TERRI Cohee’s voice trembled as she spoke on the phone to the 911 emergency operator.
“I found something in my son’s closet, wrapped in a plastic bag,” she said. “I think it’s a human head.”
When cops arrived, the horrified Colorado mum told them “it’s in the sink” – pointing to where she had moved the gruesome find and placed a towel over it.
Just the day before, Terri and her husband had been out late at night when their son, Brian Cohee Jr, had an accident in his car and half-submerged it in a river.
That night something that looked like blood had been spotted dripping down the back of their 19-year-old son’s car’s bumper, which had been dismissed as having come from a possible cut. Now, after making the grizzly discovery in their son’s room, they knew the sickening truth.
The morning of March 1, 2021, a 69-year-old homeless man named Warren Barnes – affectionately known as “reading man” because of his love of books – had been reported missing to the local police.
That same day they would find out exactly what happened to him when they went to the Cohee’s house to respond to Terri’s distressed call.
Calmly standing there on the driveway was Brian, clearly visible on the visiting police officer’s bodycam. And it turned out escape or denial were the last things on his mind.
The cop said his parents had some concerns and asked him what they would be. His response was cold and matter-of-fact.
“A human head and hands,” he said.
They asked if he was being honest, and if so who they were from. “That fella who went missing recently,” was his reply.
“I murdered him. [With] a knife. I’ve always wondered what murder felt like”.
Behind him in their front yard, his mum, Terri, wailed in distress.
But despite his chilling confession, where the rest of Warren’s remains were still a mystery – that is until police went to the area underneath the highway bridge that Brian told them to look.
“He’s telling the truth,” said one of them. “Why’s that?” asked their colleague.
“Because there’s an arm.”
Searching the area under the bridge, they quickly found another arm, and what seemed to be a leg.
Back at the house, Brian was so calm that police didn’t feel the need to put him in handcuffs – nor did they have to when they took him into the police station for questioning.
In separate rooms, his mum Terri and dad Brian Sr also both spoke to cops. Still in tears, she was barely able to get the words out of her mouth as she told them about his past.
“The doctor said Brian was ADHD and autistic. They said there could be potential psychosis,” she said.
“He got suspended a few times. In school there was this girl who got upset at loud noises and, one day, he surprised her in a hall and clapped really loudly. We told him, ‘You knew that would upset her and you did it anyway.”
She added that he would sometimes have a morbid sense of humour – but then again, his dad would say, so did Stephen King.
But what had happened that day was a huge shock. They had never known Brian to do anything which was physically violent.
Brian Sr told cops that his son was suicidal about three years before that.
Aside from that, he said, he had never been in a fight in his life, and had never been physical before.
“But something changed him,” he said. “Something happened where he just became super paranoid.”
He added: “Our lives are totally over. I’ve got a feeling Grand Junction’s no longer going to be my hometown.”
But the difference between Brian’s parents, in shock at what had happened, and Brian, sitting smiling in the interview room, could not have been more marked.
And he could barely hold back a grin when asked to go through what exactly happened that night.
“I was driving one night. I saw a strange shape by the railway tracks and it revealed itself to be a homeless person sleeping,” he said.
“So I stabbed him to death, and decapitated his head and hands and arms.”
Brian then reveals he’d put the body parts in his car and driven to the river, where he wanted to dispose of them – but he had driven too far in, which is why it ended up half submerged and needed to be recovered.
But the 19-year-old also wasn’t finished with his description of exactly how he’d killed Warren – and decided he wanted to act it out.
“I killed him just after eleven. I grabbed a knife. I put on three layers of gloves.
“I pulled back the canvas and I stabbed the neck. He was panicking at first in his old man voice, saying, ‘What are you doing! What are you going!’”
As he recounted this to the investigator, he leant back in his chair and grinned.
“I just kept stabbing his neck,” he said, before he paused and asked if he could do a demonstration, which the officer said yes to.
“I was straddled on top of him, like this, and he couldn’t fight back,” he said. It was actually surprisingly easy. I was barely breaking a sweat.
“And during it I was growling, and making animalistic noises. I was so excited, so rushed up on adrenaline.
“He said, ‘Why are you doing this.’ I said I’ve been waiting to do this a long f***ing time.
“The whole ordeal lasted about a minute. And when I finished stabbing him, he took his last breath, a grunt, and his head was halfway cut off in stabs.
“After I killed him, I couldn’t stop saying, ‘Stinky, dirty, stinky.’
“I stripped his clothes. I cut open his belly to see his guts. Then I cut off his head. I gave him a Glasgow smile. A joker smile,” he said, gesturing with his hands on his face.
“I destroyed his eyes by stabbing them. And then I cut off his hands,” he added, before going into even more detail about how he mutilated the body and cut off the limbs.
“I took the head, put it into a leftover pizza box,” he said, and added he chucked the body into the river. God knows where he is now,” he said almost with a laugh.
He added to the investigator: “I’m going to jail for 20, probably.”
But he was very wrong in his estimate.
On February 6th, 2023, almost two years to the date after he murdered Warren, Brian was sentenced to life in prison.
A documentary including footage of the chilling interrogation has been going viral since it was aired on Documentary+ – with many finding the interview too harrowing to watch.
One poster called it: “So messed up and deeply disturbing.”
Another added: “I’ve seen so many true crime cases this one is too much. There are sicker people out there but the way he describes it will forever make it the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”