A Colorado judge on Tuesday adjusted the $3 million bail for Barry Morphew as he awaits trial in the murder of his wife from cash-only to a cash or surety bail — meaning he could now be released from jail if he pays $300,000 through a bondsman.
Morphew, 57, is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Suzanne Morphew, 49, who disappeared from the family’s Chaffee County home in 2020 and was found buried in a shallow grave near Moffat in 2023.
Morphew initially was charged in 2021 with his wife’s 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 was arrested and charged for a second time in June, and this time is being prosecuted in the neighboring 12th Judicial District, where Suzanne Morphew’s body was discovered. Morphew has maintained his innocence.
Should he be post bail, Morphew will be required to stay in Colorado, wear a GPS monitor, surrender his passport, drive only vehicles registered to him, use only his legal name and follow a protective order, 12th Judicial District Chief Judge Amanda Hopkins ruled.
She noted that Morphew has limited past criminal history, the support of his daughters and is not likely to commit a new offense while free on bail. She also noted that he has moved around frequently — most recently living in a trailer park in Arizona — and said he has demonstrated a “concerning” ability to “switch up his identity” and live in different places with relative ease.
“Mr. Morphew does not have a single tie to this community that I am aware of,” Hopkins said.
In court on Tuesday, Morphew’s attorneys, David Beller and Jane Fisher-Byrialsen, asked Hopkins to reduce Morphew’s $3 million cash-only bail to a $500,000 bail. They argued in a motion that Morphew can be trusted to appear in court because he was free on a $500,000 bail during the first murder case and still attended all of his court hearings as required during that case.
“That track record, I believe, is telling and is something the court can and should take into account,” Beller said.
Twelfth Judicial District Attorney Anne Kelly said the 2021 prosecution should not impact the bail in the current case, because the current case relies on different, stronger evidence — including Suzanne Morphew’s body.
“The case in 2021 was arguably entirely circumstantial with no body,” Kelly said. “This case is very different.”
She added that Morphew has moved between Colorado, Indiana and Arizona since the dismissal of the first case, that he has switched license plates between vehicles and has used the name “Lee Moore” to conduct business. (Lee is his middle name.)
Morphew’s daughters supported his effort to seek a reduced bond, Kelly said. Suzanne Morphew’s siblings objected to any reduction in bail.
“He is a flight risk and serial psychopathic controller of all in the realm of his influence,” David Moorman, her brother, wrote in an Aug. 21 letter to the court. “He needs to remain imprisoned through the entire legal proceedings ’til a verdict is read.”
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.
He has maintained he left his wife sleeping in bed. The couple’s two daughters — who have since supported their father — were out of town at the time. Before her death, Suzanne Morphew told a friend she did not feel safe alone with her husband and that she was contemplating divorce.
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 now allege that Suzanne Morphew’s body was moved. They say her body initially decomposed in a different location before someone moved it to the shallow grave near Moffat, and point to a lack of evidence of decomposition in the shallow grave to support that theory.
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