Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At 12:05 in the afternoon on Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2018, a security camera inside the entrance of the Safeway in Woodland Park, Colorado, recorded a young woman pushing a shopping cart through the doors.
In the cart sat a baby carrier with a pink blanket. Inside it was her 1-year-old daughter.
Her name was Kelsey Berreth. She was 29. It would become the last public sighting of her.
A flight instructor in the mountains
Kelsey was a pilot. She worked as a flight instructor for Doss Aviation, teaching students to fly. She lived in a townhome in Woodland Park, a small mountain town west of Colorado Springs.
Her fiancé was Patrick Frazee, a 32-year-old rancher who lived on his family’s property in nearby Florissant. They were engaged and had a daughter together, but they did not live together.
That Thanksgiving, Kelsey bought a few groceries. Investigators later learned she had also picked up medicine for Patrick, who was feeling sick.
Patrick’s version of what happened next was simple. He told police he met Kelsey that afternoon and she left their daughter with him.
He said that was the last time he saw her.
Her phone kept talking
Over the next three days, Kelsey’s phone kept sending messages.
Texts went back and forth between her phone and Patrick’s. They talked about handing their daughter back and forth. In some of them, Kelsey seemed to want to break up.
On Sunday, November 25, her employer got a text from her phone saying she would not be coming in the following week. Patrick told police that the same day was the last time he heard from her, by text.
Then, at 5:13 that evening, her phone connected to the network one last time.
“Kelsey’s phone gave a location near Gooding, Idaho on November 25th at 5:13 p.m.,” Woodland Park Police Chief Miles De Young said later.
Gooding is hundreds of miles from Woodland Park. Kelsey had family in Idaho, but she had never told anyone she was going there, and she never showed up at any of their homes.
To anyone reading her messages, Kelsey Berreth was alive, unhappy, and on the move.
Ten days of silence
Kelsey’s mother, Cheryl, could not reach her. On December 2, ten days after Thanksgiving, she asked Woodland Park police to check on her daughter.
Officers went into the townhome. Kelsey wasn’t there. Almost everything she owned was. Her purse was the only thing police said was missing. Both of her cars were still in Colorado.
“She’s not the kind that runs off,” Cheryl Berreth said. “This is completely out of character.”
On December 11, police released the Safeway video to the public and asked for help. At that point, Chief De Young would only call it a missing persons case. Asked about Patrick, he said he was “the father of Kelsey’s daughter and we’re going to leave it at that.”
Three days later, investigators served a search warrant on Patrick’s ranch in Florissant.
The camera on her door
Detectives were also working through the electronic trail that Thanksgiving had left behind.
Kelsey had a security camera at her townhome. At 1:23 p.m. on Thanksgiving, about an hour after she left Safeway, it recorded Patrick Frazee at her door.
That didn’t fit the story of a quick handoff. Neither did the cell tower records, which placed Patrick’s phone at the tower serving Kelsey’s neighborhood from about 1 p.m. to 4:30 that afternoon.
Then the FBI and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation laid the records of the two phones, Kelsey’s and Patrick’s, side by side, and checked where each one had been every time they “talked” over that long weekend.
The answer explained every message Kelsey had supposedly sent since Thanksgiving.
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