Her Fiancée Had Been Planning The Perfect Crime for months — Kelsey Barreth and Patrick Frazee

Kelsey Marie Berreth was born on September 15, 1989 in Moses Lake, Washington, where she also grew up.

Kelsey lived with her parents and her brother Clint on a farm and they were all very close.

Her family describes her as a shy, ambitious and very believing girl in God.

Since always her passion was aviation, so much so that she managed to graduate from the pilots school to make her way to the job of her dreams.

But there was undoubtedly something she longed for with all her strength and that was to have her own family.

In 2015, Kelsey met Patrick Frazee through a dating website and they started a long-distance relationship since the boy worked on a ranch and lived with his mother in Colorado.

Kelsey was so in love with Patrik that she ended up moving to Colorado to be closer to him, but living in separate houses. Immediately the woman became pregnant with Kaylee, their first daughter in common.

In 2018, when the girl was 14 months old, the couple had already been engaged for a long time but they were still living apart. Kelsey lived in Colorado Springs and very close she had her job as a flight instructor for Air Force pilots. Patrick’s farm was an hour away from her house, that’s why he took advantage of her free time to spend it with him. She was the one who was always going to see him and he was rarely the one who moved.

Between the girl, work and having to spend an hour back and an hour back by car to see Patrick, Kelsey began to get overwhelmed. It is true that this led to a certain tension in the couple but the least the woman could suspect was that Patrick had been thinking for weeks about how to kill her.

The facts:

On November 22, 2018, Kelsey went with her daughter to buy some last-minute items for Thanksgiving dinner. Before that she called her mother to ask for a sauce recipe and sent a text message to Patrick to tell him that she was going to prepare his favorite dish. This message was the last one written by the 29-year-old woman.

The days went by without news from Kelsey so on December 2, Cheryl, her mother called the police and requested a welfare check alleging that she had not been able to talk to her daughter for more than a week.

The officers went to Kelsey’s house and there they observed that her car was parked on the entrance way, look for some hands knocking on the front door. However, when they knocked on the door, there was no response.

That same day the agents talked to Patrick and he told them a somewhat strange story.

According to him, Kelsey broke the relationship a day before Thanksgiving because she wanted to start a new life. To this he added that the last time he saw her was on November 22 to leave the girl in a kind of custody agreement that they had reached between the two.

To support his story, Patrick showed them the messages she sent him after thanksgiving. On the other hand, he not only alleged that his daughter’s mother had depression problems but also one day he had to take a weapon from her property for her own safety.

The researchers also spoke with the woman’s co-workers. What they said was that on November 25 they received a message from Kelsey saying that she was sick and that she would not return until the following week.

Worried on December 3, Kelsey’s mother and brother flew to Colorado. The first thing they did was enter her house to check it with the police.

Once inside, they noticed that the woman’s bag was not there but the rest of her belongings were still there.

Suddenly when entering the bathroom something caught their attention... The mother and the brother realized that the mat she used to have was missing, but not only that, Clint found a blood stain on the base of the toilet.

After this discovery, the police notified several forensic investigators and when spraying with luminol they determined that the whole bathroom was soaked in blood. Later it was known that this belonging to Kelsey. At that time, the case of the missing person became a murder investigation.

A large-scale body search was immediately launched, reaching the national headlines. The authorities held a press conference asking for information about Kelsey’s whereabouts and the community organized a vigil in her honor. The only person who missed both events was Patrick.

Where is Kelsey?

The agents reviewed the images of the security cameras in the area belonging to November 22, let’s remember that that was the last day that Kelsey had contact with her mother.

Thank you, that’s why they found a recording of the woman entering a supermarket at 12 noon with her daughter and carrying an Easter flower.

At 1.30 p.m. the cameras of Kelsey’s neighbors captured her entering her house with Patrick, the girl and with the same Easter flower that she was carrying inside the store. Unfortunately, the woman never left her house alive again.

Minutes later, Patrick and his 14-month-old daughter were recorded at a Walmart, where the man bought a large plastic container and on November 24 he was seen at a gas station filling a bottle with fuel.

With all this information, the agents asked for an order to check their mobile phone. According to the record, the days after the disappearance, Patrick called a number in Idaho 46 times, where Kelsey’s phone was last placed.

The number that Patrick called so much was registered in the name of Krystal Lee Keeney, a 32-year-old nurse who lived in Twin Falls, Idaho, with whom she was her husband and two children at the time. Krystal was Patrick’s ex-girlfriend and at that time she was his secret lover.

The story of Kristal and Patrick goes back years in time. They both met during high school and started a relationship. After several ups and downs she left him, and when she got married they continued to see each other. In 2016 she became pregnant with Patrick but decided not to go ahead because he didn’t want the child.

Patrick never told Kristal about his relationship with Kelsey or the birth of his daughter. She found out from a third person and was in shock. Even so, they continued to see each other.

When the police showed all the evidence they had against him, Patrick hired a lawyer and refused to speak, but Krystal was an open book and although at first she lied to the agents then she told the chilling details of what really happened.

According to Krystal in September 2018, Patrick asked him on up to 3 occasions to kill Kelsey. To convince her, he alleged that the woman was physically abusing his daughter and that the child protection services had refused to intervene. Eventually it was known that all this was a lie and that Kelsey never treated the little girl badly.

At first Kristal agreed to end the woman’s life but in the end she backed off and Patrick decided to take care of everything.

On November 22, when Kelsey returned home from the supermarket, Patrick put Kaylee on her playground and attracted his fiancée to the living room. There he blindfolded her eyes and told her that he had to guess the aromas of several candles.

Kelsey had no idea what was about to happen to her. When she was already blindfolded, Patrick took a baseball bat and repeatedly hit her on the head while she begged for her life.

After the crime, the man called Krystal and told her that he had “a mess to clean up.” The woman drove for 12 hours to Colorado and on the 24th she arrived at Patrick’s house. There she saw that everything was full of dried blood. As she told the agents, she helped him clean up the crime scene because was very afraid of the man.

To this she added that as she wanted to be caught, she left blood in several places of the house, such as the wooden boards on the floor and the chimney.

After the cleaning, Patrick put Kelsey’s body and her blood-stained bible in the container he bought at Walmart. Then they took her to his mother’s ranch where they set her on fire with the gasoline he had previously bought.

Krystal took Kelsey’s phone to Idaho and sent fake text messages to several people posing as the young mother. Like her remains, the phone ended up burned.

On December 21, 2018, Patrick was arrested and charged with several crimes, including first-degree murder and the request to commit a murder.

For her part, in February 2019, Kristal pleaded guilty to a serious crime of manipulation of evidence and agreed to testify in the trial against Patrick after reaching an agreement. According to the prosecutor’s office, they were making a pact with the devil but since there was no body, they had no other choice if they wanted to put the man in the back of bars.

Kristal also took the agents to Patrick’s mother’s farm to show them the place where Kelsey’s body had been burned. Right there they found a tooth but it was so deteriorated that the forensics could only determine that it belonged to a woman.

The trial:

The trial for the murder of Kelsey Berreth began in November 2019. It is known that while Patrick was in detention awaiting trial, he asked an inmate for help to end the lives of several key witnesses and among whom was Kristal.

The prosecutor’s office argued that Patrick murdered Kelsey to collect her life insurance and obtain full custody of their daughter.

The man had several overdue payments of a loan and also had to take care of the expenses that corresponded to him for the child’s maintenance. At one point he was a beneficiary of Kelsey’s life insurance but what he didn’t know was that this policy was no longer of any use because she never managed to renew it.

Several police officers stated that after the disappearance of his daughter’s mother, the accused never showed interest in her search and that in his phone records they did not find calls to Kelsey’s to know where she was.

Before the jury, Kristal again told everything she told the agents about Kelsey’s death and Patrick’s guilt. She insisted that if she didn’t report him before, it was because of the fear she was afraid of him.

Several Kelsey’s co-workers also testified who claimed that they never saw that she had problems with depression or drinking.

In December 2019, Patrick Frazee, 33, was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole plus an additional 156 years. To this day, Kelsey’s body still does not appear and it is the maternal grandparents who take care of little Kaylee.

By her agreement with the 32-year-old Kristal Lee Keeney prosecutor’s office, she was sentenced to 18 months for tampering with evidence and in March 2021 she was put on probation.

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