Five Miles From Home - Ep. 3: Open Murder

You remember, I'm sure the old adage taken from Shakespeare.

“Either a borrower or a lender be the phrase itself borrowed all the time and”

everywhere, like so much of the great playwright's work. Why is it vise? Perhaps if widely ignored in modern life. But the question of borrowing was about to matter in the West-Wendover murder investigation. It had to do with a car, an SUV actually a Chevy Trailblazer, a borrowed trailblazer.

And why would a borrowed car matter to the investigation into the murder of that much sub-teenager, Mickey Costanzo? Curious little story, is that?

The SUV belonged to a local woman, and older woman, you could say, at least compared

with young Cody. There had been talk, rumors, that Cody may have been spending time with the woman. But, talk is cheap, isn't it?

“And no evidence of a relationship ever surfaced, and after all, Cody was at that very”

same time planning his marriage to Tony Frato. So, perhaps that woman was simply offering the SUV as a favor to a friend. To be used by Cody, to pick up those car parts he left to this school shock. But now, Cody Patton was a murder suspect. And so, naturally, detected Burnham thought it prudent to talk to that woman, the owner

of the car, and sure enough she confirmed Cody's story, confirmed also the reason he asked to use it, because it was big enough to accommodate all that car stuff parts and things. That is, she assumed it was car parts. And then the woman added, "What curious little detail?" Her SUV was spotless when she had the keys to Cody.

But, it was very dirty when he returned it. Not just teenage or messy, but especially dirty and dusty on the outside, as if he driven it off road. But did she rush out to wash it that very day? Instead, investigators had their way with that car.

They swapped it from bumper to bumper for samples of dust and dirt, and compared those samples with soil samples from the crime scene. And, they sure looked the same. Which by itself could simply have been a coincidence, of course, didn't prove Cody did some terrible thing to his old friend Mickey.

But that wasn't all those cops took from the car. They took impressions of the tread on the tires. And then, they lined them up with the tire tracks at that place in the desert where they found Mickey's body. They were consistent with the tire brand and model that was on that vehicle.

Which, again, could have been a coincidence. They would've seen me less likely now.

“And then, the investigators conducted a search where Cody lived, which was, remember,”

at the home of Claude and Cassie Frato. See, if there was any type of evidence of, you know, knives or items that could have been used to restrain her or they coincided with what we'd found at the scene at the time. Did you find anything? We didn't find anything initially, however, during our search of the house, some Cassie

Frato stated that she observed a shovel in Cody's room, and that the shovel was no longer there. And she identified the shovel as a small military and trenching type tool. The kind normally used for digging a hole in the ground, maybe. Of course, it wasn't around anymore.

So, as evidence, that story was perhaps iffy. But just as the detectives were contemplating that, it happened.

At the moment, dramatic, strange, the kind of thing that just never happens until it

does. I heard some whaling from the father, I could hear him yell, "It sounds to be like he was crying." I'm Keith Morrison, and this is five miles from home, a podcast and big life. Episode three, "Open Murder." Sunday night in West Wendover, a busy evening, along the little strip.

It's five Cassinos bustling with gamblers, drinks flowing, slots spinning. A bliviest, of course, to the real-life action just across town at the West Wendover Police

Near to I'm telling us the whole truth.

“You tell us bits of pieces, but you're not telling us the whole truth.”

By this time, it was almost one AM. All but the most dedicated gamblers had drifted into the night, and Sunday had given him the Monday. Detecting McKinney had been up 24 hours straight.

First, driving to West Wendover, then supervising the crime scene when Mickey Costanzo's

body was shown. Followed by a trip to the school, where he studied the surveillance video, and now here he was face-to-face with 18-year-old Cody Patton, in a cramped and stuffy interrogation room. Four hours, they had gone back and forth about what happened to Mickey. With Cody, denying, "I didn't know I killed the killer's statue."

And the cop offering him, "Waiting Confess." "I don't think he planned on it. I don't think you intended." "I did it, I think he planned it." At which point, Cody, perhaps feeling cornered, asked for a break.

He asked to speak with his father, so we allowed them to meet in the interview room.

"Did you overhear with him?"

"No, I didn't. I didn't hear what was said, but at one point I heard a whaling from the father." "What in the world was going on in there?" Detecting McKinney waited quite again. A few minutes later, we went back into the interview room and his father told him he needs to tell us why.

"Be a man." "That's when he told you the story."

“Would a lawyer have prevented Cody from telling you a story?”

But Cody didn't ask for a lawyer. His father's advice is what he saw. And his father, in some kind of shock from what he had heard, insisted that the truth was what was needed now.

Ugly though the truth certainly was.

This is Kit Patton, in the presence of the detectives, speaking to his son Cody. "What you did is pain is going. I don't want to abandon you at all." "Okay. You've got to do what they need you to do."

"Leaning their answers." "If the family needs their answers, you know?" "This is it, they have to fix this." And then detect a McKinney made sure his tape recorder was still rolling, and he leaned forward in his chair and listened intently as Cody Patton began.

He picked up McKinney at school, he said, "And they started driving and talking.

“That," said Cody, his when Nikki started all the trouble, and how did she do that?”

Nikki insisted Cody break up with his fiance, Tony Frotto, and date her, Mickey instead. He said, "Well, that wasn't going to happen," said Cody, so then they started arguing, and Cody kept driving, deep into the desert. "But then Mickey got really mad," said Cody, insisted, he stopped the car, so he got out. "She was fighting y'all at me, and I said it's because I'm not leaning to Tony, because

she started pounding on my chest and stuff." At this time, said Cody, he was upset too, more mad, as he put it, and that is when it happened. He shoved her, pretty hard, he said, "And she fell down and hit her head and I said, "She just laid there and when I started to turn black, and she started to shake and

she sees that point and do something and is wrong." He looked at where she was at, there's this big rock sheet, there he had on it. Cody had been trained as an EMT, said when he checked for a pulse, he couldn't get in it. And she was just flopping.

He was very cheerful, he had to stop several times to allow him to gain his composure back, a couple times he told us he was getting physically ill, while he was describing details to us. We will spare you the rest of Cody's description of what he said he did to Mickey out there in the desert.

Suffice to say, it was more than just a push in a fall, and whatever it actually was, Cody did not use his EMT training to save her life. Instead, he said, "He panicked, didn't know what to do." And then what he did do, he said, "We go to the car and grab that shovel and use it to make sure she was dead."

"I swear the little crazy guy don't come at her own, but it took the clothes part of him." "Burned him, he said, "At another location a few miles away.

done, the two went and got food, and after a while went home. And that he said is when he stashed the shovel under the Fraddo's house. There it was, he claimed. The whole awful story.

“After which Cody offered this, "That's why I'm saying that I'm sorry, he being a real”

loser all the time, but it had to have, so I wanted to fit this there."

Never before, a detective Donald Burnham heard a confession as detailed as awful as that

one. And from Cody Patton of all people, just a regular local kid, he was on the high school football team, had lots of friends, also a regular kid, but then out of the blue he brutally murdered a lifelong friend, and just because she wanted him to dump Tony and be her boyfriend. But that didn't make any sense at all.

"Oh, and there was one other thing," said Cody, and he was adamant about this, insisted on it. "He stated he was alone and with my K-line, he never implicated anybody else even being present or aware of it." "He did it alone," did he tell anybody why, no he didn't know.

“Detective Burnham still really a bit after Cody's story, did one more bit of investigating”

that night. He went to the Frotto's house to look again for the trenching shovel Cody said he used and then hit under the house and sure enough there it was. "Look like it had been wiped clean, Burnham bagged it, had it sent to the crime lab to check for clues."

"Well, Detective Kevin McKinney tried to make sense of what he had heard from Cody." "Did you think you got the whole story at that point?"

Not completely, I was never convinced that he told us the complete truth about what happened.

"By now, it was a few hours before dawn, on what was Monday morning, when the police actually arrested Cody and told him he'd be charged by the DA later that very day." His fiance Tony Frotto and her family were still sitting restless the outside the interview room, fully expecting to take Cody home. They would not do so, of course.

This is Tony's mother, Cassie.

“"The police came out and told us that Cody had just confessed, devastating, they don't”

believe it. We had been working so hard with him."

Working hard to help Cody keep his life on track so he could graduate from high school

and join the Marines. "We thought we were bringing him around. We thought things were going well until the last week or so and we knew he was angry about something. All Cody would say the week before the murder was things are coming to a head, I need to take care

of this, and Tony would say what is wrong. Why are you so angry with Michaela? What did she do? And he would say it's none of your business." "Here is Cody's fiance, Tony."

"He would tell me what things were building up and things that happened in the past. He would not go in to further detail and he would not say anything else towards me." Eddie wouldn't be telling her now, because Cody was taken a hundred miles away to the County jail in Elco, Nevada, where he would be held until they could put him on trial from murder, quite possibly facing the death penalty, though that had yet to be decided.

But was it over now? No, not at all. And the rest of the story, who else? "It didn't make sense, it's not the person that I knew," he said, "and somebody made him do it. Somebody made him do it."

"They really love the start today up." "They care about how I feel." "It's the staff on the app, it's the connections you make." "Without good, mental and physical help, you have nothing." "It tells me how to cook to keep myself healthy."

"I look at my having a like while I'm on this 7th house and stuff today." "Start today, meets you where you are, download the start today, wellness app now, on your app, or Android device, terms apply, see app for details."

On this week's episode, I get together with the talented, charming and hilarious Tracey

“Ellis Ross, to talk about her Broadway debut in a one-woman show.”

And the new season of her travel series that has Tracey seeing the world, solo. You can get our conversation for free wherever you download your podcasts." And Kate Snow, NBC News Anchor, and host of the NBC News Podcast, The Drink. This month, I'm sitting down with the hilarious Leslie Jones, we chat about her remarkable journey from her childhood to family hardships to the unexpected, almost accidental road

that led her to comedy. From her unforgettable years at Saturday Night Live, to her new show, "Rost My Rental" about vacation rentals gone terribly wrong. It is a funny, candid conversation I hope you'll give it a listen. Join us for the drink, listen, and follow now wherever you get your podcasts."

In just a few months, he planned to be on his way to the Marine Corps, to be stationed by the beach near San Diego. But now, Cody Patton's uniform was a red jumpsuit, and his station was a tiny jail cell on Nelco, Nevada.

“Well, back home and West went over the police, made this shocking announcement at a press conference.”

Patton has been enrolled as a student in the Westwind Over, during your senior high school, and has been attending until the time of his arrest. To that, his classmates expressed to cut a universal disbelief, Cody did this to Mickey. He just means he ain't angry, and that we don't have all the different means, he's gone. He's just really, they're hitting everybody hard.

There's always that could explain what we're feeling.

I just want to know what happened, why I happen. Yes, students and teachers alike, all acknowledged Cody had problems at the school. He could be a bully, sometimes intimidating. The murder his childhood friend, the very popular Mickey attack her so viciously and dump her in the desert.

Well, that was unimaginable, even the school principle was stunned. Cody was a kid. That we knew and then we were trying to give extra support as well, so that he would hopefully graduate and he had dreams of going into the military and doing some of those things. So that was obviously our push to be able to help him have some type of future.

But it was all for not. Cody's some type of future was defined a few hours after his cheerful confession when the D.A. charged him with open murder. Open murder in Nevada is a kind of legal one-stop shopping when it comes to homicide cases. They would give the jury a choice.

They could convict him a first-degree murder or second-degree murder or manslaughter.

Prosecutors like it because he can often ensure some kind of conviction. But the trial would be months and months away. The roomiles to go before any jury would lay eyes on Cody. And meanwhile, more investigating was still needed. There were lots of loose ends.

So the day after Cody's confession detected McKinney decided to stop by the jail and pay him a visit. Cody looked exhausted, depressed, hurtly surprising. The reality was setting into a cell with him. There's a couple of things to want to be clear of.

First, Detective McKinney wanted to know, exactly where did Cody stash McKinney's clothes and her other personal things? Those that weren't with the body that is, he'd buried her half naked.

“Remember, in his confession, Cody said he burned them somewhere away from the murder scene.”

But where? Now, Cody said he'd taken them over the state border to Utah to a big burned pit where the local kids often staged bonfires. It was probably too much to hope that McKinney's cell phones survived the fire that or

the coconut backpack she always carried.

That cell phone could tell them a lot. So the detective asked Cody about it, but he seemed to have only a vague recollection of that part of the awful night. The last time I saw a cell phone, it was all in the internet pocket, but we didn't find it at the scene, you know, where it could have got thrown out away from the scene somewhere

trying to sneak. Okay. What about the backpack? Did she have a witter when she came? Yeah, I brought her back back to those in a safe spot.

McKinney made a note of that, knowing that it searched the burn site.

All right. Thanks, Cody. Appreciate it.

And I hope you do it, okay?

“That would be the last time Cody ever spoke to Detective McKinney, because a few days later”

a state appointed attorney came to see him, but this wasn't just any public defender. This went specialized in keeping accused killers off death row. His name? John Olsen. Tough case.

Real tough case. Olsen was a highly regarded attorney with an impressive pedigree, stand for grad, Vanderbilt Law. He handled some three dozen death penalty cases during his 40-year career. But this case?

This case was unlike any other. By the time I got in the case, the authorities knew who'd done it. They had the proof of who'd done it. And the only issue was what they were going to do with them. Cody was not gone home.

After that interview with the police, he was not gone home. Olsen was in his 60s, was silver here, a commanding presence at a keen, analytical mind.

When I first thought about it, I started thinking about how I was going to prevent a death

verdict from being entered in the case. And a death verdict seemed impossible.

“I thought, I think it was from the prosecution point of view, from a rational point of view,”

was all that you had in my death penalty case. And probably any jury would agree. If they heard the evidence presented in what had happened to this young woman, killed them buried in the desert, that's tough stuff. Yeah, that is tough stuff.

It was the identity of the victim. It was a brutality of the killing. It was the poignancy of some of the photographs in the case. They would jet break your heart, and there were a lot of tough facts in the case. A lot of tough facts.

And tough fact, number one was Cody's confession. Nothing he could do about that, keeping him off death row could be difficult. No wonder Olson called it a dangerous case. I approach every case with a thought that I'm going to try it to a jury. And I start preparing the case for trial, without thought to a plea in the case.

Did you believe the confession that he had given? You know, I like to reserve judgment on those things because he generally will get more information from a client later on than you will at the beginning. So I think I helped my water on that.

“What Cody had in mind when he told him that he did the killing?”

God knows. But John Olson wasn't the only one puzzled by Cody Patton's confession. A lot of people in West Bend over just weren't buying it. Especially of all people, Mickey Castanzo's family. There's parts of Cody's confession that I can see it being Cody.

This is Mickey's mother, Sylia. Like I am sure that he snapped and I'm sure that he hurt her. There would have to be something somewhere that forced the whole scenario. In fact, during the weeks after Mickey's murder, her older sister Christina became convinced Cody's confession was totally concocted.

For tall tale than the truth, she had known Cody for years, liked and trusted him. It's not the person that I knew.

He would never hurt McAella.

It was like the whole town turned out. A measure of Mickey Castanzo's sunny personality, her sweet goodness, that West Bend over his 1000-seat concert hall was needed to accommodate everyone at her memorial service. Her mother, Sylia, felt like Mickey wasn't just her daughter, but like she was everybody's daughter.

This town's suffered as a group. It's not just me that suffered. It's not just DJ or Christina or my mom or my brother. This entire town suffered as if this town was her parent. Every child that was in that school, every teacher in that school lost a part of themselves.

And remember, McAella is so cruelly murdered, as the ideal young woman,

the pride of West Bend over high.

“Mickey's sister DJ gave an emotional eulogy.”

It really used a lot of love. All of you came here, because we can all see how many people love Turk. Like we did. Many of Mickey's classmates also spoke. She was many things, too many people.

A friend, a fellow student, a teammate, and an inspiration. This was Mickey's father, Teddy. He loved the opportunity. Someone took someone had no right to do that. That someone, of course, was Cody Patton.

He was the town villain now. In fact, much of West Bend over seemed to have turned against the whole Patton family, too.

“But Cody wasn't entirely alone in his five-by-seven-foot jail cell.”

His loyalty on say Tony Fredo went to see him, wrote to him, called him regularly. The cause were recorded, of course. "Not, but do you ever think of him? Pock, do you? I won't do my own thing, it's hard."

"No, I know what's hard for myself. It really is. "I love you." "I love you too." "Why are you saying that you are?"

"How is that?" "And I know you still are.

Tony, I'm always going to be here for you.

No matter what happens, the matter which way things go, I'm always going to be here for you." Tony's showered Cody with long love letters, meticulously handwritten, forever faithful, holding nothing back. This, the day Cody was taking the jail. "Dear Cody, my baby, I miss you so much, I can't wait to see your face, I love you so much,

stay strong." This letter, a week later, "Dear Cody Bear, yes, baby, I'm going to stay faithful. You're the only one for me, my SO, my cheese to my macaroni, my everything, and I'm not going to jeopardize that for the world."

And three days later, "Dear Cody, googly Bear, just been sitting at home thinking about you. I'm trying my best to stay strong, but it has been so freaking hard not seeing you every day just terraced me down. I can't be happy until you're back in my arms and that I know you are safe." Tony's parents also kept in touch and even visited Cody sometimes, to provide support, sure, but also to ask a particular question.

"I said, I don't understand this. Why did you do this? Why did this happen?" This is Tony's father, quite frato. "He just said, I just, I don't know. I can't tell you anything. I don't know. And Tony has said the same thing. She doesn't know why it happened." Neither did the police, they were still actively investigating the case, but they were able to locate that burn pit, Cody admitted he used to destroy Mickey's belonging. Here's a tech

burning. We decided to dig in that area and see if maybe this is what the area that Cody had burned the items in. And we're luckily defined remnants of that poked-up bag that the Kayla had with her. There's her time of disappearance.

“Was there anything else in there that told you anything about what happened to her or why?”

There was a key that matched her mother's key for her apartment. There was a small charm,

was a panda bear. That precious little panda bear charm, which she always carried with her,

even on the last day of her life. More devastating evidence piling up against Cody. Evidence that defense attorney John Olson had to somehow explain in a way that would keep his client off death row. But the more Olson studied Cody's confession, the more he came to believe just like Mickey's family did, that something about it just didn't add up. So Olson hired a seasoned investigator,

named Bill Savage, asked him to poke around, see what he could find out. Some former secret service agent, I was an agent in the early '70s, one of the people guarded Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, yes, President Nixon, President Ford, and several other

owlish face with narrow eyes shining through a set of wire rim glasses. He certainly came with a

pedigree. Besides the secret service he'd served the Nevada gaming control board at his own PI firm. Now he said about learning all he could about the murder and that boy's confession. Some of the details that Mr. Patton reported didn't quite pass the sniff test to me, and I wanted to certainly investigate the case under a microscope so to speak. Savage began by taking a long hard look at Mickey's autopsy report. It wasn't an easy

read, all sorts of grim specifics. She'd been cut, stabbed repeatedly, terribly beaten,

the signs of that everywhere on her body in her head. The injuries were so severe, in fact, so brutal. They certainly didn't look like they could have been caused by some sort of accident as co-deaclaimed or a shovel of all things, but rather a knife, given all the stab wounds, according to the medical examiner's report. I don't know if I'll ever know exactly what happened, but we know that from the autopsy photos, the horrible slicing disfigurement to Mickey's face.

What did that say to you? It indicates to me a great deal of rage by someone to cause those type of wounds to a young lady, disfiguring wounds. Yes, it was pretty bad. These types of wounds were disturbing. So disturbing, that Mickey's murder looked like the expression of sheer hate, except by all accounts Cody did not hate Mickey at all. There had to be more to the story. Some big secret, the Cody was refusing to reveal. Savage and Attorney John Olson,

wondered if Cody's fiance Tony Fredo might be able to provide some insight. Don't it already talk to the police. During their early routine interviews with some of Mickey's classmates,

“that's what she first went missing. And Tony was as puzzled as everybody else in town was.”

I guess just kind of curious, like, where's Mickey, what's going on, you know, where could she go on? But things were very different now, of course, Mickey was dead, and Cody was in jail, having told his alarming story. His incomplete alarming story, maybe. So no surprise, Attorney Olson wanted to follow up to see if Tony had learned anything at all about why her fiance did what he did to Mickey. She'd been talking to him after all. Oh, and just maybe, she herself might have

had some sort of connection to the crime. Cody said no, but had to ask. And I talked to her in the presence of her parents in which she said she had nothing to do with it. Did she have any idea why he? Absolutely not. No idea. As Olson wrapped up his interview with Tony, he went off script slightly and offered the Fratto family, a friendly little piece of advice. I told her parents,

“I said to you, if you want to do a favor for this child, get her out of town. Well, why would you say”

that? Because I didn't see any possibility of anything good coming out of a relationship between this young girl and a guy who was in jail and was likely to spend the rest of his life in jail. I thought to myself that this is a young person with a life ahead of her and she needs to disassociate herself with this whole thing. Given that she was not involved. How do they react to that advice? Not in their heads and laughter. And with that John Olson wave goodbye,

and thought that outside of Cody's trial, he would probably never see your here from that

young woman again. And back in the quieted office, he thought about Tony Fratto about what she said

“to it. And the way she said it, was she as devastated as other people seemed to have been?”

I would describe her aspect as deadpan. I would describe her as emotionless. 100 of that would strike you. Odd. Very odd. Now, what was a person to make of that?

what I knew. We recorded the conversation and it was dynamite. No one.

“That knows Tony would have ever seen this coming. Just isn't possible.”

Five miles from home is a production of date line and NBC news. Robert Dean is the producer.

Brian Drew, Marshall House Feld and Meredith Greenstein are audio editors.

“Molly DeRosa is a associate producer. Adam Gourphane is co-executive producer. Paul Ryan is”

executive producer and Liz Cole is senior executive producer. For NBC News Audio,

sound mixing by Rich Cutler.