Dateline Originals - Five Miles From Home - Ep. 4: Little Miss Wendover

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

A young woman makes a startling confession and suddenly turns the case upside down. This episode originally published on June 17, 2026. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Private investigator Bill Savage had a knack for getting people to talk. Good thing. Crucial skill for any good PI. To inspire trust, get subjects to open up, reveal things, private, hidden things. The skill, it was about to become very useful. Savage, remember, had been hired by Cody Patton's defense attorney to scare up anything at all that might keep Cody off. death row. In tall order, given the kid had already confessed that he murdered his lifelong friend

Mickey Costanzo, confessed in rather horrifying detail. Still, Savage figured somebody must know something that could be mitigating in some way. Something about Cody, nobody knew maybe, or understood. Something maybe his parents would know, though parents are often the last to know what their almost grown children get into. Cody's parents were Kipp and Donna Patton. So six weeks or so after their son killed and buried Mickey in the desert, Savage called them. With a request, any parent would find difficult.

And asked them to take me out to the makeshift gravesite where Mickey Costanzo's body was located. They could have said no. Of course they could. But maybe it was how he asked. They said they'd do it. So Savage got in his car and made the long track across I-80 from Reno to West Wendover,

where he met the Patton's, and they all headed out to the gravel pits. Then, as they looked down at the remnants of the actual grave from which Mickey had been exhumed, Bill Savage did what he could to make them feel, well, as comfortable as possible. Not that anyone could. Awful situation like that.

And then... While we were standing there at the gravesite, Kip Patton said to me, I think there's something you should know. And I said, of course, what is it? Savage had seen and hurt a lot in all his years as a PI, but nothing even remotely like what Kip Patton was about to reveal. And he proceeded to tell me

that Tony Frato had got in the car with him and they drove around for a while. And, well, the patents, said Kip, talked with Tony a lot after Cody's arrest. She was, after all, their son's fiancé, a member of the family, or about to be. And they often went on long drives together, especially to the jail for their regular visits with Cody.

But this particular drive with Tony, as Kip Patton told Bill Savage was different. Very different. How so? Well, for one thing, they ended up, Tony and Kip, at the very spot where Bill and Kip and Donna were standing. And then Tony started talking. And Tony told him how she was having sleepless nights

and was really bothering her, and she needed to tell somebody. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is Five Miles from Home, a podcast from Deidline. Episode 4, Little Miss Wendover. Springtime in the Great Basin, a special season in the high desert, the magic time between winter's frigid nights and the blistering heat of summer afternoons. Sagebrushes greener, wild flowers bloom. Air feels lighter somehow, full of possibilities, though,

So this particular springtime, well, we shall see. It was a bright morning in April 2011, a few weeks after Mickey was murdered. Tony Frato climbed into a car with Kip and Donna Patton, and off they went across the high desert to Elko, Nevada. Tony hadn't told her parents what she was actually going to do. They were out of town, so she'd written a note, left it at the house. For whatever reason, Tony was still in her pajamas.

Elko, you may remember, is the town where Cody was being held in the county jail. But Tony wasn't going to Elko to seek Cody. No. Tony was headed to the other side of town, to a lawyer's office. Tony said she was ready to tell the lawyer a story. Once they all arrived, she alone was ushered into an empty conference room. A small micro-cassette machine waited on the table. What it recorded was barely discernible.

But what a tale was told on that scratchy tape. The other voice on that recording was Cody's attorney, John Olson, listening as this quiet, shy little teen began to tell a terrible, terrible story. And we talked and we recorded this. conversation with her permission, and it was dynamite. It began for her, Tony said, with a text message from Cody, that he had her, meaning Mickey was with him in that SUV he had borrowed. He wanted Tony to join them.

Cody picked her up, she said, and the three drove around and talked. What did they talk about? They wanted Mickey to know, said Tony, that Cody did not want a relationship with her. Olson had no way to know then that Mickey had already made it very clear to her family, her friends, and Cody, too, that she didn't want it either. Anyway, Tony continued,

we didn't want to cause any problems. We wanted to work everything out. So she said they drove around some more and ended up at the gravel pits where Mickey, very upset, demanded that they let her out. So then, Mickey and Cody got out of the car, said Tony, and Mickey kept yelling at him and pushing him.

I looked away just for like a split second and then heard like a low set on the car or whatever. Michaela was on the ground, and she wasn't really moving at that point. They didn't know what to do, said Tony. And then Cody got out of shovel and started digging a hole. But when he finished, she said, they could see that Mickey was still alive, so they hit her with the shovel and beat her and punched her until...

She wasn't moving, until we had wounded to the grave. Moved her to the grave, said Tony, and she helped Cody hold down her legs. And slid her throat. And slit her throat with Cody's knife. Both of us. Both of us. And just like that, John Olson thought.

Awful as that story was. It was also going to make his job as Cody's defense attorney a lot easier. All of a sudden, it changed from one crazed killer to two people who committed a homicide. It gave us something to point the case towards other than Cody's axe. Did you believe what she had to tell you? Yes. It helped our case considerably. I was fired up, excited about it,

because it gave us another actor, another person to participate in the case. Maybe with some good lawyering, Cody could escape the death penalty after all, thanks to Tony Frato's sudden admission. She didn't have to tell you these things. Didn't have to tell me a thing. Why would she do such a thing?

You have to ask her. So, we did. By which time it was a good deal after the events described, however, so perhaps she had done some self-editing, or maybe not. Here she is. I wanted to come forward and tell what really happened because I knew they were not going to get the real story from Cody. So tell me about the process of deciding to come forward. It had been eating at me and eating at me. I couldn't live with myself knowing what I knew and what I had done.

I take responsibility of my actions and face my consequences. But was it guilt, the desire to face the consequences that motivated Tony? Or was she perhaps getting ahead of a story she now knew Woodleak? knew because of something Cody's father Kit Patton told her before she decided to unburden herself, which was this. During a visit to the jail, said Kit, his son held up a handwritten note to the glass separating them. The note said simply, she was there.

His dad had came to me, said something like that he knew I was there. Uh-huh. And he kind of guided me, asking me what I wanted to do and everything. And I told him I wanted to come forward. Thinking back to it now, I felt like he was guiding me to talk to his attorneys and not go to the police. But if you imagine that Tony Frato went straight from the lawyer's office to the back of a police car and then off to the county jail to be charged with murder, you would be mistaken. Instead, she walked out of that law office, a free woman, still in her pajamas and slippers,

and Cody's parents dutifully drove her back across the I-80 to West Wendover, private investigator Bill Savage. According to Kip Patton, she exclaimed to him, what does someone have to do to be arrested? Good question. She was home now, her secret confession secure her on tape, a ticking legal time bomb that could blow up the law's understanding of the Mickey Costanza murder case. But not quite yet. Instead, Tony Frato laid low.

No policeman came to her door, and no one called, not the detectives, not the district attorney. Instead, Tony just waited, waited for her parents to come home. That was probably the hardest part of my parents. How did they take it? Pretty hard. They were shocked. A bit of an understatement that, shocked they certainly were.

The Frados had just returned from a trip to Las Vegas when they were greeted by their daughter and her incomprehensible news. This is Tony's mom, Cassie Frato. No one that knows Tony would have ever seen this coming. It just isn't possible. We don't know exactly what Tony told her parents.

Was it the story she told Attorney Olson? Or the much different story she told me? More about that later. Or did she tell them a different story altogether? Tony's parents said they had never discussed the murder with Tony, or at least never prodded her with questions, because they just knew their daughter had nothing to do with Mickey's murder. They even heard that from the police, said Tony's dad, Claude Frato.

The police told us that they didn't believe at that time. There was no evidence. You never confronted her with the question. No, because there wasn't any reason for us to... Right. She wasn't a suspect, wasn't even a person of interest. So you can just imagine how the Frados must have felt when their sweet little 18-year-old God-fearing daughter

who had never been in any kind of trouble told them she had talked to Cody. attorney that she might somehow be implicated in the murder. Something very underhanded going on is what Claude Fretto thought. My immediate thought was that she's been coerced into saying this. Somebody's made her do it. Yes. Yeah.

What person popped into your head? Cody's dad. That is Kit Patton, the man who drove Tony across the state in her pajamas. To talk to Cody's lawyers, well, they, Tony's parents, were out of town. Yet Patton insisted that it was Tony's idea. She wanted to meet Cody's attorneys. He just drove her there, he said, because Tony's parents weren't around. Do you think sometimes that she thought,

I can't do this with my parents' prison? I have to wait until they're gone before I can confess to this terrible thing. I don't know. Possibly so, but we've always... has been very, very open. But then again, said the Frados, maybe she didn't really intend to confess at all. Maybe it was just an immature girl's way of trying to help her fiancé,

and without her parents, she had no idea what she was getting herself into. She doesn't believe that she's confessing to the law enforcement. She's talking to Cody's attorneys, asking them if it's going to help. Because she had thought, that it would give Cody a lighter sentence

if she confessed to more involvement. In fact, said Tony's parents, she had always been loyal to Cody throughout their entire relationship. So maybe it wasn't so surprising that now, in his greatest time of need, she was there for him,

just like always, still sending lengthy love letters, still calling. The police, by the way, remained quite, quite unaware of Tony's apparent confession in the privacy of a lawyer's office. As was Mickey Costanzo's family, they only knew what they had been told, that the case against Cody, complete with his lurid confession, was plotting its deliberate way through

the legal system. And rather than allow that depressive state of things to weigh her down, Mickey's mom, Celia, decided to somehow start a healing process, and also come up with a positive way to keep her daughter's memory alive. So, on a sunny, warm morning in early May, she returned to one of Mickey's favorite places, the track at the high school, where she had won so many races. It was May 3rd, exactly two months after the murder,

on what would have been Mickey's 17th birthday. I bought a cake, balloons, took it down to the high school, invited her friends. That was the hardest day next to finding out she was murdered. Coincidence, really, that on that very day, a hundred miles away at the Elko County District Attorney's Office, defense attorney John Olson was meeting with the DA. They chatted briefly, and then Olson pulled out a little surprise.

Maybe not so little. Remember, Cody was Olson's client. It wasn't Tony who was his client. It was Cody. So she could have no expectation of attorney-client privilege. And right there, Olson produced an audio tape. Tony Frato's secret confession. And the DA?

Well, you can just imagine. It changed the whole feature and nature of the case. It gave us the opportunity to start talking about how we could separate out our client from Tony. So given that our focus at the time was the death penalty, it was a big deal. A very big deal. Tony Frato that day went to school like any normal day,

as if such a thing were possible anymore. And she sat down to write Cody yet another love letter. I can't wait to see you, be in my arms. Yeah, so it can be a fresh start. I miss you, L-O-L. I don't want anyone taking you either. You are a baby, my baby. We are going to make it. I love you so much. Always, forever, eternity. What she was actually thinking as she composed her little bubble of illusion and what she dreamt in her bed that night, we shall never know. But we can be pretty sure that around that time to take her time. Detective Donald Burnham was digesting what he had just heard on Tony's confession tape

because the very next night, Detective Burnham paid her an official visit. I determined that we had probable cause to arrest her just based on her own admission. Yes, and they cuffed her and took her away in a squad car, like a hardened criminal. which seems strange, even to experience homicide detective Kevin McKinney. Did she seem like the sort of person who could have done such a thing? I mean, anybody's capable of anything, but she didn't strike me as someone capable of committing murder, no. Quiet, shy little Tony Frato hardly seemed like a cold-blooded killer. She'd been a beauty queen at 13, little Miss Wendover, in fact, but now,

Now she lived a quiet, almost reclusive life. Anything but a party girl, she was devoutly religious, too, and extremely close to her parents, Cassie and Claude. She always went to church with us. She never gave us a minute's grief as far as anything going on at school. She always had really good grades, never any complaints from any teachers. She had goals in her life. She knew exactly where she wanted to go. A truly responsible child.

Yes, absolutely. She has very strong convictions. And so we never worried. We always trusted Tony in her judgment. She was, what, wise beyond her years? Very much, yes. Very wise. Wise little Tony Frato, just 18 years old, an adult in the eyes of the law, was deposited in the Elko County Jail,

the very building in which Cody was being held, though they might as well have been on different planets for all they saw each other. Not quite the reunion Tony imagined in all those love letters of hers. Instead, they booked her, snapped her mugshot, told her she'd be held without bail.

She was facing, perhaps, a capital murder charge. Same as Cody. News of Tony's sudden arrest spread fast, especially to Mickey's family, where it did not land with quite the explosive effect,

you might have imagined. In fact, Mickey's mother, Celia, was not particularly surprised. In my heart of hearts, knew Tony had something to do with it because they were a couple. It was very hard for me to know she was at school, wearing his engagement ring,

acting like nothing had happened, and she knew nothing about it when I knew she knew. Mickey's older sister Christina told us that Tony's arrest was for her the ultimate, I told you so, moment. Because from day one, and I did not think that Cody deserved to be the only one punished for what had happened because I knew that she had been involved.

When she was arrested, it made me very happy because I was like, see, I told you, now it makes sense. Unless, of course, it didn't. So, the phone calls were over and the love letters stopped. There would be no white wedding dress. Tony Frato's world now was a thin mattress on a rough bunk set among strangers in a concrete room, dressed not in white, but in an ill-fitting jailhouse jumpsuit. She was geographically very close to her fiancé, Cody Patton.

Both were held to the Elko County Jail, he and the men's wing, she and the women's. But the chance of an encounter, zero. And in that gloomy place, a few. concrete walls apart, they bided their time, waiting for what came next. One long, dismal day after another. Well, still, in the wide-open world outside, not a single person could begin to comprehend their reason for committing the ugly act they were accused of, least of all, Mickey Costanza's mother, Celia, who, before the legal proceedings began, braced herself for what was coming.

course, but also studied every single bit of evidence, every photo she could get her hands on, because... I had to know exactly what happened to my daughter. Everything. No matter how bad. Everything. Every autopsy photo that was taken of my daughter, I saw. I saw it all, because I did not want to go into a courtroom and see my daughter like

that for the very first. first time. I needed to know. I saw the stab marks. I saw her jugular cut. I saw the zip ties on her hand. I saw it all. What did it say to you about the kind of death they gave her? It was brutal. It was painful. It was long. It was torturous. She went through hell. And those two could not ever get away with it. They could not walk away free. There were separate preliminary hearings for Tony and Cody to determine if there was enough evidence to take their cases to trial. Tonies began on a blazing hot summer day in July 2011, four months after the murder. The somber crowd filed into the historic and stapy courthouse in Elko, Nevada.

Inside, it was packed with spectators and very tense. A side door opened and a bailiff guided a shackled Tony to her seat, at the defense table. Her hair was tightly braided. Her face was pale and gaunt. She stared straight ahead, as the DA read the case against her, and presented a parade of witnesses, including Mickey's mother, Celia, who identified some of her daughter's charred belongings recovered from that burn pit after the murder. Celia cried as she held the panda bear charm. Mickey always carried. But a day two of the hearing came the firewood. when the prosecutor pushed play on a tape machine. Tony Frato, her very own words on that scratchy audio tape,

recorded by Cody's defense attorney. Hi, Carol was on my ground, and she wasn't really moving at that point. They played the entire thing, which until now the public had never heard. I like cutting down the legs and heard foot for growth. We had slit her throat, said Tony. How to defend against that? Tony's attorneys did what they could. They argued that her, quote, so-called confession was wholly rubbish and shouldn't be admissible.

Was it clear violation of attorney-client privilege, adding that Tony had been misled by Cody's lawyers into thinking she was on the same team with him, and his legal counsel, which, of course, she was not. Tony's defender also pointed out there wasn't any forensic evidence that Tony was even there, where and when Cody killed Mickey. So when she went to see Cody's lawyer, wasn't she just spinning a story she thought would help her boyfriend? But in the end, the judge was not swayed and bound Tony over for trial, sent her back to jail with no bail.

And just over two weeks later, it was Cody Patton's turn to be trooped into that historic old chamber. He looked thinner now, the spectators noticed. His ginger hair was longer, and he was fidgety, stole glances around the courtroom, doodled on a notepad as witnesses took their turns. One of them was his very own father, Kit Patton, who said, yes, he did urge his son to confess, that was true. And then prosecutors played the tape

so the judge could hear exactly what Kit Patton told Cody. What he did is, hanged as Cody. You've got to just, you know, do what they need you to do. This is it, man. We have to fix this. And so Cody did what his father demanded he do. He confessed. But, said the older patent, Cody also whispered something odd.

Didn't make sense, really. But Kit certainly remembered hearing it. What did Cody whisper? That he didn't actually kill her, said Kit. But we were. We were both crying, and I didn't understand, Kip told the judge. And I said, what? And then he said, never mind.

But the physical evidence couldn't lie. And there was an avalanche of that, including DNA swab for Mickey's clothes that matched only him. And then there was the video of him leaving the school just before Mickey and his tired tracks of the murder scene. And of course, the most prominent piece of evidence, his very own confession to the cops. I tried to like check her pose and stuff and I couldn't get anything and she was flopping.

The prosecution played the whole awful thing. And virtually everyone in the courtroom, including Cody, cried as they heard him describe what he had done to Mickey, to his classmate, to his childhood friend. I kind of just tried to hit her on her head, trying to just knock her out. And she started making this awful cell.

A bailiff handed Cody tissues to wipe away the tears. But the judge had no sympathy for him. And like his fiancé Tony Fratto, Cody Patton was bound over for trial. There would be six counts all felonies, and one of them, murder, was punishable by death. But attentive observers in the courtroom couldn't help but notice that the two teenagers told very different stories.

Remember, Cody said he was alone. Well, Tony insisted, again, to Cody's lawyer, that she was with Cody, and they murdered Mickey together. It just didn't matter. Who did what? With whom? And why? In some weird way, were they trying to cover for each other? Tony's parents, Cassie and Claude Frato,

simply couldn't believe, though, despite her confession that their sweet demeanage of daughter was capable of such a monstrous act can you imagine her doing those things striking her with a shovel perhaps helping with the knife I don't believe that she had anything to do with the knife

there were no fingerprints no DNA anything to indicate that she had the striking her with the shovel was an order from Cody an order from Cody That was the reason, insisted the Fratto's, and behind it a terrible secret. Cody and Tony lived together, remember,

but in the Frato house, with Tony's parents, and they said they witnessed Cody issuing lots of orders, that he was extremely possessive, physically intimidating, more than a foot taller than Tiny Tony, and that he was often angry and abusive. He would yell at her, pushing her around. He would be restraining her and throwing her down. She was also at that point

looking for some way out of their relationship. Well, inviting him to live in your home. Well, you have to understand the victim of an abusive relationship. And we weren't aware of all that was taking place. In fact, just two months before, he was killed, the school surveillance camera caught an agitated Cody appearing to get rough with Tony at her locker. Here's private investigator Bill Savage. There was an instance that occurred in the hallway of Wendover High School that depicts Cody grabbing Tony around the neck and again realizing he's six foot six, she's five foot one. But Tony declined to file charges, said her father, Her explanation was that if something like this happens, he will not be accepted into the Marines.

And I don't want to stand in the way of that. But now, after the murder and Tony's confession, whether real or made up, to save her boyfriend, the Frados looked back on their daughter's relationship with Cody with new eyes. Tony, it seemed to them, was an abused woman. She was living in fear of what she thought the repercussions would be if she brought it out. So fearing Cody might kill her too, Tony must have felt she had no choice but to cooperate with him. So her participation, as people say, in what happened that night, was strictly out of fear, controlling manipulation and orders by the one that she had already been suffering. abuse from for three years.

But she participated in the attack? Participated? Participated under extreme orders. She was afraid that she would be the one lying next to Michaela if she did not follow his orders that evening. To which Cody's attorney, John Olson, responded. Baloney. Why do you say that?

Baloney. There's nothing in there. relationship ever that would indicate that she was ever abused by Cody. But now Tony Frato, the former Little Miss Wendover, was facing the daunting prospect of losing her life, not to Cody Patton, but a lethal injection, unless she could tell a whole new story about her role in Mickey Costanza's murder. Could she betray the man she swore she loved? could she win her freedom and make him pay the ultimate price

next time there was conversations and texts between Tony and Cody from the beginning of the morning until 7 o'clock I had gotten a text saying that he had her so if you had to look for a motive in this crime the only one that seemed apparent was her animosity

it was the only one on paper in her own handwriting 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 Gorphine 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.