Cobra Killer (3 page)

More computer work—more leads

Just as helpful tips from the public were coming in, Detective Murphy’s computer work and the federal subpoena power in hand were about to yield more clues. A search warrant served on Cox Communications linked the [email protected] e-mails to Kocis in the hours before his death from an IP address linked to Cuadra’s home address in Virginia Beach.

A separate search warrant served on America Online revealed that Kocis, through his [email protected] account, had contact with [email protected] several times between January 22 and 24. As one more measure of proof, Murphy confirmed through a subpoena with Yahoo.com that the e-mail address of [email protected] was only ever used for contact with Kocis—strongly suggesting that the e-mail address was created solely for the purpose of contacting Kocis leading up to his murder, investigators would later allege.
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IP logs for the [email protected] e-mail address showed the e-mail address was first created at 4:00 P.M. on January 22 through a free account set up on Yahoo.com by “Danny Moilin.” Twenty-one minutes later, at 4:21 P.M., an e-mail was sent to the [email protected] account from [email protected]. The subject line of the e-mail was listed as “yoyo” and the body text of the message read, “jjjjjjjjjjj.”

Ten minutes later, [email protected] sent an e-mail to [email protected], another e-mail address used by Kocis. The subject line was sure to catch Kocis’ eye: “would like to model :)” and the text, complete with punctuation, grammar and usage errors, perhaps meant to further the lie that it was from a teenager, read:

hi my name is danny vissiting family for the next week in the king of Prussia area. a friend of mine told me that you guys are close to there. would like to meet you and talk about filming and stuff. don’t have much experience with this at all. may need to be taught first.

Use of the word “taught” likely burned brightly in Kocis’ mind. Kocis liked younger guys, and he had also demonstrated a willingness to help young guys explore their sexuality on camera through his Cobra Video productions.

Police uncovered another e-mail from [email protected] to Kocis, sent on the day of the murder:

good morning, I have to take my dad a few things to center city (Philadelphia) then I will be free…so if you want to meet up earlier, that would be great! I am real excited about meeting and hangin with you. Danny.

Kocis answered this e-mail, writing:

Hi Danny. I have a few meetings later this afternoon so I was thinking about 7-8 PM to have you here. I guess you’ll bring an overnight bag and don’t forget those two Ids. My address is 60 Midland Drive Dallas PA 18612.

“Danny” answered quickly, complete with a smiley face, saying, “see you around 7:15 depending on traffic.”
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Other potential suspects

While circumstantial evidence seemed to pave a wide path to Cuadra and Kerekes, investigators did not rule out other suspects, at least not initially.

Early on in the investigation, State Trooper Hannon and Dallas Township Detective Douglas Higgins flew to Palmdale, California, a tony community in the Antelope Valley, separated from Los Angeles by the San Gabriel Mountains. There they met a young man who detailed for them a troubling conversation he had once engaged with one of Kocis’ top discoveries: porn actor Sean Lockhart.

This new source told investigators that in October 2006, Lockhart, who performed in Cobra videos under what would become a famous name—Brent Corrigan—had talked about getting rid of Kocis. Police were learning that Lockhart may have felt Kocis had ruined his life.
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Informants also told police that Lockhart said his friend and one-time lover, Grant Roy, could find a “cleaner” to take care of Kocis, something the informant said Roy strongly chastised Lockhart against saying in front of other people.

While the emerging story of Lockhart’s animosity toward Kocis matched what Kocis’ Los Angeles-based attorney, Sean Macias, would also tell authorities in subsequent interviews, it lacked knowledge or awareness of how Lockhart and Kocis had begun to reach a settlement in the days just before the murder. The alleged conversation with Lockhart, after all, had occurred months earlier in October 2006, when emotions between Lockhart and Kocis were extremely hostile. Detective Higgins confirmed through Bryan Kocis’ father that he was involved in a tumultuous lawsuit with Sean Lockhart, Grant Roy, and their business partner in California, but Kocis’ kin never implicated any of the men as possible suspects.
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Kocis’ father also revealed that the lawsuit had been settled just days before and that “Bryan seemed happy and upbeat,” Detective Higgins said.
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Soon, Grant Roy would meet face-to-face with Corporals Mark Filarsky and Gerald Williams of the Pennsylvania State Police in the San Diego office of his lawyer Ezekiel Cortez. Roy confirmed he had been surfing the web looking for potential partners to work with Lockhart in a new porn production once the Cobra Video suit was settled. He came upon Cuadra’s image and website and encouraged Lockhart to invite him to meet with them during the Adult Video News confab in Las Vegas in early January 2007.

After meeting with police, Higgins eliminated Roy and Lockhart as potential suspects. “They were one-hundred percent truthful with us and they told us everything they knew.”
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Roy proceeded to tell detectives that he and Lockhart had met with Cuadra and Kerekes just a few weeks before. He detailed a dinner meeting in Las Vegas in which the idea of filming porno scenes together was discussed, “but I informed them that we could not do anything at this point because of pending litigation with Bryan Kocis,” Roy said.
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Roy went on to tell a story he would repeat verbatim many times over; it was Cuadra and Kerekes who suggested getting Kocis “out of the country,” not Roy and Lockhart. “Sean had a few drinks in him and I don’t think he understood what Harlow was saying,” Roy said. “I looked at Harlow and knew that he was talking about getting rid of (Bryan Kocis), killing him. I grabbed Harlow by the knee and told him, ‘No, we don’t need Bryan to leave the country.’”
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Roy said that after the Las Vegas dinner meeting, they next heard from Cuadra on the day after Kocis’ murder. He said Cuadra called Lockhart on his cell phone while Lockhart worked a temporary job as an office assistant. “Harlow told him to go to the WNEP-TV website,” Roy said. “Sean went to the website while he was still on the phone with Harlow. Sean saw the information about the death of Bryan (Kocis) and became upset. Harlow told Sean, ‘I guess my guy went overboard.’”
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Roy said the disclosure from Cuadra upset Lockhart so much he had to leave work immediately.

The investigation would continue to clear Lockhart and Roy from any part in the despicable acts that took Kocis’ life, but it would not relieve them of participation in the complicated journey toward justice.

The Kocis Secrets Revealed

“Bryan was a good, honest person in a bad, dishonest business.”

—Melody Bartusek, Kocis’ sister

When a person dies as a result of a homicide, it is likely his secrets, if any, will soon be revealed. That certainly was the case as investigators probed deeper into the life of Bryan Kocis and the events leading up to his grisly murder.

Summarily dismissed as a “pedophile” by some of his neighbors and even some competitors in the gay porn industry, Kocis was a great deal more complicated than such a pejorative description of him. Nineteenth century physician and sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) is credited as one of the first to advance a more precise understanding and knowledge of people with sexual tastes such as those Kocis demonstrated. Scholars credit Hirschfeld as among those who coined the more specific term “ephebophilia,” defined as sexual attraction to post-pubescent adolescents. Hirschfeld distinguished the commonly abused term from “pedophilia” that is broadly used today to describe any sexual contact between an adult and a child or adolescent.

Hirschfeld’s definition of “ephebophilia” is helpful to understanding Kocis’ sexual identity. Kocis was not, in the truest definition of the word, a pedophile as described by some. But his sexual and romantic interest in post-pubescent boys and young men left him vulnerable to personal complications and even criminal charges. Age-of-consent laws exist but vary from one U.S. state to the next. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania where Kocis lived, age-of-consent laws are less clearly defined than other states. For example, Pennsylvania’s criminal code defines the age of sexual consent as sixteen years of age. But it offers an exception, allowing thirteen-fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds to engage in consensual sexual contact with others who are no more than four years older. That exception did not help Kocis, who as a man in his thirties and forties had acted on his sexual interest in post-pubescent teens—actions that had led him into legal trouble.

Police alleged that during the months of May and June 2001, Kocis met a fifteen-year-old boy from South Whitehall Township, a western suburb of Allentown, Pennsylvania, about sixty-five miles south of Kocis’ home in Dallas Township. Police said Kocis and the boy met online in the “Male to Male” chat room on America Online. It would be those chat room exchanges that would reveal the details of their interactions and bring Kocis in contact with the police.

The
Allentown Morning Call
reported at the time that Kocis had promised to give the boy a modeling job when he turned eighteen and that he had encouraged the boy to send “dirty pictures of himself and others” via e-mail. The boy allegedly complied, sending several pictures, including one displaying his nude buttocks.

Later, police said, the boy and Kocis agreed to meet and police learned Kocis drove to South Whitehall Township to pick up the boy and take him back to Dallas Township. Initially, investigators believed Kocis “groomed” the boy by offering him work preparing mail orders for gay porn videos that Kocis produced and distributed from his home under the name Cobra Video.

During one encounter in May 2001, however, the boy reported that Kocis invited him to watch some of the videos and they engaged in sexual contact. The boy alleged Kocis videotaped the exchange. A second encounter a few weeks later may have been less consensual, investigators believed. On their second encounter, Kocis showed the boy a porno video, a probable cause affidavit filed by police alleged. In addition, the affidavit claimed that Kocis brought the boy an open can of soda and that after he drank it, he felt very tired and his body became partially paralyzed. It was then, investigators alleged, that Kocis took the boy to the bedroom where they engaged in sex.
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At a later hearing in Luzerne County on the matter, the boy, by then sixteen, told the court the sexual encounters with Kocis had occurred in the upstairs bedroom of Kocis’ home. During the hearing, Kocis’ attorney Al Flora, Jr. asked the boy, “Did you engage in sexual activity? Did you do it freely?” and the boy replied, “It was freely done, but it wasn’t anything I wanted to do.”
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As a result of Flora’s questioning, a charge of child rape against Kocis was dropped.

As part of their investigation, Luzerne County investigators served a search warrant on Kocis’ Midland Drive home on July 12, 2001, the same day they arrested him on a variety of charges, including statutory sexual assault, aggravated indecent assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, sexual abuse of children, and unlawful contact or communication with a minor.

Former Dallas Township Police investigator Fred Rosencrans, who led the probe into the allegations against Kocis, said Kocis and the boy had chatted frequently via the online chat room and that he believed the chats and contact with the boy indicated Kocis viewed him as a possible sexual mate, although it was not clear if Kocis ever intended to recruit the youth to perform in any of Cobra’s videos.
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Bryan Kocis’ 2001 arrest

Finding video evidence of the alleged assault would later prove to be a critical piece of Rosencrans’ investigation. At the time of his arrest, Kocis was not completely unknown to local authorities. Beyond a previous property line dispute with a neighbor, Rosencrans said one neighbor told him that there seemed to be a lot of men and boys going in and out Kocis’ home.
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Rosencrans said Dallas Township Police “kept an eye” on Kocis, “but without anything solid to go on, we didn’t just barge in. Once we had the break with the victim, we could serve the search warrant and go forward with a case.”
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The break came when the young man’s parents called police in Allentown. Rosencrans met Kocis for the first time when serving the search warrant, and Kocis acted surprised that the police were at his door, but also seemed to Rosencrans to be “cocky” and “standoffish.” Rosencrans said Kocis seemed annoyed by the number of people in his home, which included investigators from the Luzerne County District Attorney’s office.

Police read Kocis what the specific charges against him were as well as his rights, but Kocis was not talking to police. “He just seemed very arrogant to me,” Rosencrans said.
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Kocis was lodged in the Luzerne County Correctional Facility in Wilkes-Barre until his father posted his $75,000 bail.