CHAFFEE COUNTY, Colo. — The Sept. 22 discovery of Suzanne Morphew’s remains in Saguache County has the potential to completely reshape an investigation that stalled out after prosecutors decided to drop charges against her husband in April 2022.
Ryan Brackley, a longtime prosecutor who has been a criminal defense attorney since 2019, said he believes the investigation should be treated like a cold case – and be put in new hands.
“You always want fresh eyes,” he said. “You always want new ideas, new people looking at these cases. Ideally, in a cold case, you are building off the work by prior investigators. You're building off the narrative and the theory.
“I don't think that it makes a lot of sense in the Morphew case, given the history.”
It’s a history that has been fraught with controversy since Suzanne, 49, was reported missing on May 10, 2020.
Chaffee County sheriff’s deputies responding to the family home west of Salida found her bicycle in a ravine.
Her husband, Barry Morphew, quickly became the focus of the police investigation. He was in Broomfield that day, and he told investigators that Suzanne had been in bed asleep when he left that morning.
But police became suspicious after surveillance video showed him seemingly throwing things away in trash cans and dumpsters while he was in Broomfield – and for the next year he was the focus of the investigation. Ultimately, they arrested him May 4, 2021, and the Chaffee County District Attorney, Linda Stanley, filed first-degree murder charges against him despite the fact no body had been found.
According to a 131-page arrest affidavit, investigators believed Suzanne died sometime after she sent a message with her phone just after 2 p.m. on May 9, 2020, and early the next morning, when Barry left for Broomfield.
They cited data from both his cell phone and his truck and what the affidavit described as numerous discrepancies in his answers to questions as they built the case against him. They also pointed to evidence that Suzanne had told him she planned to leave him – something he initially denied, according to court documents.
But then Stanley, the district attorney, and her prosecutors were sanctioned by the judge for failing to turn over evidence to the defense.
Finally, in April 2022, prosecutors asked that the charges against Barry be dropped because they believed they were close to finding her body.
Then came the discovery in Saguache County of Suzanne’s remains. The area is about 45 miles south of the couple’s home. None of the voluminous evidence already made public in the case puts Barry in that area on the weekend of the alleged crime, his attorneys said.
That background led Brackley to call for a new investigation handled by new detectives and prosecutors.
“It's clear, given the history of this case, that a completely objective and unbiased investigation needs to be done here,” he said. “Barry Morphew was arrested and put in handcuffs and put in jail and subject to a criminal prosecution when they clearly didn't have the evidence to prosecute him.”
He said one option would be a “wide open” grand jury – where investigators and prosecutors present evidence, and where Barry and his attorneys would have a the chance to lay out their own theories and interpretation of evidence.
“For a grand jury to work fairly in this case, you'd want to have both sides,” he said. “You'd want to have both sides not necessarily in there, but they'd want to present everything – both inculpatory evidence, or exculpatory evidence, or evidence of other suspects.
“I think that's the way in this case you get past that stink of bias that may or may not have been present, tainting the original investigation.”
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