Now, teenage love is often challenging and complicated and at times even deadly. Like in this twisted case, when this couple thought that their relationship was in trouble, they did something that left everyone completely. Let’s get into it. Mikaela CostaSo was born on May 3, 1994, in Elko, Nevada, to Cecilia and Teddy Costco. She was the youngest of three girls and was described as a happy, outgoing and positive person who always saw the good in everyone.
When this incident happened, Mickey, as she was popularly called, was a student at West Wendover High School. She was pretty unpopular, playing on the basketball team and being a track star. She was also the editor of her school’s newspaper and dreamt of being an author. One day, Mickey was close with her mom and sisters and would text them regularly if she had a change in her schedule. So on March 3, 2011, when Mickey didn’t text her mother after school or answer her cell phone, she knew something bad had happened.
But what?
Mickey was last seen leaving the school at 05:00 P.m. Through the back doors. Usually, her elder sister would pick her up from school, but on that day, she had gone out of town, so Mickey decided to walk home. But she never arrived. Her mom started getting worried and called all her friends to check if they had seen or heard from her, but no one had seen her for a few hours.
Knowing her daughter and knowing that this was unlike her, Cecilia called the police. The police started by interviewing Mickey’s friends and classmates but got nothing. Then they pulled out her cell phone records, and that’s when they noticed something strange. Before she vanished, Mickey had been texting and calling one particular number that happened to belong to Cody Patton, an 18-year-old senior who had been Mickey’s childhood friend. Police brought Cody in for questioning, and he told them the same thing that everyone else had.
The last time he saw Mickey was outside the school at 05:00 P.m. He said that she was with someone that he thought was her boyfriend, but wasn’t sure. A widespread search was launched as friends, family, police, and volunteers combed the vast desert surrounding the town in search for Mickey, but for two days, nothing panned out. Then, on the third day, one of the searchers noticed something rather weird in the middle of nowhere, fresh tire marks veering off the road, and when he followed them, he saw a suspicious mound covered by sagebrush, and underneath was something that appeared to be blood. He immediately alerted the police, who came and uncovered Mickey’s body.
She had been brutally beaten and stabbed repeatedly on her face and neck, and there was a plastic tie around one of her arms that led investigators to believe she had been brought unwillingly to the location where she was murdered. But who could have done such a horrible thing? And why?
Mickey’s family was completely devastated when they heard the news, they could not understand why anyone would want to hurt Mickey. They held a Press conference calling for justice for their daughter. Please, ladies and gentlemen, this is not over yet until the person or persons responsible are brought to justice and the police already had a person of interest. Mickey’s oldest friend, Cody Patton. He was the last person to communicate with her, and the surveillance video in the school showed Mickey and Cody in the hallway leading to the exit, where she disappeared minutes later.
In his first interview, Cody said he saw Mickey with her boyfriend at the front of the school, but everyone else said she was at the back of the building. Mickey and Cody had known each other since they were kids and lived in the same apartment complex. They even dated for a while before they broke up and went their separate ways. Mickey started dating someone else, and Cody got involved with a girl called Tony Fratto. Tony was smart, goal-oriented, and a religious girl who came from a devout Mormon family.
She introduced Cody to the Mormon faith and kept him focused on his goal of joining the Marines. After dating for a while and despite being in high school, the two got engaged and Cody even moved in with Tony and her parents. Tony’s parents were a bit conflicted about letting their daughter’s boyfriend move in with them, but they feared that if they didn’t let him, Tony might move out to be with Cody. Therefore, they let him stay so they could keep an eye on him. But soon Cody won them over and they started seeing him as part of the family.
They were shocked to hear that Cody was a person of interest in a murder case.
When Cody was interrogated again, he tried to behave as if he didn’t know what the police were talking about, but his dad begged him to tell the truth and do the right thing, and that’s when he broke down and confessed to everything. He said that he and Mickey had gone for a drive in the desert after school and that they got into an argument when Mickey told him to break up with his fiancee and be with her instead, which he refused. The argument soon turned physical when Mickey started hitting him in the chest. Start yelling at me. I said it’s because I’m not leaving Tony.
She started pounding on my chest and stuff. Cody pushed her off and she fell, hit her head, and started to convulse. Cody broke down in tears as he told the cops how he took a shovel and hit Mikayla to knock her out. Trying to hit her on her head right here, so we’re trying to just knock her out. But Michaela was still making sounds.
So what did Cody do? He slashed her throat to get her to stop. How sick is that? But it didn’t end there when he realized that she was dead. He dug up a shallow grave buried her there and then tried to burn her belongings with such a damning confession, Cody was arrested and charged with first-degree homicide with high chances of getting the death penalty.
Still, something in his story was just not adding up.
Despite his confession and him insisting that he did everything alone and that nobody knew what he was up to, some people did not believe him and felt that he was hiding something. Mickey’s family especially was shocked by this confession because they did not imagine that the boy that they knew growing up was capable of hurting his friend. They felt that Cody was either covering up for someone or someone had forced him to do what he did, but who. Meanwhile, Cody’s fiance, Tony, was super devastated by Cody’s arrest, and she showed her support by visiting him in jail and writing love notes to him, telling him how much she missed him and would always stand by him. The fact that Cody had confessed to murder did not seem to bother her.
Then, in April 2011, Tony left home dressed only in her pajamas and went to Cody’s lawyer’s office accompanied by Cody’s dad. There she confessed on tape that she was involved in Mickey’s death and was there when it happened. She told an entirely different story of how everything happened. She said that on the day that Mickey disappeared, she received a text from Cody with the words I have her meaning that he had Mickey in his car and was coming to pick her up. The three of them drove out of the town to the desert, and as they went, Mickey became more and more agitated.
When they stopped, Cody and Mickey got out of the car to talk and their conversation soon turned into a shouting match. According to Tony, she saw Mickey pushing Cody, and then when she looked away, she heard a loud thud on the car. She got out of the car to see what was happening and found Mickey lying on the ground. Michael was on the ground and she wasn’t moving. At that point, according to Tony, they started freaking out and didn’t know what to do.
So she allegedly hit Mickey with a shovel and then together with Cody, they slit her throat and buried her in a shallow grave that Cody had prepared. After this, the pair then drove to a nearby swimming pool to clean up and then went to McDonald’s as if nothing happened. How sick and twisted is that? Until this point, no one had even suspected Tony of being involved in this. She had appeared to be so sweet and innocent girl who got involved with the wrong guy, but now everyone was shocked and could not believe what they were hearing.
The chilling confession would later turn over to the police and Tony was arrested and charged with homicide. But the story does not end there.
When Tony’s parents heard about their daughter’s confession. They were horrified and could not believe their little girl was capable of such brutality. They described her as a kind and gentle girl who had never gotten into any trouble before. They claimed that Cody must have forced their daughter into committing the crime, saying that he was a jealous, possessive, and controlling boyfriend. Just a month before, the slang security cameras at their school had caught Cody pushing Tony against a wall, lifting her legs off the ground as he choked her.
This was allegedly not the first or last time that Cody had abused Tony. Still, Tony refused to press any charges against him, worrying that it might prevent him from getting into the Marines. Cody had moved in with Tony’s family after his parents had thrown him out, and according to some of his classmates, he would often brag about how his girlfriend’s family was under his control. He would publicly insult and humiliate them, yet they let him stay in their home. Tony’s parents said that they thought that Cody was changing his ways and becoming a better person, but clearly, he wasn’t.
They believed that he was still controlling their daughter from jail and that he had asked her to confess to the murder to save him from the death penalty. But is this what happened?
After both being in jail for a while, both Cody and Tony were offered a plea deal if they would testify against the other. At first, Cody agreed to the plea deal but later changed his mind. Tony, on the other hand, took the deal and agreed to plead guilty to second-degree homicide and testify against the man she promised to stand by forever. This time around, she gave another completely different version of the events that took place. She said that Cody was mad at Mickey and when she got into the SUV, she saw Mickey stuffed in the back, scared with her hands up to her face.