1976 Rourke, Pauline Dec 15 1976, Maine

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Pauline Rourke
Missing since: 1976 from Fairfield
Contact: State police

Reported missing on Dec. 15, 1976, Rourke is considered a victim of foul play. At the time of her disappearance, Rourke was living in a mobile home with Albert P. Cochran. Rourke was last seen by her daughter, who reported overhearing her mother and Cochran arguing the night before she disappeared. Rourke was scheduled to be interviewed by state police in connection with the Janet Baxter murder as a possible witness against Cochran, who was convicted of Baxter’s murder in 1998 but who denies any knowledge of Rourke’s disappearance.
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SUSPECT'S LOVER VANISHED IN '76 ALBERT COCHRAN IS CHARGED WITH KILLING A MAINE WOMAN, AND POLICE PLAN TO QUESTION HIM ABOUT A MISSING GIRLFRIEND.
Portland Press Herald (ME) - Thursday, March 19, 1998
Author: Alan Clendenning Staff Writer The Stuart News in Florida contributed to this report.

Albert P. Cochran was charged Wednesday with a 1976 murder in Norridgewock. Now Maine police want to ask Cochran about the disappearance of his girlfriend from their Fairfield home shortly after the murder.

Pauline Rourke has not been seen since.

Investigators hope to ask Cochran about Rourke after he arrives in Maine to face a murder charge stemming from the killing of Janet Baxter.

Cochran is accused of killing Baxter, a 30-year-old Oakland woman, on Nov. 23, 1976. He was charged with Baxter's murder Wednesday, after new DNA testing matched Cochran's hair to a sperm sample taken from Baxter's body.

Cochran could return to Maine as early as this week. An extradition hearing for Cochran, 61, is scheduled for this morning in Martin County Court in Stuart, Fla. Cochran will agree to be extradited to Maine at the hearing, said his court-appointed lawyer, John Hetherington.

Maine police want to talk to Cochran about another 1976 mystery. Pauline Rourke was living with Cochran at the time of the Baxter murder. And Rourke has been missing since Dec. 12, 1976.

Her daughter, Honey Rourke, then 12, came home from school that day and found that her 32-year-old mother was gone. In an interview Wednesday, Honey Rourke said Maine State Police told her they tried to question Cochran this week about Pauline Rourke 's disappearance.

Honey Rourke said Cochran told police he never knew Pauline Rourke , then he refused to discuss the matter further.
Maine State Police officials declined to say if they asked Cochran about the Rourke case. But Fairfield Police Chief Jean Pouliot said he hopes to have a detective question Cochran about Rourke.

``It's still an open case as far as we are concerned,'' said Pouliot, adding that little work has been done on the case for years.

State police spokesman Stephen McCausland declined comment Wednesday when asked if Cochran has been asked about Pauline Rourke 's disappearance.

``What somebody says or does not say when they are questioned is not something we get into,'' McCausland said. Rourke's disappearance ``is still an open case, and we know for a fact he was living with her at the time,'' McCausland said.

Honey Rourke says she clearly remembers the day of her mother's disappearance - and the days that led up to it.

After Baxter's murder, Cochran was obsessed with the killing, Honey Rourke said Wednesday. The case received widespread publicity in central Maine after Baxter's body was found riddled by bullets in the trunk of a car on the banks of the Kennebec River.

Shortly after the killing, Cochran even drove Honey and Pauline Rourke 10 miles from their Fairfield trailer home to visit the Baxter crime scene in the hamlet of Norridgewock.

``He wanted us to see where this happened,'' said Rourke, who now lives in Bath. ``My mother thought this was real odd. From there on, the fighting got real bad between them. . . . Then all of a sudden, my mother disappeared.''

Pauline Rourke knew Cochran because she was a foster child who lived with Cochran and Cochran's mother in their Oakland home in the 1950s, said Joy Card of Wiscasset, Pauline Rourke 's sister.

After attending local schools, Card said, Cochran moved away and joined the Air Force.

He was living in Joliet, Ill., and working as a discount store manager when his wife, Patricia Ann Cochran, was murdered on Feb. 10, 1964.

Cochran claimed he choked his wife to death after she stabbed their three young children to death in a bathtub. Cochran denied killing the children, but police and prosecutors were skeptical because there was no blood on his wife's body.
Still, Cochran was charged and convicted only of killing his wife, not the children. He served nine years in prison in Illinois, was paroled in 1973 and moved back to Maine in 1976. Cochran got a job as a carpenter, working for his brother, Alfred, who was a building contractor.

Honey Rourke said Cochran became romantically involved with her mother soon after Cochran's return to Maine. Cochran moved into Rourke's house trailer in June 1976.

Pauline Rourke knew of Cochran's criminal conviction, but believed his version of what had happened.

``My mother thought he was someone who just went crazy after seeing that his kids had died,'' Honey Rourke said.

Pauline Rourke and Cochran argued frequently, but Honey Rourke said their fights were not violent.

After Baxter was murdered, Cochran talked incessantly about the crime and insisted that Pauline and Honey Rourke go with him to see the place where Baxter's body was found.

``Me and my mother did not want to, but he was getting angry so we went,'' Honey Rourke said.

At some point, Honey Rourke said she overheard her mother say to a relative that she was scared Cochran might have been involved in Baxter's killing.

``She was scared and she didn't know what to do,'' Honey Rourke said.

A few days later, Honey Rourke came home from middle school. Her mother wasn't there. Cochran was.

``I asked him where my mother was and he said she'd probably be home later,'' Rourke said.

But her mother never showed up. Rourke's aunt came from Vermont to care for her. Several days later, they called police and reported Pauline Rourke missing.

At the time, police officers ``felt that something had been done to my mother,'' Rourke said. They told her they collected evidence, she said, but did not tell her what it was.

Cochran stayed in Maine until about 1979 or 1980, according to family members and police. Then, he moved to Florida - he has former addresses in Fort Lauderdale and was living in Stuart when he was arrested - and got married again at some point and worked as a cabinet maker.

After she moved in with her aunt in late 1976, Rourke never spoke with Cochran again. Now, with Cochran's arrest, Rourke hopes she finds out what happened.

``I'm hoping maybe I'll get something out of this, some closure or some kind of truth,'' she said.

Alfred Cochran, who lives in Norridgewock, said he has rarely talked with his brother since Albert Cochran moved to Florida.

He said he didn't know what to make of the new charge.

``He's a brother who had a completely different lifestyle than I had,'' Alfred Cochran said during a brief telephone interview Wednesday. ``I don't know anything so I can't say anything. . . . Just about everything that should have been said has been said.''

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A NEW WOMAN IN HIS LIFE

Soon after his return to Maine, Cochran hooked up with Pauline Rourke, a distant relative who was raised in his parents home, family members said.

Pauline Rourke generally accepted Cochran's story that he killed his wife in a fit of rage over the death of the three children. She agreed to allow Cochran to move in with her and her twelve-year-old daughter, Honey, in their trailer in Fairfield Center, her sister, Joy Card, recalled. Cochran and Pauline Rourke were soon romantically involved.

Honey remembers frequent fighting between her mother and Cochran, a tension that seemed to escalate after the Baxter murder.

Cochran was obsessed with the case, Honey said, and talked about it all of the time.

Card said that when she visited her sister for the Thanksgiving holiday, Cochran had newspaper clippings about the Baxter case all over the trailer. Pauline, she said, seemed nervous.

Card said she asked her sister what was troubling her. Pauline told her she was afraid of Cochran, she suspected he was involved in the Baxter murder, Card said.

Card urged her sister to move out, but Pauline was reluctant to move again and put Honey in a new school.

The sisters never spoke again.

Pauline Rourke disappeared Dec. 12, 1976, four days before her 32nd birthday

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Maine Sunday Telegram (Portland, ME)
March 22, 1998
Edition: CITY
Section: FRONT
Page: 1A



Topics:
Index Terms:
MURDER
MULTIPLE




A CASE OF MURDER RESURRECTED IN THE 21 YEARS AFTER JANET BAXTER'S SLAYING, MANY SIGNS POINTED TO ALBERT COCHRAN AS HER KILLER. IT TOOK SOPHIS- TICATED DNA TESTS TO YIELD AN ARREST.

Author: Sarah Ragland Staff Writer, Staff writers Alan Clendenning and Peter Pochna contributed to this
report, which was supplemented with material from Guy Gannett news
services.











Article Text:
One thing was certain when Maine State Police Detective Michael Mitchell took charge of the Janet Baxter murder case last year: He had a lot of reading to do.
He had inherited 20 years worth of work by two dozen detectives and a 40-pound case file. ``Holy cow,'' Mitchell thought at the time. ``This is old.''
Mitchell had no personal memory of the killing that riveted so many in central Maine; now 34, he was a sixth-grader in Skowhegan when Janet Baxter was raped and shot to death.
But he brought to the investigation two powerful weapons: evidence collected years ago by his predecessors and sophisticated new DNA techniques to test it. In the end, that was all Mitchell and the state police needed to show that even the oldest and most stubborn cases can be solved with old-fashioned persistence and modern science.
On Tuesday, Mitchell, flanked by Florida Department of Law Enforcement officials, knocked on Albert P. Cochran's door in Stuart, Fla., to place Cochran - a suspect identified within days of Baxter's death in November 1976 - under arrest in connection with her murder.
With the arrest came details of Cochran's dark past: his 1964 conviction for murdering his first wife in Illinois and the disappearance, soon after Baxter was killed in 1976, of Cochran's live-in girlfriend, with whom he had argued.
Cochran, 60, was flown back to Maine on Saturday afternoon after waiving extradition from Florida. Cochran arrived at the Portland International Jetport at 4:20 p.m., and was escorted, handcuffed, across the tarmac and through the terminal by Maine State Police troopers and detectives.
He is being held without bail at the Somerset County Jail and has vowed to attorneys and detectives that he will fight to clear his name.
In the years since Janet Baxter was killed, her case, more than a murder mystery, became the story of investigators who wouldn't give up, of parents who never lost hope, of sisters demanding answers, of a wide cast of characters who shared one thing in common: Their lives were changed by two bullets fired from a .22-caliber gun on the night of Nov. 23, 1976.
Vaughn Stevens, who was dating Baxter in 1976, struggled last week to deal with the rush of emotions brought back by Cochran's arrest and by revelations of Cochran's criminal history. He was torn between elation that a suspect is in custody and anger that, 21 years ago, Cochran - a convicted killer - had been let loose in Maine.
``It's unfathomable that this could happen,'' he said.
AN EVENING TRIP FOR COUGH MEDICINE
Vaughn Stevens drove to Janet Baxter's Oakland home the night of Nov. 23, 1976, to visit with Janet and her 7-year-old daughter, Julie.
Janet, 30, a licensed practical nurse, was suffering from a nagging cold. About 9:30, she headed out to Waterville to pick up some medicine.
She took Stevens' car - a 1974 Ford - because it was blocking hers.
At 9:59, according to a cash register receipt, Baxter bought cough syrup, Tab and some crackers at the A & P in JFK Plaza.
Stevens, back in Oakland, worried when Baxter didn't quickly return home since the shopping center was only about five minutes away. He looked for her, concerned that perhaps she'd had an accident on the slippery roads.
Shortly after 11, a motorist on Main Street stopped Leroy Jones, who was then the Norridgewock police chief, to tell him that a car had gone off Old River Road in Norridgewock and was on the riverbank.
The car was Vaughn Stevens' Ford, perched on the edge of the riverbank, hung up on an old house foundation, its engine running.
Jones and a deputy investigated.
When Jones popped the trunk at about 1:30 a.m., he saw Janet Baxter's body. She was wearing nothing but socks, her jacket covering part of her body.
She had been shot once in the head and once in the chest with a .22-caliber handgun. An autopsy would later show she had been raped.
Jones notified the state police and the Attorney General's Office.
``At the time you do what you have to do as a professional police officer,'' Jones said. ``You close the lid down and secure the scene. But then when you get alone later, the movie projector moves again and you start seeing things. Yeah, it was on my mind.''
Pat Perrino, the former head of the criminal division for the state Attorney General's Office, said that although he had handled plenty of homicides, this one was different from the start.
Perrino had attended high school in Augusta with Janet Baxter. She was only a few years his junior.
``I've seen a lot of bodies,'' Perrino said last week. ``But when I opened the trunk . . . to see someone I knew, that made it personal.''
Stevens, who was waiting back at Baxter's house, said he's never been able to express how he felt when he heard that Janet had been killed.
``I can't put into words what was going through my head. I can't put it into any context. I can't now and I never could,'' he said. ``It's beyond the worst thing that ever happened in my life.''
A STRING OF UNSOLVED MURDERS
Baxter's killing came amid a string of homicides in the Kennebec River Valley, all of them of women, all of them unsolved.
It was a bad time, Perrino said, and it made detectives more eager to find out who killed Baxter.
Earl Smith, dean at Colby College, said people were doubly anxious in the immediate area because of the 1971 murder of Katherine Murphy, a Colby student.
``It was very traumatic to have two unsolved murders in this community,'' Smith said. ``Both of these murders were so high profile and terrifying that for a very long time people wondered what had happened to the area.''
In the towns of the Kennebec River Valley, a region of rolling hills and farmland sculpted by the river's waters, fear took root among the large stands of pines and birches.
Nowhere was the fear more palpable than in Norridgewock.
``People were scared to go out at night,'' Earla Tibbetts said last week as she waited for customers in her hair salon on Main Street.
Police, however, had zeroed in on a suspect.
Five days after Baxter's death, an officer saw a man checking out the crime scene. The officer jotted down the man's license plate number, and the detectives had another lead: Albert P. Cochran.
``That's where his name came to light,'' Mitchell said.
'ONE GUY IN SCHOOL YOU NEVER HEAR FUSS'
Cochran's visit to the scene raised a small suspicion that mushroomed when detectives learned more about this man living in their midst.
Albert Cochran was born in Maine and raised in Oakland.
He attended Williams High School, where his yearbook described him as ``quietest,'' and included the rhyme, ``C is for Cochran, Albert to us; He's one guy in school you never hear fuss.''
He played football at the school, but classmates said he generally kept to himself and didn't seem to have a lot of friends.
Cochran graduated in 1956, then joined the Air Force.
Air Force records detailing his service were unavailable late last week. But, according to police, Cochran received an honorable discharge.
By 1960, he was living in Kalamazoo, Mich., working as a management trainee at a retail store. He married Patricia Sinclair when he was 21 and she was just 15. She soon gave birth to their first child.
Sinclair's father later told reporters that Cochran tried to get a job with the Kalamazoo Police Department but failed the psychological exam. He also struck out when he tried to get a job at the post office.
In October 1962, the young couple moved to Joliet, Ill., where Cochran had a job as a manager at a Topp's discount store.
A little more than a year later, the Cochrans had three children - Christine, 3, Christopher, 2, and Craig, 10 months - and a marriage on the rocks.
Albert Cochran had been involved with other women and he told friends he wanted to divorce his wife to marry someone else, according to Illinois court documents.
The Cochrans had been separated for several weeks when, on Feb. 10, 1964, police discovered that Patricia and all three children had been killed inside their home.
Patricia Cochran's body was found wrapped neatly in a blanket with a towel on her face. Her three children, dressed in pajamas, were found stabbed to death in a bathtub.
At first Cochran denied he killed his family. Then he changed his story, saying he killed his wife in a fit of rage after he discovered that she had killed their children.
``I choked her and choked her and choked her until she dropped,'' Cochran told investigators at the time.
Investigators didn't believe that Patricia Cochran killed her children because she had no blood on her, except some mingled with skin under her fingernails.
Albert Cochran had a scratched face when police interviewed him and tests of clothing he sent to the cleaners the morning after the killings turned up human blood, according to police and court documents.
Although Cochran later confessed to killing his children, the confession - as it pertained to the children - was thrown out on a legal technicality, court records show.
Cochran pleaded guilty to strangling his wife and was sentenced in September 1964 to 50 to 75 years in prison, with eligibility for parole in 11 1/2 years.
In June 1976 he was granted parole to Oakland, Maine, where his brother agreed to provide him with a job in his construction business.
A NEW WOMAN IN HIS LIFE
Soon after his return to Maine, Cochran hooked up with Pauline Rourke, a distant relative who was raised in his parents' home, family members said.
Pauline Rourke generally accepted Cochran's story that he killed his wife in a fit of rage over the death of the three children. She agreed to allow Cochran to move in with her and her 12-year-old daughter, Honey, in their trailer in Fairfield Center, her sister Joy Card recalled. Cochran and Pauline Rourke were soon romantically involved.
Honey remembers frequent fighting between her mother and Cochran, a tension that seemed to escalate after the Baxter murder.
Cochran was obsessed with the case, Honey said, and talked about it all the time.
Card said that when she visited her sister for the Thanksgiving holidays, Cochran had newspaper clippings about the Baxter case all over the trailer. Pauline, she said, seemed nervous.
Card said she asked her sister what was troubling her. Pauline told her she was afraid of Cochran; she suspected he was involved in the Baxter murder, Card said.
Card urged her sister to move out, but Pauline was reluctant to move again and put Honey in a new school.
The sisters never spoke again.
Pauline Rourke disappeared Dec. 12, 1976, four days before her 32nd birthday.
'HIS STORY WAS KIND OF WEAK'
Around the time Pauline disappeared, police were already taking a hard look at Cochran.
Cochran was formally interviewed by detectives on Dec. 17, and told a story that did little to allay their suspicions.
According to police reports, Cochran told detectives that on the night Baxter was killed he met up with three men in the parking lot at the Bob-In Tavern in Waterville. He said they drank beer and vodka and smoked marijuana.
Cochran told police he agreed to go to a party in Athens with the men, but he drove his car to the JFK Plaza - several miles away - because he did not want to leave it at the Bob-In.
Cochran told police he became nervous about the men and jumped out of their car about midnight in Skowhegan.
Then, he said, he walked to his brother's house in Norridgewock, arriving about 3 a.m., according to police.
Across the river from his brother's house, Cochran could see the police clustering around the Ford where Baxter's body had been found inside the trunk only a few hours earlier.
Perrino's assessment, then and now: ``His story was kind of weak.''
Investigators theorized that Cochran came upon Baxter in the darkened parking lot of the JFK Plaza, abducted her, raped and killed her. There is no evidence that Baxter and Cochran knew each other, police say.
Detectives had a harder time trying to figure out what happened to Pauline Rourke.
Although Rourke was not formally interviewed, Perrino said he remembers that she may have briefly met with police before she was reported missing and that her disappearance was not considered coincidental.
With metal detectors and heat sensors, officers scoured the construction job sites where Cochran had worked, trying to find her body.
``No question about it, we searched the sites where he was working,'' Perrino said. ``Everybody felt that there was foul play involved, but we didn't have any leads to follow.''
Still pressing hard on the Baxter case, investigators obtained a search warrant in January 1977 to take samples of Cochran's hair and his fingerprints. But when the hair and fingerprints didn't match up with evidence found in the Ford, the case against Cochran stalled.
It stayed stalled for 21 years.
McCLEARY FAMILY NEVER LOST HOPE
Robert and Gladys McLeary, Janet Baxter's parents, never gave up hope that someone would be charged with their daughter's murder.
``You have to have faith somewhere along the line that justice would come aboard,'' Robert McLeary said in a telephone interview last week from a vacation home near Sebastian, Fla.
He kept that faith for himself, his wife, his daughter and his granddaughter, Julie.
Raising Julie, just 7 when her mother was killed, kept their hands and hearts full.
Soon after her mother was killed, Julie asked them, ``Who's going to be my mother?''
Nanna and Bamp will be there, he told her. Nanna and Bamp will try.
Julie, now a 29-year-old University of Maine graduate working in Portland, helped them steer their way through the difficult times, McLeary said.
``She had so many of Jan's characteristics,'' he said. ``We could see Jan in so many ways every day.''
Their lives carried on, but the case and Jan's death were always there.
``It's a cloud that continually hangs over your head,'' he said. ``It's always there.''
McLeary stayed abreast of the investigation, even after the hard-press in the first couple of years gave way to what McLeary called ``on-hold mode.''
``When they had done everything they could physically, there was a denouement,'' he said. ``You go into peaks and valleys.''
The case passed from detective to detective to detective in the 1980s and '90s.
Once a year, and often more, McLeary would check in and make sure the thick and sometimes dusty file was getting another look.
There were other leads and other suspects. For years, detectives searched for a yellow Volkswagen Bug that may have driven by the crime scene the night Janet Baxter was killed. Nothing ever panned out.
``There were more yellow Bugs than Carter has little pills,'' Perrino joked last week. ``There were some other red herrings thrown at us at the time, but Cochran kept coming back up to the surface.''
Perrino said he wanted to put Cochran back behind bars, and had thought he might be able to when Cochran was arrested for breaking into some camps in Somerset County in the late 1970s. A conviction would have, among other things, meant a parole violation for Cochran and a return to prison. But Cochran was acquitted.
Cochran completed his parole in March 1979. Soon after, he moved to Florida.
Perrino, now a criminal defense attorney in Augusta, confessed to a joyous outburst when the Attorney General's Office disrupted his ski vacation in Utah last week to tell him about Cochran's arrest.
``I was convinced he was the guy,'' Perrino said. ``But we didn't have enough (evidence). We didn't have enough and we didn't have the right technology.''
INTRODUCTION OF NEW DNA TEST
The technology came into play last summer, when the Maine State Police Crime Laboratory introduced highly sophisticated DNA testing.
The new tests prompted a new look at some very old evidence: the hair plucked from Cochran's head 21 years ago and the semen on a slide saved from Baxter's autopsy.
The DNA work, which began in October and ended earlier this month, determined that the samples came from the same man. The chance that the DNA extracted from the samples came from a white male other than Cochran is 1 in 37 billion, police say. There are only 5.8 billion people on Earth.
``In this case, the technology finally caught up with us,'' said Maine State Police Sgt. John Dyer, who supervises detectives working in central Maine. ``But it's too bad it took nearly 22 years.''
McLeary, after waiting so long for someone to be charged with his daughter's murder, said he wasn't all that surprised when he got Mitchell's call.
Mitchell had been calling him fairly regularly, so McLeary knew that Mitchell was enthusiastic about the case, even optimistic.
``At this point in time, I think the world of Mike. I'd like to adopt him,'' McLeary said. ``He came along at a good time; he had his track shoes on and he was ready to go.''
McLeary said he and his wife are relieved that Cochran was charged in their daughter's death, and it gives them a certain buoyancy. But, he said, they know there is still much ahead as the case works its way through the criminal justice system.
``We've got a long road ahead, but I want to see this to the end,'' McLeary said.
The case is not over for detectives, either.
In Florida, where Cochran has lived for nearly 20 years, detectives are taking a closer look at unsolved homicides and missing persons cases in the cities and towns where Cochran has lived. Detectives said they are checking to see if Cochran crossed paths with any known victims.
In Maine, they're re-interviewing people involved in the Baxter case, tying up loose ends, making sure everything is in order for the legal fight ahead.
Mitchell, who also was assigned the Pauline Rourke case, will continue to tackle that as well.
``I want to answer any and all questions,'' Mitchell said. ``There are still loose ends I want to tie up.''


Caption:
Albert Cochran Arrives in Maine
Headlines from the Chicago Sun-Times and Waterville Sentinel chronicle the deaths of Albert Cochran's wife and children in 1964 and the murder of Janet Baxter, pictured at left. Police plan to question Cochran, above in a jail photo, about the 1976 disappearance of his girlfriend, Pauline Rourke, shown in large center photo.
Palm Beach Post photo by Susannah Nesmith Robert and Gladys McLeary, Janet Baxter's parents, never gave up hope that someone would be charged with their daughter's 1976 murder. ``We've got a long road ahead, but I want to see this to the end,'' Robert McLeary said. p.6A
Photo by David Lane Albert P. Cochran makes his initial appearance in court Wednesday in Stuart, Fla., over a video link between the jail and the courthouse. p.6A
Staff photo by John Ewing Albert P. Cochran is escorted in handcuffs by Maine State Police officers to a waiting cruiser at the Portland Jetport on Saturday. Cochran returned to the state from Florida to face a murder charge in the 1976 death of Janet Baxter. After his arrival at 4:20 p.m., Cochran stared straight ahead and ignored questions from a dozen waiting reporters and photographers. He then bowed his head as he sat inside the cruiser. p.7A
Staff art Source: Maine State Police TIMETABLE OF SLAYING
The events on the night of Nov. 23 and the early morning of Nov. 24, 1976, covered four towns in the Kennebec River Valley. Culled from police records, this is a look at that time and the events that led to one of the region's biggest mysteries - who killed Janet Baxter?
Fairfield:
Albert Cochran leaves his house at 7:30 p.m.
Oakland:
Janet Baxter leaves her house at 9:30 p.m. to buy cold medicine. She is driving a friend's Ford.
Waterville:
Cochran later says he drank vodka and smoked marijuana near the Bob-In Lounge the night of the killing.
Baxter is last seen alive at the JFK Shopping Plaza at 10 p.m., when a clerk sells her cold medicine. Cochran leaves his car in the plaza parking lot after leaving the Bob-In.
Norridgewock:
Police find an abandoned Ford on the banks of the Kennebec River at 1:30 a.m. Baxter's lifeless body is discovered in the trunk.
Cochran shows up at his brother's house at 3 a.m. He insists that his brother drive him back to Waterville so he can retrieve his car at the shopping plaza.
p.6A
PHOTO: 5 color
MAP: TIMETABLE OF SLAYING

[PorchlightUSA]

Portland Press Herald (ME)
March 19, 1998
Edition: CITY
Section: FRONT
Page: 1A



Topics:
Index Terms:
MURDER




SUSPECT'S LOVER VANISHED IN '76 ALBERT COCHRAN IS CHARGED WITH KILLING A MAINE WOMAN, AND POLICE PLAN TO QUESTION HIM ABOUT A MISSING GIRLFRIEND.

Author: Alan Clendenning Staff Writer
The Stuart News in Florida contributed to this report.











Article Text:
Albert P. Cochran was charged Wednesday with a 1976 murder in Norridgewock. Now Maine police want to ask Cochran about the disappearance of his girlfriend from their Fairfield home shortly after the murder.
Pauline Rourke has not been seen since.
Investigators hope to ask Cochran about Rourke after he arrives in Maine to face a murder charge stemming from the killing of Janet Baxter.
Cochran is accused of killing Baxter, a 30-year-old Oakland woman, on Nov. 23, 1976. He was charged with Baxter's murder Wednesday, after new DNA testing matched Cochran's hair to a sperm sample taken from Baxter's body.
Cochran could return to Maine as early as this week. An extradition hearing for Cochran, 61, is scheduled for this morning in Martin County Court in Stuart, Fla. Cochran will agree to be extradited to Maine at the hearing, said his court-appointed lawyer, John Hetherington.
Maine police want to talk to Cochran about another 1976 mystery. Pauline Rourke was living with Cochran at the time of the Baxter murder. And Rourke has been missing since Dec. 12, 1976.
Her daughter, Honey Rourke, then 12, came home from school that day and found that her 32-year-old mother was gone. In an interview Wednesday, Honey Rourke said Maine State Police told her they tried to question Cochran this week about Pauline Rourke's disappearance.
Honey Rourke said Cochran told police he never knew Pauline Rourke, then he refused to discuss the matter further.
Maine State Police officials declined to say if they asked Cochran about the Rourke case. But Fairfield Police Chief Jean Pouliot said he hopes to have a detective question Cochran about Rourke.
``It's still an open case as far as we are concerned,'' said Pouliot, adding that little work has been done on the case for years.
State police spokesman Stephen McCausland declined comment Wednesday when asked if Cochran has been asked about Pauline Rourke's disappearance.
``What somebody says or does not say when they are questioned is not something we get into,'' McCausland said. Rourke's disappearance ``is still an open case, and we know for a fact he was living with her at the time,'' McCausland said.
Honey Rourke says she clearly remembers the day of her mother's disappearance - and the days that led up to it.
After Baxter's murder, Cochran was obsessed with the killing, Honey Rourke said Wednesday. The case received widespread publicity in central Maine after Baxter's body was found riddled by bullets in the trunk of a car on the banks of the Kennebec River.
Shortly after the killing, Cochran even drove Honey and Pauline Rourke 10 miles from their Fairfield trailer home to visit the Baxter crime scene in the hamlet of Norridgewock.
``He wanted us to see where this happened,'' said Rourke, who now lives in Bath. ``My mother thought this was real odd. From there on, the fighting got real bad between them. . . . Then all of a sudden, my mother disappeared.''
Pauline Rourke knew Cochran because she was a foster child who lived with Cochran and Cochran's mother in their Oakland home in the 1950s, said Joy Card of Wiscasset, Pauline Rourke's sister.
After attending local schools, Card said, Cochran moved away and joined the Air Force.
He was living in Joliet, Ill., and working as a discount store manager when his wife, Patricia Ann Cochran, was murdered on Feb. 10, 1964.
Cochran claimed he choked his wife to death after she stabbed their three young children to death in a bathtub. Cochran denied killing the children, but police and prosecutors were skeptical because there was no blood on his wife's body.
Still, Cochran was charged and convicted only of killing his wife, not the children. He served nine years in prison in Illinois, was paroled in 1973 and moved back to Maine in 1976. Cochran got a job as a carpenter, working for his brother, Alfred, who was a building contractor.
Honey Rourke said Cochran became romantically involved with her mother soon after Cochran's return to Maine. Cochran moved into Rourke's house trailer in June 1976.
Pauline Rourke knew of Cochran's criminal conviction, but believed his version of what had happened.
``My mother thought he was someone who just went crazy after seeing that his kids had died,'' Honey Rourke said.
Pauline Rourke and Cochran argued frequently, but Honey Rourke said their fights were not violent.
After Baxter was murdered, Cochran talked incessantly about the crime and insisted that Pauline and Honey Rourke go with him to see the place where Baxter's body was found.
``Me and my mother did not want to, but he was getting angry so we went,'' Honey Rourke said.
At some point, Honey Rourke said she overheard her mother say to a relative that she was scared Cochran might have been involved in Baxter's killing.
``She was scared and she didn't know what to do,'' Honey Rourke said.
A few days later, Honey Rourke came home from middle school. Her mother wasn't there. Cochran was.
``I asked him where my mother was and he said she'd probably be home later,'' Rourke said.
But her mother never showed up. Rourke's aunt came from Vermont to care for her. Several days later, they called police and reported Pauline Rourke missing.
At the time, police officers ``felt that something had been done to my mother,'' Rourke said. They told her they collected evidence, she said, but did not tell her what it was.
Cochran stayed in Maine until about 1979 or 1980, according to family members and police. Then, he moved to Florida - he has former addresses in Fort Lauderdale and was living in Stuart when he was arrested - and got married again at some point and worked as a cabinet maker.
After she moved in with her aunt in late 1976, Rourke never spoke with Cochran again. Now, with Cochran's arrest, Rourke hopes she finds out what happened.
``I'm hoping maybe I'll get something out of this, some closure or some kind of truth,'' she said.
Alfred Cochran, who lives in Norridgewock, said he has rarely talked with his brother since Albert Cochran moved to Florida.
He said he didn't know what to make of the new charge.
``He's a brother who had a completely different lifestyle than I had,'' Alfred Cochran said during a brief telephone interview Wednesday. ``I don't know anything so I can't say anything. . . . Just about everything that should have been said has been said.''

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This is Pauline's daughter, Honey, holding a photo of her

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Note Date. Pauline apparently disappeared once before when her daughter was quite young.

Kennebec Journal
Saturday, November 27, 1965

WOMAN, BABY ARE MISSING

Gardiner Police said Friday a general alert has been broadcast for a local woman not seen since Monday. Mrs. Pauline Rourke was reported missing by her sister, Mrs. Julia Greenleaf, 17 Robinson St., with whom she had been living in recent weeks.

Mrs. Greenleaf told police her sister and Pauline's 19-months-old daughter had not returned from a Monday shopping trip to Augusta.

The Gardiner woman said Mrs. Rourke had lived in Boston prior to returning to Gardiner. Mrs. Rourke's husband, William, had left for Boston to look for her there, Mrs. Greenleaf said.

Mrs. Rourke is 20 years old, five feet tall and weighs 100 pounds. She has blue eyes and blonde hair and when she left Monday was wearing blue slacks, police said.

She was operating a 1956 blue station wagonwith Maine registration 384-470, authorities reported
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[PorchlightUSA]

Kennebec Journal
Saturday, November 27, 1965

WOMAN, BABY ARE MISSING

Gardiner Police said Friday a general alert has been broadcast for a local woman not seen since Monday. Mrs. Pauline Rourke was reported missing by her sister, Mrs. Julia Greenleaf, 17 Robinson St., with whom she had been living in recent weeks.

Mrs. Greenleaf told police her sister and Pauline's 19-months-old daughter had not returned from a Monday shopping trip to Augusta.

The Gardiner woman said Mrs. Rourke had lived in Boston prior to returning to Gardiner. Mrs. Rourke's husband, William, had left for Boston to look for her there, Mrs. Greenleaf said.

Mrs. Rourke is 20 years old, five feet tall and weighs 100 pounds. She has blue eyes and blonde hair and when she left Monday was wearing blue slacks, police said.

She was operating a 1956 blue station wagon with Maine registration 384-470, authorities reported