the death was concealed.
Tausha’s body, in trash bags, was found dumped along a road in Follansbee, W.Va.
Tharp is serving her sentence in the State Correctional Institution at Muncy in central Pennsylvania
Antoinette Frank is on Louisiana death row for the murders of three people including a fellow police officer. At the time of the murders Antoinette Frank was working for the New Orleans Police Department as an officer. In this article on My Crime Library we are going to take a closer look at Antoinette Frank
Antoinette Frank Beginnings
Antoinette Frank was born in Louisiana on April 30, 1971
Antoinette would apply to the New Orleans Police Department in 1993 and was caught lying in several areas of her application and would fail two psychological evaluations. However due to certain changes Frank would be allowed to reapply as the New Orleans Police Department lost a number of officers due to corruption. This time Antoinette Frank would be hired.
After she finished the Police Academy and even though she was one of the top performers in her class she was not thought of as a strong officer and many fellow officers would state she knew little about policing. Antoinette Frank would be sent for a supervisor review on a number of occasions
Antoinette Frank And Rogers Lacaze
Antoinette Frank and Rogers Lacaze met in 1994 and started to date even though she was police officer and he was a known drug dealer. The couple would soon attract the attention of the New Orleans Police Department as fellow officers saw her driving a vehicle belonging to Lacaze.
Soon Antoinette and Rogers were driving around together in her patrol car where they would pull over and rob motorists. Frank would also raise red flags when she bought ammunition for a 9mm hand gun that belonged to Rogers.
Antoinette Frank Murders
On March 5, 1995 Antoinette Frank and Rogers Lacaze would enter a Vietnamese restaurant where Frank had worked as part time security. Soon after a shooting would take place where Rogers Lacaze would shoot a police officer in the back of the head, the officer had been working security for the restaurant..
The employees of the restaurant would hide in the freezer.
Once inside the freezer Antoinette Frank began pistol whipping on of the employees demanding money. Frank would obtain the money than fatally shot the employee and would then fatally shoot another employee.
When leaving the restaurant Frank overheard the 911 call and would grab a patrol car and return to the scene where she planned to kill remaining witnesses. However one of the employees was able to escape and run to other officers arriving at the scene. Antoinette Frank and Rogers Lacaze were arrested.
Antoinette Frank Trial
Antoinette Frank would stand trial on September 1995 where she was convicted of the murders, it took the jury 22 minutes to find her guilty and she would be sentenced to death.. Antoinette Frank remains on Louisiana Death Row
Rogers Lacaze would also be convicted and sentenced to death although later his sentence would change to life in prison without parole.
Antoinette Frank Photos
Antoinette Frank Videos
Antoinette Frank More News
There is just one woman rotting away on Louisiana’s death row.
Antoinette Frank can be kindly be described as the worst of the worst
A onetime New Orleans cop, Frank, now 48, was always going to go rogue.
Oldtimers at the police academy thought so and put it in writing.
And officers in the New Orleans Police Department have always been familiar with its cultural corruption.
As long as there have been cops in the Big Easy, there has been bad cops. Very bad. Murders and drug trafficking were just part of the mix when Frank joined the force in 1993.
She was 22 at the time and got caught lying several times on her application. PD headshrinkers marked her file DO NOT HIRE.
But Frank — described by fellow cops as weak, indecisive and occasionally irrational — weaselled her way in.
NOPD was a historically poorly paid department (hence the corruption) and had a tough time keeping good officers and detectives. Plus, she was black and relations between cops and the black community have never been great.
Enter Rogers Lacaze, an 18-year-old small-time dope dealer who got a case of lead poisoning.
Frank took his statement. Then the cop and the crook began having sex.
Lacaze would ride with Frank in her police cruiser and they would have romps in alleys and behind housing projects as he pedalled crack.
On March 4, 1995, around 11 p.m., Frank and her boy toy rolled into the Kim And Vietnamese restaurant. She’d picked up a few extra bucks there working security.
“The Vus took a real liking to her,” Frank’s ex-partner later said. “I mean they were in love with this girl. They bought her presents for this, presents for that. Anything she wanted, anything she needed, they gave her.”
Fellow NOPD Officer Ronald Williams was working security at the time. He knew Frank well. Problem was, Williams knew her boyfriend as a third-rate thug.
Around midnight, Chau Vu, 24, was working the restaurant with her sister and two brothers. It was slow, time to call it a night.
Then, she noticed the key was missing. Still, she decided to pay Williams and let him go home.
When she walked into the dining room, there was Antoinette Frank.
Sensing something was wrong, she slid into the back, hid the cash in a microwave and returned to the front of the joint.
Chau didn’t trust the cop, partly because of her sleazy looking beau with his chains and gold teeth.
Williams asked Antoinette Frank about the missing key. She ignored him and went to the kitchen.
The sleazeball boyfriend Lacaze then entered and shot Williams in the back of the head with a single .9 mm slug. The boy toy terror then parked two more bullets into Williams’ paralyzed body.
Lacaze took his gun and wallet
Chau grabbed her brother and another employee and they hid in the walk-in cooler, turned out the lights and prayed.
Greedy Frank and Lacaze scoured the restaurant for the dough.
As Chau watched through the cooler’s glass windows, her heart was shattered in a million pieces as Antoinette Frank stood over her brother and sister, who were holding hands, sobbing and begging for mercy.
It mattered not a whit. Frank shot them both in the head as ice cold as can be.
The two psychos then fled the restaurant.
Her brother ran to a neighbour’s and called 911.
But within minutes, terror returned.
Officer Antoinette Frank in her uniform. Chau ran. Frank pursued her but other cops stopped the killer in blue.
Frank told her fellow officers three armed men had run out the back.
To legendary NOPD homicide detective Eddie Rantz, the whole scene stunk.
Balls of brass Frank then approached Chau who was talking to Rantz. She asked the terrified woman “if she was alright.”
Shaking, and speaking in broken English, Chau said: “Why would you ask that? You were there. You knew what happened.”
That was enough for Rantz, who said years later: “There’s no doubt in my mind she went back there to kill the rest of them.
Frank stumbled fast under the rapid fire questioning at the scene from Rantz and his partner Det. Marco Demmo.
When it became clear what went down, the veteran detective said, “I wanted to vomit.”
The low-rent Romeo and Juliet pointed the finger at each other.
Lacaze was sentenced to death.
And Frank? On Oct. 20, 1995, she was also sentenced to death via the rocket ride to oblivion that is lethal injection.
After 30 years on the job, Rantz went back to school and joined the district attorney’s office. He still thinks about Antoinette Frank.
“She is, without a doubt, the most cold-hearted person I’ve ever met,” Rantz said
Kelly Cochran is a serial killer from Michigan that has been convicted of two murders but is believed to have murdered nine more.
In October 2014 Kelly Cochran and her husband Jason Cochran lured Christopher Regan over to their home with the promise of sex. Once Christopher was in the home he was “caught” having sex with Kelly and fatally shot. Kelly and Jason Cochran would then use an electric saw in order to dismember Regan body. The body would later be disposed around Michigan
Christopher Regan would be reported missing a few days later and Kelly Cochran and Jason Cochran would be named as suspects however the twisted married couple would not be charged due to lack of evidence.
In 2016 Jason Cochran would die from a massive heroin overdose. Police did not believe that the death was an accident and investigated Kelly Cochran.
Weeks later Kelly Cochran was charged by Michigan police for the murder of Christopher Regan however she would flee before they were able to arrest her. A few weeks later Kelly would be arrested by US Marshals.
During the interrogation Kelly would tell police where they could find the remains of Christopher Regan. While in custody police returned to the investigation of the death of Jason Cochran and it turned out he did not die from a heroin overdose but by asphyxiation. Apparently Kelly gave Jason a large does of heroin and then smothered him to death
Kelly Cochran would ultimately be convicted for the murder of Christopher Regan in Michigan and Jason Cochran in Indiana. Kelly would be sentenced to two life sentences without parole.
Kelly Cochran 2021 Information
MDOC Number: 356714
SID Number: 5267595X
Name: KELLY MARIE COCHRAN
Racial Identification: White
Gender: Female
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Hazel
Height:5′ 10″Weight:165 lbs.
Date of Birth:06/05/1982 (38)KELLY MARIE COCHRAN
Image Date:7/3/2020
Current Status: Prisoner
Earliest Release Date: LIFE
Assigned Location:Huron Valley Complex/Women’s
Maximum Discharge Date:LIFE
Kelly Cochran More News
Kelly Marie Cochran, 34, stands accused of helping her husband kill and dismember her boyfriend. She is also charged with killing her husband to “even the score” – and the prosecuting attorney thinks her body count may not stop there.
According to reports, on October 13, 2014, Cochran and her husband, 37-year-old Jason Cochran, came up with a diabolical plan: the next night, Cochran would lure 53-year-old Christopher Regan, Kelly’s coworker and boyfriend, to her home with the promise of sex and Jason would kill him. The plan worked, and when Jason “caught” Regan with his wife, he shot him in the head with a .22 caliber long-barrel shotgun.
The Cochrans then set about dismembering Regan’s body – Kelly later admitted to getting a cord for an electric hand saw, known colloquially as a “sawzall”, so Jason Cochran could cut up his corpse. They then divided Regan’s body between garbage bags, and threw the bags into the woods around the Iron River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Regan was reported missing a few days later, and his car was found abandoned at a park-and-ride lot four miles east of Iron River, Michigan. According to the local Daily News, police honed in on Cochran because she was one of the last people to see Regan. When police searched her home with the FBI in March, 2015, they found nothing – but Cochran was spooked and she and her husband packed up and moved to Lake County, Indiana.
Police continued their investigation with Kelly listed a person of interest, but a year passed and still they had nothing. Then, in February 2016, Jason died of an apparent heroin overdose. Kelly held a memorial service, writing on Facebook that his death was “the hardest thing I will ever have to deal with.” But police weren’t buying it. Nine weeks after Jason died, Michigan authorities charged Kelly Cochran with Regan’s death – and she fled Indiana. The U.S. Marshals Service eventually tracked her down in Kentucky, where she was arrested on April 28th and taken into custody. According to court documents, she spent her time in her jail cell turning her glasses into shanks and threatening violence against anyone who came near her. She was extradited to Michigan where she is now in custody awaiting trial.
Following her arrest, Cochran was interrogated by both Michigan and Indiana police for almost 70 hours. According to the northwest Indiana Post-Tribune, she was able to direct investigators to a desolate stretch of Michigan woods where they discovered evidence of Cochran’s alleged crimes, including a human skull with an apparent bullet hole, bones and bone fragments. Police also recovered a .22 caliber rifle, a .22 caliber bullet, and a pair of glasses at the scene.
While Cochran was in custody, police also questioned her about the death of her husband. They had grown suspicious when Cochran’s version of what happened the night that Jason Cochran died kept changing. Paramedics had been called to the house that Cochran shared with her husband in February, but the EMTs found Jason unresponsive and were unable to revive him. At first glance it looked like he had died of a heroin overdose, but the Indiana Lake County Coroner discovered that Jason had actually died from asphyxiation, not heroin. That’s when suspicion turned to his wife, who had been “disruptive” while EMT were working on her husband’s body.
The Post-Tribune reports Cochran told police that she delivered an overdose of heroin to her husband and proceeded to put her hands on his neck, nose, and mouth, until he died less than a minute later.
In an interview with detectives in Hobart, Indiana, Cochran finally gave police a motive for her brutal crimes –her decade-plus marriage needed saving. According to the Post-Tribune, Cochran told police that the night before the murder, she and her husband had argued – perhaps about Regan – and her husband wanted to know how “she was going to fix things.” The answer they stumbled on, apparently, was to kill Regan. In interviews, Cochran said she blamed her husband for Regan’s death and for “taking the only good thing I had in my life.” The Post-Tribune notes that in court records Cochran said, “I still hate him (her husband), and yes, it was revenge. I evened the score.” There was a brief moment before Regan’s death, she had reportedly considered killing her husband instead of her boyfriend. Instead she ended up killing them both, waiting 16 months to exact her revenge on her husband.
In Indiana, Cochran has been charged with the death of her husband; in Michigan, she faces charges related to Regan’s death, including homicide, assisting her husband to “mutilate, deface, remove or carry away a portion of a dead body” and concealing the death of an individual. Cochran pleaded not guilty to all the charges. While she initially claimed that she wanted to defend herself, she eventually relented and asked for assistance from a public defender.
While Cochran is charged with two murders, Iron County prosecuting attorney Melissa Powell thinks there may be more bodies buried in Cochran’s past. According to her court filings, Cochran has “claimed responsibility for the deaths of other individuals, which, if true, make her a serial killer.”
While it’s unclear what other deaths Cochran may be talking about, Powell appears to be taking the statements seriously enough to question Cochran’s mental health – before Powell can launch an investigation into Cochran’s claims, she has to prove that Cochran is competent. Iron County District Court Judge C. Joseph Schwedler agreed and has ordered a forensic examination of Cochran to determine both mental competency and criminal responsibility.
According to Powell’s filings, Cochran has a long history of mental illness, including a voluntary admission to a psychiatric hospital in Indiana and suicidal ideation. Cochran has “written her family goodbye letters and has threatened to commit suicide while incarcerated as well as threatened bodily harm against any persons whom she may have contact with while incarcerated.”
Until the forensic examination can determine her competency, which the judge has asked to expedite, Cochran remains in the Iron County Jail on a $5 million cash bond.
Ray and Faye Copeland were two serial killers from Missouri that are a bit odd for a number of reasons including the fact that they were married and for their ages by the time they would go on trial for multiple murders. In this article on My Crime Library we are going to take a closer look at Ray and Faye Copeland.
Ray And Faye Copeland Early Years
Ray Copeland was born in Oklahoma on December 30, 1914 to a poor family and from an early age turned to a life of crime. Ray would be arrested and sent to jail in 1939 for forging a check. Once released Ray would meet Faye Wilson and the pair would soon marry and have a number of children. Ray Copeland would serve a number of jail sentences for theft and forging checks causing the Copeland family to constantly move from one place to another.
Ray And Faye Copeland Murders
To help with the Copeland family farm Ray would hire farmhands to purchase cattle, Ray could not as he was known as a thief, with bad checks and soon after the purchase was done the farmhands would disappear. Ray would sell the cattle quickly. Unfortunately the scam was quickly noticed by authorities and he was soon arrested again.
Once out of jail Ray Copeland would resume the scam but this time he would use farmhands that had no connection to him. One of the farmhands would later go to police and tell them about the scam and that he had seen human bones on the property. The police decided to investigate Ray Copeland
When the police searched the Copeland farm they found the remains of several people. Ray and Faye Copeland would be arrested and charged with multiple murders
Ray And Faye Copeland Trial
The police came to the conclusion that Ray Copeland had hired the farmhands to purchase cattle and after the deal was done would murder the individuals. However Faye Copeland role in the murders was not clear.
Ray Copeland would be quickly convicted and sentenced to multiple death sentences.
Faye Copeland lawyers tried to put forth a defense that she was innocent of the charges and was an abused woman who was controlled by her husband. The defense did not work and she as well was sentenced to multiple death sentences.
Ray And Faye Copeland Deaths
Ray Copeland would die from natural causes in October, 1993 while he awaited execution on Missouri Death Row
Faye Copeland remained on Missouri Death Row until 1999 when her death sentences were overturned and she was resentenced to multiple life without parole sentences. In 2002 Faye Copeland suffered a massive stroke that left her unable to speak and partially paralyzed. The Governor of Missouri would grant a medical pardon a few weeks later allowing Copeland to be moved to a nursing home where she would die of natural causes at the age of 82 on December 23, 2003.
Ray And Faye Copeland Photos
Ray And Faye Copeland Videos
Ray And Faye Copeland More News
Faye Copeland, a convicted killer once considered the nation’s oldest woman on death row, has died at a nursing home where she had been released on medical parole, the Missouri Department of Corrections said Tuesday. She was 82.
Copeland was convicted and sentenced to death along with her husband for the murders of five transients as part of a late-1980s livestock swindle at their farm near Chillicothe.
She was the oldest woman on death row until a federal court commuted her sentence in 1999 to life in prison. Copeland suffered a stroke in August 2002 that left her partially paralyzed and unable to speak. She was paroled a couple of weeks later to nursing home in her hometown.
Copeland died Sunday at the Morningside Center nursing home from what Livingston County coroner Scott Lindley described Tuesday as natural causes.
Authorities contended Ray and Faye Copeland used transients in a scheme to buy cattle with bad checks, then killed the men and buried them in shallow graves. Faye Copeland’s defense during trial was that her husband committed the killings without her knowledge and that she was bystander who was the victim of battered woman syndrome.
But jurors found Faye Copeland’s guilty after prosecutors presented a handwritten list of farm helpers in her writing. She had written the names because Ray Copeland was illiterate.
Twelve of the names had scrawled X’s by them. Five of those men turned up dead, and prosecutors believed three others who were missing also died.
Rep. Kenny Hulshof, R-Mo., who before he was elected to the U.S. House helped prosecute the Copelands in separate trials, said in 1999 that the list of names showed Faye Copeland was more of an accomplice than she claimed.
Copeland had pressed for her release since she was imprisoned
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
