TELLER COUNTY, Colo. — The woman who has spent more than a year in prison after accepting plea deal for tampering with evidence in the murder of Colorado mother Kelsey Berreth will be resentenced later this month.
Krystal Lee Kenney has been serving a three-year sentence in the Colorado Department of Corrections since January 2020. Last month, the appeals court said the 34-year-old should be resentenced because the punishment she had been given exceeded the maximum for the charge she agreed to in her deal with prosecutors.
RELATED: Krystal Lee Kenney to be resentenced after taking plea deal following murder of Kelsey Berreth
The resentencing is slated for 9 a.m. on March 23. The parties involved will not be in the courtroom during the proceeding, but it will be streamed on Webex.
In 2019, then-District Attorney Dan May called the agreement with Kenney "a deal with the devil."
It was the culmination of a years-long on-again, off-again relationship between Kenney and Patrick Frazee, who is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder after a jury found him guilty of killing Berreth.
Berreth, who was 29 at the time of her death, was last seen on Thanksgiving Day 2018. Kenney testified that Frazee beat Berreth to death with a baseball bat while their young child was in the other room, and then put her body in a tote that was stored at a ranch in rural Teller County before it was burned on Frazee's property near Florissant.
Kenney said Frazee had asked her to kill Berreth on multiple occasions, but she couldn't go through with it. However, when Frazee told her she "had a mess to clean up" after Berreth's murder, Kenney said she drove to Colorado from Idaho to clean up the crime scene.
Kenney said she also saw Frazee burn Berreth's body, and that she brought the young mother's cellphone with her back to Idaho and later disposed of it in an effort to fool law enforcement into believing Berreth had disappeared.
Frazee's November 2019 trial brought media from across the U.S. to the Teller County courthouse in Cripple Creek.
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Prosecutors were able to link Kenney and Frazee using phone records.
According to Colorado DOC records, Frazee is currently serving his sentence at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Prowers County. His and Berreth's now-3-year-old daughter is in the custody of the Berreth family.
Prosecutors asked that Kenney receive the maximum sentence possible for her role in the crime, and during her January 2020 sentencing, the judge agreed.
“To consider probation would minimize the depravity of your actions,” Judge Scott Sells said during Lee’s sentencing. “Simply saying ‘I’m sorry’ is not enough. Your actions deserve the maximize sentence permitted by law.”
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