Dateline Originals - Five Miles From Home - Ep. 3: Open Murder

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

An interview with an unlikely suspect takes a surprising turn, leading to an arrest. This episode originally published on June 15, 2026. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You'll remember, I'm sure, the old adage taken from Shakespeare. Neither a borrower nor a lender be. The phrase itself, borrowed, all the time and everywhere, like so much of the great playwright's work. Wise advice? Perhaps, if widely ignored, in modern life. But the question of borrowing was about to matter in the West Wendover murder investigation.

It had to do with a car. An SUV, actually, a Chevy Trailblazer, a borrowed trailblazer. And why would a borrowed car matter to the investigation into the murder of that much-loved teenager, Mickey Costanzo? Curious little story, is that? The SUV belonged to a local woman, an older woman, you could say, at least compared with young Cody. There had been talk, rumors that Cody may have been spending time with the woman. But talk is cheap, isn't it? And no evidence of a relationship ever surfaced.

And after all, Cody was at that very same time planning his marriage to Tony Frato. So, perhaps that woman was simply offering the SUV as a favor to a friend. To be used by Cody to pick up those car parts he left at the school shock. But now, Cody Patton was a murder suspect. And so, naturally, Detective Burnham thought it prudent to talk to that woman, the owner of the car, and sure enough she confirmed Cody's story, confirmed also the reason he asked to use it,

because it was big enough to accommodate all that car stuff parts and things. That is, she assumed it was car parts. And then the woman added, one curious little detail. Her SUV was spotless when she handed the keys to Cody. But it was very dirty when he returned it. Not just teenager messy, but especially dirty and dusty on the outside, as if he'd driven it off road. But did she rush out to wash it that very day?

No, she did not. Instead, investigators had their way with that car. They swabbed it from bumper to bumper for samples of dust and dirt. and compared those samples with soil samples from the crime scene. And they sure looked the same. Which, by itself, could simply have been a coincidence, of course, didn't prove Cody did some terrible thing to his old friend Mickey. But that wasn't all those cops took from the car.

They took impressions of the tread on the tires. And then they lined them up with the tire tracks at that place in the desert where they found Mickey's body. consistent with the tire brand and model that was on that vehicle. Which, again, could have been a coincidence, though it was seeming less likely now. And then the investigators conducted a search where Cody lived, which was, remember, at the home of Claude and Cassie Frato. See if there was any type of evidence of, you know, knives or items that could have been used

to restrain her or that coincided with what we were. we'd found at the scene at the time. Did you find anything? We didn't find anything initially. However, during our search of the house, Cassie Frato stated that she had observed a shovel in Cody's room and that the shovel was no longer there. And she identified the shovel as a small military entrenching

type tool. The kind normally used for digging a hole in the ground? Maybe. Of course, it wasn't around anymore. So as evidence, that story was perhaps iffy. But just as the detectives were contemplating that, it happened. The moment.

Dramatic, strange, the kind of thing that just never happens until it does. I heard some wailing from the father. I could hear him yell and it sounded to be like he was crying. I'm Keith Morrison. And this is five miles from home, a podcast from Dateline. Episode 3, Open Murder. Sunday night in West Wendover, a busy evening along the little strip. It's five casinos bustling with gamblers, drinks flowing, slots spinning.

Oblivious, of course, to the real-life action just across town at the West Wendover Police Department, where Detective Kevin McKinney was still grilling Cody Patton. You're not telling us the whole truth. You're telling us bits of pieces, but you're not telling us the whole truth. By this time it was almost 1 a.m. All but the most dedicated gamblers had drifted into the night, and Sunday had given in to Monday. Detective McKinney had been up 24 hours straight,

first driving to West Wendover, then supervising the crime scene when Mickey Costanzo's body was exuned, followed by a trip to the school where he studied the school, surveillance video, and now here he was face to face with 18-year-old Cody Patton in a cramped and stuffy interrogation room. For hours, they had gone back and forth about what happened to Mickey, with Cody denying. I did not kill him. Kill Extantel. And the cop offering a way to confess. I don't think he planned on it. I don't think you intended. I didn't. I think he panicked. At which point, Cody

Perhaps feeling cornered? Asked for a break. He asked to speak with his father. So we allowed them to meet in the interview room. Did you overhear what they said to each? I didn't hear what was said, but at one point I heard some wailing from the father. What in the world was going on in there?

Detective McKinney waited, quiet again. And a few minutes later, we went back into the interview room, and his father told him he needed to tell us what happened. Be a man. Mm-hmm. And that's when he told you the story. Mm-hmm. Would a lawyer have prevented Cody from telling his story?

But Cody didn't ask for a lawyer. His father's advice is what he sought. And his father, in some kind of shock from what he had heard, insisted that the truth was what was needed now. Ugly, though the truth certainly was. This is Kit Patton, in the presence of the detectives, speaking to his son Cody. What you did is pain is Cody.

I don't want to abandon you at all, okay? You've got to do what they need you to do, and they need their answers. The family needs their answers, you know? This is it, man. We have to fix this. And then Detective McKinney made sure his tape recorder was still rolling, and he leaned forward in his chair,

and listened intently as Cody Patton began. He picked up Mickey at school, he said. And they started driving and talking. That, said Cody, is when Mickey started all the trouble. And how did she do that? Mickey insisted Cody break up with his fiancé Tony Frato and date her Mickey instead, he said. Well, that wasn't going to happen, said Cody.

So then they started arguing, and Cody kept driving deep into the desert. But then Mickey got really mad, said Cody, insisted he stopped the car. So they got out. She would fire to yawning at me, and I said that it's because I'm not leaving Tony Hunt. She started, like, pounding on my chest and stuff.

By this time, said Cody, he was upset, too. More mad, as he put it. And that is when it happened. He shoved her. Pretty hard, he said. And... She fell down and hit her head, and she just laid there, and like her eyes started to turn black,

and she started to shake and seize. At that point, I knew something was wrong. I looked at where she was at. There was this big rock she had hit her head on. Godi had been trained as an EMT, said when he checked for a pulse, he couldn't get anything, and she was just flopping. He was very cheerful.

He had to stop several times to allow him to gain his composure back. A couple times he told us he was getting physically ill while he was describing details to us. We will spare you the rest of Cody's description of what he said he did to Mickey out there in the desert. Suffice to say, it was more than just a push and a fall, and whatever it actually was, Cody did not use his EMT training to save her life.

Instead, he said, he panicked, didn't know what to do. And then what he did do, he said, was go to the car and grab that shovel and use it to make sure she was dead. I put her in the little crazy thing that dog covered her up. It took the clothes apart. burned them, he said, at another location a few miles away. After which, he went and picked up Tony, he said,

and told her nothing about what he had done. The two went and got food, and after a while, went home. And that, he said, is when he stashed the shovel under the Fratto's house. There it was, he claimed, the whole awful story. after which Cody offered this.

That's what I'd say that I'm sorry and hate being in a wrong place and wrong time. It had to happen to someone that if it didn't deserve. Never before had Detective Donald Burnham heard a confession as detailed, as awful as that one. And from Cody Patton of all people, just a regular local kid. He was on the high school football team, had lots of friends, also regular kids, but then out of the blue he brutally murdered a lifelong friend. And just because she wanted him to dump Tony and be her boyfriend?

Well, that didn't make any kind of sense at all. Oh, and there was one other thing, said Cody, that he was adamant about this, insisted on it. He stated he was alone with Michaela. He never implicated anybody else even being. being present or aware of it. He did it alone. Did he tell anybody why?

No, he did not. Detective Burnham, still reeling a bit after Cody's story, did one more bit of investigating that night. He went to the Frato's house to look again for the trenching shovel, Cody said he used, and then hid under the house, and sure enough, there it was. It looked like it had been wiped clean. Burnham bagged it.

that had sent to the crime lab to check for clues. Well, Detective Kevin McKinney tried to make sense of what he had heard from Cody. Did you think you got the whole story at that point? Not completely. I was never convinced that he told us the complete truth about what happened. By now, it was a few hours before dawn on what was Monday morning, when the police actually arrested Cody and told him he'd be charged by the DA later that very day. His fiancé, Tony Frato and her family were still sitting restlessly outside the interview room,

fully expecting to take Cody home. They would not do so, of course. This is Tony's mother, Cassie. The police came out and told us that Cody had just confessed. Devastating. They don't believe it. We had been working so hard with him. Working hard to help Cody keep his life on track so he could graduate from high school.

and join the Marines. We thought we were bringing him around. We thought things were going well until the last week or so, and we knew he was angry about something. All Cody would say the week before the murder was, things are coming to a head. I need to take care of this. And Tony would say, what is wrong?

Why are you so angry with Michaela? What did she do? and he would say, it's none of your business. Here's Cody's fiancé, Tony. He would tell me what things were building up and things that happened in the past. He would not go into further detail and he would not say anything else towards me.

And he wouldn't be telling her now because Cody was taken 100 miles away to the county jail in Elko, Nevada, where he would be held until they could put him on trial for murder. quite possibly facing the death penalty, though that had yet to be decided. But was it over now? No, no. Not at all.

And the rest of the story? Well... It didn't make sense. It's not the person that I knew. And I said, then somebody made him do it. Somebody made him do it. In just a few months, he planned to be on his way to the Marine Corps. to be stationed by the beach near San Diego.

But now Cody Patton's uniform was a red jumpsuit at his station was a tiny jail cell in Elko, Nevada. Well, back home in West Wendover, the police made the shocking announcement at a press conference. Patton has been enrolled as a student in the West Wendover Junior Senior High School and has been attending until the time of his arrest. To that, his classmates expressed a kind of universal disbelief. Cody did this to Mickey?

It just makes me angry and that we don't have all over me. I mean that she's gone is just really hitting everybody hard. There's no words that could explain what we're feeling. I just want to know what happened, why it happened. Yes, students and teachers alike. All acknowledged Cody had problems at the school.

He could be a bully, sometimes intimidating. But to murder his childhood friend, the very popular Mickey, attack her so viciously and dump her in the desert? Well, that was... it was unimaginable. Even the school principal was stunned. Cody was a kid that we knew, and we were trying to give extra support as well, so that he would hopefully graduate, and he had dreams of going into the military and doing some of those things, so that was obviously our push to be able to help him have some type of future. But it was all for not. Cody's some type of future was defined a few hours after his cheerful confession,

when the DA charged him with open murder. Open murder in Nevada is a kind of legal one-stop shopping. When it comes to homicide cases, it would give the jury a choice. They could convict him a first-degree murder or second-degree murder or manslaughter. Prosecutors like it because it can often ensure some kind of conviction. but the trial would be months and months away. There were miles to go before any jury would lay eyes on Cody. And meanwhile, more investigating was still needed.

There were lots of loose ends. So the day after Cody's confession, Detective McKinney decided to stop by the jail and pay him a visit. Cody looked exhausted, depressed. Hardly surprising. Reality was setting into a cell with him. There's a couple of things who wanted to clear up. First, Detective McKinney wanted to know

exactly where did Cody stash Mickey's clothes and her other personal things. Those that weren't with the body, that is. He'd buried her half naked. Remember, in his confession, Cody said he burned them somewhere away from the murder scene. But where? Now, Cody said he'd taken them over the state border to Utah,

to a big burn pit where. the local kids often staged bonfires. It was probably too much to hope that Mickey's cell phone survived the fire, that or the Pocod backpack she always carried. That cell phone could tell them a lot. So the detective asked Cody about it, but he seemed to have only a vague recollection of that part of the awful night. The last time it was our cell phone was on it in her pocket.

Well, we didn't find it at the scene anywhere. Right. Could you have got thrown out away from the scene somewhere? I'm trying to think. Okay. Now, what about the backpack? Did she have with her when she came? Yeah, I'd like a backpack, too. It was in the same spot. McKinney made a note of that, knowing they had searched the burn site soon. Once again, Cody himself had voluntarily provided more key evidence against himself.

All right. Thanks, Cody. Appreciate it. I hope you're good, okay. That would be the last time Cody ever spoke to Detective McKinney, because a few days later, a state-appointed attorney came to see him. But this wasn't just any public defender. This one specialized in keeping accused killers off death row.

His name? John Olson. Tough case. Real tough case. Olson was a highly regarded attorney with an impressive pedigree, Stanford grad, Vanderbilt Law. He'd handled some three dozen death penalty cases during his 40-year career. But this case?

This case was unlike any other. By the time I got in the case, the authorities knew who'd done it. They had the proof of who done it, And the only issue was what they were going to do with him. Cody was not going home. After that interview with the police, he was not going home. Olson was in his 60s, with silver hair, a commanding presence, and a keen, analytical mind.

When I first thought about it, I started thinking about how I was going to prevent a death verdict from being entered in the case. And a death verdict seemed possible. I think it was from the prosecution point of view, from a rational point of view, it was a legitimate death penalty case. And probably any jury would agree. If they heard the evidence presented in what had happened to this young woman being killed and buried in the desert, that's tough stuff. Yeah, that is tough stuff. It was the identity of the victim. It was the brutality of the killing.

It was the poignancy of some of the photographs in the case. It would just break your heart. And there were a lot of tough facts on the case. A lot of tough facts. And tough fact number one was Cody's confession. Nothing he could do about that. Keeping him off death row could be difficult. No wonder Olson called it a dangerous case.

I approach every case with the thought that I'm going to try it to a jury. And I start preparing the case for trial without thought to a plea. in the case. Did you believe the confession that he had given? You know, I like to reserve judgment on those things because he generally will get more information from a client later on than you will at the beginning. So I think I held my water on that. What Cody had in mind when he told him that he did the killing, God knows. But John Olson wasn't the only one puzzled by Cody Patton's confession. A lot of people in West Wentover just weren't buying it.

Especially, of all people, Mickey Costanzo's family. There's parts of Cody's confession that I can see it being Cody. This is Mickey's mother, Celia. Like, I am sure that he snapped and I'm sure that he hurt her.

There would have to be something somewhere that forced the whole scenario. In fact, during the weeks after Mickey's murder, her older sister Christina became convinced

Cody's confession was totally concocted. More tall tale than the truth. And she had known Cody for years, liked him. Trusted him. It's not the person that I knew.

He would never hurt Michaela. It was like the whole town turned out. A measure of Mickey Costanzo's sunny personality, her sweet goodness, that West Wendover's one thousand-seat concert hall was needed to accommodate everyone at her memorial service. Her mother, Celia, felt like Mickey wasn't just her daughter. Felt like she was everybody's daughter. This town suffered as a group. It's not just me that suffered. It's not just DJ or Christina or my mom or my brother. this entire town

suffered as if this town was her parent every child that was in that school every teacher in that school lost a part of themselves and one by one they wept as they said goodbye and remembered Michaela so cruelly

murdered as the ideal young woman the pride of West Wendover High Mickey's sister DJ gave an emotional eulogy. It really needs a lot out of all of you came here because we can all see how many people love Turk like we did. Many of Mickey's classmates also spoke. She was many things to many people,

a friend, a fellow student, a teammate, and an inspiration. This was Mickey's father, Teddy. I left her dearly. Someone took it. Someone had no right to do that. That someone, of course, was Cody Patton. He was the town villain now. In fact, much of West Wendover

seemed to have turned against the whole Patton family, too. But Cody wasn't entirely alone in his five-by-seven-foot jail cell. His loyal fiancé Tony Frato went to see him, wrote to him, called him regularly. The calls were recorded, of course. Not to see you every day and talk to you. When you, my arm's doing, it's hard.

Yeah, I know it's hard for me, so it really is. I love you. I love you, too. How is that? You are always. And I know you still are. Tony, I'm always going to be here for you. No matter what happens,

no matter which way things go, I'm always going to be here for you. Tony showered Cody with long love letters, meticulously handwritten, forever faithful, holding nothing back. This, the day Cody was taken to jail. Dear Cody, my baby, I miss you so much,

I can't wait to see your face, I love you so much, stay strong. This love you. a week later. Dear Cody Bear, yes, baby, I'm going to stay faithful. You're the only one for me, my S.O., my cheese to my macaroni, my everything. And I'm not going to jeopardize that for the world. And three days later, dear Cody, Googly bear, just been sitting at home thinking about you. I'm trying my best to stay strong, but it has been so freaking hard, not something.

seeing you every day just tears me down. I can't be happy until you're back in my arms and that I know you are safe. Donnie's parents also kept in touch and even visited Cody sometimes. To provide support, sure, but also to ask a particular question. I said, I don't understand this. Why did you do this? Why did this happen? This is Tony's father, Claude Frato. He just said, I just, I don't know. I can't tell you anything. I don't know. And Tony has said the same thing.

She doesn't know why it happened. Neither did the police. They were still actively investigating the case. But they were able to locate that burn pit Cody admitted he used to destroy Mickey's belonging. Here's Detective Burnham. We decided to dig in that area and see if maybe this is what, the area that Cody had burned the items in.

and we're luckily to find remnants of that polka dot bag that Michaela had with her at their time of disappearance. Was there anything else in there that told you anything about what happened to her or why? There was a key that matched her mother's key for her apartment. There was a small charm. It was a panda bear. That precious little panda bear charm, which she always carried with her, even on the last day of her life, More devastating evidence piling up against Cody, evidence that defense attorney John Olson had to somehow explain in a way that would keep his client off death row.

But the more Olson studied Cody's confession, the more he came to believe, just like Mickey's family did, that something about it just didn't add up. So Olson hired a seasoned investigator named Bill Savage, asked him to poke around, see what he could find out. I'm a former Secret Service agent. I was an agent in the early 70s.

One of the people guarded Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, yes, President Nixon, President Ford, and several other foreign dignitaries throughout the country. Savage was 60-something, thick brown hair, owlish face, with narrow eyes, shining through a set of wire-rimmed glasses. He certainly came with a pedigree. besides the Secret Service, he'd served the Nevada Gaming Control Board at his own PI firm. Now, he said about learning all he could about the murder and that boy's confession.

Some of the details that Mr. Patton reported didn't quite pass the sniff test to me, and I wanted to certainly investigate the case under a microscope, so to speak. Savage began by taking a long hard look at Mickey's autopsy report. It wasn't an easy read, all sorts of grim specifics. She'd been cut, stabbed repeatedly, terribly beaten, the signs of that everywhere on her body and her head. The injuries were so severe, in fact, so brutal. They certainly didn't look like they could have been caused by some sort of accident,

as Cody had claimed, or a shovel of all things. but rather a knife, given all the stab wounds, according to the medical examiner's report. I don't know if we'll ever know exactly what happened, but we know that from the autopsy photos, horrible slicing disfigurement to Mickey's face. What did that say to you? It indicates to me a great deal of rage by someone

to cause those type of wounds to a young lady. Disfiguring wounds? Yes. It was pretty bad. These types of wounds were disturbing. So disturbing that Mickey's murder looked like the expression of sheer hate. Except by all accounts, Cody did not hate Mickey at all. There had to be more to the story.

Some big secret that Cody was refusing to reveal? Savage and attorney John Olson wondered if Cody's fiancé Tony Frato might be able to provide some insight. Tony had already talked to the police during their early routine interviews with some of Mickey's classmates. That's when she first went missing.

And Tony was as puzzled as everybody else in town was. I guess she's kind of curious, like where's Nikki, what's going on, you know? where could she have gone? But things were very different now, of course. Mickey was dead and Cody was in jail, having told his alarming story. His incomplete alarming story, maybe?

So, no surprise, Attorney Olson wanted to follow up to see if Tony had learned anything at all about why her fiancé did what he did to Mickey. She'd been talking to him after all, Oh, and just maybe she herself might have had some sort of connection to the crime? Cody said no, but had to ask. And I talked to her in the presence of her parents in which she said she had nothing to do with it. Did she have any idea why he had?

Absolutely not. No idea. As Olson wrapped up his interview with Tony, he went off script slightly and offered the Frato family a friendly, little piece of advice. I told her parents. I said, if you want to do a favor for this child, get her out of town. Why would you say anything like that?

Because I didn't see any possibility of anything good coming out of a relationship between this young girl and a guy who was in jail and was likely to spend the rest of his life in jail. I thought to myself that this is a young person with a life ahead of her and she needs to disassociate herself with this whole thing. Yeah.

Given that she was not involved. How did they react to that advice? Knotted their heads and left. And with that, John Olson waved goodbye and thought that outside of Cody's trial, he would probably never see or hear from that young woman again. And back in the quiet of his office, he thought about Tony Frato,

about what she said to it. And the way she said it, Was she as devastated as other people seem to have been? I would describe her aspect as deadpan. I would describe her as emotionless. How did that strike you? Odd. Very odd.

Now, what was a person to make of that? Next time. It had been eating at me and eating at me. I couldn't live with myself knowing what I knew. We recorded the conversation, and it was dynamite. No one that knows Tony would have ever seen this coming. It just isn't possible. Five Miles from Home is a production of Dateline and NBC News.

Robert Dean is the producer. Brian Drew, Marshall Housefeld, and Meredith Greenstein are audio editors. Molly DeRosa is associate producer. Adam Gorfane is co-executive producer. Paul Ryan is executive producer and Liz Cole is senior executive producer. From NBC News Audio, sound mixing by Rich Cutler.