Barry Morphew was charged this week for a second time in the death of his wife Suzanne, five years after she vanished from her home in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains and more than three years after the original criminal case against him collapsed.
A grand jury indicted the 57-year-old on one count of first-degree murder in the death of Suzanne Morphew, 49, the 12th Judicial District Attorney’s Office announced Friday.
Suzanne Morphew’s disappearance, her husband’s arrest and the protracted court saga that continued even after the original case was dismissed have continued to spark interest across the world as the subject of news stories, documentaries and podcasts.
Barry Morphew was arrested in Arizona on Friday, two days after the grand jury voted on the . He is being held on $3 million cash-only bail, according to court records.
Prosecutors will seek to extradite him to the San Luis Valley, the district attorney’s office said. If convicted, he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Suzanne Morphew disappeared from the family’s Chaffee County home on May 10, 2020, and her body was not discovered until September 2023, when state officials came across it while investigating an unrelated case near Moffat. Authorities determined she died with a mix of animal tranquilizers in her body.
Barry Morphew was initially charged with his wife’s murder in 2021, before her body was found. All charges against him were dropped in 2022 after prosecutors mishandled the case and were sanctioned for discovery violations — misconduct so egregious it ultimately led to the disbarment of 11th Judicial District Attorney Linda Stanley.
“Law enforcement, the Chaffee County community and Colorado as a whole has never stopped fighting for justice for Suzanne,” 12th Judicial District Attorney Anne Kelly said at a news conference in Alamosa on Friday night. She took over the case after Suzanne Morphew’s body was discovered in her jurisdiction.Kelly declined to answer specific questions about the investigation but emphasized it is a different case than the one brought against Barry Morphew in 2021.
“We have worked very hard to move forward,” she said.
Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty and Denver District Attorney John Walsh are also providing and resources and support to Kelly’s office during the case, she said.
Barry Morphew has maintained his innocence since his wife went missing, and he sued police and prosecutors for $15 million over his original arrest and prosecution. A judge dismissed that lawsuit last year.
His attorney, David Beller with the Denver law firm Recht Kornfeld, blasted the new indictment Friday.
“Yet again, the government allows their predetermined conclusion to lead their search for evidence,” Beller said in a statement to The Denver Post. “Barry maintains his innocence. The case has not changed, and the outcome will not either.”
Morphew’s attorney in the first case, Iris Eytan, said she will support his new lawyers to “sustain his rightful innocence.”
“I’ve handled thousands of cases, and I’ve never seen prosecutors mishandle a case so recklessly,” Eytan said in a statement Friday. “This case was fumbled so terribly, three prosecutors were penalized. After Barry’s case was rightly dismissed, I dedicated the second half of my career to ensure what happened to Barry doesn’t happen to another innocent person. This and this alone is the only reason I’m not representing Barry today.”
Last seen alive in 2020
In the first case against him, prosecutors argued that Barry Morphew killed his wife on May 9, 2020, after discovering her nearly two-year extramarital affair, then disposed of her body and staged a bike crash before leaving for work in Broomfield early the next day.
He has maintained he left Suzanne sleeping in bed. The couple’s two daughters were out of town at the time.
The last time investigators can prove Suzanne Morphew was alive was just after 2 p.m. on May 9, 2020, when she sent a selfie to her paramour from the couple’s home. Barry Morphew put his phone into airplane mode at 2:47 p.m. that day, and Suzanne never responded to messages from her paramour sent at 2:44 and 2:46 p.m., court filings and testimony have shown.
While Barry Morphew initially told police he had a happy marriage, Suzanne told a friend before she died that she would not feel safe alone with her husband and described a 2018 incident in which he pushed her into a closet and put a gun to his own head, asking if that was what she wanted.
She told that friend she was contemplating a divorce, but that Barry was “begging for another chance.”
The indictment released Friday states that Barry Morphew deleted text messages with his wife but saved a screenshot of one of her messages from May 6, 2020, that said: “I’m done. I could care less what you’re up to and have been for years. We just need to figure this out civilly.”
Investigation focuses on tranquilizers
After Suzanne disappeared, investigators found a tranquilizer dart gun, empty darts and a dart package that included a capped needle typically used for injecting tranquilizer chemicals into the darts, according to prior court testimony. They also found a cap used to cover such needles in the clothes dryer at the house.
Barry Morphew told investigators that he regularly used animal tranquilizers and darts, and sometimes shot tranquilizer darts around their Colorado home.
The new indictment details testimony from experts and law enforcement officials that no private citizens or businesses in that part of Colorado purchased the tightly-regulated prescription tranquilizers — a formulation known as BAM — found in Suzanne Morphew’s remains in the three years before her disappearance.
Her husband purchased multiple kits containing the drug in 2018, a few months before the family moved from Indiana to Colorado, according to the indictment.
“Ultimately, the prescription records show that when Suzanne Morphew disappeared, only one private citizen living in that entire area of the state had access to BAM: Barry Morphew,” the indictment states.
Much of the prior case focused on Morphew’s movements and actions the evening of May 9, 2020, and morning of May 10, 2020, before his wife was reported missing. The driver and passenger doors on Morphew’s truck were opened at 3:25 a.m. May 10, 2020, prior testimony revealed.
Barry Morphew’s phone appeared to move to the area where his wife’s abandoned bicycle was found, although the data was inconclusive because of the poor cell coverage in the region. The last ping on Suzanne Morphew’s cellphone was at 4:23 a.m. May 10, 2020, near the family’s home, testimony revealed.
Evidence shows body was moved
The initial preliminary hearing did not include evidence to show Barry Morphew drove south, toward Moffat, where his wife’s body was eventually found. Prosecutors in the first case wrongly theorized her body had been dumped in a mountainous region near the Morphew family home.
The new indictment states that Suzanne Morphew’s remains appeared to have decomposed in a different location than where they were found, a few hundred feet down a dirt road off of Colorado 17 in Saguache County, about 45 minutes from the Morphew home.
Testimony from a forensic anthropologist, botanist and entomologist found “a distinct lack of bug activity,” which did not line up with her remains decomposing at the same place they were found, the indictment stated. There was no evidence that animals had come across her remains, and her clothes “lacked evidence of decomposition,” the indictment said.
Around 5 a.m. May 10, Barry Morphew drove to a Front Range landscaping job and disposed of items in trash cans and dumpsters at five different spots near Broomfield, testimony in the first case revealed. He later told investigators he couldn’t remember what he was throwing away, and said it might have been wrappers.
A neighbor eventually reported Suzanne Morphew as missing on the afternoon of May 10, 2020, prompting a massive search effort that lead to authorities finding Suzanne’s mountain bike in rough terrain at the bottom of a steep ditch off of County Road 225, near the family’s home. They found her helmet about .84 miles away a few days later. It did not appear she had crashed.
