Five Miles From Home - Ep. 4: Little Miss Wendover

Private investigator Bill Savage had a knack for getting people to talk.

Good thing.

“Crucial skill for any good PI to inspire trust, get subjects to open up,”

reveal things, private hidden things. The skill, it was about to become very useful. [MUSIC] Savage remembered had been hired by Cody Patton's defense attorney to scare up any of it all that might keep Cody off death row.

It's all order, given the kid it already confessed that he murdered his lifelong friend, Mickey

Castanzo, confessed in rather horrifying detail. Still, Savage figured somebody must know something that could be mitigating in some way. Something about Cody, nobody knew, maybe, or understood, something maybe his parents would know. The parents are often the last to know what they're almost grown children get into. Cody's parents were kipp and donna Patton.

So six weeks or so after their son killed and buried Mickey in the desert, Savage called them. The request, any parent would find, difficult. >> And asked them to take me out to the

makeshift graveside where Mickey Castanzo's body was located.

[MUSIC] They could have said no, of course they could, but maybe it was how he asked, they said they'd do it. So Savage got in his car and made the long trek across IAD from Reno to West Wendower, where he met the Pattons and they all headed out to the gravel pits. Then, as they looked down at the remnants of the actual grave from much Mickey had been exhumed,

Bill Savage did what he could to make them feel, well, as comfortable as possible, not that anyone could awful situation like that. And then, while we were standing there at the grave site, Kipp Patton said to me, "I think

“there's something you should know." And I said, "Of course what is it?"”

[MUSIC] Savage had seen and heard a lot in all his years as a PI, but nothing even remotely like what Kipp Patton was about to reveal. And he proceeded to tell me that Tony Frado had gotten the car with him and they drove around for a while. And, well, the Pattons said, "Kipp talked with Tony a lot after Cody's arrest. She was after all their sons fiancé, a member of the family,

or about to be." And they often went on long drives together, especially to the jail for their regular visits with Cody. But this particular drive with Tony, as Kipp Patton told Bill Savage, was different, very different. Also, well, for one thing they ended up, Tony and Kipp, at the very spot where Bill and Kipp and Donna were standing, and then Tony started talking,

and Tony told him how she was having sleepless nights and was really bothering her, and she needed to tell somebody." And Keith Morrison, "And this is five miles from home," a podcast from decline. Springtime in the Great Basin, a special season in the high desert, the magic time between winter's frigid nights and the blistering heat of summer afternoons, sagebrushes greener, wild

flowers bloom, air feels lighter somehow, full of possibilities, though this particular springtime, well, shall see. It was a bright morning in April, 2011, a few weeks after Mickey was murdered. Tony Fraddle climbed into a car with Kipp and Donna Patton, and off they went across the high desert to Elco Navada. Tony hadn't told her parents what she was actually going to do. They were out of town, so she'd written a note left it at the house for whatever reason,

“Tony was still in her pajamas. Elco, you may remember, is the town where Cody was being held in”

the county jail, but Tony wasn't going to Elco to see Cody. No. Tony was headed to the other side of town to a lawyer's office. Tony said she was ready to tell the lawyer a story.

A small microcoset machine waited on the table.

“What it recorded was barely discernible. But what a tale was told on that scratchy tape.”

The other voice on that recording was Cody's attorney, John Olson, listening, as this quiet, shy little teen began to tell a terrible, terrible story. And we talked and we recorded the conversation with her permission, and it was dynamite. It began for her, Tony said, with a text message from Cody that he had her, meeting Mickey was with him and that SUV he had borrowed. He wanted Tony to join them.

Cody picked her up, she said, and the three drove around and talked.

What did they talk about? They wanted Mickey to know, said Tony, that Cody did not want a relationship with her. Olson had no way to know them,

“that Mickey had already made it very clear to her family, her friends,”

and Cody, too, that she didn't want it either. Anyway, Tony continued. We didn't want to cause any problems. We wanted to work everything out. So she said they drove around some more and ended up with the gravel pits, where Mickey, very upset, demanded that they let her out. So then, Mickey and Cody got out of the car, said Tony, and Mickey kept yelling at him, and pushing him.

I've put the rage just for like a split second and then I'd love to know

that I'm a car or whatever. Mickey would only go out and she wasn't really moving at that point. They didn't know what to do, said Tony, and then Cody got out of the shovel and started digging a hole. But when he finished, she said, they could see that Mickey was still alive, so they hit her with the shovel and beat her and punched her until she went to the grave.

Moved her to the grave, said Tony, and she helped Cody hold down her legs. And slid her throat with Cody's knife. Both of us, and just like that, John Olson thought, awful as that story was. It was also going to make his job as Cody's defense attorney a lot easier. All of a sudden, it changed from one crazed killer to two people who committed a homicide.

It gave us something to point the case towards other than Cody's acts. Did you believe what you had to tell you? Yes, they helped our case considerably. I was fired up, it's excited about it, because it gave us another actor, another person to participate in the case. Maybe with some good loyering, Cody could escape the dust mentally after all, thanks to

Tony Frateau's sudden admission. She didn't have to tell you these things.

“Didn't have to tell me a thing. Why would she do such a thing? You have to ask her.”

So, we did. By which time it was a good deal after the events described, however, so, perhaps she had done some self-editing, or maybe not, here she is. I wanted to come forward and tell what really happened, because I knew they were not going to get the real story from Cody. So, tell me about the process of deciding to come forward. It had been eating at me and eating at me. I couldn't live with myself knowing

what I knew and what I had done. I take responsibility of my actions and face my consequences. But was it guilt, a desire to face the consequences that motivated Tony? Or was she perhaps getting ahead of a story she now knew would leak? New because of something Cody's father, Kit Patton, told her, before she decided to unburden herself, which was this. During a visit to the jail, said Kit. His son held up a handwritten note

to the glass separating him. The note said simply, she was there. His dad had came to me, said something like that he knew I was there, and he kind of

Thinking that to it now, I felt like he was guiding me to top to his attorneys and not go to the police.

“But if you imagine that Tony Frater went straight from the lawyer's office to the back of a police”

car and then after the county jailed to be charred with murder, you would be mistaken. Instead, she walked out of that law office, a free woman still in her pajamas and slippers and Cody's parents due to flee drove her back across the I-80 to West Wind over. Private investigator Bill Savage. According to Kit Patton, she exclaimed to him, what if someone had to do to be arrested? Good question.

Hey guys, Willie guys here reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast. On this week's episode, I get together with the talented charming and hilarious Tracy Ellis Ross to talk about her Broadway debut in a one-woman show and the new season of her travel series

“that has Tracy seeing the world solo. You can get our conversation for free wherever you”

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“She was home now. Her secret confession secure her on tape. A ticking legal time bomb that could”

blow up the laws understanding of the Mickey-Cost-Anseomer case, but not quite yet. Instead, Tony Fratell laid low. No policeman came to her door and no one called, not to detectives, not the district attorney. Instead, Tony just waited, waited for her parents to come home. That was part of the hardest part of my parents. How have they taken? Pretty hard. They were shocked.

Bit of an understatement, that shocked they certainly were. The Fratell had just returned from a trip to Las Vegas when they were greeted by their daughter and her incomprehensible news. This is Tony's mom, Cassie Fratell. No one that knows Tony would have ever seen this coming. Just isn't possible. We don't know exactly what Tony told her parents. Was it the story she told the attorney, Olson? Or the much different stories she told me? More about that later.

Or did she tell them a different story altogether? Tony's parents said they had never

discussed the murder with Tony, or at least never prodded her with questions because they just knew their daughter had nothing to do with Mickey's murder. They even heard that from the police, said Tony, Dad, Claude Fratell. The police told us that they didn't believe that that time. There was no evidence. You never confronted her with the question. No, because there wasn't any reason for us to arrive.

She wasn't a suspect, wasn't even a person of interest. So you can just imagine how the Fratell's must have felt when their sweet little 18-year-old

God-fearing daughter who had never been an any kind of trouble told them she had talked to Cody's

attorney that she might somehow be implicated in the murder. Something very underhanded going on is what Claude Fratell thought. My immediate thought was that she's been coerced into saying this, somebody made her do it. Yes. What person popped into your head? Cody's dad. That is,

well they, Tony's parents, were at a town. Yet Patton insisted that it was Tony's idea.

“She wanted to meet Cody's attorneys. He just drove her there, he said, because Tony's parents”

were at around. Do you think sometimes the chief thought, "I can't do this with my parents' present. I have to wait till they're gone before I can confess to this terrible thing."

I don't know. Possibly so, but we've always been very, very open.

But then again, said the Fratell's. Maybe she didn't really intend to confess at all. Maybe it was just an immature girl's way of trying to help her fiance, and without her parents, she had no idea what she was getting herself into. She doesn't believe that she's confessing to the law enforcement. She's talking to Cody's attorneys, asking them if it's going to help.

“Because she had thought that it would give Cody a lighter sentence if she confessed”

to more involvement. In fact, at Tony's parents, she had always been loyal to Cody throughout their entire relationship. So maybe it wasn't so surprising that now in his greatest

time of need she was there for him, just like always. Still sending lengthy love letters,

still calling. The police, by the way, remain quite unaware of Tony's apparent confession in the privacy of a lawyer's office. As with Mickey Costanzo's family, they only knew what they had been told that the case against Cody, complete with his lurid confession, was plotting its deliberate way through the legal system. And rather than allow that depressive state of things to weigh her down, Mickey's mom Celia decided to somehow start a healing process, and also come

up with a positive way to keep her daughter's memory alive. So, on a sunny warm morning and early May, she returned to one of Mickey's favorite places, the track of the high school, where she had won so many races. It was May 3rd, exactly two months after the murder. I'm what would have been Mickey's 17th birthday. I bought a cake, balloons, took it down to the high school, invited her friends. That was the hardest day next to finding out she was murdered.

Coincidence, really, that on that very day, a hundred miles away at the Elco County District Attorney's office, Defense Attorney John Olson was meeting with the DA. They chatted briefly,

“and then Olson pulled out a little surprise. Maybe not so little. Remember, Cody was Olson's”

client. It wasn't Tony who was his client. It was Cody. So, she could have no expectation of a Attorney's client privilege, and right there Olson produced an audio tape. Tony Frotto's secret confession and the DA, well, you can just imagine. It changed the whole feature and nature of the case. It gave us the opportunity to start talking about how we could separate out our client from Tony. So, given that our focus at the time was the death penalty, it was a big deal.

A very big deal. Tony Frotto that day went to school like any normal day, because it's such a thing we're possible anymore. And she sat down to write Cody yet another love letter. I can't wait to see you. Be in my arms. Yes, so it can be a fresh start. I miss you, LOL. I don't want anyone taking you either. You are a baby, my baby. We are going to make it. I love you so much,

always forever, eternity. What she was actually thinking as she composed a little bubble of

illusion and what she'd dreamt of her bed that night, we shall never know. But we can be pretty sure that around that time, Detective Donald Burnham was digesting what he had just heard on Tony's confession tape. Because the very next night, Detective Burnham paid her an official visit. I determined that we had probable cause to arrest her just based on her own admission. Yes, and they cuffed her and took her away in a squad car, like a hardened criminal.

this sort of person who could have done such a thing? I mean, anybody's capable of anything,

“but she didn't strike me as someone capable of committing murder now.”

Quiet, shy little Tony Frotto hardly seemed like a cold-blooded killer. She'd been a beauty queen at 13. Little Miss Wendover, in fact, but now she lived a quiet, almost reclusive life. Anything, but a party girl, she was devoutly religious too and extremely close to her parents,

Cassie and Claude. She always went to church with us. She never gave us the minute's grief.

As far as anything going on at school, she always had really good grades, never any complaints from any teachers. She had goals in her life. She knew exactly where she wanted to go. A truly responsible child. Yes, absolutely. She has very strong convictions,

“and so we never worried. We always trusted Tony in her judgment.”

She was what, why's beyond her years? So very much. Very wise. Wise little Tony Frotto. Just 18 years old and adult in the eyes of the law, was deposited in the

Elco County jail. The very building in which Cody was being held, though they might as well

have been on different planets for all they saw each other. Not quite the reunion Tony imagined in all those love letters of hers. Instead, they booked her, snapped her mugshot, told her she'd be held without bail. She was facing perhaps a capital murder charge, same as Cody. News of Tony's sudden arrest spread fast, especially to Mickey's family, where it did not

“land with quite the explosive effect you might have imagined. In fact, Mickey's mother Celia”

was not particularly surprised. In my heart of hearts, the new Tony had something to do with it, because they were a couple. It was very hard for me to know she was at school, wearing his engagement ring, acting like nothing had happened, and she knew nothing about it, when I knew she knew. Mickey's older sister Christina told us the Tony's arrest was for her, the ultimate, I told you so, moment. Because from day one, I could not think that Cody

deserved to be the only one punished for what had happened because I knew that she had been involved. When she was arrested, it made me very happy because I was like, "See, I told you, now it makes sense." Unless, of course, it didn't. So, the phone calls were over, and the love letters stopped. There would be no white wedding dress. Tony Frateau's world now was a thin mattress on a rough bunk set among strangers in a concrete room,

dressed not in white, but in an ill-fitting jailhouse jumpsuit. She was geographically very close to her fiance, Cody Patton, both were held at the Elco County jail. He and the men's wing she and the women's. But the chance of an encounter, zero. And in that gloomy place, a few concrete walls apart, they bided their time, waiting for what came next. One long, dismal day after another.

Well, still, in the wide open world outside, now the single person could begin to comprehend their reason for committing the ugly act they were accused of. Least of all making customs with mother Cecilia, who, before the legal proceedings began, raised herself for what was coming. Of course, but also studied every single bit of evidence, every photo she could get her hands on. Because I had to know exactly what happened to my daughter. Everything.

No matter how bad. Everything. Every autopsy photo that was taken of my daughter. I saw. I thought all because I did not want to go into a courtroom and see my daughter like that

for the very first time. I needed to know. I saw the stab marks. I saw her jugular cut. I saw

It was brutal. It was painful. It was long. It was torturous. She went through hell.

“And those two could not ever get away with it. They could not walk away free.”

There were separate preliminary hearings for Tony and Cody to determine if there was enough evidence to take their cases to trial. Tony's began on a blazing hot summer day in July 2011, four months after the murder. The somber crowd filed into the historic and safety court as in Elco and Nevada. Inside, it was packed with spectators and very tense. A side door opened and a bailiff guided a shackled Tony to receipt at the defense table. Her hair was tightly braided,

her face was pale and gaunt. She stared straight ahead as the DA read the case against her and presented a parade of witnesses including Mickey's mother Celia who identified some of her

“daughter's charred belongings recovered from that burn pit after the murder. Celia cried as she”

held the pen to bear charr. Mickey always carried. But a day two of the hearing came the fireworks

when the prosecutor pushed play on a tape machine. Tony Frotto, her very own words on that scratchy audio tape recorded by Cody's defense attorney. I came up with on my ground and she wasn't really doing it that way. They played the entire thing, which until now the public had never heard. We had slet her throat, said Tony. Out at the fence begins that. Tony's attorneys did what they could. They argued that her so-called confession was wholly rubbish and shouldn't be

admissible. It was a clear violation of attorney-client privilege. Adding, the Tony had been misled by Cody's lawyers into thinking she was on the same team with him. In his legal counsel, which of course she was not. Tony's defender also pointed out there wasn't any forensic evidence that Tony was even there, where and when Cody killed Mickey. So when she went to see Cody's lawyer wasn't she just spinning a story she thought would help her boyfriend. But in the end, the judge was

not swayed and bound Tony over for trial. Center back to jail with no bail. And just over two weeks later, it was Cody Patton's turn to be trouped into that historical chamber. He looked in her now, the spectator's noticed, his ginger hair was slonger. And he was fidgety. Stole glances around the courtroom. Doodle on a note pad as witnesses took their charms. One of them was his very own father, Kip Patton. We said yes, he did urge his son to

confess that was true. And then prosecutors played the tape. So the judge could hear exactly what Kip Patton told Cody. What he did is pain is going. He kind of just, you know, to what they need you to do. This is it, man. We have to fix this. And so Cody did what his father demanded he do. He confessed. But said the older Patton. Cody also whispered something odd.

“Didn't make sense, really. It keeps her and he remembered hearing it. What did Cody whisper?”

That he didn't actually kill her. Said Kip. But we were both crying and I didn't understand

Kip told the judge. And I said what? And then he said never mind. But the physical evidence

couldn't lie. And there was an avalanche of that, including the NA swab from Mickey's clothes that matched on me him. And then there was the video of him leaving the school just before Mickey. And his tire tracks to the murder scene. And of course the most prominent piece of evidence is very own confession to the cops. The prosecution played the whole awful thing. And virtually everyone in the courtroom, including Cody, cried. As they heard him describe

what he had done to Mickey, to his classmates, to his childhood friend. I can't just try to hit her on the other head, try to just dock her out. She said the baby was awful so. A bailiff handed Cody tissues to wipe away the tears. But the judge had no sympathy for him.

counts, all felonies. And one of them, murder, was punishable by death. But a tentant of

observers in the courtroom couldn't help but notice that the two teenagers told very different stories. Remember Cody said he was alone. Botoni insisted, again, to Cody's lawyer,

“that she was with Cody, and they murdered Mickey together. It just didn't allow. Who did what?”

With whom? And why? In some weird way were they trying to cover for each other. Tony's parents Cassie and Claude Frato simply couldn't believe, though, despite her confession, did their sweet, diminished of daughter was capable of such a monstrous act. Can you imagine her doing those things? Striking her with a shovel, perhaps helping with the knife. I don't believe that she had anything to do with the knife.

There were no fingerprints, no DNA, anything to indicate that she had.

The striking her shovel was an order from Cody. And order from Cody? That was the reason insisted the Frato's and behind it a terrible secret. Cody and Tony lived together, remember, but in the Frato house, with Tony's parents, and they said they witnessed Cody issuing lots of orders that he was extremely possessive, physically intimidating, or than a foot taller than Tony. And that he was often angry and abusive.

He would yell at her, pushing her around. He would be restraining her and throwing her down. She was also at that point looking for some way out of the relationship. Well, inviting him to live in your home was some way out.

“You have to understand the victim of an abusive relationship.”

And we weren't aware of all that was taking place.

In fact, just two months before Mickey was killed, the school's surveillance camera caught an agitated Cody appearing to get rough with Tony at her locker. Here's private investigator Bill Savage. There was an instance that occurred in the hallway of Wind Over High School that depicts Cody grabbing Tony, Romanic, and again realizing he's six foot six,

she's five foot one. But Tony declined to file charges, said her father clawed. Her explanation was that if something like this happens, he will not be accepted into the marines. And I don't want to stand in the way of that. But now, after the murder, and Tony's confession, whether real or made up, to save her boyfriend, the Fredo's look back on their daughter's relationship with Cody,

with new eyes. Tony, it seemed to them, was an abused woman. She was living in fear of what she thought the repercussions would be if she brought it out. So, fearing Cody might kill her, too. Tony must have felt she had no choice, but to cooperate with him. So her participation, as people say, in what happened that night,

was strictly out of fear, controlling manipulation and orders. By the one that she had already been suffering, abuse from for three years. But she participated in the attack. Participated, participated under extreme orders. She was afraid that she would be the one line next to McKay live.

She did not follow his orders that evening. Two-age Cody's attorney John Olson responded. "Balone, what do you say to that?" "Balone, there's nothing on their relationship, ever, that would indicate that she was ever abused by Cody." But now, Tony Frotto, the former little miss went over,

was facing the daunting prospect of losing her life, not the Cody pattern. But to lethal injection. Unless, she could tell a whole new story about her role in McKay Constance's murder. Could she betray the man she swore she loved?

“Could she win her freedom and make him pay the ultimate price?”

Next time, there was conversations and texts between Tony and Cody from the beginning of the morning until seven o'clock. I had gotten a text saying that he had her.

was her animosity and was the only one on paper and her own handwriting.

“Five miles from home is a production of dateline and NBC News.”

Robert Dean is the producer, Brian Drew, Marshall Housefeld 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 MNBC News Audio, sound mixing by Rich Cutler.