Author 'convinced' she knows who killed Lynn MA teen in 1941
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Author 'convinced' she knows who killed Lynn teen in 1941
By Debra Glidden
The Daily Item of Lynn
Saturday, March 5, 2005
SWAMPSCOTT -- An author who was researching the 1941 murder of East
Lynn resident Frances Cochran says she received threats in 1993, but
that hasn't deterred her.
Joan Pinkham, a 73-year-old former Lynn resident, said she
received the threats when she was researching the gruesome and highly
sensationalized murder.
"The caller told me to 'stay away from the Cochran case' but I
don't scare easily and the threats don't bother me. I am licensed to
carry (a gun). I was kind of amused," Pinkham said.
Pinkham, who is known for her book about the 1991 murder of artist
Martha Brailsford in Salem, said she has spent years investigating the
Cochran case for her book and she is certain she knows who the murderer
is.
"I have spent years of my life researching this case. I don't
believe the murderer was alive in 1993. I believe he died in the 1960s,
but the book I am working on is what brought the caller out of the
woodwork," Pinkham said.
Pinkham is not the only one who has received calls regarding the
Cochran murder. On June 13, 2003, an anonymous male caller left a
message on the Swampscott Police Department answering machine regarding
the murder.
According to Detective Sgt. Tim Cassidy, the caller provided
"good" information on a murder including an accurate description of the
murder scene.
Pinkham, who has traveled to Canada and the West Coast chasing
down leads in the murder, is convinced she knows who killed the Lynn
teen, but she declined to name the murderer or the other people she
believes were involved in the bizarre murder.
Cochran was last seen alive July 17, 1941 as she walked along
Marianna Street toward her home on Webster Street. Cochran's body was
found on July 20, 1941 when police received a tip that led them to a
site on Swampscott Road just beyond the Salem line, where they found
the mutilated, sexually abused and partially burned body of the
19-year-old Lynn woman.
The investigation, in which more than 1,900 people were
interviewed and more than 100 suspects questioned, has proven fruitless
but that hasn't deterred Pinkham, who was 10-years-old when Cochran was
murdered, from pursuing the case.
Pinkham has staked out graveyards on the anniversary of Cochran's
death, interviewed police detectives from numerous communities and
investigated other area murders looking for clues to who the murderer
might be.
Cochran's face and head were bludgeoned. A section of tree branch
approximately an inch in diameter had been shoved down her throat.An
autopsy revealed strangulation was the cause of death.
She had knife marks on her forehead and black and blue marks on
her legs and body. Clothing had been wrapped around her neck and set on
fire in an attempt to burn the body.Her clothing was scattered around
the crime scene and there were fresh oil stains on her clothing, which
were scattered around the crime scene.
According to Item reports, the only evidence found on the body
were teeth marks, a several dark hairs and a single red hair from a
male that according to police reports was not from his head.
There was not any blood at the scene where the body was found,
which led police to believe she was attacked somewhere else and she was
taken to the site where the body was found when she was close to death
or dead. According to newspaper accounts from 1941, dirt was dumped on
her body that was not from the area where the body was found.
As for the book - even though Pinkham is convinced she knows who
murdered Cochran, she said she would let readers decide for themselves.
"One problem with writing true crime books is so many releases are
needed so I decided to write this like a crime novel. I am presenting
different scenarios and the reader can pick the ending," Pinkham said.
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http://216.239.63.104/search?q=cache:67NdliOqc-wJ:www.wesx1230.com/news.htm+Frances+Cochran+murder&hl=en
Swampscott
An Anonymous tip is prompting a new investigation into two murders
decades apart. Swampscott Sgt. Tim Cassidy says the department received
credible information regarding an unsolved murder from 1941. According
to Cassidy the caller left some information about the murder scene and
left a name of a former Swampscott resident who was the murderer of
Frances Corcoran. Swampscott police say there are similarities with the
1941 murder case and the unsolved murders of 15-year-old Paula
Kallenback and 15-year-old Henry E. Bedard Jr. Frances Cochran's body
was found on July 20, 1941 on Swampscott road, mutilated, and partially
burned. Beard's body was found in a wooded area between Suffolk Ave
and Paradise Road in December of 1974, and Kallneback's body was
found in 1979 she was sexually abused and beaten with a baseball bat
that was found at the scene. Police believe all three are connected
somehow and say they are very anxious to speak with this individual
again because we believe he may have information that could help us
solve other cases."
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Chris Eaton
an idea recently. This may be far out there, but one never knows... A strange fact that her body had SAND (foreign to the area where she was left) deliberately sprinkled on her upper body led me to think a little. To get to the point, Leslie Dillon, attached as a suspect to the Black Dahlia murder, also went by AKA "JACK SANDS." Could be a reach, but... I don't think that any idea should be set aside at this point. Wanted to share this and thanks for reading.
Chris Eaton
Greg Carr
PART 1: 100 THINGS TO DO BEFORE I GRADUATE
Who was she?
Frances Cochran was a 19 year old who lived on Webster Street in Lynn, Massachusetts. She was only five feet tall and weighed close to 100 pounds. She worked as a bookkeeper for the Dudley Leather Company, on 54 Water Street. One of her friends described her as "death on auto rides" because she had a passion for cars and never passed up an opportunity to take a ride in one. She took the bus every morning to work and rode the same bus back in the evening. There were a few blocks between her house and the bus stop so she would walk the rest of the way unless she could get a ride.
The Night of The Incident
On the night of July 17, 1941 at 6:00pm, she was on the bus on her way home from work. In one version of the story she told her friend she was on her way to buy a dress for a dance that was happening later that night and then walked off the bus. Her friend watched her climb into a square-backed black car after she appeared as though she knew who the driver. In another version, she got off the bus and dropped a letter off in the mailbox on the corner and then began to walk down the street towards her home. From the other direction a square-backed black car, that was later said to be black with yellow trim and wooden spokes on its wheel, was driving down the road. When the driver noticed Cochran, they made a U-turn and pulled up beside her. Witnesses saw her smile, walk toward the car, get in and shut the door. The car then drove onto Chatham Street which is in the opposite direction of her house. This was the last time she was seen alive. Although the descriptions of the suspect were inconsistent, there was a general agreement that he was a "dark" or "swarthy" man with slicked-back hair.
The Aftermath
When Frances did not arrive home on time her parents began to worry. When the police arrived at their house at 9:30, they began to panic. They knew their daughter was a person who always arrived on time and never broke her daily habits. Because of her size, they knew that most men would be able to overpower with little to no trouble. That night her father stayed up waiting till 3:00am for his daughter to return. A car pulled up to their house and he went over to it to have a closer look finding two men, one in the driver seat and the other in the back seat. When he got close enough the driver said, "She's in back" and the man in the back said, "No, Frances is in front." Then they took off before her father, Harold, could even get a word out. After this the police kept guard on Webster Street. On July 20 at 1:00pm, the local radio station, WESX, aired a message from Frances' parents to her, "If you hear this broadcast, Frances, come home or telephone at once. If there are any explanations, do not hesitate." 40 minutes after the broadcast, an unknown man called and said, "If you want the body its off the Danvers Road, off Highland Avenue and Swampscott Road. The police then drove to the site and found a women's shoe beside the road and continued to search for about an hour until they found what they went there for, the body. After this they tried to find the anonymous caller but to no avail. They even broadcasted a plea, "In the name of humanity and for the sake of the mother and father and brother of this innocent girl who was cruelly tortured and put to ignominious death, the DA urges you to come forward and help clear up this heinous crime," but the caller still did nothing.
The Gory Details
They found her body in a thicket, laying on her back with a stone underneath her head. Her face was beaten so bad that her bones could be seen through a pair of gashes in her forehead right above her eyes. Most of her teeth were broken and an inch-thick swamp alder stick was coming out her mouth and was shoved deep in her throat. Her jacket was pulled up underneath her armpits; her blouse was torn and exposed her bruised and lacerated flesh. Her skirt and slip were bunched around her hips; grass and twigs had been stuffed into her vagina. There were scorch marks on her shoulders, neck, and chest, which led police to believe the murderer had tried to burn her body. Other evidence found on her body were teeth marks, several dark hairs, and a single red hair that belonged to a male and the police said it did not come from his head. Also, there was sand sprinkled on her face and breasts that was foreign to the dump site. After the coroner had examined her body, his first belief was that she had died by being suffocated and possibly choking on the stick. His next conclusion was that she may have died from the brutal beaten. There was no time of death but she had been dead for 1-2 days when she was found. Because of the slow rate of decomposition, they were convinced her body was stored somewhere cold, like a refrigerator, while her killer thought about his next move.
Newspapers With Stories About The Murder
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Suspects
The first person they arrested for this murder was a man in his thirties who was a resident in Lynn. He was found at 8:30am on July 21 sleeping in his car 100 feet away from the old field artillery on Highland Avenue. When questioned, he told the police he was in New Hampshire for the weekend with a couple of his friends and became to tired to drive, so he pulled over. They researched his alibi and later released him. His name and the name of his friends were never released to the press. Another suspect was a young man who was married. He happened to have given Cochran a ride home from her bus stop a few days before she went missing. This man did not match the description they were given by the bystanders on July 17. The police were so desperate they gathered a group of middle-aged men who called themselves the Triggers, a group of men who hung out in the woods around Swampscott Road and spied on couples having sex, for questioning. A police report titled "Triggers, Ghosters and Creepers Night at the Salem Police Station" documents the interviews and includes details of the activities that were happening in the woods during the time when of Frances' disappearance. The police never came close to finding someone who matched the description after several arrests, about 1,900 interviews, and over 20 false confessions to the murder. The case remains unsolved.
Janice Knowlton
In July of 1991, fifty years after the murder of Frances Cochran had happened, a woman by the name of Janice Knowlton had called Salem police detectives. She explained to them that she had recently recovered repressed memories that were traumatic from her childhood through counseling. She then told them that she thought her father, George Knowlton, would bring her around the North Shore while she watched him kill several women. She believed her father brought her along to lure the women in and to also make them feel safe about riding with him. She was positive that her father had traveled through New England and Los Angeles, killing women. The LA murder in 1947 of Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress and who is popularly known as the "Black Dahlia" she believes is the work of her father. She also told police that when she heard about this case she began to have flash blacks of details of the case and other specific details that never made it out to the public. Because her father died in 1962, there was no way to prove whether she was correct or not. Knowlton later writes about it in the book "Daddy Was The Black Dahlia Killer."
Black Dahlia Killer
This became the name that Knowlton's father was well known as. Since this murder happened in Los Angeles and it was one of the most gruesome murders they have ever seen, it is more popular than Cochran's murder. The reason he is referred to as the Black Dahlia Killer is because the young lady he murdered, Elizabeth Short, was an aspiring actress in Hollywood and the media referred to her as Black Dahlia. Because this murder was something that shocked people across the country and made popular and widely known by the media they made a movie about it.
Joan Pinkham
An author who was investigating this murder had received threats in 1993. A person had called her and told her to "stay away from the Cochran case" but Pinkham says that she does not scare easy. She wrote a book in 1991 about the murder of Martha Brailsford in Salem and was planning on doing the same for Frances Cochran. She claims she knows who the murderer was and believes they had died in the 1960s so she knew that the person who had called her was not the murderer but because she started digging into the case, the person had called her trying to scare her and stop her from getting more into the case. But she wasn't the only one who had received calls about this case, on June 13, 2003 an anonymous male caller left a voicemail on the Swampscott Police Department answering machine. In the message the caller gave police "good" information about the case and also included an accurate description of the murder scene.
How does this tie into Salem as a place? As a myth? As a memory?
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It creates Salem's sense of place because before people use to believe there was a ghost and supernatural activity is what Salem is mostly famous for. The myths in Salem are that there were witches and now there are ghosts, and in this case people believe that her ghost haunts Swampscott Road. The memory in Salem has been created through the spookiness of the witches and ghosts and this murder was remembered and sustained for a while when people would tell ghost stories about Frances' murder before when the area was completely deserted. They would dare each other to drive down the road without their headlights in the dark and see who could last the longest. It adds to Salem being an old and haunted city and adds to the supernatural superstitions.
Works Cited
"Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer." Google Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2015. <https://books.google.com/books?id=HkNeuv9HCxQC&pg=PA241&lpg=PA241&dq=frances%2Bcochran%2Bmurder%2Blynn&source=bl&ots=jnbuSUZs8M&sig=_XX_Bfygci8HMy_usCv84k_UvOg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iUsoVf-dMoOVNrnHgYgN&ved=0CB4Q6AEwADgK#v=onepage&q=frances%20cochran%20murder%20lynn&f=false>.
"The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes." Google Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2015. <https://books.google.com/books?id=gijG7fSwvjAC&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86&dq=frances%2Bcochran%2Bmurder%2Blynn&source=bl&ots=KP0GHSaLDA&sig=oH0VWASqyJBtEAjbghlNWbNSUCg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=l0ooVYmfDYycNvfvgOgI&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=frances%20cochran%20murder%20lynn&f=false>.
Press, Margaret. "Salem as Crime Scene." Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory. By Dane Anthony. Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2004. 254-56. Print.
"The Telegraph - Google News Archive Search." The Telegraph - Google News Archive Search. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2015. <https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2209&dat=19420911&id=NIlAAAAAIBAJ&sjid=uKQMAAAAIBAJ&pg=7253%2C4664813&hl=en>.
Thomas Tryniski 309 South 4Th Street Fulton Ny. In The End... All You Really Have Is Memories (n.d.): n. pag. Web. 10 Apr. 2015.
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