Two phones, one tower
The phones had been together.
Every time a text went from Kelsey’s phone to Patrick’s, or from Patrick’s back to hers, the two phones were in the same place, using the same cell towers. Investigators said the messages were sent and received off the same tower near Patrick’s ranch.
There had been no conversation. Prosecutors said that until the phone left Colorado, one man had been holding both of them.
Kelsey’s phone and Patrick’s phone even traveled together on the evening of Thanksgiving, near Cripple Creek.
And on the morning of November 25, Kelsey’s phone started moving with a different phone. Early that day, both connected to the same tower near the Colorado-Utah border. That evening, Kelsey’s phone went dark near Gooding, Idaho.
The second phone belonged to a woman from Idaho.
The nurse from Idaho
Her name was Krystal Lee Kenney. She was a nurse who lived in Hansen, Idaho, and she had known Patrick for more than a decade. They had dated in college and had an affair years later.
At first, she told investigators she didn’t even know who Kelsey Berreth was. According to the arrest affidavit, Patrick had made up a story and told her what to tell the FBI if they called.
On December 20, she got a lawyer and told investigators what she knew.
She said Patrick had asked her at least three times that fall to kill Kelsey. She didn’t do it. Then, she said, he called her to say he had a mess at Kelsey’s house and needed her to come to Colorado and clean it up.
She drove down from Idaho. On November 24, she spent hours scrubbing Kelsey’s townhome. She later called it “a horrific scene.”
Then Patrick gave her Kelsey’s phone and told her to take it back to Idaho, to throw investigators off the trail.
The text to Kelsey’s boss went out that Sunday, the day the phone was on the road to Idaho. And after she got home, Krystal said, she sent one last message from Kelsey’s phone to Patrick:
“Do you even love me?”
Then she got rid of the phone.
“No body, no crime”
On December 21, 2018, police arrested Patrick Frazee and said for the first time that they believed Kelsey was dead. He was charged with first-degree murder and with soliciting others to kill her.
In February 2019, Krystal Lee pleaded guilty to tampering with evidence, Kelsey’s phone, and agreed to testify against him.
Patrick’s trial opened in Cripple Creek that fall. Krystal Lee was the star witness.
She testified that Patrick told her how it happened. He covered Kelsey’s eyes with a sweater and had her smell scented candles, a guessing game. Then he beat her to death with a baseball bat, while their daughter was in another room of the townhome.
She said she watched him burn a plastic tote on the ranch that she believed held Kelsey’s body. Kelsey Berreth has never been found.
Other witnesses backed her up. A family friend testified that months earlier, Patrick had told him he had figured out a way to kill Kelsey and get away with it.
“No body, no crime,” prosecutor Beth Reed told the jury. “That’s what the defendant has been banking on.”
Life without parole
On November 18, 2019, after less than four hours of deliberation, the jury found Patrick Frazee guilty on all six counts.
Judge Scott Sells sentenced him on the spot to life in prison without parole, plus 156 years.
“Your actions were vicious, senseless, without reason or explanation,” the judge told him.
Patrick appealed. In December 2022, the Colorado Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction.
Krystal Lee Kenney was sentenced to three years in prison in January 2020. An appeals court later ruled the sentence too harsh, and in March 2021 she was resentenced to 18 months and released on parole.
Kelsey’s daughter now lives with Kelsey’s parents. In a letter to the court, her mother wrote that Patrick had chosen “a horrible death” for her daughter, and left a little girl to call out for her mother at night.
For three days after Thanksgiving, Kelsey’s phone told everyone she was alive and leaving. In the end, it was the phone that gave them away. It had never once been anywhere without the people hiding what happened to her.
