Murder of Kelsey Berreth

Kelsey Berreth, a 29-year-old flight instructor from Woodland Park, Colorado, was last seen in public on Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2018, on surveillance video shopping with her one-year-old daughter, Kaylee, at a Woodland Park Safeway. Berreth was engaged to Kaylee's father, Patrick Frazee, a rancher and farrier from nearby Florissant; the two had met through an online dating site in 2016, and Berreth moved to Colorado to be near him, though the couple never lived together. Berreth's mother, Cheryl Berreth, reported her missing on December 2, 2018, after growing concerned. A police wellness check at Berreth's townhome found her phone, purse, and keys gone, while both of her vehicles remained in the driveway.

Investigators concluded that text messages sent from Berreth's phone to her mother, her employer, and Frazee in the days after Thanksgiving had been sent by someone else as a decoy. Cell-phone records showed Berreth's phone had traveled roughly 800 miles, ending up near Gooding, Idaho, by November 25, 2018. Frazee was arrested on December 21, 2018, on suspicion of murder and solicitation of murder, and the couple's daughter was placed in the custody of Berreth's parents.

At Frazee's 2019 trial, prosecutors said he attacked Berreth inside her Woodland Park home while she was blindfolded during a candle-scent guessing game, beating her to death with a baseball bat, then placing her body in a plastic tote that he burned on his property; her remains have never been recovered despite an extensive search. The prosecution's central witness was Frazee's former girlfriend, Krystal Lee Kenney, who testified that Frazee had asked her on three separate occasions to kill Berreth before calling her on Thanksgiving to say he had a mess for her to clean up. Kenney testified she scrubbed blood from Berreth's home and later drove Berreth's phone to Idaho to create a false trail. She pleaded guilty to tampering with physical evidence and testified against Frazee under a plea agreement.

A jury convicted Frazee on all six counts against him — two counts of first-degree murder, one count of tampering with a deceased human body, and three counts of solicitation to commit murder — after about three and a half hours of deliberation on November 18, 2019. Teller County District Court Judge Scott Sells sentenced him the same day to life in prison without the possibility of parole plus 156 years, the maximum sentence available after prosecutors had earlier decided not to seek the death penalty.

Frazee appealed, arguing that statements he made in jail to a Department of Human Services caseworker about his relationship with Berreth should have been suppressed because he had not been given Miranda warnings. On February 10, 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed his conviction, holding that the caseworker was assessing the welfare of Frazee's daughter rather than acting as a law-enforcement agent and so was not required to give Miranda warnings. As of that ruling, Berreth's body had still not been found.