Where is Brian Cohee now and who was his murder victim, Warren Barnes?

The convicted murderer Brian Cohee, whose gruesome crime is the subject of a new documentary, is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for killing a homeless man in 2021.

Cohee - who was just 19 years old at the time - attacked and murdered Warren Barnes as the 69-year-old slept under a bridge in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Where is Cohee serving his sentence?

According to the Colorado Department of Corrections, Cohee is an inmate at the Buena Vista Correctional Complex, a prison in Chaffee County, Colorado.

Originally known as the Colorado State Reformatory, the Buena Vista Correctional Complex was opened in 1892. A facility that houses close, medium and minimum-security prisoners, Buena Vista currently has the capacity for just over 1,300 inmates.

Cohee’s Colorado Department of Corrections profile does not specify which security level he is housed in; however, the US’s Federal Bureau of Prisons says all male inmates serving non-parolable life sentences must be locked up at the close security level.

Cohee’s mother calls 911 after finding head

Cohee, now 22, murdered and dismembered Barnes on 27 February 2021, before hiding some of the victim’s body parts in his bedroom closet at his parents’ home. His mother, Terri, alerted law enforcement to the crime when she found Barnes’ severed head inside her son’s closet and called 911.

“[Brian] has had a little bit of a fascination with the morbid,” Terri told the dispatcher as she reported her horrific discovery. “He was channelling it, I thought, into becoming a crime scene investigator. But not so much.”

Arrested on 1 March 2021, Cohee confessed to the murder. Per the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, he told police investigators that he had chosen a homeless man as his target as he believed his victim’s disappearance would attract little attention.

At his trial in early 2023, Cohee pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but failed to convince the jury: he was found guilty on all four charges levelled against him. According to KJCT8, a local ABC affiliate in Colorado, these charges were: first degree murder, two counts of tampering with a dead body, and tampering with evidence.

Who was Warren Barnes?

Barnes was a familiar figure to Grand Junction residents, the Daily Sentinel reports. The outlet notes that he was known for his “outgoing personality and his love of reading”, adding that some businesses in the city would put out a chair for Barnes so he could sit and read.

Indeed, the Colorado Sun reveals that Barnes was known in Grand Junction as ‘the reading man’. The Sun’s Nancy Lofholm recalls: “Passersby would stop to chat about what he was reading and, if they bid him, ‘have a good day,’ he invariably responded, ‘And you also.’”

In November 2021, a memorial to Barnes was erected close to Grand Junction’s Main Street. Created by the artist Tim Navin, the installation consists of a chair shaded by a tree, with a pile of books lying on the seat.

How to watch Brian Cohee documentary

Released last weekend, the documentary “Parents Discover Teen Son’s Horrifying Secret” is available to watch for free on the EXPLORE WITH US YouTube channel. The programme seeks to analyse Cohee’s case “from an educational, legal and psychological perspective”, EWS says.

Since it dropped on Sunday 24 March, the documentary has accrued nearly 10 million views.