Pharmacist Natalie Cochran was last week (January 28) sentenced to prison “for her natural life without the possibility of parole” after being found guilty of the first degree murder of her husband, according to US Court TV.
Assistant prosecuting attorney Ashley Acord told the West Virginia jury that Cochran “killed her husband Michael Cochran” to stop him discovering her “felony-level financial crime involving…hundreds of millions of dollars”.
Mr Cochran “was a minority partner in the business Tactical Solutions Group”, a Ponzi scheme for which his wife was the 51% majority owner, Acord said.
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She added that in 2018, Mr Cochran uncovered the “extent of family investors and investments” involved in the business and wanted to “be more involved and understand how everything works”.
In 2019, after a series of further investments and failed bank payments, Mr Cochran was “about to discover the truth of everything that [had] been going on”, Acord said.
Read more: “Appalling callous woman”: Pharmacy worker jailed for poisoning partner
“Her motive to kill him becomes very clear, it becomes very obvious who’s been running the company [and] that Mr Cochran has no idea about the Ponzi scheme,” she added.
“She has two choices: she can come clean [or] she can go into self-preservation, which requires that she take him out of the equation and make sure he never finds out what was happening,” Acord said.
“Indifference for human life”
In February 2019, Mr Cochran was brought to hospital after his blood glucose levels “seemingly plummeted out of nowhere”, where he “was immediately intubated and he never woke up”, Acord said.
The prosecution posited that Ms Cochran “injected [her husband] with insulin”, adding that doctors involved in the case “testified that there was no alternative reasonable explanation” for his jump in sugar levels.
“[Ms Cochran] was a diabetic counselor and a pharmacist, she knew that injecting insulin into a non-diabetic would cause harm,” Acord said.
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“She also showed a complete indifference for human life when she continued to work on contracts and make plans for bingo all while her husband lay dying in the hospital,” she added.
“She dosed Mr Cochran with insulin that he was not prescribed and that he did not need,” she said.
The jury unanimously chose to “not recommend mercy” for Ms Cochran, leaving her to spend the rest of her life in prison without parole, Court TV revealed.
Read more: Pharmacist pleads not guilty to causing death of teen by careless driving
In 2024, a pharmacy worker who drugged her partner before going on a “shopping trip fraudulently using his bank cards” was jailed.
At the time, police revealed that the victim’s brother had concerns that the 53-year-old pharmacy worker had “been poisoning him”.
And in 2023, a former pharmacy manager was jailed for life after stabbing his brother to death in a fish and chip shop.
