WITNESS SAYS FRAZEE WANTED HIM TO KILL INVESTIGATOR, FRIEND
DENVER & THE WEST
A man who met Patrick Frazee in the Teller County Jail testified in court Friday that Frazee asked him multiple times to kill Krystal Lee Kenney, the prosecution’s key witness in the murder of Kelsey Berreth.
The surprise witness, Jacob Bentley, said he was housed next to Frazee until October of this year and the two started talking.
Bentley said he told Frazee he was part of a prison gang and that Frazee offered to help bail him out of jail if he arranged the killings of Kenney and other witnesses in the case. Bentley testified that Frazee also asked him to kill the lead Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent on the case, relatives of Kenney, Frazee’s friend who testified in court, and others.
Bentley would be the last witness called in the trial. The prosecution rested its case Friday afternoon, and Frazee’s defense team said it would not call any witnesses. Frazee declined to take the stand.
“I will remain silent,” Frazee said, the most he has spoken to the court throughout the three-week trial.
On Monday, attorneys will present closing arguments and then the case will go to the jury for deliberation.
The CBI agent, Gregg Slater, testified that Bentley provided investigators more than a dozen handwritten notes that appeared to be in Frazee’s handwriting. The notes, some written on paper towels, described how to find Kenney and others in the case and instructed Bentley to destroy the notes afterward. Prosecutors displayed the notes to the court, and Slater said that multiple people named in the notes had not previously been named by news reports.
“They all need to disappear unseen until after Nov. 22 after the trial,” one note read. “My life and my little girl’s life depends on you!”
Although the jailhouse notes, if written by Frazee, appear damning, they also showed that the Florissant rancher maintained his innocence in the killing of Berreth.
“I’m not the monster they say I am,” one note read. “I don’t know what happened or where she went. Honestly my wheels are spinning out of control the closer it gets to trial.”
Bentley testified that he was not promised anything by prosecutors in exchange for his testimony. But prosecutor Beth Reed told the court that Bentley had asked that his pending cases from multiple counties be resolved in one county.
Bentley also requested that prosecutors ask the news media to not publish his name because he feared gang retaliation, and a representative from the district attorney’s office asked the reporters in the courtroom not to publish it, acknowledging it was the reporters’ decision. The Denver Post is publishing Bentley’s name because he testified in open court.
Frazee’s defense attorney, Adam Steigerwald, attacked Bentley’s credibility in cross-examination. Stiegerwald said Bentley was expected to testify in a separate trial in Weld County that another defendant asked him to kill a witness, which Bentley affirmed. He said that Bentley watched a television show about the case before he came forward.
“Honestly, at first I was hoping to get some sort of help in my case,” Bentley said, when asked why he came forward in the case. He also said it seemed like the right thing to do and that he was scared to testify.
Before Bentley took the stand, prosecutors called a bloodstain expert who explained that the blood spots found in the Berreth’s condo were consistent with Kenney’s account.
Berreth’s father leaned forward in his front-row seat in the Teller County courtroom and cried as Jonathyn Priest testified in vivid language and with swinging motions how blood could have been splattered across Berreth’s Woodland Park condo.
People seated next to Darrell Berreth patted the father on the back and handed him tissues as he watched body camera footage of Kenney walking law enforcement through Berreth’s condo, describing the gruesome scene she cleaned on Nov. 24. At one point, Kenney used a broom to point to a spot more than 12 feet high on the wall where she said she cleaned blood spatter. Kenney’s description of the blood patterns she found are consistent with a high-impact attack with an object, which would spread a large quantity of small blood spots across the condo, Priest said. When Fourth Judicial District Attorney Dan May asked if the stains were consistent with an attack with a bat, Priest said, “Oh, absolutely.”
“The fact that there are small bloodstains supports my opinion that we have a forceful incident, not a passive one,” Priest said.
The body camera footage from Dec. 21 showed Kenney telling investigators that she cleaned a large amount of blood from the condo two days after Frazee bludgeoned Berreth to death on Thanksgiving Day. Kenney, who spoke to investigators as part of a plea deal, testified earlier in trial that she watched Frazee burn Berreth’s body on his Florissant ranch and helped him dispose of Berreth’s belongings.
Kenney described the scene she saw when she walked into the condo on Nov. 24. Blood pooled on the living room floor and spatters turned the white walls red. She said tiny drops coated the kitchen appliances, the kitchen chairs and on a baby gate that had been in the living room.
Kenney walked investigators directly to tiny blood spots she said she deliberately left behind.
He also said the staining found between the slats of the wooden floor was consistent with a large pool of blood that had time to seep into cracks.
Holding a sample of the floor from Berreth’s condo, Priest also described two indentations on the wood plank, though he couldn’t tell exactly what hit it.
“So something substantially heavy and substantially hard had an impact on this area and certainly a baseball bat is consistent with that,” he said.
In cross-examination, defense attorney Ashley Porter questioned Priest’s analysis because it included information from Kenney, whom defense attorneys have attempted to discredit. Priest said he would have come to similar conclusions even without Kenney’s account, and said that none of the evidence contradicted Kenney’s testimony.