SKOWHEGAN — The last time Sandra “Honey” Rourke saw Albert “Pat” Cochran was in December 1976, two days after Honey’s mother, Pauline Rourke, disappeared from the trio’s Fairfield home without a trace.
That is until Honey Rourke watched Cochran being led in handcuffs Monday morning from the Somerset County Jail across the street into the Skowhegan District Courthouse.
The man who terrified her 21 years ago when she was a 12-year-old child terrifies her still. Goose bumps lined her arms, and she trembled as her eyes followed Cochran into the courthouse. She went into the building, leaned against a wall and wept.
Cochran, now 60, was making his first appearance in a Maine courtroom before Judge Douglas Clapp. He was arrested a week ago in Stuart, Fla., through the use of DNA evidence and charged with the 1976 slaying of Janet Baxter of Oakland. Cochran waived extradition and was returned to Maine to face the murder charge. He also is considered a suspect in Pauline Rourke’s disappearance.
No stranger to homicide, Cochran was charged in 1964 with murdering his teen-age wife and three small children in Illinois. He served nine years of a 75-year sentence for his wife’s strangulation before being released on parole and moving to Maine.
Within months of coming to Fairfield to work at his family’s construction company, Cochran accosted Baxter, police theorize, at a Waterville shopping center on Nov. 23, 1976, forced her to drive to a remote location in Norridgewock, raped her and then shot her twice. Her body was found in the trunk of a boyfriend’s car on the banks of the Kennebec River.
Hours later, Cochran turned up at his brother’s house in Norridgewock, across the river from the crime scene, and asked for a ride to his car, which was parked at the same mall where Baxter last was seen alive.
A few weeks later, Pauline Rourke disappeared from Cochran’s home, and shortly afterward, Cochran moved to Florida.
Honey Rourke and her aunt, Joy Card, sat in the front row of the courtroom Monday, staring at the man they believe killed their loved one. He never looked up, never looked at the woman he had lived with when she was a child.
And as eager as Honey Rourke was to see Cochran pay for what he is accused of doing to Janet Baxter, she was just as eager to see if he would provide information about her mother, Pauline.
Pauline and Honey Rourke were living in Fairfield with Cochran when Baxter was killed in November 1976. Within two weeks of Baxter’s death, Pauline Rourke disappeared. No trace of her was ever found. Honey Rourke and Card have believed for 21 years that their mother and sister was murdered by Cochran.
Finally facing him Monday was too much for both women. Waiting outside the courthouse for Cochran to be brought over from the jail, Card dissolved in tears.
Afterward, facing a dozen television cameras, Honey Rourke sobbed on her aunt’s shoulder.
“I know he killed my mother,” Rourke cried. “For 21 years I’ve been scared of him.”
In the courtroom, Cochran kept his head lowered into the collar of his jail-issue denim coat. He occasionally rocked slowly back and forth and seemed to have difficulty rising from his seat and walking.
Baxter’s daughter, Julie Baxter, who was 7 years old when her mother was killed, wasn’t in the courtroom, nor were any members of Cochran’s family, several of whom live in Maine.
Cochran was ordered held without bail until a hearing at 11 a.m. Friday. He asked Judge Clapp for a court-appointed attorney, and his request was granted. That appointment will be made before Friday, court personnel said.
Assistant Jail Administrator Steve Giggey said Monday that Cochran was being held with the general population in a four-person cell at Somerset County Jail in Skowhegan.
“He has not presented us with any problems,” said Giggey.
After the hearing, Rourke and Card talked of Pauline Rourke — a carefree, devoted mother.
“She was my Girl Scout leader, an artist. She was teaching me how to bake,” Rourke said. “She was the kind of mother that came to my school one day and told them I had a dentist appointment. Outside, I said to her, `I don’t have a dentist appointment.’ She said, `I know. We’re going sledding!’ We did everything together. She was a wonderful mother.”
In contrast, Rourke recalled Cochran’s dark moods and rages.
“I remember him as a man who never laughed and never smiled. Never. Not even once a day. When he got upset he would turn red. I remember calling him Tomato Man one time, and he really got mad at me,” Rourke recalled Monday morning.
In the two weeks after Baxter’s death, Rourke said, her mother and Cochran fought constantly.
One evening, Cochran drove Rourke and her mother to the crime scene.
“We parked across the street and they argued,” she said. “I don’t remember what they were saying, but they were both upset.”
Joy Card, her boyfriend and her children spent Thanksgiving Day at the Cochran trailer a few days after Baxter’s killing.
“There were newspapers about the murder all over the house,” Card said Monday. “It was like he was obsessed with it. It was clear Pauline wanted to talk to me, but he wouldn’t let her be alone with me for a minute.”
Card eventually convinced her boyfriend to take Cochran to the store so the two women could talk.
“She was afraid and told me, `Pat [Cochran] never came home the night Janet Baxter was killed. I think he had something to do with it.’
“I told her to pack a suitcase right then and come with me. But she said she didn’t want to move Honey out of school. That was the last time I saw her,” Card said.
On Dec. 13, 1976, Rourke said, her mother and Cochran fought worse than ever.
“It got so bad that I went to my room and put a pillow over my head so I couldn’t hear them. I finally fell asleep,” Rourke said. When she woke in the morning, she was surprised to find her mother still in bed, the covers pulled nearly over her head.
“She always got me off to school, but she had recently had surgery and I thought maybe she was tired,” she recalled. Leaving for school, Honey Rourke went into her mother’s bedroom. “She was lying on her side, facing away from me, and all I could see was the top of her head. I kissed her hair and said, `Goodbye, Mommy.’ She was gone when I got home from school, and the only thing missing from the trailer was the nightgown she had been wearing.”
Rourke and Card said they believe that Cochran killed Pauline Rourke in the night and that she was already dead when her daughter poignantly kissed her goodbye.
After she found her mother missing when she came home from school, Rourke said, Cochran acted very strangely.
“He woke me up at 2 a.m. to wash the dishes. I told him I wanted my mother and I tried to use the phone. He grabbed it away from me, and then I tried to run out the door. He grabbed me by the shoulder and dragged me back to the sink. Eventually I was able to get into my bedroom and push my bed up against the door.”
The next day, Cochran called Card, asking if she had seen Pauline. “He said, `She’s been missing for two days,”‘ said Card, who now lives in Woolwich but was living in Vermont in 1976. Card drove to Maine, picked up Honey and raised her as her own.
“My sister and I were always close,” she said. “We had always said that we’d raise each other’s children if anything happened to either of us. I never believed it would.”
“I never even got my mother’s things,” said Rourke. When Card returned to the Fairfield trailer to get Honey’s belongings, Cochran’s mother, Edith, had packed everything in boxes. “To this day I think my mother’s things are still in Edith Cochran’s garage in Oakland,” Rourke said.
“We always hoped for a day like today,” Card said. “I’m a firm believer in what goes around, comes around. Even if he doesn’t confess to my sister’s murder, maybe he told someone else and they can tell authorities.”
“This man knows the truth,” Rourke said. “I want to ask him to tell us what happened.”
After Cochran’s court appearance, Detective Michael Mitchell said that Cochran had been a cooperative prisoner on the flight back from Florida. He would not elaborate on whether Cochran has talked about any of his past activities and said the Rourke case “is still an open missing-person’s case.”
Cochran was arrested on the basis of 21-year-old semen and hair samples tested earlier this year using DNA profiles at the Maine State Police lab. Mitchell said there is other evidence, such as fingerprints, that will be used to convict Cochran.
This isn’t the first time Cochran has been charged with murder. In 1964, he was charged with killing his wife and three children in Joliet, Ill. His confession to stabbing his three young children to death in a bathtub was tossed out of court on a technicality, and he pleaded guilty to a single count of murdering his wife.
Pauline Rourke’s daughter and sister said they are praying that no such legal technicality frees Cochran again.
“I’ve been terrified all my life. I hate to think what would happen if he gets off,” Rourke said.
Card added, “I wish Maine had the death penalty. I’m absolutely terrified that he will find a loophole or the evidence will be tainted or something.
“On the other hand, I want to believe there is a higher power making sure he pays for what he has done.”
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