Murder, Mystery & Makeup · Audioboom Studios

The serial killer you’ve never heard of… Killed her BF, husband, and 7 more? Who is Kelly Cochran

·1 hr 3 min·4 clips

Kelly says Jason shot Chris, made her help cut up the body, and forced her to describe it to police.

Bailey Sarian opens with the Kelly Cochran case and the question of whether Kelly was a serial killer, a mastermind, or something harder to pin down. She frames the story around Iron River, Michigan, where a small-town relationship mess turns into national headlines. The marriage is already unstable. What looks like a love triangle is really a love square, with one man vanishing, another overdosing, and a third getting pulled into the scandal. The episode keeps circling the central mystery without pretending the early evidence is enough for a neat arrest. Investigators search the Cochran home. They find journals and short stories written by Jason Cochran, including one called "Quack Quack's Revenge." That story stands out because its killer goes on a spree and wants revenge on a man whose description closely matches Chris's. The writing is bizarre and deeply suspicious, but it is not proof by itself. That gap between obvious weirdness and legal evidence becomes one of the episode's biggest frustrations. Lab work on blood samples from ceiling tiles raises hopes. The results do not cooperate. The samples come back bad and offer no clear DNA answer. With the Cochrans gone, the private investigators become unexpectedly important. One of them quietly places a GPS tracker on the Cochran truck during the search warrant. That legal move shows the couple driving to Hobart, Indiana, where Kelly's parents live. From there, the episode keeps pressing on how much of the case is still hidden behind behavior, patterns, and suspicion rather than a single clean confession. Sarian reacts to Kelly's choices with disbelief and fatigue. The tone stays conversational even as the details get grim. By the end, the story lands on Chris Regan's death and the sense that he never had a fair chance against Kelly, Jason, and the web around them.

As heard by us

A tangled Kelly Cochran case told with side-eye, disbelief, and enough room for the weirdness to register.

Bailey Sarian follows Kelly Cochran from a quiet Upper Peninsula town into a case where one disappearance leads to another death, and then to a wider mess that keeps dragging more people into it.

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Why you'd press play

Start here if you want a murder case that starts as small-town gossip in Iron River, Michigan, and keeps sliding into darker, stranger territory.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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