Harold – or as his friends know him, ‘Sandy’ – Cohen disappeared on July 5, 1986.
The Covington business owner served on Covington’s Board of Commissioners from 1982 to 1985.
Less than a week after his disappearance, Cohen’s friends found his body near an Amtrak station in Cincinnati’s Lower Price Hill neighborhood.
Now, nearly 40 years later, two independent filmmakers are making sure Cohen’s story isn’t forgotten.
“We’re two busy guys who are doing this passion project in our free time, and it’s becoming more of a huge thing,” said Paul Nocchi, one of the filmmakers. “And … we don’t want anybody to forget this story, basically.”
Nocchi and the other filmmaker, Louie Meisner, thus started a campaign to raise money for their documentary project, titled “Our Friend Sandy.” The pair has started a website for the project as well as a crowdfunding campaign, which has raised about $3,500 as of the publication of this article. The goal is to have the project completed by the fortieth anniversary of Cohen’s death next year
Nocchi and Louie Meisner went to college together. Louie Meisner is the son of David Meisner, one of Cohen’s good friends and one of the men who found his body.
“I loved him like a brother,” David Meisner said in a trailer for the documentary, which you can view below.
“Growing up, I was familiar with this area and all of our family friends,” Louie Meisner told LINK nky. “They were like uncles to us; I was familiar with this entire community of people, but he’d always mention his friend Sandy, and essentially, all I knew was that he had a friend that was murdered, and that was pretty much it.”
Many of the people who lived through Cohen’s disappearance and death are getting older, both Nocchi and Louie Meisner said, so now was the time to preserve his story for the future while people who could give a first-hand account of the events were still around.
“This is kind of like the last shot that anybody will have to talk to the people who were there,” Louie Meisner said.
To that end, he encouraged “anybody out there who knows anything about this story that isn’t public, or if anybody knows anything else about this story” to contact him (money helps, too).
Who was Sandy Cohen?
A Jewish and closeted gay man originally from Mississippi, Cohen moved to Covington in 1978, eventually setting up a printing firm on Madison Avenue. He served two terms on the commission, the latter of which ended on the last day of 1985.
During his time in office, he was a proponent of building out Covington’s neighborhoods and stayed active in community life, even when out of office. News reports from the time indicate that he wanted to focus more on his business, so he decided not to run for a third term.
Cohen disappeared on July 5, 1986, a Saturday. His friends and loved ones noticed that he had not shown up to any of his weekend appointments and didn’t come to work on the following Monday, which was unusual. He was officially reported missing on July 8, a Tuesday.
Louie Meisner said “my father and his friends did everything humanly possible to find him,” even consulting a psychic, Patricia Mischell, who had purportedly helped the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department in earlier investigations. The words she gave to Cohen’s friends were admittedly cryptic: “tall grass, railroad tracks and water.”
Accounts differ – in fact, Louie and Nocchi noted that teasing out all of the discrepancies from first-hand accounts has been a huge part of putting the film together – but after searching at several sites throughout the tri-state, Cohen’s friends finally located his body under a couch near some railroad tracks on July 10. His body showed signs of being beaten.
“I think maybe a quarter mile away, half a mile away, the police were staking out Sandy’s car that was dumped by the river,” Louie Meisner said. “This is all happening simultaneously, and the police were doing that at the same time because they’re thinking ‘Is one of the criminals is going to come back and torch it get rid of the evidence?'”
One of them did – Louise Meisner wasn’t sure which one – but in the course of torching the car, they accidentally set themselves on fire, according to David Meisner. Two men were later charged with murder: Gregory Moore and James Messmer. Both were 22-year-old men from Cincinnati.
One account has one of the murderers holding a tire iron against Cohen’s throat, eventually crushing it, but this doesn’t account for the other bludgeoning wounds found on Cohen’s body: The coroner’s report, Louie Meisner said, put the number of strikes to Cohen’s head at 16 (LINK nky has not read the report).
“We do have information about the trials, which is troubling because the defense team, in short, they were trying to twist the story into somehow saying that this is accidental because they were involved in some deviant behavior,” Louie Meisner said, “because Sandy was gay.”
In other words, the defense attorneys argued the men were engaging in some consensual act that went wrong, but given the state of Cohen’s body, Louie Meisner doesn’t find this convincing. Although he doesn’t believe the murder was premeditated, he believes other explanations could also be likely, such as a robbery, but figuring out precisely what happened and why the men acted the way they did is one of the many lines of inquiry the filmmakers hope to pursue.
Messmer will be eligible for parole in May 2029, at which point the filmmakers hope to interview him. Louie Meisner said they’re still tracking down Moore.
“These things are closed, like, people are in jail,” Louie Meisner said. “But there’s so much more that happened and that is left unresolved. And if I don’t do that, if I’m not the one to clear it up, I don’t think anyone ever will.”
You can learn more about the documentary, including how to contribute to its fundraising campaign, how to follow its progress and how to contact the film makers to share any information you have about Sandy Cohen at ourfriendsandy.com. You can also contact the film makers at ourfriendsandydoc.@gmail.com.