Advice from a Crime Writer:
Always Be Ready to Carry the Coffin
Pulitzer-prize nominee Mike Cochran found himself doing just that at Lee Harvey Oswald's funeral!
Mike spent most of his four decades with the Associated Press roving Texas, particularly West Texas, uncovering its unusual stories, interviewing its offbeat characters and reporting on its darkest crimes and deepest secrets. Putting more than two million miles into his stories, he covered the Kennedy assassination, the Oswald funeral, the Ruby trial, the University of Texas tower sniper, the Mexico City earthquake, the shuttle Challenger explosion, the Branch Davidian siege and several of the state’s high-profile murder trials.
“People tell him things after midnight that they wouldn’t confess to their priests,” the Fort Worth Star-Telegram wrote in the 1980s. “Late at night, asking questions in a smoky bar, he may just be the best reporter in Texas.”
Cochran, a native of Stamford, is a 1958 graduate and 1988 Distinguished Alum of the University of North Texas. By the late 1960s, he was traveling throughout Texas for the Associated Press, taking time out to write Texas vs. Davis, on the murder case of Fort Worth millionaire T. Cullen Davis.
His second book, And Deliver Us From Evil, contains a trilogy of true-crime stories. These include the account of the scandalized Dallas minister Walker Railey and the story of falsely accused fugitive Kenneth Miller. Claytie, released in 2008, is the authorized biography of Texas rancher-wildcatter-politico Clayton Williams Jr. His latest book, an autobiography of legendary Las Vegas gambler Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson, was released in November 2009 titled The Godfather of Poker.
Cochran’s numerous writing honors also included six Texas Headliner awards and the Associated Press Managing Editors Top Performance Award worldwide for feature writing. He is a three-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize.
