A former Idaho nurse who aided Teller County rancher Patrick Frazee after he brutally killed his fiancée Kelsey Berreth in Woodland Park was released on parole Tuesday after receiving a reduced sentence.

Krystal Jean Kenney’s release from the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility came after she was resentenced to 18 months in prison for evidence tampering in Berreth’s Thanksgiving Day 2018 murder, prison officials confirmed.  

“Based on the new sentence, Ms. Kenney was now past her mandatory release date and she was released from the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility on parole,” Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman Annie Skinner said.

Teller County District Judge Scott Sells imposed the new sentence about a month after the Colorado Court of Appeals overturned the 3-year sentence Kenney received in January 2020. The appeals court ordered the judge to resentence her to between 1 year and 18 months. 

“You could have warned her. You could have called law enforcement. You could have prevented the murder and done the right thing,” Sells told Kenney at a virtual sentencing hearing in choosing to impose the maximum. “But you did nothing.” 

Kenney, 34, attended the hearing via video from the Denver women’s prison before her release later in the day. She wore a mask and mostly kept her eyes cast downward, her face partly hidden by her long, brown hair that fell over her left shoulder. She did not speak and only nodded to affirm she declined to make a statement.

Her attorney, Dru Nielsen, previously said the new penalty — even at the maximum — would leave Kenney eligible for automatic parole, given credit for time served and good behavior. 

Under normal Department of Corrections practice, people with convictions similar to Kenney’s are typically released on mandatory parole after serving 67% of their sentence, significantly less than she has already served, said Colorado Springs defense attorney Shimon Kohn, who isn’t involved in the case.   

If Kenney sought to have her parole transferred to Idaho, she had a “very good chance” of succeeding, given her ties to the state, Kohn added. 

“She could parole straight out of DOC (Department of Corrections) to Idaho if she has the paperwork in place,” Kohn added. It’s unclear where she will be under supervised release. 

Skinner provided no additional details about Kenney’s parole, and her attorney didn’t respond to a voice mail. 

In resentencing Kenney, Sells recounted how Frazee, with whom Kenney had a yearslong, on-and-off relationship, solicited her three times to try to kill Berreth.

Prior testimony showed that Frazee directed her to bring his fiancee a poisoned coffee drink from Starbucks on one occasion and to assault her with a metal pipe or a baseball bat on the others. Although the nurse didn’t follow through, she could have warned Berreth and saved her life, the judge said.  

Sells recounted how she spent hours cleaning up “a brutal and horrific murder scene” before stopping at a fast food restaurant to buy food for Frazee. He said she made the “conscious decision” to use Berreth’s phone to create false impression she was still alive, a ruse that lasted for days.

“Your actions were not impulsive. They were not spur of the moment,” Sells said. “You had hours and hours and hundreds of miles to do the right thing, and you never said a word until you were later confronted by law enforcement.”

‘I am sorry that I did not save Kelsey,’ Patrick Frazee mistress Krystal Lee says when sentenced

Nielsen emphasized evidence that Kenney wasn’t directly involved in Berreth’s murder and only “followed the direction of a man who threatened to harm” her and her children. Evidence that Frazee later tried to solicit someone to kill Kenney’s family members to keep her from taking the stand at his trial only proved his deadly intentions, she added. 

Nielsen credited Kenney’s “courage and principle” with leading her to cooperate with authorities.

“She did it not for a deal but because it was the right thing to do,” Nielsen said. 

Kenney’s resentencing came after a three-judge panel from the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that Sells erred by sentencing Kenney in the “aggravated” range. The panel sent the case back to Sells, ordering him to resentence Kenney within the lower “presumptive” range.

The panel found that Kenney, also known as Krystal Lee, did not admit factors meriting an aggravated sentence as part of her February 2019 plea deal, according to the ruling. Nor did she formally consent to “judicial fact finding” necessary for the judge to impose an aggravated sentence of his own accord.

CO Appeals Court overturns 3-year sentence for former nurse who helped Patrick Frazee after Kelsey Berreth murder

A copy of the written plea agreement shows that prosecutors agreed to remove language from the deal that would have required Kenney to admit to the existence of aggravated circumstances, the panel pointed out in its decision. 

For those reasons, the judge’s decision to impose a sentence in the aggravated range violated Kenney’s constitutional rights under Blakely v. Washington, a 2004 Supreme Court decision, the appeals court found. 

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser declined to ask the Colorado Supreme Court to intervene, despite a request by the 4th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the case. Weiser said he agreed with the appeals court decision.

Former District Attorney Dan May, who left office in January, previously called Kenney’s plea bargain a “deal with the devil” necessary to build the case against Frazee and secure her testimony against him. During Tuesday’s resentencing, Nielsen accused May of trying to change Kenney’s plea deal “at the last moment” in January 2020 in asking the judge for the aggravated sentence.   

Patrick Frazee trial: ‘Please stop,’ Kelsey Berreth pleaded as she was beaten to death, says witness

Prosecutor Jennifer Viehman briefly addressed the court Tuesday, saying while she believed that Sells made “the appropriate ruling” in imposing his original sentence, she acknowledged that he would be forced to reduce her penalty. Berreth’s relatives did not speak at the hearing. 

During her two days on the witness stand at Frazee’s 2019 trial, Kenney testified how Frazee acknowledged beating Berreth to death with a baseball bat while their toddler daughter lay in another room. Although she wasn’t present for the attack, she described how she put on a hazardous materials suit and scrubbed blood from the Woodland Park townhouse where it happened, and later helped Frazee dispose of Berreth’s body and her phone.

Frazee was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole plus 156 years. He is serving the sentence at Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Crowley County.