The faint scent of cinnamon buns still clinging to the air inside the sweltering Woodland Park townhome was a ghostly reminder of a Thanksgiving that never happened. For days, the world believed 29-year-old Kelsey Berreth, a pilot and mother, had simply walked away from her life, leaving behind her one-year-old daughter, her belongings, and a half-eaten meal. But the heat cranked to maximum inside her home, the freshly wiped refrigerator shelves, and a missing bathroom mat told a far more sinister story to the family who knew her best.
What investigators initially dismissed as a missing person’s case had just revealed its first, horrifying secret: the home was a crime scene, saturated in the blood of the young woman who was supposed to be carving the turkey.
The discovery came not from a forensic breakthrough, but from the desperate intuition of Cheryl Berreth, Kelsey’s mother, and her brother, Clint. They had flown in from Washington state, driven by a gnawing certainty that the official narrative was wrong. Kelsey, a woman who spoke to her mother every single day, had not called since Thanksgiving morning.
Her car was parked outside, her clothes untouched, and her phone was pinging from a tower 800 miles away in Idaho—a state she had no known reason to visit. When Cheryl and Clint walked into the house, they were immediately struck by the oppressive heat, as if someone had tried to bake away the evidence of a struggle. They noticed the refrigerator had been wiped down with a cleaner, leaving visible streaks, and the bathmat was gone.
Then Clint spotted it: a small, dark stain on the toilet that looked like blood.
Their call to the police changed the trajectory of the entire investigation. Responding officers brought in luminol and a cadaver dog, and the results were staggering. The home lit up with the chemical glow of blood spatter, covering the walls, the floor, the dishwasher, and even the ceiling.
DNA analysis confirmed what the family had feared most: the blood was Kelsey’s. The sheer volume of the evidence, coupled with the fact that she had left her daughter behind without a word, led the Woodland Park Police Department to officially reclassify her disappearance as a homicide investigation. The lead investigator admitted that it was only after speaking with Cheryl and Clint that he realized this was not a woman who had fled; this was a woman who had been brutally murdered in her own kitchen.
The spotlight immediately turned to Patrick Frazee, Kelsey’s fiancé and the father of her child. The 32-year-old Colorado cowboy, who lived on his mother’s 35-acre ranch, had told police a story that now seemed riddled with inconsistencies. He claimed that Kelsey had ended their relationship the day before Thanksgiving, that they had met briefly in an alley to exchange their daughter, Kaylee, and that he had not seen her since.
He painted a picture of Kelsey as a depressed and unstable woman, hinting that she might have been suicidal or struggling with substance 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮—a characterization that her friends and family vehemently denied. But the cracks in his alibi began to show almost immediately. Neighbor’s CCTV footage contradicted his timeline, showing Patrick entering Kelsey’s home with her and Kaylee on the day she vanished, and then returning alone hours later.
Cell phone records placed his phone in the same location as Kelsey’s for days after her disappearance, and her phone’s final pings in Idaho led investigators to a woman named Crystal Lee Kenney.
Kenney, a nurse from Idaho, initially denied knowing Patrick, but a deeper dig into her phone records revealed a decade-long on-and-off 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 with him. She was the missing link. When confronted with the evidence, Kenney broke down and admitted to her role in the horrific crime, leading investigators on a walkthrough of Kelsey’s home that was captured on video.
She described in chilling detail how she had been summoned by Patrick to clean up the “mess” after he had beaten Kelsey to death with a baseball bat while their daughter played in the other room. Kenney recounted how she scrubbed blood from the walls and appliances, but deliberately left a few spots, claiming she wanted Patrick to get caught. She then led police to the Frazee ranch, where she described watching Patrick place Kelsey’s body in a black plastic tote, douse it in five gallons of gasoline and motor oil, and burn it in a metal trough while his mother, Sheila, watched from the porch.
The motive, as pieced together by prosecutors, was a tangled web of control, financial ruin, and a desire for a new life. Patrick was deeply in debt, having defaulted on a $72,000 loan, and was failing to pay the agreed-upon child support. He was also listed as the beneficiary on a recent life insurance policy taken out by Kelsey.
But perhaps the most damning piece of evidence was a text message he sent to Kenney, telling her he needed her to “take care of his baby mama.” Kenney, who was under his spell, claimed she initially tried to poison Kelsey with coffee but lost her nerve. She eventually pleaded guilty to tampering with evidence in exchange for her testimony, a deal the District Attorney described as “a deal with the devil” that was necessary to secure a conviction.
On December 21, 2018, less than a month after Kelsey was last seen, Patrick Frazee was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, solicitation to commit murder, and six other charges.
The trial, which began in October 2019, was a media circus, with cameras banned and security tight. The jury heard from Kenney, who detailed the murder and the subsequent cover-up, and from an inmate who claimed Patrick had tried to hire him to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Kenney and other witnesses from his jail cell, passing notes on toilet paper that read, “I’d really like to see Crystal with a bullet in her head.” The defense painted Kenney as the mastermind, a jealous lover who had acted alone, but the mountain of forensic and digital evidence was insurmountable.
It took the jury just two and a half hours to return a unanimous guilty verdict on all counts. The judge sentenced Frazee to life in prison without parole, plus an additional 156 years for the solicitation and tampering charges, telling him, “Your actions were vicious, senseless, without reason nor explanation. After you beat her, you burned her body like a piece of trash.”
Kelsey Berreth’s remains have never been found, leaving her family without a grave to visit. In the aftermath, the community of Woodland Park rallied together, donating labor and materials to renovate the blood-soaked townhome where the murder occurred, an act of defiance against the darkness that had descended on their town. Crystal Kenney was released from prison in 2021 after serving a reduced sentence, a fact that continues to anger Kelsey’s family, who believe she got off far too lightly for her role in the heinous crime.
Patrick Frazee’s appeal was denied in 2023, ensuring he will spend the rest of his life behind bars. As the years pass, the memory of Kelsey Berreth—the country girl who loved flying, the devoted mother, the woman with the best hugs—remains a painful scar on the community, a reminder that some monsters hide in plain sight, wearing the guise of a handsome cowboy on a ranch in the mountains.
