Three years, two months and nine days after Barry Morphew walked out of a Colorado courtroom a free man who was no longer accused of murdering his wife, he returned to court in handcuffs Tuesday — once again facing a murder charge.
Morphew, 57, made his first appearance in the new murder case Tuesday in an Alamosa courtroom. A grand jury indicted him on a single count of first-degree murder in the death of his wife, 49-year-old Suzanne Morphew, who disappeared from the family’s Chaffee County home in 2020 and was found dead in a shallow grave near Moffat in September 2023.
Morphew was charged in 2021 with her death — before her body had been discovered — but the case was dropped in 2022 after extensive misconduct by prosecutors that resulted in 11th Judicial District Attorney Linda Stanley being disbarred.
Morphew on Tuesday appeared in court handcuffed and in a striped white-and-orange jail uniform. His attorney, David Beller, said previously that Morphew maintains his innocence.
Prosecutors on Tuesday said they’d provided almost all discovery materials to the defense — save for one transcript that should be available in the next two weeks. Chief Judge Amanda Hopkins set Sept. 2 as Morphew’s next court date.
In the first case against Morphew, prosecutors argued he 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.
Morphew maintains he left his wife sleeping in bed.
The two had a troubled marriage, and Suzanne was considering a divorce, court testimony in the first case showed. She told a friend she did not feel safe alone with her husband.
Suzanne’s body was found with traces of prescription animal tranquilizers in her bones. Morphew had access to the chemicals used — a formulation known as BAM — and admitted to using the tranquilizer mix to sedate deer, the prior case showed.
Investigators in the first case believed Morphew disposed of his wife’s body somewhere in the mountains around the family’s home. Her body was actually discovered 45 miles to the south of the family’s home in Maysville.
Prosecutors allege in the new case that Suzanne’s body was moved — that her body initially decomposed in a different location before it was taken to the shallow grave near Moffat. Prosecutors pointed to a lack of evidence of decomposition in the shallow grave to support that theory.
