Cobra Killer (4 page)

Rosencrans, meanwhile, pored over seized records, computers, DVDs, and video tapes taken from Kocis’ home. Rosencrans shared Kocis’ records with federal authorities hoping to find something that would link him to federal charges, ranging from child pornography to possible tax evasion. No federal charges were ever leveled. The local investigation stalled, and the case quickly fell into a “he said-he said” argument with Kocis through his attorney, flatly denying the boy’s allegations.

The key clue would come in a tiny micro-DVD cartridge, stuffed in a box away from the presumably legal videos being produced and distributed for the Cobra Video enterprise. “That was a huge break that broke our case,” Rosencrans said. On the microcassette was a sexual encounter between Kocis and the boy that matched the encounter described earlier by the accusing boy.
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“We were just going on the victim’s statement, but that (videotape) solidified this for us,” Rosencrans said. “I looked through thousands of tapes and scenes and finally I found this tape and showed it to (Kocis’ attorney Flora) and they couldn’t deny it; it was on the microcassette.”
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On April 4, 2002, Kocis pleaded guilty to a single count of corruption of a minor for producing and possessing the sex video of himself and the fifteen-year-old boy.
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Luzerne County prosecutors dropped the other charges against Kocis. Assistant District Attorney Jeff Tokach conceded that there was a valid “mistake of age” defense to almost every charge. Flora told the court the boy had repeatedly lied to Kocis about his age and that Kocis was unaware he was only fifteen.
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The boy’s reluctance to participate in the prosecution of Kocis was a key stumbling block as well, as Tokach learned his family didn’t want to be involved in any more than they had to. “The reason why he pled to the sexual abuse of children charge is because the victim, at the last minute, before the trial, did not want to testify,” Rosencrans recalls. “He didn’t want the embarrassment. It would have been public in an open court.(So) the only thing we could have (Kocis) plead to and would stick was the sexual abuse of children and that was only because we had it on video.”
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On May 15, 2002, Luzerne County Judge Michael Conahan approved Kocis’ plea agreement and sentenced him to a year of probation. Conahan did not require Kocis to register as a sexual offender under Pennsylvania’s sex offender registry law. That failure to require Kocis to register as a sexual offender with state and local authorities would later prove controversial as questions were raised about whether the law was followed regarding a Pennsylvania mandate that he register as a sex offender.

Attorney Al Flora told reporters in 2007 (as the investigation into Kocis’ murder went forward) that the DA’s office “never intended Kocis to plead guilty to a charge that would have made him register as a sex offender.”
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Flora and Tokach agreed that a “clerical error” led to Kocis pleading guilty to the wrong charge (sexual abuse of a child) and that a change was made to the sentencing order in 2006. At that time, Kocis’ guilty plea was downgraded to a single count of “corruption of a minor” and included an unusual written note on Kocis’ court record from Judge Conahan that Kocis was “not subject to any Megan’s Law provisions.”
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Kocis seeks to move on

With the legal struggles behind him, Kocis moved on to rebuild his life. His parents, Michael and Joyce Kocis, and his sister Melody Bartusek remained loyal by all accounts. They may not have fully understood the nature of Bryan’s new business, but the Kocis family stayed in close contact with one another.

Bryan Charles Kocis was born May 28, 1962 in Fairbanks, Alaska, before the family settled in Larksville, Pennsylvania. He was raised in a simple home on East Main Street in the northeast Pennsylvania town of Larksville, a community about ten miles southeast of where he eventually settled as an adult in Dallas Township. Situated on the Susquehanna River, Larksville is a typical Pennsylvania town with a mostly white, aging, and stagnant population just two miles west of the regional centers of this part of the state, Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

The son of a typical post-war American family, Kocis’ father served eight years in the U.S. Air Force before settling into a comfortable middle-class family life, paid for with his salary as a food inspector for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As a youth, Bryan Kocis was active in church, serving as a youth Deacon, and in the Boy Scouts of America, rising by age seventeen to the rank of Eagle Scout (the highest Boy Scouts rank) from Pennsylvania Troop 247. He graduated in 1980 from Wyoming Valley West High School in nearby Plymouth, Pennsylvania, where he was reported to be a good student.

An avid photographer as a young man, Kocis won a nationwide photography contest and later attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, a private institution of about 8,000 students founded in 1829 at Rochester, New York, focusing on academic majors in the fields of art and design, computer science, medical sciences, and engineering. RIT was then and now ranked among U.S. colleges and universities as “very competitive” in terms of admissions.
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Upon graduation from RIT in 1984 and until the mid-1990s, Kocis worked as a biomedical photographer for Pugliese Eye Care in Kingston, Pennsylvania. Company mergers and management changes at work caused Kocis to pursue other interests, including a failed effort at selling cell phones. Still, at age twenty-four, he was able to purchase his own home at 60 Midland Drive for about $56,000. Attempts to start his own businesses were not successful, however, fueling his 2001 Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing that sought relief from $200,000 in debts from credit cards and a $20,000 loan from his father. In his bankruptcy filing, he listed limited personal assets, outside of the value of his mortgaged home, at about $6,000 and monthly income of only $1,800 from online video sales. The filing revealed that in the midst of this personal and professional reorganization, Kocis was launching Cobra Video—his new vocation and avocation.
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Beyond his financial struggles, his 2001 arrest had likely confirmed for his loving family what they had suspected in the past: Bryan was gay. But like a lot of gay men of his generation, he kept his life compartmentalized. He interacted with his family much as he always had, but when away from them, he moved toward a more openly gay life. His embrace of his sexuality seemed to coincide with the development of his interest in gay pornography as a business enterprise, something his family was initially unaware of. Bryan’s family eventually learned of his business interests, but as his father said, “I had very little knowledge of what he did in his business. I know now, but then, I didn’t have a clue.”
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The base for his business was his Midland Drive home, a locale no one entered unless invited. Kocis’ neighbor and friend Nancy Parsons was aware of his meticulous efforts to remodel his home by himself, but said his arrest and subsequent bankruptcy had altered his outlook. “He changed a lot,” she said.
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Kocis eventually created and registered the Business Entity Name “Cobra Video LLC” with the State of Pennsylvania on September 20, 2002, listing himself as president and his home address as the business location. In 2005, he also registered Cobra with the Corporations’ Division of the State of Delaware, a state known for its business-friendly laws.
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Kocis focused his efforts with Cobra Video on the type of guys he liked: young, white, thin, clean-cut guys under the age of twenty-one. He easily found an audience for his videos. As Cobra grew, his financial stability did as well. He bought a Rice Township parcel in 2004 for $159,900 and another one in 2006 for $225,000. No mortgages were ever listed for the purchases, supporting neighbors’ statements that Kocis claimed he paid cash for them.
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Kocis demonstrated other signs of his growing wealth. His family recalled a once-in-a-lifetime trip Kocis organized for his parents and sister via limousine to New York City for Independence Day 2004.

Several expensive and showy cars were spotted at various times at Kocis’ home, including a Maserati convertible, a BMW SUV, and a V8 Aston Martin. Always well coiffed, Kocis dressed himself in expensive, semi-casual clothing and often sported a Rolex watch emblazoned on the back with his initials “BCK.”

Prior to his 2001 arrest, Kocis was well-known to many neighbors, sometimes attending block parties where he was described as intelligent but overly confident, maybe even a little too arrogant or slick for his small community.
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Michael and Nancy Parsons recalled he attended neighborhood cook-outs in their backyard on several occasions. “He used to walk in the neighborhood,” Nancy Parsons said. “He was nice to everybody.”
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His arrest changed all of that.

Nancy Parsons remembered that day well. “My husband came up and he woke me up from bed and he said, ‘There’s cops all over!’ We looked outside our kitchen door and this policeman said, ‘Wait until you find out what’s living next door to you.’ So then (the police) start telling us, because this kid, well, you know, had accused Bryan of molesting him or whatever, and I thought, oh Bryan is so proud and everything, I never thought he’d come out (of his house), I thought he’d shoot himself. But then he came out and he was arrested, his mug shot was on TV and he never was, like, apologetic or embarrassed. He just acted the same, like it never happened.”
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One neighbor, Jeanette Niebauer, told the
Citizens’ Voice
that when she and her husband moved to Midland Drive in 2003, other residents pointed to Kocis’ house and warned her that a “pedophile” lives on this block.
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“Of all the people on this block, we were probably the only ones he stayed friendly with,” Nancy Parsons said. Her husband did yard work for the increasingly reclusive Kocis in return for money, holiday gifts, or an occasional case of beer exchanged on a hot summer day.
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As the
Citizens’ Voice
reported, “Most others in the neighborhood came to regard (Kocis) as a strange outsider, a square peg among these well-groomed homes with roundly trimmed shrubs.”
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A secluded life

The sexual abuse charges had served to make Kocis more guarded and secretive than before, but did not stop his quest for new models above the age of eighteen in online AOL and other online chat rooms. An online exchange from two young gay guys in San Diego, California would, in fact, prove too tempting for him to resist and would serve as the introduction of Sean Lockhart to Bryan Kocis.

By all indications, Kocis’ personal life also grew as guarded as his professional conduct in the years following his arrest and guilty plea. Kocis accepted no unexpected visitors to his home. “We just couldn’t drop in on him,” Kocis’ father Michael said. “We had to notify him beforehand. If it was out of the ordinary, say we were passing by, we would call him from the down the road.”
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His friend Deborah Roccograndi confirmed the same. She had only twice been inside Kocis’ home in the twenty-five years she knew him—normally meeting him at a restaurant or outside his home.

Kocis refused to answer the door for FedEx and UPS deliveries and pick-ups that were part of his business. Packages were picked up and left on the front porch. On at least one occasion, Kocis enlisted the help of neighbor Michael Parsons in delivering prepared packages containing videos and DVDs to the Dallas post office.

As comfortable as Kocis may have been with the Parsons, Michael reported that the friendship had strict, unspoken rules. “If I went over and knocked on his door, he wouldn’t answer the door. I’d come back and I’d call him on the phone, and most of the time he wouldn’t even answer the phone, he’d just let it go to the answering machine, and I’d just leave a message and then a couple of minutes later he’d call back or he’d be knocking on my door.”
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After his murder, investigators reported that Kocis concealed numerous loaded firearms throughout his residence, which they said further illustrated his concern with his personal security, and the unlikely idea that he would allow unknown visitors to enter his home.
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One of Kocis’ former actors told
Out
magazine that Kocis was “just a smart, nice guy. Not the sleazy, overbearing producer. There was nothing stereotypical about him.”
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Some of Kocis’ other neighbors, however, painted a significantly more negative view of him as a secretive man. They told detectives that the curtains and blinds in Kocis’ home were almost always drawn, regardless of the weather or time of day.
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Amy Withers, one of Kocis’ neighbors, told the writer from
Out
magazine that “he slept during the day and worked at night. I would hear car doors at three in the morning. I would hear him having sex in the Jacuzzi on his deck, right below my bedroom window. He always scared the hell out of me: always wore aviator sunglasses and a baseball hat. Everything that you would ever think of a creepy porn guy? That would be him.”
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It was Withers who confronted Cobra Video star Sean Lockhart outside Kocis’ home while he stayed there during the summer of 2004. Lockhart quoted her as questioning him about his age and warning him, “Are you aware you’re living with a pedophile? He’s not supposed to have any contact with any child under the age of eighteen.”
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