Barbara Perez couldn’t believe her new hire.
The editor and publisher of the newspaper in rural northwest Nebraska looked in amazement at the resume for her newest reporter, A. Marie Hamilton: multiple degrees from a well-known journalism school. Seventeen years working for the . Several statewide awards for her coverage.
“We were all super excited,” Perez said of the April 2023 hire. “Like, wow, why would someone with that much experience, why would she be here?”
Slowly, though, Perez realized that not everything was as it seemed. Hamilton had a problem with authority, Perez said, and ruffled feathers with the town’s police chief and school board. She appeared to sometimes sleep in the office. Nobody ever met her husband, who she said was a district manager for a local cable company.
“We heard so many different things,” Perez said. “It turned out to be this melange of (expletive).”
In fact, A. Marie Hamilton wasn’t even her real name. Those bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Arizona State University? Never attained. No evidence exists that she worked for 17 years at USA Today-affiliated newspapers.
“In seeking truth, you have to get both sides of the story,” Hamilton said in her at the Nebraska paper, citing the quote .
This is the other side, a story rife with inconsistencies, false claims and, now, a slew of felony charges that could land her in prison for decades. A. Marie Hamilton is actually April Marie Morganroth. Before that, she was April McClellan. At various points in her career, the journalist reinvented herself to start fresh in new states, including Colorado.
Wyoming prosecutors last month charged Morganroth, 40, with 20 felonies in two separate criminal cases in which she is alleged to have falsified documents and lied under oath — charges that relate to her alleged acts as a private citizen, not as a journalist. But Morganroth’s previous stops in at least four states and numerous publications were also marked by falsehoods and fabrications about her background, The Denver Post found.
She was fired from a Boulder newspaper for inventing quotations and misrepresenting the stories of sources she had interviewed about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In Arizona, she was convicted of forgery after authorities said she falsified documents as she sought housing. In Wyoming, she claimed to be a muckraking reporter with a Ph.D. who was also in law school. She never sought either degree.
Now she’s facing decades in prison, leaving the communities she covered wondering: Who was April Morganroth?
“There are people who are liars, people who are chronic liars, and then there is mental illness,” Perez said.
Two journalism ethics experts told The Post that while there have been high-profile examples of reporters caught ǰ, they had never heard of someone committing these ethical violations and then altering their identity to continue practicing the trade elsewhere.
“It’s safe to say this is historically unprecedented in the modern era,” said Mark Feldstein, the Richard Eaton Chair of Broadcast Journalism at the University of Maryland.
None of the editors interviewed by The Post who worked with Morganroth outside of Boulder said they found fabrications in her work, and the newspaper could not independently fact-check all of her published stories.
Morganroth, who is free on bail in the two criminal cases, did not return messages from The Post seeking comment.
‘It was always the perfect story’
In her writings and website biographies, Morganroth extolled the virtues of freedom of speech, of seeking the truth no matter the roadblocks and of adhering to strong ethical values.
She wrote that she harps on honesty and accuracy as a foundation for earning and maintaining public trust. Her work must be consistent and principled, fair and independent.
“I aspire to bring truth, integrity and a personal touch to American journalism, unlike what we’ve seen since its early conception,” Morganroth once wrote on her .
But peel back the lofty rhetoric, and a different side of Morganroth emerges.
In 2007, Morganroth — then known by her birth name April McClellan — was charged with cashing a $5,000 welfare check in Arizona meant for her brother, according to court documents. She failed to respond to the bank’s efforts to seek restitution, authorities said, and attempts to locate her were unsuccessful.
“She then withdrew the $5,000 and disappeared,” investigators said in a criminal complaint.
McClellan pleaded guilty to one count of forgery, a class four felony, and was sentenced to probation.
In March 2008, McClellan was charged with three counts of felony forgery after Arizona authorities accused her of forging a court document, a Department of Corrections employment statement and a document from her previous landlord as she sought an apartment for rent, according to an arrest affidavit.
She pleaded guilty to one count and received probation.
McClellan, after her marriage to Scott Morganroth, started going by April Morganroth.
Bethany Barnes met April Morganroth around 2010 when the two worked at a Sears department store in the Phoenix suburbs, and the two quickly became close friends.
Over time, however, Barnes realized that it became hard to trust her friend’s word. Morganroth said things about her family that Barnes later learned were false. She would say she couldn’t hang out for a certain reason, only for Barnes to find out that Morganroth was somewhere else.
“She was always making herself look bigger than what was actually the case,” Barnes told The Post. “It was just a little bit of everything. You could tell she was being dishonest.”
These larger-than-life tales grew harder to tolerate, Barnes said. Eventually, the two lost touch.
“It was always the perfect story,” she said. “She did it very well. She lied very well.”
Morganroth graduated from , a community college, in December 2013 with an associate’s degree in digital photography. At the same time, she was finishing her first full semester at Arizona State’s .
On her blog, Morganroth promoted her services as a commercial and wedding photographer, showcasing her work in local galleries.
During her school years, she accumulated bylines for ASU’s student newspaper, appeared on the school’s radio station and did a , the state’s largest news organization, covering a variety of breaking news stories, including fires, floods and crime. A university spokesperson told The Post that Morganroth was enrolled at ASU at one time but never completed her degree.
Fabricated quotes and a retraction
In 2020, Morganroth moved with her husband and three children to Colorado, where she got a job in the joint newsroom of the Boulder and , newspapers owned by , which also owns The Post.
Her author page shared little in common with reality: She claimed she had been a newspaper journalist for nearly 20 years — even though she was just 35 at the time. She referred to her role at the Arizona Republic as a “full-time writer and multimedia journalist,” but an archived version of the from that time doesn’t show her name. Morganroth, on her , called it an internship.
She said she graduated summa cum laude from Arizona State.
Early in her tenure, The Post organized a Zoom call with its staff and employees from its sister papers to review safety protocols during the George Floyd protests that had broken out in Denver in the summer of 2020. At the end of the call, Morganroth asked the safety instructor if she could bring her gun to the protests, according to staffers who attended the meeting. The instructor advised against it.On Sept. 11, 2021, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Daily Camera and Times-Call by Morganroth featuring reflections from locals who had been impacted by the day’s horrors.
Morganroth interviewed three Boulder residents, including a naval intelligence analyst who recounted a harrowing story in which, she wrote, he watched Marines perform a heroic rescue of children from a nursery in the Pentagon. She quoted a flight attendant who, she said, was scheduled to work on 9/11 but switched her plans at the last minute. And she detailed the supposed experiences of a mental health clinician who, she wrote, didn’t know whether his daughter was alive or dead on Sept. 11.
It turned out that the three individuals said very little of what Morganroth wrote.
A few weeks after its publication, the Daily Camera , saying in a lengthy editor’s note that the story “substantially misrepresented” statements from the three subjects and fabricated many of the quotations attributed to them. One of the sources called his purported quotes “fictional.”
“I was absolutely horrified — like blood-pressure-spiked horrified,” said Mark Pfundstein, the former naval intelligence analyst, in an interview with The Post. “I thought, ‘My God, what will my colleagues think about this?'”
Morganroth, after the retraction, was fired, according to a from one of her colleagues. Mitchell Byars, who covered courts and crime for the paper, called for more due diligence in the hiring process.
“I feel there were some frankly easily identifiable red flags that I brought up with editors after her hire,” he wrote. Byars did not identify those warning signs on social media and declined to be interviewed for this story.
Colleagues, though, had noticed that Morganroth frequently retweeted far-right conservatives on social media, including U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert. Standard social media policies at newspapers forbid this type of political activity.
John Vahlenkamp, one of the editors who retracted the story, declined to comment on his investigation into Morganroth’s work or her tenure in Boulder.
An incident like this could have ended Morganroth’s journalism career. Instead, she pivoted.
New state, new name
In 2022, Morganroth popped up in the Wyoming journalism scene under a new byline: A. Marie Hamilton.
She worked for the , a newspaper in a small community in southeast Wyoming near the Nebraska border, for roughly a year, according to a review of her bylines on the site. Current ownership could not confirm her exact employment dates.
Morganroth’s father, in text messages with Barnes, the friend from Arizona, suggested that he knew that his daughter was running from trouble.
Child protective services “from Colorado was on April; she ran to Cheyenne this time,” Bill McClellan wrote to Barnes in June 2022, according to texts reviewed by The Post. “She thinks it’s okay to keep pulling her lieing (sic) and (expletive). Not working for her, I’d say.”
A few months later, McClellan told Barnes that “they will catch her soon enough.” McClellan died in 2024.
In April 2023, Morganroth took the job in Sidney, Nebraska.
Perez, the editor and publisher there, said Morganroth appeared to be “super knowledgeable” with professional writing chops. The editor said she never worried about the content of her reporter’s work — and only recently learned about what happened at the Daily Camera.
Still, Morganroth was difficult to manage, Perez said.
“Nobody knew what she knew,” Perez said. “Her attitude was: everyone was stupid.”
Many details about her life, though, just didn’t add up. The cable company that her husband supposedly worked for advertised in the paper. So Perez asked about him. The company said they had no idea what she was talking about.
Only four months after getting to the state, Morganroth said she was putting in her two-week notice. Perez didn’t fight her. On her way out, Morganroth told colleagues that the Nebraska newspaper company was starting a new outfit in Cheyenne and that they had asked her to be the editor, Perez said. None of this was true.
“That level of lying and thinking you’ll get away with it that goes beyond telling falsehoods,” Perez said. “That’s where you live in your own reality.”
A slew of felony charges
Once again, Morganroth started anew.
She returned to Wyoming, landing a job at the in southeast Wyoming, an hour north of Cheyenne.
Her listed accolades just kept growing: She now boasted more than 25 years of journalism experience, despite being under 40. The paper, in its , said she previously worked for National Public Radio and iHeartMedia. The Post could find no evidence of these employment stints.
Morganroth, still going by “Marie Hamilton,” earned the nickname “Little Miss Fact-Checker” by her peers at Wyoming Press Association conventions, the paper said, for “always providing clarifying and enriching accurate information about various news topics in our state.”
She again falsely claimed to hold both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Arizona State, and said she was in the midst of obtaining a law degree from the University of Wyoming. A university spokesperson said she was never enrolled there.
After the Record-Times briefly ceased publication, Morganroth launched her own media outlet called the , an “independent, community-centered” news organization focused on southeast Wyoming.
Its stated values: honesty and accuracy, integrity, ethical and watchdog journalism. Its motto: “Independent. Local. Unafraid.”
“I am unafraid to hold the accountable — accountable — and I have faced my fair share of credible threats, attempts to intimidate, blackmail and discredit because I refuse to allow elected officials to have a get-out-of-jail-free card,” she wrote.
Her journalism, in practice, often blurred the line between objective news coverage and her own opinions.
On social media, Morganroth frequently posted her thoughts on gun rights, supposed corruption in the Democratic Party and President Donald Trump.
Morganroth took a particular interest in a planned near the town of Chugwater in southeast Wyoming. She published a on Nov. 25 — which she called an “investigation” — in which she falsely drew links between solar and wind farms and disabilities in children.
The story, published under a “Wyoming Sentinel Staff” byline, quoted a “Marie Hamilton” numerous times as an advocate for children with disabilities. Hamilton is listed on the news outlet’s website as the owner, publisher and managing editor. There’s no indication anyone else worked there.
Her involvement in the project, though, was about to get much more serious after she personally lobbied against the wind farm.
On March 9, prosecutors in Platte County, Wyoming, arrested Morgranroth and related to her opposition to the Chugwater energy project. Authorities allege the local journalist concocted letters of support from two area residents expressing their supposed objections to the project and lied under oath during a public hearing held by a state panel considering the proposal.
In a pre-hearing statement, she asserted she held three degrees from Arizona State, was pursuing a law degree, owned an unspecified local brand and operated various family ranching businesses in several states, an arrest affidavit states. She introduced herself as “Dr. Marie Hamilton.”
Two weeks after the initial charges, prosecutors in the same district against Morganroth. Authorities say she forged documents purporting to show that she had prequalified for a federal loan as she attempted to purchase a home in Chugwater, according to an arrest affidavit cited in local media reports.
Morganroth also claimed that she and her husband had been approved for a federal grant to do construction on the property to allow them to qualify for the loan, prosecutors alleged, submitting to the sellers supposed invoices from two companies for the work. Both companies told investigators and The Post that they never did jobs on this property.
“It was so impressive,” Jessica Logue, owner and CEO of Cowgirl Demolition and Excavating, told The Post. “She used my logo, faded it with an opaque excavator, and had all the verbiage right. I was like, ‘Who is this?'”
‘Detrimental to journalism’
Up until the arrest, people in southern Wyoming knew her as Marie Hamilton. When the news broke, editors at the papers she worked for expressed their disappointment and confusion.
Klark Byrd, managing editor at the Casper-based , said Morganroth covered the state legislature for a month this year, but she never filed paperwork with human resources to get paid. Despite numerous reminders, he said in an interview, the reporter wouldn’t submit her forms.
Boyd said he fact-checked her work and it was always clean.
“It’s always detrimental to journalism when someone in the profession breaks that kind of trust,” he said. “It wasn’t just public trust; she broke the trust of colleagues. It floored me when all the pieces finally came together.”
Lying about a journalist’s true identity calls into question what else they might have fabricated in their stories, the two journalism experts said, calling trust a bedrock principle for the industry.
“You expect this maybe out of priests who get bounced from parish to parish or doctors who get their licenses pulled in one state and move to another,” said Feldstein, the University of Maryland ethics expert. “But I’ve never heard of a journalist doing that.”
Publicly advocating on a topic you’re also covering as a reporter is a clear violation of journalism ethics, said Bob Steele, a former professor and director of the at DePauw University in Indiana. Since Morganroth served as the Wyoming Sentinel’s publisher, editor and reporter, there’s an even greater obligation to be honest, independent and fair in her reporting, he said.
Quoting oneself in the third person, meanwhile, breaks every rule of journalism, both experts said.
“It’s astounding,” Steele said. “It’s problematic to the nth degree.”
Steele and Feldstein said it’s important to characterize Morganroth’s behavior as an extreme outlier in the industry. The public, they said, should not see this as all that’s wrong with journalism. Even Pfundstein, the intelligence analyst whose story Morganroth mispresented in the 9/11 remembrance, said the incident did not shake his confidence or trust in the media.
Those who knew Morganroth previously said they weren’t entirely surprised by her alleged actions. They were just surprised she got caught.
“Part of me thinks she’ll wiggle out of this; that is her forte,” said Perez, the Nebraska editor. “Getting out of things is kind of her milieu. I’m popping some popcorn to see how she’ll get out of this one.”
