NOV 15, 2019
Kelsey Berreth murder case: Bloodstain expert testifies on crime scene
Kelsey Berreth’s father leaned forward in his front row seat in a Teller County courtroom and cried as a bloodstain expert testified in vivid language and with swinging motions how blood could have been splattered across his daughter’s Woodland Park condo
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The bloodstain expert, former Denver homicide detective Jonathyn Priest, said that Krystal Lee Kenney’s description of the blood patterns she found are consistent with a high-impact attack with an object, which would spread a large quantity of small blood spots across the condo. When Fourth Judicial District Attorney Dan May asked if the stains were consistent with an attack with a bat, Priest said, “Oh, absolutely.”
“The fact that there are small bloodstains supports my opinion that we have a forceful incident, not a passive one,” Priest said.
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Priest testified Friday the patterns described were consistent with the use of a blunt force weapon. He also said the staining found between the slats of the wooden floor was consistent with a large pool of blood that had time to seep into cracks.
Holding a sample of the floor from Berreth’s condo, Priest also described two indentations on the wood plank, though he couldn’t tell exactly what hit it.
“So something substantially heavy and substantially hard had an impact on this area and certainly a baseball bat is consistent with that,” he said.
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Priest also said that the bloodstain on the toilet – the evidence found by Berreth’s brother that intensified what started as a missing persons case – indicated that stain appeared to be from a bloody object that smeared against the bowl and not a splatter.
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