Serial Killer Documentary - Teen Killer： Brian Cohee Jr

0:08 What's going.

0:12 On, man?

0:14 Okay, so parents have some concerns with some stuff they may have found in your room.

0:18 What would it be?

0:22 A human head and hands.

0:26 To come face to face with somebody so young, it's kind of scary.

0:31 The nature was extremely brutal.

0:33 I cut open his belly to see his guts. They're really pink.

0:39 Every murder is bad, but this one, it was particularly horrific.

0:44 He found this easy to do and admits that.

0:48 I was growling and making the animalistic noises.

0:56 He seems to be completely detached from the fact that.

0:59 This was a human being.

1:01 To understand why somebody kills We have to understand their life story and the silent evolution of their thought patterns.

1:44 I think a lot of people are familiar with Grand Junction because they've passed through here along the interstate. We're located in the high mountains of Colorado, halfway between Denver and Salt Lake City.

1:58 It is, I would say, a safe place to live.

2:07 Brian, since he was a small child, had grown up in the Grand Junction community. His family lived out in the Redlands area, which is a nice upper middle income area of our town.

2:21 My name is Kellen Pfeiffer. I'm a former classmate of Brian Cohey. I grew up here in Grand Junction. When I was about eight, we moved up to the Redlands. And that's when I started going to Broadway Elementary, which is where I met Brian. Brian lived in a similar part of the Redlands to me. All the people knew each other. It was very nice living there. You always kind of felt supported. You kind of felt like you knew all your neighbors. It always felt like you could always reach out for help. People often brought each other cookies, treats for the holidays. So it felt very, you know, tight-knit.

2:56 Brian Cohey's family seemed normal. They seemed like they had normal, steady jobs.

3:04 His mom ran the daycare out of the basement of our home. His father worked in construction. His parents were separating, and they were living in two homes not very far from each other. He lived primarily with his mother, but he frequented his father's home.

3:26 Brian's mannerisms in elementary school were a little bit strange. He seemed to exaggerate his movements a little bit. He spoke very loud, oftentimes would over-pronunciate his words.

3:40 Brian Cohey's mother was reporting that he had mild autism. From the time he was very little, she was reaching out for help, trying to have him assessed and trying to get him the right help.

3:52 I would definitely say that Brian seemed to lack social awareness. Oftentimes it felt like he didn't necessarily know where bounds were supposed to be, or maybe he felt like pushing on those bounds was the best way to get attention.

4:10 By middle school and high school, the schools were interacting with the Cohey family about things that they were discovering that were disturbing. Brian Cohey, he was fixated on infamous people who hurt people, such as Hitler, Stalin. He was obsessed with crime scenes. He was obsessed with murder. He was obsessed with serial killers.

4:38 It was apparent in talking to Brian's teachers that there was disturbing behavior, disturbing thoughts.

4:46 What do you remember about Brian? Not much.

4:49 Just I remember there was like a notebook that had.

4:52 Some obviously concerning stuff talking about like serial killer statistics and stuff.

4:58 I just seem to be kind of enamored with that.

5:01 So famous serial killers and information about them?

5:03 Yeah, like kill counts and just stuff like that. That's not entirely normal.

5:16 I'm Kerry Danes. I'm a consultant forensic psychologist. How he is reading about serial killers, he's researching serial killers on the net, and he's doing all of this not through a lens of empathy. He's doing it through a lens of intellectual curiosity, and he's not empathizing with the victims. He is identifying with the killer. It's the killer and the killer's mindset and the killer's behavior that resonates with him.

5:54 People came to know him as somebody with dark, dark humor.

5:59 He'd make comments about the Holocaust, you know, wildly inappropriate all the time. He always looked for shock. He fed on that negative attention. I felt like he was bottling up a lot of dissatisfaction, because he was a really smart kid, very academically brilliant, but he was a little bit of a social outcast.

6:26 Kohi is really emotionally immature, but also you've got to understand that he does not understand the social world. He doesn't understand the nuances, of social interactions. He doesn't really understand the reciprocal nature of friendships. And he wants people to take note of him. But the only way that he's found that really he can achieve any sort of attention is by being shocking. And in being shocking, all it really reinforces to him is his difference from other people.

7:11 Brian made a series of posts on Reddit that provided a lot of insight into his thinking and his motives.

7:19 I saw my therapist today.

7:20 We talked about how I manipulate others' feelings to see what makes them tick. That because I feel less emotion than others. I'm curious to see what regular amounts of emotion feel like. That I'm like a scientist and everyone else is my test subject. I test painful stimuli to elicit a reaction. I enjoy those reactions, the ones of pain and sorrow.

7:48 The fact that Kohi is going on the internet and he's becoming more and more extreme in what he is posting shows that he is struggling himself in trying to understand this and he wants to test. Are there other people out there that feel the same kind of things to me? But of course the response is overwhelmingly negative.

8:07 So that can only feed into this cycle of feeling low, feeling different, feeling other, and also feeling resentful of the world around you.

8:21 It did seem like whenever a situation happened, maybe he didn't fully understand. Like if he had done something wrong, sometimes it felt like, you know, it was more funny than it was concerning to him.

8:34 I was bored in school. So I made a mace out of tape and a pencil. I became manic again with no warning. I got the urge to hit a kid. When I hit him on the back of the head, he fell to the ground crying.

8:50 It was entertaining, so I decided to mock him. It was very funny.

8:56 I'm Dr. Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist and author.

9:00 What I think is most fascinating about the Brian Cohey case is that he seems to have what are called callous unemotional traits. CU traits, or callous unemotional traits, are when you don't feel the same feelings as other people and you don't have the same empathy. In the brain, callous unemotional traits are related to a part of the brain called the anterior temporal cortex. And what you see with people who are high in callous and emotional traits is this area that is responsible for suppressing callous thoughts.

9:31 Is literally smaller.

9:33 Being high in these traits makes you more likely to hurt other people, and it takes away a barrier that most of us would have to doing things like murder.

9:41 It's really hard to know when someone's actually going to take something too far. You know, when something goes from being a joke that you say, you know, to get attention or to be funny to where that actually gets turned into something maybe a lot more, you know, deeper, a lot more scary.

10:08 Brian Cohey had got his car stuck in the river and had made a call to his family for help. Police were notified also.

10:17 Hey, partner, come on, talk to me real quick.

10:18 Sure, I mean, I'm really cold. Is it okay if it's in here?

10:24 That's fine.

10:25 I did not know that.

10:27 It seemed like a normal thing a teenager would get themselves into.

10:33 Well, you're not hurt, right?

10:34 You're okay? No, just a little cold is all.

10:36 Just besides your pride a little bit? What were you doing down here, bud?

10:39 Well, I felt like I needed to get out, like.

10:42 And I figured, why not park here and just relax and think. And I parked on the boat ramp, and I thought it would be easy to get out.

10:51 And it slid into the river.

10:52 I was able to get out.

10:56 Brian Cohey told officers that he was just hanging out when he had accidentally backed his car too far into the river.

11:02 He was an.

11:05 Inexperienced driver.

11:07 Okay.

11:08 Oh, yep.

11:10 Teenagers.

11:11 Does he need to stay here?

11:13 I'm sorry?

11:13 Is he free to go?

11:14 I'm sure he'd like to go home and get warm.

11:17 I'm sure he'd like to get some pants on.

11:18 Yeah, right?

11:20 Yeah, it's not a crash.

11:22 Okay.

11:23 This is stupid.

11:27 The fact that Brian's parents were on scene and telling the officers what their son had done, apparently made a mistake as an inexperienced driver, did not raise any suspicions.

11:42 What'd they say about us looking in the trunk?

11:44 They're good with it.

11:45 Okay.

11:47 Hey, quick question for you.

11:48 Sure.

11:49 The back bumper, I don't know, you can probably see it from here.

11:52 It's a lot of red.

11:54 On the back of that, dripping down it all a little bit.

11:59 A lot of red.

12:00 Looks like blood.

12:03 Blood?

12:05 Yeah.

12:07 I don't know, did your son hurt himself?

12:11 Maybe just have him do like a self-check, make sure he's okay.

12:15 Hello?

12:15 Brian, are you okay? They've seen blood on the back.

12:19 Bumper of the vehicle.

12:22 Really? Yeah, did you get hurt?

12:25 No.

12:27 Are you sure you don't have any injuries?

12:30 No, I'm fine.

12:32 There's blood on it?

12:33 No.

12:37 Brian was very calm and cool when talking to his parents on the phone after police officers had noticed blood on the back of the car. He acted like nothing happened, there was nothing wrong, and he was very convincing.

13:04 It's typical not here to dump a body.

13:16 Hi, yes, I was just wondering if you could tell me who I could possibly talk to about filing.

13:22 Maybe a report on someone that hasn't been seen for.

13:25 A couple of days.

13:27 Okay.

13:27 Are you needing to file, like, a missing persons report?

13:31 I think so.

13:33 Mr.

13:34 Barnes was reported missing by a friend of his who ran a local business. This friend would see him on a daily basis and noticed that he had not been coming around for a couple days, which made her concerned. One key connection that we found was a wallet belonging to Mr. Barnes had been located by Brian Cohey's father inside the vehicle, and that was submerged in the river.

13:53 When they realized that a wallet that was associated with the boat ramp, some local people were literally walking the Colorado River looking for Warren Barnes. He literally shows up every morning, every day without bell, like at six o'clock, sometimes a little sooner.

14:09 We always let him in before the customers. We give him free coffee.

14:12 He's the nicest old man ever.

14:14 I am Gail Gandy. I am the youngest niece of Warren Barnes. Uncle Warren is the seventh of nine children. He was definitely a fun uncle. He liked being around people. He really enjoyed country music. He definitely loved to read. My Uncle Warren would read books downtown. A local shop owner actually would give him a chair so he could sit out in the sun to absorb the sun and read his book and be out with the nature. He would help shop owners bring in boxes and stuff. And that's the weird thing.

15:01 Is I said, I'll see you tomorrow. He said, I'll be here. I'll see you tomorrow.

15:05 I don't, I don't know.

15:06 I just have a really bad feeling because it's unlike him.

15:10 We are investigating the missing person.

15:12 Okay.

15:13 I'm just going to keep looking.

15:14 Until I hear from you guys.

15:16 Okay.

15:16 I'm too worried about him.

15:17 So, all right.

15:18 Thank you guys. Thanks for coming out and looking for him.

15:33 No one wants to address the emergency.

15:36 Hi, there is an emergency.

15:42 I found.

15:45 Something in my truck.

15:46 Okay, what was.

15:50 It?

15:59 I'm Deputy Wick. I work for the Mesa County Sheriff's Office. I saw the call populating and the dispatcher, they'll take the phone call and then they start throwing in notes as they're developing the call and we can see those notes start coming in.

16:11 My first response was.

16:32 It's probably a Halloween costume or maybe it's animal parts.

16:42 I was a patrol deputy at the time and I am now a sergeant. The reporting party had said that she had found what she believed was a human head and hands in her son's closet. So that's pretty much kind of what we had as we were headed out that way. So driving down here, it's just, what are we going to? What am I going to see? I can't just go in there and think somebody's guilty or pull my gun out. I have to let their actions dictate what my actions are going to be after that.

17:17 As we're approaching, I'm going to gauge what type of reaction, what type of cooperation are we getting? Are they aggressive or calm people?

17:32 What's going on, man? Okay, so parents have some concerns with some stuff they may have found.

17:43 In your room?

17:44 Um, yeah, I believe so.

17:47 And what would it be?

17:51 A human head and hands.

17:55 Are we dealing with somebody that has a mental illness that is hallucinating, seeing this, perceiving it, or... Is it something fake that he's made and he's playing a prank on mom? I wanted to verify, like, you said human head and hands. Are they real?

18:12 Like, for real human head and hands?

18:14 Yes.

18:15 From?

18:17 That fellow who went missing recently.

18:19 Which fellow was that?

18:20 Warren.

18:21 Warren.

18:21 And how did you end up with him?

18:24 I murdered him.

18:25 With what? A knife. Why would you have done that?

18:30 I've always wondered what murder felt like.

18:34 And now my brain is like, okay, we have something.

18:37 Do you have anything on you that's going to cut, poke, hurt, stigmatize anything without reaching for nothing? Don't reach for nothing.

18:43 My phone and my wallet.

18:44 Okay.

18:45 Well, I'm going to have you face that way.

18:46 Put your hands on top of your head for me real quick.

18:47 I just want to make sure you interlace your fingers for me real quick, all right?

18:50 Okay.

18:53 How did you come across the gentleman?

18:57 I was driving.

18:58 Uh-huh.

18:59 And I saw a strange shape near the railway. So I parked my car and investigated it and I found it to be a man sleeping.

19:05 Okay.

19:06 Where's the knife at?

19:08 It is in my sunken car.

19:11 And at that point in time, with the information he was giving, the way he was answering, my brain started to shift from this isn't real to okay, so maybe he found a dead person to oh my gosh, I think this kid really killed somebody.

19:28 When I killed him.

19:30 I tried disposing of his body by putting it in the river, but I parked too low in the river.

19:35 Where's the rest of his body at?

19:37 Huh?

19:38 Where's the rest of the body at?

19:40 What parts?

19:41 His family is there listening to everything he's saying, and he seemed unbothered and unconcerned with anything that was occurring.

19:53 I'm going to have you walk over here.

19:55 You're going to sit in the back of my partner's control car for a minute, okay?

19:59 Okay. I referenced to Sergeant Stuckenschneider a motion which we used to handcuff, and he's primary deputy, and he said, you know, kind of gave me the head nod of no. We make those decisions based upon behavior, mannerisms, cooperation.

20:18 How are.

20:20 You?

20:20 I'm good, sir.

20:21 How are you? You said your name is Brian?

20:24 I'm not feeling too well.

20:25 You're not feeling too well?

20:26 I've been very, very anxious.

20:29 That's understandable. What we're going to have you do here is I'm just going to have you sit in the back here, okay? I'm going to turn on the air for you in a second. That way you're not too hot.

20:37 Are you a hot-blooded or cold-blooded kind of guy?

20:39 I am very cold-blooded.

20:43 The way he said it to me, I took it as he wasn't talking about the temperature.

20:48 So hop in here.

20:49 I know you're tall, so it's a little bit of a tight squeeze. But like I said, I'll get that.

20:52 Air in for you.

20:53 Sorry about that.

20:54 It's all right.

20:56 I can't believe it.

20:59 Oh, my god.

21:00 It's kind of a time to not really know it, so.

21:13 It was a very wild situation to watch unfold. It was kind of like their whole life was falling apart right in that moment.

21:23 Can you walk me inside?

21:26 So that's when I had dad take me inside so that I can verify for myself that what we have is an actual human head and hands.

21:34 Can I go in there and verify here first?

21:36 Oh, yeah, please.

21:37 We haven't seen it yet.

21:38 OK.

21:41 So as I'm going in the house, I'm expecting to see something.

21:50 OK.

21:55 I could tell right away as soon as I lifted up the towel.

21:59 Yeah?

22:00 It was indeed a real human head.

22:03 Yeah?

22:06 This is a home where Brian's mother ran a daycare. Several children were present on a daily basis. And to think there was a human head at hands inside the house was quite disturbing.

22:18 22, 42, are you clear for a call? Oh, yeah, you might want to call Investigations. So, oh yeah, he already, I asked him what was going on.

22:36 He said, I killed the guy.

22:38 I stabbed him.

22:39 The head's in the sink.

22:40 The body is in the river. Does it sound by my voice that it looks real?

22:47 It is.

22:49 Now we are actually verified that this is a murder and this is an actual person. Now I'm just calling the cavalry.

22:57 All right, Brian.

23:01 We're headed to the sheriff's office and your family's going to go with us, okay?

23:06 I've got one male on board.

23:07 We're en route to the office.

23:09 Brian, I'm going to roll up these windows because the air gets really.

23:11 Loud back there, okay?

23:13 We do often try to keep people at ease as much as we can, even in situations where they've just confessed to murder. Brian was just that same even-keel demeanor. He did not show emotion one way or the other. When we arrived at the sheriff's office, we pull into the back area so I can walk him through into our investigations unit. I felt fully comfortable.

23:45 He was still very polite.

23:46 He didn't do anything that I thought was.

24:02 Indicative of him trying to run or be violent.

24:05 Take another left.

24:06 Hard left.

24:06 Right here. Right here.

24:08 All right.

24:09 I walked him into the interview room and told him he could have a seat and that somebody would be with him shortly.

24:17 Even though Brian Cohey had confessed, we knew we had to gain some insight into his mental state and things that would lead us to understand his thinking.

24:26 What are we dealing with here? Is this somebody who has acted on hallucinations, delusions? Is this somebody that is suffering with a mental illness?

24:41 My name's Pete Berg.

24:44 I'm an investigator with the Mesa County Sheriff's Office, and I interviewed Brian Cohey.

24:50 And Well, this is Lisa.

24:58 Hi, how are you?

24:59 I'm okay, you?

25:00 Good, thanks.

25:01 I'm Investigator Norcross. I've worked with Investigator Berg for a really long time. Our job is to get the truth, whatever that truth is.

25:09 When was your birthday, Brian? January 10th, 2002. And your.

25:18 Address?

25:21 Which one? Um, I mean, yeah.

25:24 My first impressions of just looking at Brian, he looks like the typical 19, 20-year-old young person. Brian is well-spoken.

25:30 He's a smart young man.

25:32 He's cooperative.

25:33 He's willing to sit and talk with us. And how did you get here?

25:55 I murdered someone.

25:56 Okay. But how did you get to my office?

26:01 Well, the police drove me here from my mom's house.

26:05 Okay.

26:06 When somebody is very quick to say things like that and implicate themselves in serious crimes, that tells me I have someone who has a unique personality here, and we're going to want to talk to them a lot more.

26:20 One of the things that I knew we needed to ask about was any type of mental health issues that he's either been diagnosed.

26:29 With or he believes he has.

26:46 When you say you have a major depressive disorder, I'm curious what those are.

26:52 Well, actually, I have several.

26:54 I have high-functioning Asperger's.

26:56 Okay.

26:57 I have.

27:00 ADHD, a major depressive disorder. And they also said I was schizo-something. That isn't me misremembering. They just said you have your schizo-something, whether it be schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, schizopapal or schizoid disorder.

27:17 They said I had something that was schizo.

27:22 Can you imagine?

27:23 At the age of 19, you've got this list of diagnosis, list of labels. Here are all the reasons why there's something different about you, there's something wrong about you. None of this is being addressed therapeutically, and he feels like a freak.

27:46 It seemed like Brian had studied serial killers a lot to me, and he did want to be like those people. I mean, it seemed like maybe they were his heroes.

27:55 So my nickname in high school was Jeffrey Dahmer.

27:59 Okay.

28:00 I had a reputation that I would become a serial killer.

28:02 Okay.

28:04 Why did you have that reputation?

28:05 It depends on how off-putting I was.

28:09 In school, I was not social. I didn't like anyone. I would purposely make.

28:16 offensive, crass, rude comments just to get a rise out of people. To ruffle their feathers.

28:27 Most people obviously aren't going to jump from I've never done anything wrong to killing a person. They have a progression of leading up to now I'm killing people.

28:39 Have you ever done it before?

28:41 No.

28:42 No.

28:43 Okay.

28:43 You got apps, right?

28:44 Yeah.

28:44 How about animals? Can you practice on anything?

28:47 Yes.

28:59 On October the 23rd, 2018, I killed a feral cat and mutilated it.

29:06 Cat has quality teeth.

29:08 It can hurt.

29:09 So I herded the cat into the sleeping bag and beat it and strangled it and for a snap of its neck.

29:19 I.

29:24 Was so excited. Excited in a good way. Thrilled. High on homicide, you would say. Oftentimes, over the next few hours, I would feel its warmth and play with the limp body.

29:37 I then decapitated the cat.

29:41 Hit the body in a shoebox, hit the head in a wine cork box.

29:46 I kept it for three days. Then it started to stink.

29:49 And then I disposed both in the trash and got away with it.

29:55 At the age of 16, he kills a cat.

29:58 I think psychologically, that is... quite an extreme thing to do. It's also almost.

30:05 The cliche of a serial killer.

30:08 That is the kind of behavior that is associated with callous and emotional traits, with the inability to have empathy or sympathy for other creatures.

30:16 Brian Cohey actually says about his.

30:17 Own behavior that he was, in quotes, high on homicide. Now, what that suggests is that in the process of killing, while he is doing this, and also afterwards, arguably, that he is enjoying the adrenaline rush he's getting, and also that presumably he's needing more and more of it to get the same effect. And so that's what we see with his behavior is that he's graduating to increasingly violent actions.

30:45 Brian Cohey had talked about killing a cat and keeping the remains in his house. He indicated that he gets some sense of excitement from this, and that might have been part of the reason why he kept a human head in hands.

31:04 I was driving along, and I see a shape here on the railway track. So I'm like, oh, interesting. So I go up, and as I'm looking, I see a large thing wrapped in a canvas. And I'm like, that's a homeless person. So I grab my knife, I pull back the canvas, and I stab his neck. He was panicking at first in his old man voice. He was saying, what are you doing? What are you doing?

31:36 Why that?

31:37 And I said, I've been wanting to do this for a long time. And I just kept on stabbing his neck. I was looking if I do a demonstration. This is him. I was straddled on top of him like this.

31:51 And I couldn't fight back.

31:53 It was actually surprisingly easy. I was barely breaking a sweat. I thought, oh my God, he's going to be tough. But no, it was actually surprisingly easy.

32:02 And during the time I was growling and making the animalistic noises.

32:10 Why were you doing that? I was supposed to look friendly. Okay.

32:15 I was so excited, so rushed up on adrenaline.

32:17 Okay.

32:21 After I killed him, I just couldn't stop saying, stinky, dirty, dirty, stinky, stinky.

32:28 I stripped his clothes. I cut open his belly to see his guts.

32:36 They're really stinky.

32:38 Sorry, that was morbid.

32:40 And then I cut off his head. And then I cut off his hands. And then I took. Put it in a leftover box.

32:54 Uncle Warren was vulnerable without a home when I found out that he was murdered. It really hit hard, and I know I had a hard time just knowing how he passed. It was senseless.

33:16 We were all shocked.

33:17 We were just.

33:21 It was very, very hard for all of us.

33:25 I think in the heat of the moment of killing somebody, the reason why you might disfigure their face is to try and keep your high going. So if you have done this crime not out of any real reason other than because you feel like you want to know what it feels like to kill somebody, and if you're there, you might also then go, Well, I wonder what it feels like to gouge somebody's eyes out. I wonder what it feels like to cut someone's face. Now, of course that's all very extreme, but if you're already in that mode of trying things and seeing how they make you feel, that to me makes perfect sense that he would try lots of different things and go increasingly more severe with his actions. He's trying to maximize the emotional payoff of

34:06 his murder.

34:09 One of the things that makes Brian the scariest type of person is that he found this easy to do and admits that.

34:17 The crime scene was located near the Justice Center, near the courthouse here in Mesa County, underneath a bridge.

34:43 There was a location where homeless people do often stay. It's fairly secluded.

34:47 There's an arm.

34:50 There's another arm. There's another one.

34:57 Right here's a leg.

35:01 Could be the upper arm.

35:04 This was a disturbing crime scene as there were human remains that were thrown around and discarded after the victim was dismembered.

35:13 The most common reason for why somebody cuts somebody else's head off, after the commission of a murder especially, is to hide the body. And that is called a defensive strategy. So you have already done this and you're trying to defend yourself from actually having evidence against you. What we also have with Brian Cohey is an offensive strategy where he is decapitating somebody because he wants to, and he's mutilating the body because he's getting some sort of enjoyment out of it or a thrill.

35:42 And so that is incredibly uncommon.

35:49 When did you start thinking about killing people?

35:53 Six months ago.

35:55 The six months before the murder, Brian Cohey's parents found him with a backpack full of supplies. We refer to it as a kill kit.

36:06 His parents discovered it. They were very, very concerned.

36:35 And it did not make sense to them why he would have this kit. So they took it from him.

36:40 He was trolling or lurking around town.

37:03 Trying to identify what type of person he would ultimately kill.

37:08 I was figuring the police don't, this is not to be taken offense, but police, they don't seem to care as much about high.

37:20 Risk individuals, homeless people, prostitutes, et cetera. So I was.

37:26 Deliberately looking for someone who lived that type of life.

37:28 Okay.

37:31 In early February of 2021, Brian was conducting searches about how deadly a neck stab wound would be, where homeless people sleep, and how people react to being held at knife point. Brian had also conducted internet searches related to river washing away evidence, and also how long does it take for a body to stink. It seemed like Brian was obsessed with committing a murder after looking at his internet searches.

38:01 So any idea, like, the time of night when you started looking for this person? That night up in there?

38:09 Which was 10 p.m.

38:12 And what were you wearing? Well, you know the movie Halloween, Michael Myers?

38:17 Mm-hmm.

38:18 For Halloween last year.

38:21 I bought that as a costume to put on the mask in my room.

38:27 OK.

38:27 And, yeah, I just associated that piece of article of clothing with violence.

38:34 That's what I was wearing it.

38:36 That night?

38:37 Yes.

38:39 He's getting himself psyched up for this grand event. So it's almost like a kid playing dress-up This is an outfit that he associates with violence, and he's trying to get himself into character.

38:56 He actually went home to bed, couldn't sleep, because he was.

39:01 Afraid he had left evidence.

39:18 And that's when he returned to the scene behind the Justice Center and ultimately took pieces of the body and disposed of the primary pieces of the body in the Colorado River, which is when his car got stuck in the river. The rest of his torso and legs were never discovered. I have never handled a murder case where a human body was murdered and destroyed after the murder in this way.

39:49 There was more than enough evidence found in the home and at the scenes, in addition to Brian's confession, to determine that he was the person who had killed Warren Barnes.

40:07 He was very much looking forward to the consequences that he knew were going to be coming. He just misjudged the amount of the consequences.

40:21 What did it feel like?

40:23 It was intense.

40:25 It was, um, it was a rush of adrenaline. It wasn't fear. It was just pure... What's the word? Um, excitement, I suppose.

40:38 Not excitement as in joy, just excitement as in increased heartbeat.

40:43 Did you enjoy it or not enjoy it?

40:45 Um.

40:48 Did I enjoy it? I think when.

40:54 He says, I didn't enjoy it, but I didn't hate it, what he's trying to say is, I'm not a sadist.

41:14 I didn't do this just because I get pleasure from hurting people.

41:17 It's more that I did a thing because I thought it was interesting, and we know that he got at least a thrill out of it, that emotional slash just physical response that he was maybe struggling to get elsewhere. I think Brian Cohey killed Warren Barnes because he wanted to feel something. And notably, and this is where we get to those callous, unemotional traits, He seems to be completely detached from the fact that he has taken somebody's life.

41:45 He doesn't have those feelings of remorse and guilt.

41:53 After his interview, we took Brian back to the jail and as he was sitting in booking, he kind of grinned and said, I feel like Hannibal Lecter right now and kind of got a grin like he was a celebrity at this point because he had now killed somebody and got arrested. Because you don't hear about serial killers that don't get caught. So now he got caught and he's famous in his mind, I believe. But then it was almost like another part of euphoria of, and now I get to go to jail and tell people I'm a killer.

42:27 Brian pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He was looking at a life sentence.

42:34 This crime sounds crazy. But just because it sounds crazy and is not expected, that does not make him insane.

42:48 The plea of not guilty by reason of insanity was entirely dismissed because actually he had proven his legal sanity all the way through his police interview. He was not hallucinating. He was not struggling with paranoid beliefs. or delusions. He was fully in control of his behavior.

43:15 I think the jury did have a hard time hearing the story of what happened to Mr. Barnes, that he was an innocent victim who did nothing to provoke the situation. I think it was a lot to handle for them.

43:28 The fact that this monster would attack a 69-year-old man while he was sleeping. It was such a cowardly act. The judge said this was the worst crime he had ever heard in his lifetime on the bench. I know it shocked everybody. It wasn't just our family that was affected. It was pretty much everybody in this valley was affected by it.

44:06 Ryan Cohey, who committed first-degree murder. Every murder is bad, but this one, it was particularly horrific. Ultimately, he's serving the appropriate sentence of life, life without parole.

44:20 I think that Cohey killed Warren because he was feeling down, feeling lost, feeling that he couldn't relate to anybody in the world other than serial killers.

44:36 I think there were two things going on when Brian Cohey murdered Warren Barnes.

44:41 I think the first thing is he was thrill-seeking.

44:43 He was trying to get a rush, and we could see that as a pattern of behavior where he perpetrated various violent acts over the course of his life, and they got more and more extreme.

44:52 The other thing that I think was happening is.

44:54 That we know that Brian Cohey had a fascination with serial killers.

44:58 He would record their kill counts.

45:01 He was fascinated by the fame that comes with killing people. And I think it's possible that he saw himself as someone who would fit that kind of label, that maybe that.

45:15 Kind of fame would look good on him.

45:18 This is somebody that is really struggling to experience any kind of emotion. He's so cut off from his own emotions. He doesn't have a language for his own emotions. You know, he's expecting to feel something. I think that a lot of things are best left as fantasies because the reality just doesn't measure up.

45:45 Uncle Warren got the moniker the Reading Man because a lot of the downtown business owners saw him reading all the time. There is a a memorial downtown off of Main Street. I believe that we should remember my Uncle Warren being the kind, generous person that he was. Remember to take time just to go out and soak up some sun. Tomorrow may not come for you. Enjoy the little things in life and the here and now.