Cobra Killer

Cobra Killer

CHAPTER 1
A Murder on Midland Drive

“At first glance, this may look like just a lurid saga on the margins of a far-flung subculture. But the tabloid headline of the tale may conceal a larger truth… a reality where the participants hoped to realize their most outrageous sexual fantasies, where screen names and avatars enable endless reconstruction of selves: a fluid, identity-less existence that many millions of people have chosen as their primary model for seeking sex and love.”
—Michael Joseph Gross, Out magazine, October 2007

During third week of January 2007, Bryan Kocis boarded an airplane in San Diego for a long flight back home to Pennsylvania. He was filled with excitement and hope. It was a trip he had taken many times before over the last several years as his home-based gay pornography business began to grow. He’d found financial success in producing gay porn in the most unlikely of all places – tiny Dallas Township, Pennsylvania – and his company soon rivaled anything being produced in the porn capitol of the world: the San Fernando Valley of California. He carried with him on this return flight to Pennsylvania a signed copy of a legal settlement that he thought ended an issue that had nagged him for more than a year. He thought he was nearing the end of a protracted and bitter fight that had brought him scorn and to the brink of arrest on federal child endangerment laws.
The settlement settled a lot. But it ended nothing.
Five days later, Kocis, forty-four, was dead, his head nearly severed from his body, his body curled into a fetal position and pierced with twenty-eight separate knife wounds to the abdomen and chest. His body was charred with second and third degree burns that would render him unrecognizable. Police retrieved dental records to identify him. His life had ended on the leather sofa in his living room as his home was reduced to a smoking hull of burned up dreams.
Bryan Kocis was dead and the hunt for what had brought such unparalleled violence to Dallas Township, Pennsylvania was just beginning. The violence that took Kocis’ life would send shockwaves across the community and across the country. His murder would reveal more about Kocis than most people ever knew, and even more about an unexpected enterprise operating from a base in passive, conservative northeast Pennsylvania.
As details emerged, first neighbors, then the community and everyone would know that Bryan Kocis had built a successful gay pornography business from his modest home – an undertaking that may have contributed to his death. His secrets would unfurl for all to see, revealing the sometimes complicated life Kocis had led, and the hastily planned and executed conspiracy that cost him his life.
The long road to justice begins
There was never any question the investigation into the murder of Bryan Kocis would be a joint effort.

© All material Copyright 2011
Andrew E. Stoner – Peter A. Conway