Snow was falling over Woodland Park, Colorado, the kind of delicate, endless snow that makes everything look clean—almost innocent. In one small townhouse on the edge of town, the scent of cinnamon rolls lingered in the air. It was Thanksgiving morning, November 22, 2018, and 29-year-old Kelsey Berreth had woken early, her baby girl balanced on one hip as she stirred sugar into coffee and hummed under her breath. She sent a photo to her mother in Idaho—baby Kaylee clutching a stuffed animal, frosting smeared on her cheek—and wrote, “Happy Thanksgiving, Mom.”
By nightfall, Kelsey would vanish forever.
Outside, Patrick Frazee was driving his red pickup through the mountain fog toward her home. The roads between Florissant and Woodland Park were icy, quiet, the world wrapped in the kind of silence that feels like it’s holding its breath. He wasn’t in a hurry. He’d planned this day too carefully to rush.
To everyone who knew him, Patrick was the picture of small-town stability—a rugged Colorado farrier, a man who worked with horses and smelled of hay and leather. The kind of man neighbors trusted, the kind of man who shook your hand and looked you in the eye. But behind that calm, calloused facade, something dark had been quietly building for months.
Kelsey had met him years earlier. He wasn’t charming in the movie sense—he didn’t buy flowers or make grand gestures. What he offered instead was a kind of steadiness, the illusion of safety. She liked that. A pilot by profession, she was used to structure, to precision. Patrick seemed simple, grounded, predictable. For a while, that was enough.
They had a daughter together, Kaylee, a child Kelsey adored beyond words. They weren’t married. They didn’t even live together. Patrick stayed on his family’s ranch in Florissant, while Kelsey lived 15 miles away in a cozy townhouse on a quiet cul-de-sac. They shared parenting duties, exchanged the baby between them like clockwork. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked—until it didn’t.
By late 2018, Kelsey’s family noticed her light dimming. Her messages became shorter. Her voice sounded thinner, cautious. She mentioned stress, uncertainty, but never said the words that would have changed everything: I’m afraid of him.
In public, Patrick was polite. In private, he was controlling, a man who measured affection in obedience. He criticized what she wore, how she spoke, who she saw. He told her she was lucky he stayed. And she believed him—because that’s what fear disguised as love does.
That Thanksgiving morning, the mountains glistened under a cold sun. Kelsey baked, texted her mother, and waited for Patrick to stop by and pick up Kaylee. When he arrived, the neighbors saw nothing unusual—just a man at a woman’s door, a brief exchange, a baby carried out. Then the door closed, and Kelsey was never seen alive again.
Later, Patrick told investigators that she handed him the baby, smiled, and said she needed “a little break.” He said she walked back inside. He said she was fine. But there were no more calls, no new photos, no flight logs from her job at Doss Aviation, where she’d been training student pilots. Her phone went dark that weekend, except for a few strange text messages that didn’t sound like her.
Her mother, Cheryl Berreth, called police on December 2nd after ten long, silent days. “Something’s wrong,” she told them. “She wouldn’t just leave her baby.”
Detectives entered the townhouse that night. The heat was off. The lights were out. Her car sat in the driveway. Inside, the air felt wrong—cold and too clean. On the counter, a single half-eaten cinnamon roll had hardened beside an empty mug. In the trash, they found a baby wipe faintly stained with red. Her purse was missing. So was her phone. But her makeup bag, toothbrush, and coat were still there.
No signs of struggle. No forced entry. Just a silence that screamed.
Patrick kept up appearances. He showed up in public with their daughter, shaking his head at reporters, saying he was “worried sick.” He told police that Kelsey might have gone home to Idaho, that she’d been stressed, maybe even unstable. But even as he spoke, detectives were already watching him closely—and what they found made every word unravel.
Because Patrick hadn’t just planned to make Kelsey disappear. He had rehearsed it.
Months earlier, he had reached out to another woman—Crystal Lee, a nurse from Twin Falls, Idaho, and his on-and-off girlfriend. She’d known Patrick for years. Once upon a time, she thought they might have a future together. Even after his relationship with Kelsey began, Crystal lingered on the edges of his life, answering his calls, reading his mixed signals. When Patrick began talking about Kelsey with disgust, Crystal listened. When he began saying Kelsey didn’t “deserve” to be a mother, Crystal didn’t walk away. And when he started asking her to help make Kelsey “go away,” she didn’t report it.
He’d asked her three times before that November day—three separate murder attempts. Once, to poison Kelsey’s coffee. Another time, to hit her with a metal pipe. Then, to inject her with drugs. Each time, Crystal said she couldn’t do it. But she also couldn’t stay away.
By the time Thanksgiving arrived, Patrick had stopped waiting. He told Kelsey he wanted to play a game—a “trust exercise.” He asked her to close her eyes. He said he had a surprise. He told her to smell a candle. She was still smiling when the world went black.
What happened next would haunt Colorado for years.
Patrick wrapped her body in a plastic tote and left the baby in another room. Then, like nothing had happened, he fed the horses at his ranch and texted from Kelsey’s phone, pretending she was still alive. He even messaged her mother. “Taking some time off,” the text read. “Be back soon.”
But Cheryl knew her daughter’s voice, even in writing. And that—she told police—wasn’t it.
Investigators followed the digital trail. Cell towers pinged Kelsey’s phone not in Colorado, but in Idaho—near Twin Falls. That’s when everything cracked open.
Crystal Lee’s name surfaced.
When the FBI knocked on her door weeks later, she trembled. She lied at first, said she didn’t know anything, hadn’t seen Patrick in months. But guilt rotted quickly. Within days, she confessed. She told them about the plan, the cleanup, the fire. She told them she’d driven 700 miles to help Patrick erase what he’d done. She told them she found blood on the walls, on the baby gate, even on the ceiling.
She told them that the woman she cleaned up after had still had frosting on the counter from the cinnamon rolls she’d made that morning.
The story of Kelsey Berreth’s murder was not just about one man’s brutality—it was about trust, about how quietly evil can move when disguised as love. In small-town America, where fences are low and everyone waves, no one saw it coming.
And that was exactly how Patrick Frazee wanted it.
The interrogation room in Teller County, Colorado, was small, dimly lit, and cold enough to make the walls hum. Across the steel table, Crystal Lee sat with her hands clasped so tightly her knuckles had turned white. She had been awake for more than twenty hours when the FBI agents slid a photo across the table — Kelsey Berreth’s smiling face, frozen in a moment that no longer existed. The woman in the photo was alive, vibrant, holding her baby girl. Crystal couldn’t look at it for more than two seconds. Her throat constricted. She whispered, “He told me he needed help cleaning up a mess.”
The words hung in the air like smoke.
The agents leaned forward. “What kind of mess?”
She swallowed hard. “The kind that doesn’t wash off.”
And with that, the story began to unravel — piece by horrifying piece.
For weeks, Woodland Park had been blanketed in snow and rumor. Search parties combed through fields, dumpsters, and frozen creek beds. Volunteers wore orange vests and carried flashlights, their boots crunching on hard ice. Flyers with Kelsey’s face — brown hair, green eyes, “missing since Thanksgiving” — were taped to gas station doors and tacked onto telephone poles across Teller and El Paso Counties. The kind of small-town solidarity that blooms only in tragedy had gripped the community. But behind the scenes, detectives already suspected they weren’t searching for a missing woman. They were searching for proof of something far worse.
And the key to unlocking that proof sat trembling in front of them in that interrogation room.
Crystal spoke softly, her voice breaking as she described the days after Thanksgiving. She said Patrick had called her the next morning, his tone flat, distant. He told her, “It’s done.” She didn’t ask what that meant. She already knew. He said he needed her in Colorado. He said she had to help him “fix it.”
So she drove.
Seven hundred miles of empty highway from Twin Falls, Idaho, to Woodland Park, Colorado — snow-slick asphalt, black coffee, and the slow descent into something she couldn’t undo. The kind of drive where your mind starts building a wall between who you were and who you’re about to become.
When she arrived at Kelsey’s townhouse, the lights were off. The door wasn’t locked. She said the smell hit her first — the heavy, metallic scent of bleach, air freshener, and something else. Something she would never be able to name.
Inside, everything looked too clean.
She saw baby toys piled neatly in a corner. A Christmas stocking hanging over the fireplace. A candle burned low on the counter. But then her eyes caught the stains — faint but everywhere. The floor. The baseboards. The underside of a chair. She found one of Kelsey’s teeth near the vent.
Her hands began to shake as she spoke. “I cleaned for hours,” she said. “I scrubbed until my arms went numb. I threw everything away — the toys, the books, the blinds. Everything that had red on it.”
One agent asked, “Why would you do that?”
Crystal’s eyes flooded. “Because I loved him. Because I thought if I helped him, he’d finally choose me.”
That line would echo across every courtroom in Colorado for the next year.
Meanwhile, Patrick Frazee was pretending nothing had happened. He fed his horses. He visited his mother at the ranch in Florissant, telling her Kelsey was “staying with family.” He even showed up in public with baby Kaylee, smiling stiffly for cameras, telling reporters, “We just want her home safe.”
But investigators were already piecing together the cracks.
Kelsey’s cell phone pinged in Idaho on November 25 — three days after she vanished. Text messages sent from her phone to her employer at Doss Aviation said she’d be taking time off. But the phrasing was strange — clipped, cold, not like Kelsey. The GPS trail didn’t make sense either: the phone had traveled from Woodland Park to Gooding, Idaho, almost the exact route Crystal Lee would have taken on her drive home.
When agents confronted Crystal with that data, she broke completely.
Through tears, she told them Patrick had stored Kelsey’s body in a black plastic tote, hidden it in his barn behind bales of hay, and kept visiting it like it was nothing. He even brought the baby there. Fed the horses. Played music. Talked about ranch chores — all while her body sat just a few feet away.
Then, one night, the smell grew too strong.
Crystal said Patrick built a massive burn pit behind the barn. He poured motor oil over the tote, lit it, and stood there for hours feeding the fire. The smoke rose thick and dark into the Colorado sky, drifting over pine trees and open pasture. Neighbors noticed it but thought it was just a rancher burning wood.
He told her he’d burned everything — her body, her clothes, the tote, the blanket. He said when the fire was done, he smashed the remains and scattered them along the dirt road that ran through Florissant.
“Did you see it?” the agents asked.
Crystal nodded. “The fire was still warm when I got there.”
It was the kind of testimony that freezes a room.
In early December 2018, armed with her confession, investigators obtained a search warrant for Patrick’s ranch. They brought cadaver dogs, ground-penetrating radar, forensic specialists — the full arsenal. Snow crunched under their boots as they spread across the property, marking off the barn, the fire pit, the sheds. The dogs alerted immediately near the burn site. They found fragments — small, blackened, fragile. Pieces of what once was bone.
Inside the barn, forensic lights revealed microscopic traces of blood that no bleach could erase. Under the floorboards. Behind the couch. Even beneath a fresh layer of hay.
Patrick had cleaned, but not well enough.
When deputies showed up to arrest him on December 21, 2018, he didn’t resist. He didn’t shout. He just looked at them with that same detached calm and said, “You’ve got the wrong guy.”
But he knew they didn’t.
In Twin Falls, Crystal Lee prepared to testify. She signed a plea agreement: one count of evidence tampering in exchange for her cooperation. It wasn’t forgiveness — it was survival. She would later tell prosecutors that she saw Patrick as someone she couldn’t escape, someone who pulled her into his orbit until she forgot who she was. “I thought he’d kill me if I didn’t help him,” she said. “And I thought he’d stop loving me if I didn’t.”
It was a paradox that would haunt her forever.
By January 2019, the case had gone national. News vans crowded the streets outside Woodland Park Police Headquarters. Headlines read: “Missing Colorado Mom Feared Dead — Fiancé Arrested.” The entire country watched as the pieces fit together like a nightmare jigsaw: the cinnamon rolls, the staged text messages, the quiet rancher who’d fooled an entire community.
And through it all, one question echoed: Where was Kelsey Berreth’s body?
Months later, even after the snow melted and the spring winds swept across the Rockies, the answer never came. The fire had done its job. There would be no grave, no closure, only ash and air.
But the prosecution didn’t need a body.
They had her blood, his lies, and her voice — the one that finally broke the silence.
When Patrick Frazee stood trial in November 2019, exactly one year after Thanksgiving, the courtroom in Cripple Creek, Colorado, was packed. Reporters lined the walls. Kelsey’s parents sat in the front row, hands clasped, eyes red. And when the jury filed in, everyone could feel it — that electric, unbearable tension that comes when truth finally steps into the light.
What they heard next would stun even the most seasoned detectives.
Because when Crystal took the stand, the woman who had once driven seven hundred miles to clean another woman’s blood finally told the world exactly what Patrick had done — and why she’d helped him.
And as she spoke, the room went silent.
To be continued…
