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As a warning, this case contains many disturbing details of a murder that involves dismemberment & mutilation & involves a killer’s chilling confession that casually discusses the details.
On Monday, March 1, 2021 at 1:48 pm, Terri Cohee, a mother from Grand Junction, Colorado, tearfully called 911 & told the dispatcher that she found something in her 19-year-old son’s closet that was wrapped in a plastic bag that she believed was a human head. She explained that she had since moved the bag to the kitchen sink, but there was also a second bag that she hadn’t opened.
As she began to speak more quietly, she told the dispatcher that her son just pulled up from his friend’s house. She explained that he was always fascinated with the morbid, but she believed he’d been channeling these interests into becoming a crime scene investigator.
This was the second time in two days that Terri Cohee had been in contact with police. Her first call came through at 2 am on Sunday morning, February 28, 2021 when she contacted authorities about the fact that her son, Brian Cohee Jr., somehow managed to drive his car into the Colorado River.
When officers responded to the location in question, they found Brian’s car partially submerged in the river. Terri initially spoke for Brian, who was sitting inside his parent’s car to keep warm, & she explained that her son was an inexperienced driver since they didn’t allow him to get his license until he was eighteen. They hoped by then he would be more mature & less likely to get into an accident.
When Brian was asked to explain how his car ended up in the river, he said that he went out for a drive that night to clear his head & ended up parking out by the river. He backed his car onto the boat ramp, reversed too far down & his car slowly slid down the ramp & into the water. At the time, the situation was chalked up as nothing more than a teenager’s mishap.
While officers remained at the scene awaiting the tow truck’s arrival, Terri & Brian Sr. took Brian back home so he could change into dry clothes. When they came back to the site without him, the officer told them that a substance that appeared to be blood was dripping down the car’s bumper so they wondered if maybe Brian hurt himself. When Terri called her son, he acted confused & told her that he hadn’t been injured & had no idea what the substance could be from.
After the car was pulled out of the water, it was released to Terri & Brian Sr.
One day after Brian’s car was pulled from the river, 69-year-old Warren Barnes was reported missing. Warren was a homeless man known around downtown Grand Junction as the reading man. When he wasn’t helping the owners of a shop move things around or doing odd jobs through a temp agency, he often sat behind a bridal shop immersed in his paperbacks. Warren was a constant figure within the town who brought joy to so many, so when he hadn’t been seen, it was immediately concerning.
Monique Lanottie, the owner of the bridal shop where Warren would sit, realized she hadn’t seen her friend since Saturday. He hadn’t shown up for work & everyone was extremely worried because his schedule was like clockwork. He was a kind man who people in town cared about very much.
Police soon learned that Brian Cohee Sr found Warren’s wallet in his son’s now recovered Ford 500. When he was inspecting his son’s car after it came out of the river, he came across a wallet that, based on the contents, belonged to a man named Warren Barnes. There was also a card inside with the man’s place of employment.
When Brian Sr. contacted the number on the card, he was told that Warren was missing & hadn’t shown up for work. He immediately found this very chilling since on top of this information, Brian Sr. had also found a large butcher knife in his son’s glove compartment. He immediately thought back to the previous night when officers noted a blood-like substance dripping down Brian’s bumper.
When Brian Sr. confronted his son about this, Brian claimed that he found the wallet while he was down at the boat ramp the night before.
Feeling uneasy about what her husband found, while Brian was out at a friend’s house on Monday, Terri went into his room when she came across the horrifying contents in his closet.
As the officer pulled up to the Cohee home in regards to the call, he found Brian standing out on the driveway. He calmly approached the patrol car & they spoke about his parent’s concern about items she found in his room. The officer asked what these items might be & Brian calmly responded, A human head & hands.
When Brian was taken to wait in the back of a patrol car, Brian Sr. brought officers into their home while Terri sat weeping in the driveway. As the officer stepped into the kitchen, he saw that the contents in the sink had been covered with a towel & quickly confirmed that the bag contained a human head just as Terri suspected.
After Brian & his parents were taken down to the station, they were each interviewed in separate rooms. Terri explained that everything started when her husband came across the mysterious wallet in the passenger side door of his son’s car as well as a butcher knife in the glove compartment.
When Terri was in Brian’s room, she began digging through a plastic storage bin that he kept in his closet when she came across a white plastic trash bag. She picked up the bag & noted that the object inside felt heavy & had been double bagged. She was sickened when she peeked inside the first layer & thought she saw maggots & old blood, but the true horror came when she exposed the second layer & saw a human ear attached to a head.
Since it was mid-day & Terri ran a day care center out of their home, she immediately began to scramble, calling parents to pick their children up so she could call 911 to report what she found in her son’s closet. When she called Brian, who had taken his younger brother’s car to go to his friend’s house, she lied & told him he had to get back home so Andy could use it for his driving lessons.
Over the course of two hours, Brian spoke with officers in an interrogation room where detectives noted that he was fidgety, nervous but pleasant & affable. It didn’t take long before he matter-of-factly admitted that he was there because he murdered someone.
He explained that on the night of Saturday, February 27, 2021 there was a full moon & since he was going through a bad time, struggling with major depressive disorder, he decided to go out for a drive. As he drove under a bridge near Crosby Avenue at about 11 pm, he noticed something laying on the ground that was wrapped in a canvas. He stopped the car, put on three layers of gloves as well as a Michael Myers Halloween mask, grabbed his knife, walked up to the sleeping man, who was Warren Barnes, ripped the canvas back & began stabbing him in the neck.
Brian explained that the man began panicking & asking him, why are you doing this? Brian told him, I’ve been wanting to do this for a long f*cking time. He said that he knelt above him, straddling his body as he continued to stab him & as he was stabbing him, he was growling like an animal. While he told the detective the story, he seemed to be relishing the fact that he was able to relive the murder. In regards to the murder, Brian told the detectives, It was actually surprisingly easy. I was barely breaking a sweat.
He said that the whole ordeal lasted a minute & a half at most when he heard the man take his final breath. By that point, the man’s head was partially severed. He continued to smile & laugh while he recounted the events as if he was talking about a mundane subject like the weather.
Brian went on to say that he cut the man’s belly open so he could view his guts & laughed as he said, they’re really pink. He said that he removed Warren’s clothing & sliced his legs multiple times before he took photos of the man’s deceased & mutilated body. Despite the fact that he later deleted these horrifying images, authorities were able to recover them.
Before Terri contacted 911 about the contents of her son’s closet, Brian had been at his friend, Kylynn Like’s house. When investigators spoke with her she said that she’d known Brian since 9th grade; he always had a dark sense of humor & loved to get a reaction out of people. He offended a large percentage of the people he came across & had no issues calling others disparaging names or body shaming them.
Brian continued to go into great detail about the mutilation he performed to Warren’s body. He said he placed Warren’s head in a leftover pizza box & transferred it along with his hands to the trunk of his car. He threw parts of Warren’s body, including his arms, around the vicinity of the area under the bridge & drove home, leaving the rest of Warren’s body under the bridge. Once home, he concealed the hands in ziplock bags as well as a trash bag & placed Warren’s head in a separate bag, concealing both in the closet in his bedroom. He cleaned the knife & threw his blood-spattered clothing into the washing machine; when he murdered Warren, he wore a one piece navy jumpsuit that he purchased for a previous Halloween when he dressed up as Michael Myers.
Brian said he ultimately planned to buy a paint bucket, seal it with the head inside & throw it into a random ditch while he would discard the hands in another location.
He also proudly discussed the three rule for bodies that he came up with himself; within 3 hours rigor mortis begins, within 3 days the body begins to smell from decomposition, in three weeks the body begins to seriously decompose, in three months the body is unrecognizable & in three years, it turns into a skeleton. He said he coined this rule from his fascination for forensics & anatomy & physiology. He said he always wanted to know what it would feel like to cut someone up.
While Brian remained at the station, officers were dispatched to the area under the bridge in question where they recovered parts of Warren’s remains that included several pieces of his arm while other parts of the man’s body were missing.
Although Brian admitted that he worried about getting caught, he felt that the police didn’t really care about high risk individuals such as homeless people, prostitutes, etc which is why he specifically sought out for a victim who lived that type of life.
He admitted that he’d been thinking about murdering someone for the past 6 months to a year & his internet search history from several weeks earlier on February 12, 2021 included: How to cope with murderous thoughts, homicidal ideation, homicidal thoughts every day.
Brian said that once every two weeks, he would go out on a night drive in search of a potential victim. He compared himself to serial killer Ed Kemper who was responsible for killing ten people, including his mom & his grandparents. He said that when he saw females walking, he likened himself to Kemper as half of him wanted to take a girl home & make her feel nice while the other half wanted to see what her head looks like on a stick. He said these disturbing words with a smile & a laugh.
Several months before Warren’s murder, Terri came across a backpack that Brian was carrying around & saw that it contained duct tape, a hammer & zip ties. It eventually came to light that he assembled this kit because he considered abducting a sex worker, tying them up & torturing them, but he decided against this plan since he felt it was too risky. When he was asked if he’d ever confided in his parents about his dark thoughts, he said that he did but they were disguised as dark jokes.
Investigators located additional disturbing internet searches on Brian’s devices that were related to the unabomber & bombs as well as, how do people react to a home invasion, how do people react to being held at knifepoint & how deadly is a neck stab wound.
When investigators spoke with Brian’s parents about his background, Terri indicated that he was diagnosed with ADHD when he was five, a time when he was put on medication. While he was in middle school he began showing signs of antisocial behavior & when he began tenth grade, he started getting into a lot of trouble. Because of his frequent dark jokes & conversation topic, his classmates nicknamed him Jeffrey Dahmer. By 11th grade, school officials had a meeting with Terri & Brian Sr. about the fact that their son made other students feel unsafe so he was placed into an alternative high school.
At one point a teacher came across Brian’s notebook that was filled with disturbing entries & listed the names of serial killers & how many victims they were responsible for killing. In 2019 he was suspended for targeting a child with PTSD, when he caused the child to have a panic attack after he sidled up to her & made an unexpected loud noise, something that he knew would affect her. School administrators concluded that Brian was a potential danger to the school & at high risk for committing a violent act though they admitted that they weren’t sure how to handle him.
During this time, a doctor confirmed that not only did Brian have ADHD & autism, but he should be tested for the potential of psychosis. However, Terri was under the impression that her son was improving since he graduated high school & maintained a job at Safeway where he worked part-time as a bagger 2-4 days a week. As far as she knew, he continued to take his medication for ADHD as well as the antidepressant, Zoloft.’
Although Brian denied ever murdering a human prior to Warren, he admitted that during Halloween 2018, he killed & dismembered a neighborhood stray black cat.
When the detectives spoke to Brian about the night before his mom called 911 after she found the disturbing contents in his closet, when his car became submerged in the river, he explained that he hadn’t actually driven out there to clear his mind. After he murdered Warren Barnes, he went home & tried to sleep, but he was too worried about a hole that he saw in his gloves & feared that investigators would be able to obtain a partial print. Brian got up, changed his clothing, drove back to the bridge where he murdered Warren & placed the man’s body in the trunk of his car & drove to the Blue Heron drop off.
He backed down the boat ramp close to the river & placed Warren’s remains in the water, but when he attempted to pull away, he realized that his car was stuck & eventually slid into the river. Brian sat in the interrogation room laughing about the situation & reflected on the blood that investigators found on the back bumper of his car after it was pulled out of the water.
One day after the murder, Brian’s search history included, How to wipe data from android phone, does a river wash away evidence & how to dispose organic refuse. He also searched for various serial killers, something he was known to have a strong interest in.
Investigators asked Brian what prompted him to murder an innocent man that night & he said that he hadn’t taken his medicine & for years he had been wondering what murder would feel like. According to books he read about Ted Bundy & the Zodiac killer, they indicated that murder was the best feeling in the world. Brian said that now that he knew what murder felt like, he described it as intense, a rush of adrenaline that made his whole body shake from excitement. He said overall, he felt neutral about it; he didn’t enjoy it & he also didn’t hate it. He guessed he would be sent to prison for about fifteen years for his actions & if he could go back, he wouldn’t have done it. When he walked down for booking, he told the detective that he felt like Hannibal Lector.
In January 2022 Brian pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. During a psychological evaluation, he expressed absolutely no remorse for murdering Warren Barnes & only voiced that his situation sucked because he couldn’t see his friends, play video games or use the internet.
Two psychologists examined Brian for his insanity plea & concluded that he was not insane while a third psychologist for the defense disagreed & argued that he was experiencing a psychotic episode that rendered him insane.
A jury rejected the insanity defense & after a two week trial & two days of deliberation, they found Brian Cohee Jr. guilty on one count of first-degree murder, one count of evidence tampering & two counts of tampering with a deceased human body. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole & will spend the rest of his life at Buena Vista Correctional Complex in Colorado Springs.
During the trial, Terri expressed her sympathy for Warren Barnes’ family members & told them that what happened tears her apart. She apologized to the jury for being forced to see such horrific images during the trial & ended her statement by begging the court to show Brian mercy while she asked for better mental health care. She indicated that the odds were stacked against her son from the start.
Warren’s friends & relatives spoke at the courthouse about the pain they feel from losing their friend & that being homeless doesn’t make a person’s life less valuable & Warren was not a throw-away person.
Warren Barnes was described by his friends as an amazing man who loved to sit & read books. A bench was erected with a plaque in his honor at the location where he spent many hours reading between Out West Books & Monique’s Bridal on Main Street. He was gentle, selfless & kind; he asked for nothing from others beyond a place to sit & read. The gentle soul lost his life in a horrific way by a person who didn’t see him as a human, but as nothing more than a thing to satisfy his sadistic curiosity
Warren was one of eight siblings & his sister, Geraldine Shipp, continues to have nightmares about the way her brother lost his life. He had only called her one day earlier to wish her a happy birthday. Although he may have chosen to live outside, his life mattered; he was a man of honor & integrity & was tremendously loved by the community & his family. To those that wished him a nice day, he was known to always respond, And you also. He shared his daily Subway sandwich with the birds that gathered around his boots & he never hesitated to help anyone in need.
When Brian Cohee Jr. callously & viciously stabbed Warren to death, mutilated his body & discarded his remains into the Colorado River like a piece of trash, he incorrectly believed that because the man was homeless, no one would care & he wouldn’t be missed. But immediately, Warren was deeply missed. Passersby would no longer have the opportunity to stop & pleasantly chat with sweet Warren Barnes.
References:
- YouTube: Explore With Us: Parents discover teen son’s horrifying secret
- Wikipedia: Edmund Kemper
- The Colorado Sun: Killer of Warren Barnes, Grand Junction’s “reading man,” sentenced to life in prison
- The Daily Sentinel: A look back: Cohee trial top crime story of 2023
- Independent: Chilling moment killer confessed to storing victim’s severed head in his closet
- Western Slope Now: The people v. Brian Cohee: Sentencing hearing
- 10 Minute Murder: Warren was here
