Anatomy of Murder - Vanished - Part 2 (Kelsey Berreth)

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

Police start to get answers about what happened to Kelsey, the young Colorado mom that went missing before Thanksgiving. The truth is worse than any of them imagined.For episode information and photos, please visit https://anatomyofmurder.com/Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

Previously on Anatomy of Murder. told us to come out of her mouth. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anasiga Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder. A quick reminder, this is our second episode in a two-part series. If you haven't yet, go back and listen to part one. Kelsey Barrett was a 29-year-old mother and pilot who had moved to Colorado to be with her fiance, Patrick Frazee. On November 22nd of 2018, she had returned to her condo with groceries and plans to cook a Thanksgiving dinner

for Patrick and their young daughter. But no one had seen or heard from her since. Trace amounts of blood in Kelsey's condo had investigators fearing the worst. It really didn't make any sense for her to disappear like that, short of foul play. A big break in the case came when investigators used Patrick's phone records to track down an Idaho nurse named Crystal Lee, who made a shocking confession. She not only knows where Kelsey is, she knows who killed her. I think everybody's jaws dropped when she tells us that, yes, Patrick killed Kelsey. Not only that he killed her, how he killed her, what he did with her remains afterwards, and that he had tried to get Crystal to kill Kelsey on three other occasions.

According to Crystal Lee, Kelsey had definitely not run off, as Frazee told her family and police. She had been beaten to death in her own home, a cold-blooded murder that was months in the making. You know, I've been a homicide prosecutor for years, and I've dealt with domestic violence homicides. I thought what had happened was probably some sort of argument, and then he gets angry and he may have strangled her.

So I thought maybe he shot her, something. That's not at all what we find. He's been planning this for months. In an interview room with Colorado investigators, Crystal Lee admitted that she and Patrick Frazee had been involved in an on-again, off-again romantic relationship since college. And during that time, Frazee had gone to great lengths to paint his fiancée, Kelsey, as an unstable and unfit mother. He even went so far as to claim that Kelsey had been abusive to their daughter, which after exhaustive interviews with Kelsey's mother, her brother, her friends, her coworkers,

all of them, investigators knew were all lies. By all accounts, Kelsey was a gentle and loving mother, managing a career while raising her child with little help from Frazee. But even as Frazee carried on these two relationships simultaneously and kept Crystal a secret from Kelsey, Frazee, though, did seem to have Crystal under his spell. She knows what buttons to push with Crystal, and he is a master manipulator of everyone around him.

He tells Crystal that Kelsey is abusive, that she is an alcoholic, she's a drug addict, that the baby is in danger, and that if she, Crystal, doesn't do something about it, that the baby's going to be harmed, killed, something terrible is going to happen to the baby. And now it's on Crystal to somehow solve this problem for him. Jennifer was there listening through the glass of the interview room as Crystal recounted how Patrick had first broached the subject of killing Kelsey. So in his words, she would no longer be a problem. First, it starts with what we have referred to as the coffee incident.

Patrick says, well, just put some poison in her coffee. She likes to drink caramel macchiatos. It's like her favorite drink. So just put some poison in that or put something in it, and then she'll drink it, and then she'll just go to sleep and never wake up. And according to Lee, she agreed to participate in his sick plan. In September of 2018, she traveled from her home in Idaho all the way to Kelsey's home in Woodley Park.

And then she knocked on the door. She develops, I would describe it as kind of a ruse. Goes to Kelsey's door and says to her, thank you for putting my dogs back in. I just brought over this coffee to say thank you. But according to Crystal, she couldn't actually go through with it. She tells us that she didn't put anything in the coffee because she was there really more to size up Kelsey and to really see, is this person who Patrick says she is? Patrick is furious with Crystal that this didn't work.

Crystal went on to say that Patrick then decided to take an even more direct and decidedly more brutal approach. There's two incidences, one where he asks her to bring a baseball bat with her and another incident where he's going to leave a pipe for her at the front gate to his property. When she comes back with the bat, he tells her just to get to swinging. You know, Anastigua, what I'm hearing here

is that she's setting up some type of theory that he may be controlling her and that he made all of these suggestions and she was just going to go through the motions, but when it actually came down to it, she just couldn't do it. Claiming also, perhaps, she feared him. And something I would add to it, be a valuable piece of information, damaging testimony, if she were agreeing to testify to everything that she knows. And it's interesting because she is laying out the facts that presumably investigators would at some point uncover, yet giving her own spin, you know, her best foot forward. Yes, I did these

things, but I didn't put the poison in the coffee. I wasn't actually going to carry through with it. Is that true or not? We don't know. But what is clear is that she never actually renounced. And again, I'm going down the legal rabbit hole just to give you that word, because unless you actually make it clear that you are no longer part of the plan and have left the situation or do something else to extricate yourself from it, well, then it's not going to fly. But remember, she's there with this queen for a day, as we talked about in the last episode, which means that she is there to lay it all out in truth, including any criminal culpability that she may have. And it's up to prosecutors to then decide if truthful, if her testimony is worthy of them going forward with a cooperation agreement

to secure her testimony. But certainly what we hear right now, she is laying out things that they have never heard before. So incredibly, Lee again traveled to Colorado with a plan to murder her romantic rival. But once again, she lost her nerve, or perhaps regained whatever sense and scrap of humanity that she had left. And it's at this point that Crystal is like, I can't do this. This is crazy. This isn't going to happen. I'm not doing this. And tells him as much.

But she made zero effort to stop him. She never called the police. She never warned Kelsey in any way. Knowing that Kelsey's life was in true danger, Crystal Lee did exactly nothing. And every time Patrick Frazee again tried to convince Crystal to do his bidding, he always used the baby and the story about purportedly terrible things being done to her to try and convince Crystal to act. He's like, well, if something happens to the baby, this is your fault. Blood is on your hands. Blood on her hands. She had no idea just how accurate a statement like that would become. Because on November 22nd, 2018, Crystal said she was having Thanksgiving dinner with her family in Gooding, Idaho,

when she received a notification of a missed call from Frazee. And that's the call that we see in Patrick's phone records. She thinks maybe it's just a regular Happy Thanksgiving type of phone call. When they do talk later, it is far from a Happy Thanksgiving phone call. It is, there's a mess here for you to clean up. You need to get out here right away and you need to clean this up. You know, and this is the part we both still have a hard time understanding. Even after knowing Frazee's plan to kill his fiance and now hearing that he had accomplished his goal, Lee agreed to borrow a friend's car, drive to Colorado and help him get away with murder. He tells her that the keys to Kelsey's condo will be at his gate for her to pick up. She picks up the keys, goes to Kelsey's condo,

walks into the condo and finds a horrific, bloody scene. She said there's blood everywhere. There's blood pooling on the floor. There's blood up the walls. There's blood on furniture. There's blood everywhere. It's 11.15, again on the 21st of December 2018. We're inside Kelsey's apartment with Crystal. Her attorney's with us.

So, when you came in, what did you see? When I first walked in, I saw blood all over the floor. I saw blood on the wall. I saw blood on this wall. That is the voice of Crystal Lee, who accompanied investigators to the crime scene to describe exactly what she saw when she first entered Kelsey's condo. There was a lot of blood. So there was blood on the floor, all over the

floor. She described how Kelsey's blood was visible on the walls, the floor, the furniture, the curtains, and what seemed like every visible surface. The violence and rage of her murder would have been on full display. But rather than flee or call the police, Crystal put on the painter's coveralls and took out the various products that she had brought with her from her home in Idaho and she got to work. Scrubbing, trying to remove all traces of blood,

the evidence from the condo. She brings all of the cleaning items with her from Idaho. Coverings for her feet. She brings in almost a full outfit for herself. She brings cleaning items, bleach. She also brings trash bags with her. So the items she can't clean that have blood on them, She packs up into trash bags. The items she can clean, she does. Again, here's the actual audio from the video recorded of Lee speaking with detectives at the crime scene. You put your stuff on, and what did you start pulling up first? I started picking up things that were blood splattered

that I would have a hard time getting bled out. I worked from that side all the way around, did the upstairs, and then I did the bathroom. She goes on to point out each and every place she found blood. Places that she had cleaned so thoroughly that none of it had been discovered by police in their initial search of Kelsey's home. There was blood on the front of the dishwasher. There was blood on the front of the stove. There was that cinnamon roll pan

had blood on the tin foil on top of it. There was blood on top of the coffee maker. Just bloody footprints all up there. Lee also goes on to explain that Frazee had also instructed her to find and dispose of one specific piece of evidence that he had left behind. He tells her that he thinks there may be a tooth in the condo. Crystal says she does find a tooth. Into the trash bag went the bloody blankets, towels, the cleaning supplies. But according to Lee, she purposely left something behind, what she hoped would be a breadcrumb for police. She also tells law enforcement that she left behind blood for

them to find. In the interview, you told us that you had left blood spots. Can you show me where you left those? She did describe leaving blood behind on the fireplace and on the baby gate. She says it now because she's cooperating and that she wanted to cooperate at that very moment. She knew that it would come back to her and she would want to point out that she made an overt act in that crime scene to be able to lead police to a killer.

But she also could have been in a situation where she missed it in the cleanup and now has to explain it. What's your thoughts? I think it's an interesting point that you're bringing up. I don't know what she actually stands to gain by making that up, right? Because she's already admitting to her culpability in helping clean up evidence of this murder. And that is in and of itself a felony.

So she's already admitted that. So because she was a little helpful to police, well, look, she obviously, remember, she lied to the FBI when they first asked if she even knew Frazee. So I don't know. I honestly look at this as a woman who was in it part and parcel with Frazee, at least in some aspects, but maybe did, whether it was just like guilt or maybe to get out from under his thumb at some point that she purposely left those things behind. Again, it could go either way, but I don't think I took that leap in my mind. But again, we can't really get into hers. Right. And in addition to the baby gate, there was a blood smear on the toilet, which had been discovered by Kelsey's

brother and had been the catalyst for initiating this homicide investigation. Then Lee loaded several trash bags into her borrowed car and texted Patrick that she was ready to see the horse, which was their prearranged code for discussing Kelsey's murder. She then drives back to Patrick's property in Florissant. And that's when Patrick tells her more details about what happened and what he did. OK, Scott, the elephant in the room, which is really there for us all to see. Why would she agree to do any of this? And all I picture, like when I'm thinking about it, is like he's this puppet master and she is the puppet on a string.

You know, relationships make certain people do crazy things. You know, she wanted to keep him. Who knows what her own personality was, but that she obviously had some sort of feelings for him that she was willing to do his bidding to try to keep him. Yeah, I totally agree. She felt like this was, in fact, a way to clear a path for her and Patrick to be together. I mean, that's what was standing in her way, which was his fiancée, Kelsey, who was our victim in this case. So, in a sense, doing this and agreeing to this is basically clearing the path for them to have this relationship that maybe in her mind she believed they were going to have. And while I do think that it seems plausible, at least up to here, everything she's saying, you know, the things she didn't, didn't do, I don't necessarily buy into some of her explanations.

And I do think that goes towards human nature. Like now, at this point, when she's caught, she sees how despicable, you know, being part and parcel of this is. So she's still trying to put her best foot forward. You know, she goes on, as you remember, to say that she was so shocked by the extent of blood that her motivation to clean was in part because she didn't want Kelsey's family to see or know just how brutally their daughter, friend, loved one had been murdered. I mean, just stop. You know, that is just a ridiculous claim. Of course, you would then call police or, you know, do something else to try to help. You wouldn't clean up so that they wouldn't be faced with the blood.

That, to me, just goes towards alternate explanations for really being willing to help Frazee out. I think that she is selling the remorse theory, which I'm not buying. So after Crystal Lee packed up the car with the horrifying evidence of this murder, she drove the 20 miles to the Frazee family ranch with just one pit stop along the way. It takes a long time for her to clean it up. So she describes then getting something to drink at Sonic because her throat is so dry.

I think it's a weird thing to do after you clean a horrific crime scene that you would go to a fast food restaurant and purchase food. But she did. And then when she finally met up with Patrick, it was then that he coldly recounted just how he lured Kelsey to her death. He tells Crystal that on Thanksgiving morning, after he comes back to her condo from the bank and from Walmart, he asked her to guess the scent of candles. So he blindfolds Kelsey, and as she's leaning over to smell candles, he hits her repeatedly with a baseball bat. He even described how at one point she had begged him to stop, but nothing would stop him. Not the sight of her blood spattered on the walls, not a scintilla of guilt or mercy,

not even the fact that their 16-month-old daughter was right there in the next room. The baby is in the condo, as all of this is happening, when her father kills her mother. When Frazee was done, Kelsey Barrett was dead. Her body slumped in a pool of blood on the floor. What Lee had recounted to investigators was unbelievably brutal, outrageous. But on its face, it seemed credible in that it did not contradict any of the evidence that the police already had. Still, it was a scenario that would have to be meticulously investigated, corroborated.

And it's in this corroboration of her confession where much of the heavy lifting for this investigation was done. It's really important anytime you have a witness that comes forward with some sort of a cooperation agreement that you corroborate everything you possibly can. First, the blood. Was there still any evidence of Kelsey's blood where Crystal said she cleaned? Because that would go a long way to confirm that Kelsey was indeed killed in that condo.

They pull up all of the floorboards that are in the living room area of the condo. They pull up all of the floorboards that are in the living room area of the condo and they find a significant amount of blood evidence, DNA evidence. They never would have found that had it not been for Crystal saying that's where it was. They thought that, and I thought,

that the crime had occurred in the bathroom. Another part of Crystal Lee's story that was lining up with the evidence that police had already collected, that strange film that they had noticed on the furniture during their initial search of the home. That's where those wipe marks, that film, really came into play. She says that she tried to clean this up. You can see that's where that cleaning film came from. That's where those white marks came from because she left that behind.

The next step was to try to establish that Patrick was indeed at Kelsey's condo during the time of her murder. Remember, he claimed he had only met Kelsey outside the condo in an alley to exchange custody of their daughter. But he would have to be inside to kill her the way that Crystal had described. So it would come down to the surveillance footage that police recovered and then would use to piece together a timeline of Patrick Frazee's movements on the day Kelsey was killed. There's also a lot of video evidence about where Patrick is that morning of Thanksgiving.

What we know is that he does go to the condo and meet up with Kelsey and gets the baby. Cameras which were mounted outside of a furniture store on the same street as Kelsey's condo captured his timestamped arrivals and departures from her property. First, you can see Patrick going up in his truck towards Kelsey's condo. Then you see Patrick leave and he goes to Walmart in Woodland Park. He purchases some items, so you see him on video in Walmart. What you can also see is you can see a toad box in the back of his pickup truck, and you can see what direction it's facing because it has very distinctive metal clasps on the box.

A large metal toad or box similar to the type you might see a contractor carry in the back of their pickup truck, large enough to hold, well, just about anything. It's probably three foot by one foot deep. It's a large box. Frazee always claimed that after picking up his daughter, he drove to his ranch, but video footage from a neighbor's doorbell camera shows that Patrick then returned to Kelsey's condo and then stepped inside. And you never see Kelsey going back out of that condo again, nowhere on any camera. It's just like she just vanished out of this condo. And we just know that's obviously not possible.

Then where is she? The answer to that question lies in Frazee's purchase of that large tote box, an item that would also play a grisly role in understanding what happened to Kelsey's remains. Obviously doesn't clean up the scene itself, but does take that tote box that we saw on the surveillance video and puts kelsey's body in the box takes her remains with him in that truck which is mother's house in florissant and tells crystal do you know how awful it is to have

thanksgiving dinner with your family while kelsey's body is in a box in the back of my truck? This is just terrible. I mean, even after killing Kelsey, he's complaining about how it's an inconvenience to him. I mean, I'm just flabbergasted. I think that's the right word because it is just this complete self-absorbed, narcissistic outlook. I mean, he's just killed the mother of his child, someone that he has loved, just another human being.

And he is complaining that he had to eat dinner with that person's remains in his truck. There is no word to describe, honestly, like how just completely, I guess, disgusting it is when you hear him complain about that. And maybe we can look at this as sort of consistent behavior with somebody who would do what he's alleged to have done. And also someone who completely lacked remorse. And as Crystal described to police, his actions after removing Kelsey's body

from her condo are no less disturbing. He then takes Kelsey's remains to a ranch in another county of Colorado. So it's close by, but it's probably about an hour from his house. Crystal says that they go out to that ranch. They pick up that tote box, put it back in his truck, bring that tote box back to his property where he has built a fire pit in an old, rusted-out horse watering truck, and puts her remains in that box in the fire and sets it ablaze. This grim bonfire is so large that young ranch hands would later tell police they could see it clear across the property. Pillows, stuffed animals, gifts for the baby from Kelsey's family, books, the tooth is in there.

All of the things that Crystal used to clean up are in there. But some things were not. Because at this point, Patrick has given Crystal Kelsey's purse, Kelsey's phone, Kelsey's keys, all of her items to take back to Idaho. So she's turning on Kelsey's phone as she's traveling. So it looks like Kelsey's leaving. Patrick asks her to send some sort of text to make it look like Kelsey may have just ran off and killed herself or ran off. So Crystal sends a text message from Kelsey's phone to Patrick's phone that says, do you even love me?

And Patrick replies, would I go through all of this if I didn't? So the answer to your question is yes, I do. And it was those cryptic texts that Patrick believed would support his shaky story that Kelsey had simply walked away from him and his daughter to parts unknown. Crystal takes the gun, the purse, keys to Idaho. She disposes of the purse in the trash. She burns the phone and she gives the gun to one of her friends in Idaho to take. So law enforcement, they're able to find the burned remains of what looks like a phone, like some of the circuitry. They find that friend of hers and they are able to get the gun back from him. Collecting this evidence serves to further bolster

the credibility of Crystal Lee's story. But there is still one critically important piece of evidence that is still missing. Kelsey's body. Even with a credible, cooperating witness, without a body, it is a much higher hurdle for any prosecutor to cross to prove that a murder has even taken place. And so investigators working the murder of Kelsey Barrett were holding out hope that they could still find Kelsey's remains

in the depths of a burn pit on Frazee's ranch. When they go back out to his ranch with Crystal, she walks straight to an area and says, this is where the burn pit was. And you might be asking, well, how could investigators not have seen the burn pit before on one of their prior visits to the ranch? The answer to that was that Frazee had so thoroughly covered it up with dirt that it was indistinguishable from the rest of the property. And in Crystal Lee's ability to lead detectives to the pit's location, it was another way to further corroborate her story, what she had told investigators about the crime.

The only way you would know it was theirs if you had been there to see it. And with the help of the FBI evidence response team, they began to dig. They do what I can only describe as an archaeological dig. They sift all the dirt away, and you can see a burn scar. Almost looks like tar or something. It's definitely something was burned there. They sift all that dirt away. They discover, as they're sifting through that, a human tooth.

A human tooth. Presumably Kelsey's tooth that Frazee had instructed Crystal to collect off the floor of her home. Unfortunately, the DNA was too degraded to make a positive ID. But even sadder, that tooth is all that to this day has ever been found of Kelsey. They are not able to recover anything except for that human tooth. No bones, nothing else of Kelsey's

that would have been burned in that area. And without Kelsey's remains, prosecutors would have their work cut out for them, proving not just that Frazee is the killer, but that a murder took place at all. But they were ready to take a chance to get justice for Kelsey and to get a cold-blooded killer off of the streets.

Patrick, at this point, has now been arrested for first-degree murder. In exchange for her testimony against Frazee and her admissions about her role in the aftermath of Kelsey's murder, Crystal Lee pled guilty to one charge of felony evidence tampering, a charge that carried a maximum sentence of three years in prison. The case against Patrick Frazee went to trial in November 2019. This trial went very quickly. I've been a homicide prosecutor for years, and I've never had a case go to trial in under a year, and this one did. And with the fast pace, the early involvement

of both Jennifer and the other prosecutors who ultimately handled this case with her was very beneficial. That's why it was so important that we were involved in this case from the very beginning. The prosecutors, myself included, and Beth Reed and Dan May, because we're in there. We know what's going on. We're getting all this information from law enforcement as they're getting it. They're telling us this is what happened. This is what happened. That's so important and so critical to be able to put a case of this scope and size in front of a jury is to have people that were boots on the ground from the very beginning.

Due to the media attention this case had attracted and the sheer audacity of the crime itself, the trial of Patrick Frazee was one of the highest profile trials the state of Colorado had ever seen. And prosecutors were also facing the challenge of proving what is called a nobody homicide. You know, Anastasia, we have definitely covered no body homicides in our cases. And it always is a question that comes up. I mean, how do you explain to a jury that you know a murder occurred if you don't have another crime scene, which is your victim, in a sense? It definitely is that important additional step. You know, I really think that the guy who's termed the no body guy, former prosecutor Tad Tobias, who all you out there might remember was featured in a two-part case that we did on AOM of Mary and Fi. He really said it best.

And when it was really, yes, it's an additional challenge, but it's really just an additional step. And basically, they just have to go about proving by circumstantial evidence that the person in question did, in fact, die and that it was at the person who's now on trial at their hands. And I think it also comes down to a reasonable explanation for the evidence, right? Being able to take the jury through what you have, blood at a condo, the surveillance video, phone records, which are always so important and one of my favorite pieces of evidence,

and really Crystal's story. If she's a great prosecution witness, then obviously you want to have Kelsey's body for so many different reasons, especially for the family. But if you can take them down a reasonable path, meaning the jury, you could probably get there. And get there, many prosecutors have, and that's exactly what Jennifer was hoping to do. I think there were really two main issues that I felt like we had to overcome. The biggest issue,

in my opinion, was Crystal Leap. The jury has to believe her because that's where all of our evidence of a murder comes from. We don't have a body. That's the second hurdle that we have to overcome. And the way to overcome that is through the testimony of Crystal Lee Kenney. And that's why it became so important to corroborate everything we possibly could of what she says happened. The other evidence to back up what Crystal Lee claimed. Things such as the description of the crime scene that was then corroborated by the discovery of the blood evidence, right there where Lee said it would be. The existence of the burn pit backed up by her description of how Frazee had disposed of Kelsey's body. Piece by piece, her credibility grew.

But in looking at the state's case against Frazee, there is one critical detail that I think prosecutors still need to prove, and that is putting Frazee at the crime scene. And that is where those phone records come back into play. When you look at the phone records, it shows that Patrick is at Kelsey's condo for hours on Thanksgiving. His phone is pinging in the area of Woodland Park for hours on Thanksgiving. So is Kelsey's phone. Kelsey's phone then travels with Patrick's phone from Woodland Park on Thanksgiving evening at the exact same time. And it travels back to Florissant, Colorado,

about 20 miles away. So both of these phones are together. And that is inconsistent with what Frazee had initially told police about his timeline on the day Kelsey was killed. He talks about there being phone calls between them on Thanksgiving weekend, but the phones are essentially next to each other when these phone calls are being made. The prosecution explained to the jury that there was only one plausible theory as to why Kelsey's phone had traveled back with Frazee to his ranch on Thanksgiving and then alongside Crystal Lee when she went back to Idaho, pinging a trail of cell towers along the way.

Phone data can be so important in homicide cases or lots of criminal investigations, but in this particular case, it became so important because it shows that Patrick had her phone. And the only way somebody is going to have her phone is if he took it. And he took it because he wanted to continue to maintain that she was still alive. So he's sending texts and he's doing things from Kelsey's phone to make it look like Kelsey has the phone and that Kelsey is still alive. Even though at this point, she's not. You know, those phone records really showed something else about Frazee that I think is really revealing. What was also telling about those phone records isn't just what's in there, but what's not in there. She never tries to call Kelsey ever again, or text, or anything.

For someone trying to convince the world that Kelsey was still alive, Frazee's failure to make a single call or text in the weeks and months after the investigation spoke volumes. He didn't try because he knew no one would answer, because he knew Kelsey was gone forever. Jennifer Beeman would go on to present the blood evidence found in Kelsey's home, which matched Kelsey's DNA, as well as blood spatter analysis to reconstruct Kelsey's murder. An analysis that matched Crystal Lee's version of events. There was also the surveillance footage, the phone records, the items recovered from the burn pit. All essential elements in building a case against Kelsey's killer.

But the most compelling evidence was what would turn out to ultimately be the four-hour testimony of Frazee's accomplice after the fact, Crystal Lee. Essentially, that was the crux of their defense. You can't believe Crystal. She's not credible. She's a liar. She lies to her family. She lies to law enforcement. So you really just can't believe anything she says. And considering her role in Kelsey's demise,

I would agree she is not a witness of high character. But the defense has a problem here. I believe they do. Because they can't really prove she is a liar without implicating Frazee in her own story. So essentially, if he wants to shift the blame to Crystal, painting her as a jealous girlfriend who then acted on her own, he still has to corroborate certain things she said, for example, that they had a romantic

relationship, right? So as he starts to give a little, well, it ultimately is brick by brick, still, in essence, implicating himself, at least ultimately. So there's really nothing left for him to do if his defense decided to do anything at all, except deny, deny, deny. I think what the defense ultimately became was, we don't know what happened to Kelsey, but Patrick didn't do it. Which, given the evidence,

does not seem like the sturdiest defense. But incredibly, we still have not hit the true bottom of Frazee's depravity. Because even while sitting in jail during the trial, he was concocting a backup plan. In the middle of trial, we discovered that he was soliciting an inmate at the Teller County jail to kill witnesses for him. Apparently, Frazee had passed a note to a fellow inmate in an attempt to manipulate yet another person to do his evil bidding. Instead, upon release from jail, that inmate went straight to the authorities and showed them Frazee's handwritten note.

He's very specific in some of the details. He references Crystal Lee, references where she may be living, her ex-husband, her kids. And he is really graphic in what he wants to have done to her. I think he says, take her out and set her on fire. And some of what Frazee had concocted in jail included the prosecutors to the extent it was determined that they would be provided security. And that included Jennifer Beeman. But even in the face of those threats, she persevered. And with his jailhouse plot foiled, all that was left for Patrick Frazee was to face the jury and await its verdict. So the verdict was guilty first degree murder, guilty solicitation to commit murder three times, and guilty of tampering with a deceased human body, all of which are felonies, but murder in the first degree is a class one

felony which carries a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Frazee's sentencing then followed. Patrick was sentenced immediately to life without the possibility of parole, plus 156 years for the other crimes that he was convicted of. In a crime this brutal, it often feels besides the point to even ask why. Because there's no reason, no motive that could ever justify this level of violence, this cruelty. But the why is an important part of the victim's story. And knowing why someone is killed, having those answers, can also be important for the victim's loved ones that are left behind. Yeah, I don't have to prove motive,

but that doesn't mean I don't wonder why, and I'm sure a jury wonders why. You know, domestic violence and intimate partner violence, the dynamics of that can sometimes give you that why, because he's a violent person and there's this history of violence. We didn't even have that, really. From my perspective, my thoughts, Patrick was going to try and seek custody of the baby and Kelsey, at that point, would have said, well, then I'm just going to move back to Washington. So in Patrick's mind, he thought it was just easier to kill her than it

was to have a custody fight. Crystal Lee had originally received a three-year sentence for her role in Kelsey's murder. However, Lee eventually filed an appeal arguing that her sentence was unconstitutional because it exceeded the maximum for the felony evidence tampering charge. Her sentence has since been vacated. And then she was re-sentenced to the maximum of 18 months. And despite an exhaustive search, Kelsey's remains have never been found.

I find what happened to Kelsey to be so tragic and awful. It really tears at my heart. You know, I've prosecuted a lot of homicide cases, and each one is unique. What always really kind of kills me and still to this day makes me kind of tear up is the thought that this little girl, this baby, while she may not know or remember what happened down the road, anytime she may google her mom, this is what's going to pop up. So for the rest of her life, she's going to know that her father killed her mother. And in a horrific fashion.

And it just breaks my heart. But against all odds, Kelsey's daughter is not just surviving. She's indeed thriving. She's with Kelsey's family. She's an energetic, very intelligent, articulate, adorable little girl. And so she's doing really, really well.

Patrick Frazee uses this incredible story to motivate Crystal to murder That Kelsey and Patrick's daughter is in danger And that Kelsey is capable of hurting her But he also is the very same person who is concocting multiple ways for her to die Poisoned coffee, an aluminum bat And Frazee, as the master manipulator, gets Crystal to help him clean up the crime scene to mop up the blood and then help him burn Kelsey's body. Prosecutors needed her

testimony. It was critical. And as of this recording, Crystal Lee has served her time and has been released. It's three Cs. Callous, cruel, coward. Callous for what Frazee did to Kelsey, and by result, his own daughter. Cruel, the way he did it. Coward, again by what he did rather than face whatever road was supposed to be before him. Kelsey should be remembered not for how she died, but more importantly, for who she was as she lived. She was

accomplished, strong, and brave. Her profession alone is all the proof we need of that. But she was also the mother to a baby girl who she absolutely adored. Those are just some of the things that we hope that Kelsey's daughter will be taught and hold in her heart about her mom. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an Audiochuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Forseti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?