GREAT BEND, Kan. — A 37-year-old Texas man has been sentenced to life in prison in the deaths of a Kansas couple who were vendors at a Kansas county fair.
Rusty Frasier, who was sentenced Friday, was one of several people charged in the July 2018 deaths of Alfred “Sonny” Carpenter and Pauline Carpenter. They were killed at the Barton County, Kansas, fair. Their bodies were later found in shallow graves near Van Buren, Arkansas. Investigators say one suspect posed as a member of a mafia group and ordered the couple’s deaths as part of initiation.
Police say there is no “carnival mafia.”
