On October 18th, Frazee entered the courtroom for a pretrial conference. Defense wanted a continuance. The judge wants this trial to start on time, which is on the 28th. The judge also is talking about putting a full gag order.
This week, a judge denied prosecutors to air accusations at trial that Frazee bludgeoned a cow sometime before investigators say he beat his Kelsey to death.
"She had her wings down here and she was an earthly angel … and now she'll have real angel wings, heavenly angel wings."
-Ashley Cogburn
Kelsey loved her God, she loved her family and friends and she loved her job as a flight instructor. She was gorgeous and very put together. She was raised on a hay farm and very much a tomboy. She wasn't afraid to challenge the typical boundaries.
After Kelsey was reported missing police talked to Frazee. He told them that the day before Thanksgiving, Kelsey said she wanted to end their relationship. They wanted to split custody. Patrick Frazee told police he and Kelsey met to exchange the baby on Thanksgiving Day. He also returned Kelsey's belongings.
Fifteen minutes later a neighbor's security camera captures an image of Frazee and Kelsey with a baby carrier in front of Kelsey's door. But then, according to authorities, around 3:30 p.m., that same security camera captures an image of "an individual that matches the physical description of Frazee at Berreth's residence."
Police searched Kelsey's home but turned up no signs of foul play. Then Kelsey's mother, Cheryl, and Cheryl's son went to the house to check it out. There had been a mat in the bathroom and they noticed it was gone. They also noticed that the refrigerator looked like it had been wiped down recently. They went in the bathroom and noticed blood on the base of the toilet.
Cheryl alerted investigators who returned to the house. This time they used chemicals to detect the presence of blood. They found trace amounts of blood everywhere in the bathroom. Later. DNA results showed it was Kelsey's. Some of her blood was mixed with unknown female and male DNA. The male DNA did not belong to Frazee.
Phone records also showed that three days after Thanksgiving, while Frazee's cell stayed near his ranch, Kelsey's phone was on the move, heading west out of Colorado.
Krystal and Frazee met after high school. Then, eight months before Kelsey disappeared, Krystal and Frazee's relationship heated up.
Two months before Kelsey went missing, Krystal drove 12 hours from Idaho to a Starbucks near Kelsey's home in Colorado. She gets the drink and takes it to Kelsey's house,but couldn't poison it. Krystal knocked on the door and when Kelsey answered Krystal made up a story about a lost dog and gave Kelsey the coffee.
Phone records show Frazee called Krystal in Idaho on Thanksgiving Day and told her, "You need to get out here now, you got a mess to clean up." And to be on the lookout for a tooth while cleaning up. She told Frazee that she would be out there a few days.
Krystal is at home and she will be sentenced after Patrick Frazee's trial. If her story doesn't hold up, that plea deal she got from prosecutors is off the table and could be charged with a much more serious crime.
Patrick Frazee caught Kelsey's eye on a dating website in 2016. He was, like, a country boy and that's what she was used to. They started a long-distance relationship. Patrick Frazee lived on a 35-acre ranch in rural Florrisant, Colorado, with his mother. There he trained cattle dogs, shoed horses and groomed donkeys.
Eventually Kelsey moved to Colorado from Washington State to be closer to Frazee. They were expecting a child were engaged. After their daughter Kaylee was born in October 2017, the couple still didn't live together but shared parenting duties. He never came to see her, but she would go back and be with him on her days off. Kelsey was struggling to balance the baby, her job and a long commute. Her relationship with Frazee seemed strained. Frazee was emotionally abusive to Kelsey.
Kelsey was last seen grocery store shopping with her baby on Thanksgiving Day, 2018. Her mother reported her missing after she couldn't reach her for days.
Police began to suspect Frazee. If she wanted to end things with Frazee, why was she was shopping the next day for the family dinner?
Kelsey had also sent Frazee this text message:
"I bought some sweet potatoes in case you wanted sweet potato casserole ..."
Kelsey also never mentioned to her mother that her and Frazee split up when she spoke to her Thanksgiving morning.
Another suspicious thing is that Frazee claims that exchange of their daughter happened outside Kelsey's home, but he's never said when. Shortly after 1:15 p.m. he is seen on Walmart surveillance with a baby carrier.
Then, investigators found important evidence in Kelsey's driveway near her car. They also brought cadaver dogs and they found human decomposition.
Authorities looked at Kelsey's cellphone records, which confirmed that Frazee was their man.
Frazee told authorities he drove their daughter Kaylee to his ranch for Thanksgiving dinner. He said Kelsey wasn't with them, but investigators discovered that her cell phone was. It pinged off every tower that his did as his did.
Investigators believe that Frazee made around 19 messages from Kelsey's phone pretending to be her texting his phone.
While it was on the move. there was a text from Kelsey's phone to her supervisor at Doss Aviation saying … "I won't be at work."
The next text from Kelsey's phone read: "Do you even love me?" By this time, Kelsey's phone pinged near Gooding, Idaho.
The next text from Kelsey's phone read: "Do you even love me?" By this time, Kelsey's phone pinged near Gooding, Idaho.
During this time, phone records show that Patrick Frazee was in touch with Krystal Kenney Lee. Krystal was a nurse and avid horsewoman who grew up in Idaho. Authorities believed that it was Krystal who traveled to Idaho with Kelsey's phone. When the FBI made their initial call to Krystal she said she had no idea who Kelsey Berreth was. She also denied knowing Patrick Frazee. Krystal did end up changing her story and admitted to knowing Frazee. She claimed that they didn't have a personal relationship and that she just looked at his horses a few times. The police found out that she was lying yet again.
A month into Kelsey's disappearance, a friend of Krystal's called the FBI and told them about a conversation that they had with Krystal a month before Kelsey disappeared. In the conversation, Krystal had confided in her friend that Frazee wanted her to kill his "baby mamma". Krystal told her friend that Frazee had told her it was because she wanted to take him back to court to get custody of the baby … and he was in fear that she was going to harm the baby.
Investigators found no proof Kelsey had harmed her daughter. They did find evidence that Frazee had planned to challenge Kelsey for custody and believe that may have been his motive for murder.
Krystal began to tell the events leading up to Kelsey's demise. She claimed Frazee tried to get her to kill Kelsey three different times. The first attempt was to get Kelsey's favorite drink from Starbucks, a Caramel Macchiato, and poison it with a lethal dose of Ambien and Valium.
After the tip the FBI received from Krystal's friend, the FBI went back and talked to Krystal again. Krystal was ready to come clean, but she wanted a deal first. In exchange for her testimony against Frazee, she agreed to plead guilty to evidence tampering. She admitted to getting rid of the gun, to tossing Kelsey's keys in a canyon and destroying her phone. Doing this, Krystal would only face a maximum sentence of three years in prison.
Two months before Kelsey went missing, Krystal drove 12 hours from Idaho to a Starbucks near Kelsey's home in Colorado. She gets the drink and takes it to Kelsey's house,but couldn't poison it. Krystal knocked on the door and when Kelsey answered Krystal made up a story about a lost dog and gave Kelsey the coffee.
When Frazee found out that Krystal didn't poison the coffee, he was furious and came up with another plan. He told Krystal that he had metal pipe that he'd leave outside his property that she could come pick up. He wanted Krystal to go wait for Kelsey at her town home and hit her on the back of the head. Krystal said that she drove to Kelsey's house with that metal pipe, but didn't attack her and drove back to Idaho.
A week later Frazee called with a new murder plan. And once again, Lee drove from Idaho to Kelsey's Colorado townhouse. This time she waited for Kelsey outside her home with an aluminum baseball bat. Just like her earlier attempts, she says she chickened out.
Two days later Krystal traveled to Frazee's ranch to pick up a set of Kelsey's keys he left for her outside. Then she drove to Kelsey's home with cleaning supplies, bleach, hair nets, gloves and trash bags. When Krystal opened the door there was blood everywhere. Every inch of the town home was covered in blood. Krystal then spent four hours cleaning up the horrific scene. There was some stuff she couldn't get clean, so she loaded the items up in trash bags and stuffed them in her car. She also found the tooth, that she was supposed to be the lookout for, along with a bloody sweater. She put them both in a trash bag as well.
After cleaning the murder scene, Krystal went to sonic and ordered a burger before meeting up with Frazee. Frazee then told Krystal had invited Kelsey to play a game with candles. He had took a sweater from Kelsey's room and blindfolded her with it. He had candles sitting out in front of Kelsey and told Kelsey to guess the scent of each candle. While baby Kaylee was in another room, he took a baseball bat and went to swinging. He put her body in a black tote.
Krystal said that after Frazee told her the horrific details, that she watched as he doused the black tote in gasoline and burned it. Krystal also told investigators that she helped Frazee cover up his sinister act in part because she loved him. She was also terrified of him and he had threatened her and her own daughter. Krystal then took investigators to Kelsey's home and pointed out where she claims she intentionally left blood for them to find.
One month after Kelsey went missing, Frazee was arrested on first-degree murder charges. Two months after his arrest, authorities searched a landfill for Kelsey's remains. After weeks of searching, they didn't find a thing. They did however, find a piece of a tooth when they searched Frazee's ranch. They also found residue of an accelerant.
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