Cochran guilty of 1976 murder > Judge says killer faces life sentence

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BANGOR — Albert P. Cochran was found guilty Thursday evening of the 22-year-old murder of Janet Baxter, 30, of Oakland.

The jury took only two hours and 20 minutes to return the guilty verdict after a nine-day trial that paraded more than 40 witnesses through Penobscot County Superior Court.

Cochran faces a mandatory life sentence under a statute in place in 1976 when Baxter’s murder occurred, according to Justice Andrew Mead, who presided over the trial. That sentence is based on Cochran’s 1964 murder conviction in Illinois for strangling his 19-year-old wife.

The twice-convicted murderer also confessed to police he stabbed his three young children to death, but his confession was thrown out on a technicality. He served 12 years of a 50- to 75-year prison sentence before being paroled and moving back to Maine in July 1976.

Cochran showed no reaction to the verdict, sitting stonelike at the defense table, as he had throughout the trial. He will be sentenced on a date not yet decided in Somerset County Superior Court.

Baxter’s family, including her parents and daughter, held one another’s hands, hugged and cried quietly at hearing the verdict.

Honey Rourke, whose mother, Pauline Rourke, lived with Cochran at the time of Baxter’s death and disappeared mysteriously within a month of the killing, sobbed in the arms of her aunt, Joy Card.

Later addressing reporters, members of Baxter’s family said they were delighted with the verdict. “This one’s for Jan,” Robert McLeary, Baxter’s father, said.

The verdict closed a lengthy trial in which the defense team of attorneys Michaela Murphy of Skowhegan and John Pelletier of Augusta launched an alternative suspect defense, accusing a “gang of thugs” from Waterville involved in drug smuggling, stolen cars and police payoffs of killing Baxter.

Murphy and Pelletier both said they were very disappointed in the verdict and planned to appeal the jury’s decision.

“Mr. Cochran is not guilty,” Pelletier said on the steps of the courthouse after the trial.

Murphy said she will interview the jurors because an alternate juror reported earlier this week that she had a conversation with a co-worker that referred to Cochran’s previous conviction.

“We need to know if she [the juror] shared that information [with other jurors],” said Murphy.

After the verdict, Assistant Attorney General William Stokes, who had relied extensively on DNA evidence, called the defense theory “smoke and mirrors.”

“In this atmosphere of innuendo, I just hope something stuck with the jury,” the prosecutor commented. He said Cochran was a suspect in Rourke’s disappearance. “I doubt this man will ever say anything [about Rourke],” he said. “I don’t think this man has a conscience.”

In closing arguments Thursday afternoon, defense attorney Pelletier didn’t dispute that Cochran’s DNA profile was found in semen on Baxter’s body, but quietly argued, “Sex is not murder. You cannot assume Albert Cochran killed her because you believe he had sex with her.”

Stokes, however, called Baxter’s murder “every woman’s nightmare,” and said the nurse and mother of one lived her last minutes in fear and terror.

“[Cochran] killed her because she was the only witness to what he had done to her,” Stokes told the jury.

Baxter was found shot and stuffed in the trunk of a car teetering on the bank of the Kennebec River in Norridgewock in November 1976. Less than an hour earlier, she had been abducted from the parking lot of a Waterville A&P store where she had gone to buy cold medicine, soft drinks and toilet paper.

Stokes called the defense theory about four Waterville men speculation.

“The defendant was at the very last place where Janet Baxter was seen alive, when she was ambushed, and in the same town where her body was found.”

“And whose sperm was inside Janet Baxter’s body?” Stokes asked dramatically. “Albert Patrick Cochran’s.”

The defense claimed the DNA evidence was not reliable because the state only tested three of the four semen slides created from evidence in Baxter’s body.

Cochran told police that he had been partying in the parking lot of a Waterville bar with three bearded strangers when he became frightened of their motives and fled their car in Skowhegan. He said he walked to his brother’s home in nearby Norridgewock and asked for a ride to his car, which was parked at the A&P lot in Waterville.

Referring to a surprise defense witness, Irvin Kelley, who testified Tuesday that he witnessed the Waterville gang rape Baxter and saw one of the group, Perley Doyan, shoot her twice, Stokes told the jury more than a dozen times, “You judge the credibility of that man.

“He concocted a fictitious story and is totally unworthy of belief,” the prosecutor said.

Throughout the trial, Murphy outlined a case that began with the Baxter killing, but which soon became clear to investigators was entwined with an earlier murder of a Colby College student in 1971. She repeatedly ticked off the suspects’ names: Alan Pelletier, Armand Boudreau, Galen Lessard and Doyan. “These men were involved in both cases,” Murphy asserted.

“There is obviously something very wrong in Waterville in the 1970s and early 1980s,” the defense attorney said in closing arguments. “These men were not just a bunch of wild boys. They were serious, vicious wild men.”

She said the FBI also was investigating these men for drug smuggling and police payoffs involving a former Waterville police officer, Cecil Cates.

After the verdict, Rourke said investigators had promised her they will re-interview Cochran regarding her mother’s disappearance. She said that she had been afraid every day of her life since 1976.

“Now I don’t have to be afraid anymore,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “I’m hoping that maybe now he’ll give us some answers about my mother.”