Krystal Jean Kenney, the former nurse who helped Teller County rancher Patrick Frazee clean up blood after the murder of his fiance Kelsey Berreth, appears on course for an early prison release after the Colorado Court of Appeals on Wednesday overturned her three-year sentence.

Ruling that Teller County District Judge Scott Sells erred in sentencing Kenney, 34, in the aggravated range for evidence tampering, a three-judge panel vacated the sentence and ordered Sells to resentence her in the normal range of 1 to 1½ years in prison.

The ruling is likely to set her up for release on parole, said her attorney Dru Nielsen of Denver, who cheered the court’s finding and praised Kenney as an “exemplary inmate.”  

“She’s been in for 13 months. So, yes, with her good and earned time … she should be eligible for release immediately.”

A resentencing hearing has yet to be scheduled, court records show, and Kenney remains incarcerated at the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. Her next scheduled parole hearing under her voided sentence was expected in November, prison records show. A parole board turned down her last request for parole shortly before the Thanksgiving holiday, the latest in her repeated attempts an at early release.

She faces a mandatory one-year parole under terms of her plea bargain.

The 12-page ruling was written by Judge Neeti V. Pawar with Judges David J. Richman and Lino S. Lipinsky de Orlov concurring, according to a copy of the order.  

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

For those reasons, Sells’ penalty violated Kenney’s constitutional rights under Blakely v. Washington, a 2004 Supreme Court decision, the panel found.

Kenney’s appeal was handled by Littleton attorney Krista A. Schelhaas. Like Schelhass, Nielsen also argued that Kenney’s rights under Blakely would be violated if the judge imposed an aggravated sentence, an argument Sells rejected.  

Kenney, who had an on-again, off-again relationship with Frazee, became a focal point in the globally watched case, and former District Attorney Dan May called her plea bargain a “deal with the devil” necessary to secure her cooperation after the Frazee investigation had run aground.

Kenney was a star witness at Frazee’s November 2019 trial, telling a jury how she suited up in a hazardous materials suit and scrubbed blood from the Woodland Park townhouse where Frazee fatally beat Berreth with a baseball bat on Thanksgiving Day 2018.

Kenney dabbed at tears as she unraveled a plot to use Berreth’s stolen phone to make it look like the victim had gone on the run, and told how she led authorities to the dirt-covered burn scar on Frazee’s ranch where Berreth’s body was torched in a bonfire, leaving behind a tooth fragment believed to be the slain woman’s.

She provided a far less detailed account in pleading guilty, however, admitting only that she “took the victim’s cellphone with the intent to impair the phone’s availability in the investigation.”

Sells seized on Kenney’s admission that she “knew Frazee had committed a homicide” in imposing the aggravated sentence. However, the appeals court found that part of her statement wasn’t “essential” to her guilty plea to evidence tampering and couldn’t be lawfully used as grounds for aggravation.

Frazee, 34, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison plus 156 years. He is an inmate at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Center in Crowley County in southeastern Colorado.

Jerilee Bennett/The Gazette file

Krystal Lee Kenney is led to a van by representatives of the Teller County Sheriff’s Office after being sentenced at the Teller County Courthouse in Cripple Creek in January 2020.

Jerilee Bennett/The Gazette file