Transcript of Little Miss Wendover New

Private investigator Bill Savage had a knack for getting people to talk. Good thing. Crucial skill for any good P.I. To inspire trust, get subjects to open up, reveal things— private, hidden things. A skill that was about to become very useful. Savage, remember, had been hired by Cody Patton's defense attorney to scare up anything at all that might keep Cody off death row. A tall order, given the kid had already confessed that he murdered his lifelong friend Mickey Costanzo, confessed in rather horrifying detail. Still, Savage figured somebody must know something that could be mitigating in some way, something about Cody something nobody knew, maybe, or understood. Something maybe his parents would know, though parents are often the last to know what their almost grown children get into. Cody's parents were Kip and Donna Patton. So 6 weeks or so after their son killed and buried Mickey in the desert, Savage called them. With a request any parent would find difficult.

And asked them to take me out to the makeshift gravesite where Mickey Costanzo's body was located.

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 I-80 from Reno to West Wendover, 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 which 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 gravesite, Kip Patton said to me, "I think there's something you should know." And I said, "Of course, what is it?" Savage had seen and heard a lot in all his years as a PI, but nothing even remotely like what Kip Patton was about to reveal. And he proceeded to tell me that Tony Fratto had got in the car with him, and they drove around for a while, and—

Well, the Pattons, said Kip, talked with Toni a lot after Cody's arrest. She was, after all, their son's fiancée, 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 Toni, as Kip Patton told Bill Savage, It was different. Very different. How so? Well, for one thing, they ended up, Toni and Kip, at the very spot where Bill and Kip and Donna were standing. And then Toni started talking.

And Toni told him how she was having sleepless nights and it was really bothering her and she needed to tell somebody.

I'm Keith Morrison, and this is "Five Miles from Home," a podcast from Dateline. Episode 4, "Little Miss Wendover." 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.

Sagebrush is greener, wildflowers are Flowers bloom.

Air feels lighter somehow, full of possibilities. Though this particular springtime, well, we shall see. It was a bright morning in April 2011, a few weeks after Mickey was murdered. Tony Fratto climbed into a car with Kip and Donna Patton, and off they went across the high desert to Elko, Nevada. Toni 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, Toni was still in her pajamas. Elko, you may remember, is the town where Cody was being held in the county jail. But Toni wasn't going to Elko to see Cody. No. Toni was headed to the other side of town, to a lawyer's office. Toni said she was ready to tell the lawyer a story. Once they all arrived, she alone was ushered into an empty conference room. A small microcassette machine waited on the table. What it recorded was barely discernible. But what a tale was told on that scratchy tape.

So, are you willing to proceed? I think so, yeah.

Okay. 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, Toni said, with a text message from Cody that he had her, meaning Mickey was with him in that SUV he had borrowed. He wanted Toni 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 Toni, that Cody did not want a relationship with her. Olson had no way to know then 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 at 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 looked away just for, like, a split second and then heard, like, a "no" thud on the car or whatever. Michaela was on the ground, and she wasn't really moving at that point.

They didn't know what to do, said Toni. And then Cody got out a shovel and started digging a hole. But when he finished, she said, They could see that Micki was still alive, so they hit her with the shovel and beat her and punched her until—

She was not moving, and so we climbed into the grave.

Moved her to the grave, said Toni, and she helped Cody hold down her legs.

And, um, slit her throat.

And slit her throat with Cody's knife.

Who cut her throat? Both of us.

Both of us. And just like that, John Olsen 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 work with. Point the case towards other than Cody's acts. Did you believe what she had to tell you? Yes. It helped our case considerably. I was fired up, excited about it, because it gave us another actor, another person to participate in the case.

Maybe with some good lawyering, Cody could escape the death penalty after all, thanks to Tony Fratto'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 gonna get the real story from Kody.

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? The desire to face the consequences that motivated Toni? Or was she perhaps getting ahead of a story she now knew would leak? Knew because of something Cody's father, Kip Patton, told her before she decided to unburden herself, which was this. During a visit to the jail, said Kip, his son held up a handwritten note to the glass separating them.

The note said simply, "She was there." His dad had came to me and said something like that he knew I was there.

Uh-huh.

And he kind of guided me, asking me what I wanted to do and everything, and I told him I wanted to come forward. Thinking back to it now, I felt like he was guiding me to talk to his attorneys. And not go to the police.

But if you imagined that Toni Fratto went straight from the lawyer's office to the back of a police car and then off to the county jail to be charged 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 dutifully drove her back across the I-80 to West Wendover. Private investigator Bill Savage.

According to Kip Patton, she exclaimed to him, "What does someone have to do to be arrested?" Good question.

She was home now, her secret confession secure on tape, a ticking legal time bomb that could blow up the law's understanding of the Mickey Costanzo murder case. But not quite yet. Instead, Toni Fratto laid low. No policeman came to her door, and no one called, not the detectives, not the district attorney. Instead, Toni just waited, waited for her parents to come home.

That was probably the hardest part, was telling my parents.

How did they take it?

Pretty hard. They were shocked.

Bit of an understatement, that. Shocked they certainly were. The Frattos 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 Fratto.

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 Attorney Olson or the much different story she told me? More about that later. Or did she tell them a different story altogether? Toni's parents said they had never discussed the murder with Toni, 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 Toni's dad, Claude Fratto.

The police told us that they didn't believe at that time. There was no evidence, was there?

So you never confronted her with the question?

No, because there wasn't any reason for us to.

Right.

She wasn't a suspect, wasn't even a person of interest. So you can just imagine how the Frattos must have felt when their sweet little 18-year-old God-fearing daughter, who had never been in 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 Fratto thought.

My immediate thought was that she's been coerced into saying this.

Somebody's made her do it.

Yes.

Yeah. What person popped into your head?

Cody's dad.

That is Kit Patton, the man who drove Toni across the state in her pajamas to talk to Cody's lawyers. Well, they, Toni's parents, We're out of town. Yet Patton insisted that it was Toni's idea. She wanted to meet Cody's attorneys. He just drove her there, he said, because Toni's parents weren't around. Do you think sometimes that she 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 Frattos, Maybe she didn't really intend to confess at all. Maybe it was just an immature girl's way of trying to help her fiancé, 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 Kody'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, said Toni'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 him falling. The police, by the way, remained quite unaware of Tony's apparent confession in the privacy of a lawyer's office, as was Mickey Costanzo's family. They only knew what they had been told, that the case against Cody, complete with his lurid confession, was plodding 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 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 in early May, she returned to one of Mickey's favorite places, the track at the high school where she had won so many races. It was May 3rd, exactly 2 months after the murder, on what would have been Mickey's 7th 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, 100 miles away at the Elko County District Attorney's Office, defense attorney John Olson was meeting with the DA. They chatted briefly, and then Olsen pulled out a little surprise. Maybe not so little. Remember, Cody was Olsen's client. It wasn't Toni who was his client, it was Cody. So she could have no expectation of attorney-client privilege. And right there, Olsen produced an audiotape. Toni Fratto's secret confession. And the D.A.? 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, uh, a big deal.

A very big deal. Tony Fratto that day went to school like any normal day, as if such a thing were possible anymore. And she sat down to write Cody yet another love letter. I can't wait to see you, be in my arms. Yeah, 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 her little bubble of illusion, and what she dreamt in 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 Toni's confession tape. Because the very next night, Detective Burnham paid her an official visit. Hello. I determined that we had probable cause to arrest her just based on her own admission.

Almedo 465.

Yes, and they cuffed her and took her away in a squad car like a hardened criminal, which seems strange even to experienced homicide detective Kevin McKinney. Did she seem like the 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, no. Quiet, shy little Toni Fratto 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 a 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. Yes, absolutely. She has very strong convictions. And so we never worried. We always trusted Toni and her judgment.

She was, what, wise beyond her years almost? Very. Much.

Yes.

Very wise.

Wise little Toni Fratto, just 18 years old, an adult in the eyes of the law, was deposited in the Elko 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 Toni 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 Toni'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, I knew 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.

Vicki's older sister Christina told us that Tony's arrest was, for her, the ultimate "I told you so" moment.

Because from day one, I did 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. Toni Fratto'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 fiancé, Cody Patton. Both were held at the Elko County Jail, he in the men's wing, she in the women's.

Huh.

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. While still in the wide-open world outside, not a single person could begin to comprehend their reason for committing the ugly act they were accused of, least of all Mickey Costanzo's mother, Celia, who, before the legal proceedings began, braced 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 saw it 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 the zip ties on her hand. I saw it all.

What did it say to you about the kind of death they gave her?

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 2012. July 2011, 4 months after the murder, a somber crowd filed into the historic and stately courthouse in Elko, Nevada. Inside, it was packed with spectators and very tense. A side door opened, and a bailiff guided a shackled Toni to her seat at the defense table. Her hair was tightly braided. Her face was pale and gaunt. [SPEAKING GERMAN] She stared straight ahead as the D.A. read the case against her and presented a parade of witnesses, including Micki'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 panda bear charm Micki always carried. But on day 2 of the hearing came the fireworks, when the prosecutor pulled out pushed play on a tape machine. Toni Fratto, her very own words on that scratchy audio tape recorded by Cody's defense attorney.

My camera was on the ground, and she wasn't really moving at that point.

They played the entire thing, which until now the public had never heard.

I remember, like, putting down a leg and her foot hit the ground.

We had slit her throat, said Toni. How to defend against that? Toni's attorneys did what they could. They argued that her, quote, "so-called confession was wholly rubbish and shouldn't be admissible," was a clear violation of attorney-client privilege, adding that Toni had been misled by Cody's lawyers into thinking she was on the same team with them. And his legal counsel, which, of course, she was not. Toni's defender also pointed out there wasn't any forensic evidence that Toni 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 Toni over for trial, sent her back to jail with no bail.

No bail?

And just over 2 weeks later, it was Cody Patton's turn to be trooped into that historic old chamber. He looked thinner now, the spectators noticed. His ginger hair was longer. And he was fidgety, stole glances around the courtroom, doodled on a notepad as witnesses took their turns. One of them was his very own father, Kip Patton, who 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 you did is painless, Cody. You've gotta just, you know, do 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. But Kip certainly 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 DNA swabbed from Mickey's clothes that matched only him. And then there was the video of him leaving the school just before Mickey, and his tire tracks at the murder scene. And of course, the most prominent piece of evidence, his very own confession to the cops.

I tried to, like, check her pulse and stuff, and I couldn't get anything, and she was flopping.

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 Micki, to his classmate, to his childhood friend.

I kind of just tried to hit her on the— on her head, tried to just knock her out. And she started making this awful sound.

A bailiff handed Cody tissues to wipe away the tears. But the judge had no sympathy for him. And like his fiancée, Toni Fratto, Cody Patton was bound over for trial. There would be 6 counts, all felonies, and one of them, murder, was punishable by death. But attentive observers in the courtroom couldn't help but notice that the two teenagers told very different stories. Remember, Cody said he was alone. Well, Toni insisted, again, to Cody's lawyer, that she was with Cody and they murdered Mickey together. It just didn't add up. Who did what with whom and why? In some weird way, were they trying to cover for each other? Toni's parents, Cassie and Claude Fratta, simply couldn't believe Though, despite her confession that their sweet, diminutive 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.

She didn't?

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

The striking her with the shovel was an order from Kody.

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

He would yell at her, pushing her around.

He would be—

Restraining her.

Restraining her and throwing her down. She was also, at that point, looking for some way out of their relationship.

Well, inviting him to live in your home wasn't some way out.

Wow.

You have to understand, the victim of an abusive relationship.

And—

Mama. We weren't aware of all that was taking place.

In fact, just 2 months before Mickey was killed, the school surveillance camera caught an agitated Cody appearing to get rough with Toni at her locker. Here's private investigator Bill Savage.

There was an instance that occurred in the hallway of Wendover High School that depicts Cody grabbing Toni around the neck. And again, realizing he's 6'6", she's 5'1".

"But Toni declined to file charges," said her father, Claude. 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 Toni's confession, whether real or made up, to save her boyfriend, the Frattos looked back on their daughter's relationship with Cody with new eyes. Toni, 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, Toni must have felt she had no choice but to cooperate with With him. 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 3 years.

But she participated in the attack.

Participated? Participated under extreme orders. She was afraid that she would be the one lying next to Michaela if she did not follow his orders that evening.

To which Kody's attorney, John Olson, responded, "Bologna." Why do you say that?

Bologna. There's nothing in their relationship ever that would indicate that she was ever abused by Kody.

But now, Toni Fratto, the former Little Miss Wendover, was facing the daunting prospect of losing her life life not to Cody Patton, but a lethal injection. Unless she could tell a whole new story about her role in Mickey Costanzo'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 Toni and Cody from the beginning of the morning until 7:00.

I had gotten a text saying that he had her.

So if you had to look for a motive in this crime, the only one that seemed apparent was her animosity.

It was the only one on paper in her own handwriting.

5 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 associate producer. Adam Gorfain is co-executive producer. Paul Ryan is executive producer. And I'm Robert Dean. Liz Cole is senior executive producer. From NBC News Audio, sound mixing by Rich Cutler.