Vietnam Veteran Begged to Be Killed, Two Friends Say

Death was Frederick Hughes’ favorite topic lately, from the makeshift homeless camp where he slept in a chicken coop to the bars where he drank away what little he earned from construction.

Coughing up blood from emphysema, racked with pain from cirrhosis of the liver, the 48-year-old Vietnam veteran talked about how nice it would be to die. He even begged his friends to kill him, hatching the plan as they drank at a country-western bar.

So one of his friends shot him and another burned and buried the corpse. They called it a mercy killing. Police disagree.

James Wise, 39, is charged with second-degree murder and Matthew Cochrain, 39, as an accessory after the fact. Both are being held at the Orange County Jail.

Hughes talked about dying almost every day and often coughed up blood, Cochrain said by telephone from the jail. “The emphysema was terrible. He coughed constantly,” said Cochrain, who had known Hughes about three months. “He was my friend.”

On the night of the killing, the three had gathered at the Tiffany Inn to drink, as they had for the previous three weeks. “They would pretty much spend what they earned that day,” said Mark Norton, the bar’s owner.

As they drank and ate hamburgers with Wise and Wise’s girlfriend, Mary Black, Cochrain said, Hughes told his friends he was suffering intense pain and asked Cochrain to kill him.

“I said no, he would have to do it by himself,” Cochrain said. “When he realized I wasn’t going to do it, he got Jim to do it.”

Police corroborated Cochrain’s version of events that night. Wise refused to be interviewed. Black could not be reached.

Cochrain said Hughes got a semiautomatic handgun from Black, who had been holding the weapon for him. Wise and Hughes staggered out of the bar, and Wise returned by himself about 45 minutes later.

“I saw the two of them coming down the path,” said Mike Shriver, who lives in the homeless camp where Hughes’ body was found, about a quarter-mile from the bar. “Five minutes later, I heard a pop.”

Wise returned to the bar, Cochrain said, and told him what he had done. Cochrain didn’t believe him and went to see the body himself.

“[Hughes] had told me to burn him and bury him if he ever died or committed suicide,” Cochrain said. So that’s what Cochrain did.

Hughes’ friends at the homeless camp--where the man they believed originally came from South Carolina lived under a plastic tarp, with beer bottles and old furniture scattered about--said that’s the way the ex-Marine would have liked to be buried.

“It was a ‘Nam funeral,” said a homeless man who would only give his nickname, “Diamond.” “They burned the bodies so the enemy couldn’t mutilate the bodies.”

Whatever the motives, it is still considered murder, said Cmdr. Steve Jones, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.

A third of homeless American men seeking shelter are veterans, mostly from the Korean, Vietnam or Persian Gulf conflicts, according to a study released last November by the International Union of Gospel Missions.

The group’s executive director, Stephen Burger, said Vietnam veterans continue to fall through the cracks of social programs, often after multiple divorces and struggles with alcohol and drugs.

Virtually nothing is known of Hughes’ life. Cochrain said he turned himself in because he wanted Hughes to have a proper funeral. “I don’t care what they do to me. I can sleep better now,” he said. “He was my friend.”