Barry Morphew is once again charged with killing his wife.
A Colorado grand jury indicted the 57-year-old on one count of first-degree murder in the death of his wife, Suzanne Morphew, 49, the 12th Judicial District Attorney’s Office announced Friday.
Morphew was arrested in Arizona on Friday and prosecutors will seek to extradite him to the San Luis Valley, the district attorney’s office said.
Suzanne Morphew disappeared from the family’s Chaffee County home on May 10, 2020. Her body was discovered in September 2023 in a shallow grave near Moffat. Authorities determined she died with a mix of animal tranquilizers in her body.
Barry Morphew was initially charged with Suzanne Morphew’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.
“Federal, state and local law enforcement have never stopped working toward justice for Suzanne,” 12th Judicial District Attorney Anne Kelly said in a statement. “The 12th Judicial District Attorney’s Office stands in solidarity with Suzanne’s family and the citizens of Chaffee and Saguache counties in pursuing the grand jury’s indictment.”
In the first case against Barry Morphew, prosecutors argued that 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.
Barry Morphew 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.
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.
Much of the prior case focused on Morphew’s movements and actions on the evening of May 9, 2020, and the 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.
And at about 3:51 a.m. on May 10, Morphew’s cellphone 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, testimony revealed.
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.
Around 5 a.m. on 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.
Authorities found Suzanne’s mountain bike in rough terrain at the bottom of a steep ditch of County Road 225, and found her helmet about .84 miles away a few days later, but it did not appear she had crashed.
Suzanne Morphew told a friend before she died that she would not feel safe alone with her husband and described a 2018 incident in which Barry Morphew 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.”
This is a developing story that will be updated.
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