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Idaho Nurse Cleans Up Her Lover's Bloody Crime Scene After He Brutally Kills His Fiancée
After Patrick Frazee first tried to get his girlfriend Krystal Kenney to kill his fiancée Kelsey Berreth, he eventually took matters into his hands on Thanksgiving Day of 2018.
Some people will do anything for love.
Determined to prove her devotion to her boyfriend Patrick Frazee, Krystal Lee Kenney tried to carry out not one, but three separate plots to kill his fiancée, Kelsey Berreth.
When Kenney lost her nerve and Frazee carried out the heinous murder himself on Thanksgiving Day in 2018, Kenney drove 13 hours to clean up the crime scene, scrubbing blood from the walls. She then watched as Frazee lit Berreth’s remains on fire at his Colorado ranch.
To get justice for the beloved 29-year-old flight instructor and mother, then-District Attorney Dan May admitted he “did a deal with the devil” to secure Kenney’s cooperation and put Frazee behind bars for good in a case so disturbing, it left jurors in tears, according to Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
“This one had probably more twists and turns than any case I’ve ever seen,” May said. “This one had more emotion to it than almost any case I’ve seen.”
For more from Dateline: Secrets Uncovered:
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Who was Kelsey Berreth?
Even as a child, Berreth had been fascinated by the concept of flight. By high school, she was watching crop dusters from her family farm in Moses Lake, Washington, and dreaming of one day taking flight herself.
“Kelsey was a light,” her uncle, Scott Morin, recalled. “She lit up a room. She lit up your heart.”
After graduating from high school, Berreth set out to achieve her dream, enrolling in a flight program at a local community college. Berreth not only became a pilot herself, but soon got a job working as a flight instructor so she could share her passion with others.
“I think it was exciting. She was fascinated with it,” Morin said.
In 2015, another aspect of her life seemingly began to fall in place. Berreth met Frazee, a Colorado rancher and farrier, through an online dating site. Although he lived more than 1,100 miles away in Florissant, Colorado, a romance soon bloomed and Berreth moved to Colorado, where she got a new job at a flight school there.
Not long after, the couple learned they were expecting a baby and in October of 2017, they welcomed their daughter, Kaylee.
Although Berreth was living in a condo in Woodland Park and Frazee was living at his family ranch about 20 minutes away, the couple worked together to care for their young daughter. They got engaged and made plans for the future.
But those plans came to a sudden halt.
What happened to Kelsey Berreth?
Berreth suddenly disappeared on November 22, 2018. She was last seen that Thanksgiving morning on surveillance footage at a grocery store with her young daughter.
Her mom, Cheryl Berreth, reported her daughter missing after more than a week went by without being able to contact her.
“It’s just not in her character to just take off and be gone,” a worried Cheryl insisted at the time.
Frazee told investigators he hadn’t seen his fiancée since Thanksgiving Day when he picked up their daughter. He claimed that not long after that, she called him on the phone and broke up with him, continuing to hash out details of their break up via text message in the days that followed.
On November 25 at around 5:13 p.m., Berreth’s phone pinged miles away in Gooding, Idaho, before going quiet, a surprising detail that left authorities perplexed.
Initially, authorities had to consider whether the young mom had simply gotten overwhelmed and walked away from her life, but when Berreth’s brother discovered a blood smear on the toilet in her condo, it became all too obvious that she had likely met a much darker fate.
Crime scene analysts used a blood visualizing agent in the bathroom and discovered someone had cleaned up the room, which had been covered in blood.
Who is Krystal Lee Kenney?
Investigators with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation took a close look at Frazee’s phone and found that he had recently been in contact with a woman living in Idaho, not far from where Berreth’s phone last pinged.
The woman, Krystal Lee Kenney, was a former rodeo queen who worked as a senior nurse at a local hospital and had two young children.
“We knew that she had a family, that was about it,” CBI Agent Gregg Slater recalled. “She didn’t have a criminal history or anything like that.”
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CBI Agent Jon Grusing made an initial call to Kenney, who was in Las Vegas at the time for a rodeo event with friends. Kenney first claimed she didn’t know who Berreth was and denied knowing Frazee, until Grusing pointed out that their phone records told a different story.
Then, she claimed she had made the 13-hour drive to Colorado on Thanksgiving Day to talk with Frazee about a horse they owned together, but that he told her he didn’t think it was a good time to sell the horse and she returned home.
Believing she was lying, investigators went to speak to the divorced mom of two in person at her home in Idaho. While she didn’t reveal any new details, Kenney got herself a lawyer and came to authorities three weeks after Berreth disappeared with a shocking story.
What Krystal Lee Kenney revealed about Kelsey Berreth’s death
Kenney claimed she had been having an on-again, off-again relationship with Frazee since 2006. Investigators say she believed he was her first true love and she craved his approval, but that Frazee initially didn’t reciprocate her strong feelings and the romance fizzled out.
But by 2018, the pair had reconnected and started an affair. Kenney said she initially had no idea Frazee was engaged to another woman, whom he shared a child with. When she found out, he plied her with false stories about Berreth being an alcoholic and abusive mother.
“He started telling Krystal that Kelsey was an abusive mom, that he had people watching Kelsey and that he was concerned that Kelsey was going to hurt the baby, if not worse,” Grusing said.
Authorities say that’s how Frazee convinced Kenney to agree to help him get rid of Berreth.
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The first plan was for Kenney, a nurse, to lace Berreth’s favorite Starbucks coffee drink with prescription drugs. Kenney knocked on Berreth’s door in September of 2018 pretending to be a neighbor and offering her the drink. Berreth took the drink, but must have never drank it.
When the plot failed, Frazee was enraged and instructed Kenney to return to Berreth’s townhouse with a metal pipe. He told her to use the pipe to beat Berreth in the back of the head. But after driving to the location, Kenney heard a dog barking, got spooked and left.
In a third attempt, Frazee instructed Kenney to take a baseball bat to the townhouse and attack Berreth. But once again, while sitting outside Berreth’s house waiting, she saw a police car drive by and decided to abort the plan.
“She was madly in love with Patrick and that overruled all her common sense and her judgment,” Grusing said of Kenney's willingness to attempt to carry out the horrific crime.
How was Kelsey Berreth killed?
Kenney would later testify in court that Frazee, seemingly fed up with the failed murder attempts, took it upon himself to get rid of Berreth. She testified that on that Thanksgiving, Frazee convinced Berreth to play a game where she tried to guess the scent of different candles. After tying a sweater around her eyes as a makeshift blindfold, Frazee struck his unsuspecting fiancée in the head with a bat, while their young daughter was still in the house.
A blood spatter expert would later testify in court that Frazee beat her with the bat 10-15 times.
Krystal Lee Kenney cleans up scene after Kelsey Berreth’s murder
After the brutal attack, Frazee called Kenney and demanded she come and clean up the crime scene.
“The call basically is, ‘You need to come now, you have a mess to clean up,’” Grusing said.
Kenney gathered some cleaning supplies — a coverall outfit she usually wore at the hospital to protect herself from bloodborne pathogens, booties, a hairnet, a box of gloves and some bleach — and made the 13-hour trek back to Colorado.
Once there, she headed to Berreth’s condo and stumbled on a “horrific” sight.
“When I first walked in, I saw, um, blood all over the floor,” she told investigators of her actions, as seen a chilling video. “I saw blood up the wall. Saw blood on this wall.”
Kenney gathered all the blood-splattered items she didn’t think she’d be able to clean, like Kaylee’s blood-soaked stuffed animals, in a trash bag and then set to work scrubbing the home clean. As she cleaned, she found a human tooth on the floor.
Kenney told authorities that although she agreed to help Frazee, she purposely left some blood spots behind for authorities to find later.
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After cleaning the townhome, she headed to Frazee’s ranch where she watched him burn Berreth’s body in a black plastic tote.
“I also threw in all the clothing that I was wearing, plus a pair of shoes that I had been wearing,” Kenney told investigators.
Kenney said she returned home to Idaho, taking Berreth’s phone with her. She used the phone to send text messages to Frazee and Berreth’s employer in an attempt to mislead investigators before destroying it.
Krystal Lee Kenney agrees to testify against Patrick Frazee
Kenney agreed to testify against her one-time lover as part of a deal with prosecutors that allowed her to plead guilty only to tampering with evidence.
May referred to it as doing a “deal with the devil.”
“I’m not proud of it,” he told Dateline: Secrets Uncovered. “I’m not telling you it’s justice for Krystal Lee. It’s not justice for Krystal Lee, but it got justice for Kelsey in the end.”
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A month after Berreth disappeared, Frazee was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, solicitation to commit murder and tampering with a deceased body.
His sensational trial began a year later. Kenney served as the prosecutor’s key witness as authorities also presented phone records, surveillance footage and a jailhouse snitch who testified that Frazee wrote him notes behind bars asking him to take out key witnesses from the case, including Kenney and Berreth’s mom Cheryl.
“They all need to disappear,” he wrote in one note.
Was Patrick Frazee convicted of Kelsey Berreth's murder?
It took the jury just three hours of deliberations to convict Frazee on all the charges against him. He’s currently serving out a life sentence plus 156 years behind bars.
Kenney, who was originally sentenced to three years, had her sentence reduced to 18 months in 2021. She was released from prison later that year.
Berreth's daughter Kaylee is now being raised by her maternal grandparents.
