Motion Filed After Court Deadline
~ by Trevor Phipps ~
Early last week, Patrick Frazee’s defense team ran out of time to name an alternate suspect for the reported brutal killing of Kelsey Berreth of Woodland Park.
But then on Wednesday, new court documents were released to the public announcing that the murder suspect’s defense team was in fact naming an alternate killer as part of their defense.
The motion was filed by Deputy State Public Defender Adam Steigerwald, a day after the court’s deadline. Since the motion was filed late, it is still not known whether or not the judge will accept the filing.
In many cases, an alternate suspect declaration will cause the trial to get postponed so that each side has more time to prepare their cases. However, since the defense team filed the motion after the deadline the judge previously set, the courts may not allow the trial to get pushed back.
In the motion, the state public defender said that their defense was based on a general denial and that another suspect may be to blame. “There may be evidence that other individuals committed or fabricated portions of the crimes alleged against Mr. Frazee, to include Krystal Lee,” Steigerwald stated in the motion.
Frazee was arrested last December for charges related to the murder of his former fiancé and mother of his child Kelsey Berreth, who was last seen on Thanksgiving Day of last year. His former girlfriend, Krystal Lee, told investigators that Frazee called her last Thanksgiving, told her that he murdered Berreth by beating her over the head with a baseball bat and demanded that she clean up the crime scene.
Lee admitted to helping clean up blood in Berreth’s apartment as well as witnessing Frazee burn her remains on his property in Florissant. She also said that Frazee had tried to get her to kill Berreth three times before. Lee said that he tried to get her to murder Berreth once by telling her to posion Berreth, a second time by asking her to bludgeon the mother of Frazee’s child with a baseball bat he gave her, then again he wanted Lee to kill Berreth with a metal pipe he gave her.
Lee said that each time Frazee tried to get her to commit murder she never went through with it. As a part of a deal offered by the district attorney’s office, Lee pleaded guilty to felony charges of tampering with evidence and agreed to testify against Frazee during the trial.
By filing the recent motion Frazee’s defense team is saying that Lee’s story is not entirely true. The defense is pointing their finger back at Frazee’s former girlfriend in an attempt to create reasonable doubt by turning the murder trial into a big “he said/she said” battle.
The defense suggests that they have evidence that Lee may have committed the crime herself and lied about the story to the investigators. The defense team currently has two of their own independent investigators working on coming up with evidence to prove their argument.
The next time Frazee is scheduled to appear in court is on October 18, during hearing for a pre-trial readiness conference. As of now, his murder trial is still scheduled to take place on October 28.
