Law Enforcement
Appearances
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Wild Crime: You've Got Your Monster | S4 Ep. 2
After talking to the family, Essex Police Department obtained a search warrant to go in the house and have a look.
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Wild Crime: You've Got Your Monster | S4 Ep. 2
We had many tips to run down about many different people. The quality of the information that they provided was generally not good. Nevertheless, it had to be run down.
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Wild Crime: You've Got Your Monster | S4 Ep. 2
People were just walking around there, trying to locate some sign of them.
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Wild Crime: You've Got Your Monster | S4 Ep. 2
So it can be very, very difficult to come up with a witness to something because it's not like the city where there's always going to be people on the street. It's not like that here.
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Wild Crime: You've Got Your Monster | S4 Ep. 2
It was like a bomb went off. I can't even begin to describe the emotion of that moment. We just got the thing that's been missing all along from this case, and that's the truth.
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Wild Crime: You've Got Your Monster | S4 Ep. 2
We were hoping for maybe DNA. Looking for fibers and those type of things that could have attached to Samantha. There was a shed separated from the house.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
LaTosha's vehicle was still on campus, and so we knew that she didn't leave in her vehicle. They didn't have a whole lot of evidence as to the whereabouts of where LaTosha was. Some campus police departments have very limited resources, and the Jackson State police chief decided to reach out to the Jackson Police Department for assistance.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
Investigators with the Jackson Police Department spoke to Latasha's boyfriend. They spoke to her roommate. A month or so prior to her coming up missing, Latasha's tires had been slashed on campus.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
The timing was awfully strange because particular crimes such as tire slashing, breaking out windows, those are usually more intimate type crimes. It's somebody that you know. Usually, if it's a stranger, they may break into your car and try to take something, but most of the time, they're not gonna slash your tires or break your windows out or anything like that.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
Investigators decided to reach out to the FBI.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
I was the case agent for the Latasha Norman case. When I first got assigned the case, the Jackson State Police Department and Jackson PD gave me the rundown of what they had already attained and just where they were at that particular point, which was basically they didn't have a whole lot of evidence as to the whereabouts of where Latasha was.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
And so we have to go back over the case because we may have missed something. We decided to pull Natasha Norman's cell phone information. The initial cell phone data that I got from her phone showed that it was at Marquise's location where he lived. And then it was traveling towards the direction of Jackson State University. And somewhere within that timeframe, all activities ceased.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
She could have cut the phone off, they could have died, could have been on purpose, but as far as I'm concerned, a college student her age would not leave her phone dead for over 30 minutes, you know, so let alone three days. In looking at LaTosha's life, there was nothing that would lead us to believe she would end up walking away from everything.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
We decided to interview Latasha's current boyfriend, Marquis Smith. Because usually when you're dealing with a missing person, oftentimes it's that person in an intimate relationship with that individual that has something to do with the whereabouts of that individual. Marquis was a little older, he had a job, he had a car, he had his own place.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
We also wanted to check his cell phone ping information. Back then, it was fairly new. Most people didn't know that we could use that to help corroborate certain stories they told us. Time, dates, and things of that nature that he gave us, they seemed to match up just fine.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
He mentioned that the night prior to her missing, Latosha spent the night at his house, and he probably was one of the last people to see her.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
Stanley Cole came across my radar from Marquis Smith.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
We went to Jackson State, we checked out his records, and we found out that he withdrew from school a week or two before us checking in to him, which I thought was strange. And talking to Latasha's friends, we learned that Latasha's friend kind of suspected him of slashing her tires. We also found out that their relationship had gotten physical at times.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
She also reported that to the campus police as well.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
We learned that this was not a normal ex-boyfriend, ex-girlfriend relationship. They are having some physical altercations that are occurring and that could lead to deadly altercations.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
It was Thanksgiving. We received a call from a car dealer.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
We checked the tag in the van and found that it belonged to a young lady that we found to be Stanley Cole's girlfriend, Simone. We found out that Simone was pregnant and Stanley was the father. and that they lived in an apartment building in North Jackson. If you were to do a mental checklist, you have a young lady missing.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
She was possibly in a volatile relationship with her ex-boyfriend who just dropped out of the same school that she was going to, and his current girlfriend was selling her car. The timing was awfully strange. some things that we can't act on as far as getting arrest warrants, but we were definitely able to get search warrants for the vehicle.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
The FBI Evidence Recovery Unit discovered quite a bit of blood splatter in the trunk.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
Simone came, and to my surprise, Stanley came. I kind of ignored Stanley, acted like I didn't really know who he was, shook his hand, and I took Simone back. We asked her about the phone records. She was very forthwith. She told us that there was one particular time that Stanley was supposed to go out and empty the trash. He did, but he took 40 minutes to do it.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
The interview lasted 20, 30 minutes, and we decided that we wanted to talk to Stanley next. His demeanor was very, very nonchalant, a little too nonchalant. He kind of slid back in his chair and put his arm back up on the chair, and he said, all the girls from Jackson love all the guys from Greenville. and it was the way he said it. It was almost adversarial, right?
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
And you would think that if I'm trying to find out where your ex-girlfriend is, that you wouldn't be my adversary. Basically, the test question for me is, what do you think should happen to the person that did something to Latasha? And Stanley answered, I don't really know. Most people minimize their punishment. So I knew then he had done something.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
We knew that Stanley most likely knew where LaTosha was. I have daughters and I wouldn't want my daughter to be laid in some field or somewhere, you know, whether dead or alive by themselves. So I kind of, I told Stanley that we need to find LaTosha. Can you help us find LaTosha? He hesitated, his eyes started watering, and he just kind of stared off for a little while.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
He shook his head and he said, if I tell you where she is, will you let me see my mom? Stanley's mother was in the lobby He said, let me see her before I tell you where Latasha is. My partner said, OK. She went in the room and spoke about two minutes. She opened the door, and she said, is my son under arrest? And I said, no, ma'am. She said, well, we'll be leaving.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
The fact that Stanley's mother, rather than her helping and assisting, she started looking out for her son. That stung. It became more personal at that point. We set out to go ahead and get an arrest warrant for Mr. Stanley Cole.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
There's media everywhere. They're all outside police headquarters. There's detectives and the chief in this interview room looking through the two-way glass. It is literally a show. Then as soon as I opened the door, I started in on Stanley. Just technique, playing chess. I was gonna make him angry at me. So angry that he would just forget to lawyer up, so to speak. It wasn't hard to get angry.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
I said a few curse words and threw my notepad. He was upset. I was upset. I stormed out. He had liked one of the female investigators that had interviewed him before I had from Jackson Police Department. I ran upstairs and got the investigator. I said, hey, you're on. I want him to maybe find solace in this young lady, and maybe she would be the one to get him to tell her where LaTosha was.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
I wasn't sure if that would work. It was a gamble. She started out far away. She moved in close. He starts to tell us, they got an argument in Simone's car. And he was sitting in the driver's seat and he struck her with a back fist to her nose area.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
He went and met up with a friend of his, then his girlfriend, and then they picked up Simone Harris.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
For him to drive around with her in that trunk, that stood out. For me, it stood out. He starts to tell us where she is. How he's explaining it, he's got to show us. So we decided to take him to the scene. We had this long caravan of police cars and news cars behind us. Stanley led us to the area. Within 10 minutes, we were able to recover Latasha Norman's body. She was partially closed.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
The upper torso of her body, including her face, was covered with a piece of cardboard. Unfortunately, her body had been pretty badly decomposed. In order to identify Latasha, we needed to have her dental records checked. And they were able to give us a positive match.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
And if you see Stanley Cole, he's a 140-pound man.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
Not to mention that if she was bleeding so much out of her nose, as he said, we should have found some blood in the front seat. Once Latasha Norman's body is at the medical examiner, we discover a slight jagged nick to the inside of her rib cage. A portion of that rib was missing. Due to the jaggedness of it, it looked like it could have been a metal device or even a knife.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
But unfortunately, we weren't able to tell if she received any damage internally from her organs because she was so badly decomposed. So we did send that bone to a forensics expert as well, and they were able to tell us that it appeared to be possibly a stab wound.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
And then even listening to his attorney, right, try to clear him of that, it's really surreal.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
Putting her in the trunk doesn't make it work. The evidence only shows this is manslaughter.
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Death in the Dorms Season 2: Episode 6: Latasha Norman
a one-punch homicide. Cole's attorney claims extensive media attention prevented him from receiving a fair trial. Now he suggests a lesser charge to be considered.
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Small Town, Big Con
From the outside looking in, I would have probably been like... Pretty impressed. I thought, man, right here in O'Reilly County, West Virginia, these people are knocking it out of the park.
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Small Town, Big Con
On the morning of February 6, the plan was that the Cochrans, Michael and Natalie, were going to fly to Virginia to visit the Bank of America there.
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Small Town, Big Con
And so you're looking at close to eight hours that this man, that he was incapacitated. He was unconscious. He was on the couch and pretty much unresponsive.
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Small Town, Big Con
Michael got to the ER at Raleigh General Hospital. His blood glucose was at 21. He was critical, and he was intubated.
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Small Town, Big Con
For five days, he received medical treatment. He was in a coma, never regained consciousness, and passed away on February the 11th. at the hospice house in Beckley.
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Small Town, Big Con
A man, you know, 38 years old, what a fitness guru he was to suddenly die in the midst of financial crimes occurring. I mean, that's pretty suspicious.
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Small Town, Big Con
To suddenly die in the midst of allegations of financial crimes was pretty suspicious.
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Small Town, Big Con
Bob was going through the records as they were coming in. And so, you know, there's a ton of information there to go through. And Bob's looking at it. We're sitting there one day and he goes, I'll be damned. He said, it's a damn Ponzi scheme.
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Small Town, Big Con
We had pretty clearly identified at least, and I may be under at least 10 known victims of the Ponzi scheme. The most obvious red flag at the time was that nobody was getting any money back. We had more than enough evidence and documentation to proceed with indictment.
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Small Town, Big Con
To suddenly die in the midst of allegations of financial crimes, that's pretty suspicious.
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Small Town, Big Con
Natalie Cochran gave different versions of what happened with Michael on February the 6th to multiple people.
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Small Town, Big Con
Today's date is April 8th, 2019. I can explain to her we were looking into Michael's death. Natalie, just tell me how things progressed with Michael.
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Small Town, Big Con
It was her belief that Michael had taken an overdose of this supplement that she alleged was coming from Mexico.
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Small Town, Big Con
There was always this effort to make sure that there was an explanation for insulin being somehow involved in Michael's death. In the third conversation, she brought up that Michael was injecting with insulin. She had done a complete pivot from where it was all this supplement. Now Michael's injecting insulin. The insulin he was doing through injection?
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Small Town, Big Con
She was in the garage. The search warrant was done based off the financial crime information investigation only.
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Small Town, Big Con
Sometimes things happen in investigations that you call it fate. I started rummaging through the refrigerator, and there's this bottle of insulin sitting right there.
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Small Town, Big Con
When we started seeing the text messages with Jennifer Davis about insulin, It was very revealing. If you believe the previous things that Natalie has said, she should have already had the insulin readily available in the home. So it made no sense to go through all this effort. I think it's clear that she poisoned him with insulin.
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Small Town, Big Con
39-year-old Natalie Cochran is now accused of the February 2019 murder of her husband, Michael.
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Small Town, Big Con
What Michael Cochran didn't know is certainly one of the most important questions here. But to me, what's more important is what he was about to know, the consequences that would come when he found out that information.
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Small Town, Big Con
It was about telling that story, you know, another piece to the puzzle. And I think overall, I think we were successful.