NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS - The Disappearance & Murder of Suzanne Morphew

She hid a spy pen to catch her husband cheating. It recorded her own secret affair instead.

On Mother's Day weekend 2020, Suzanne Morphew went for a bike ride in the Colorado mountains and never came home. Three years later, her remains were found by accident in a remote field locals call "the boneyard" — with a wildlife tranquilizer in her bones and her body moved at least twice. Her husband Barry has pleaded not guilty to her murder. His trial begins October 13, 2026.

This is the whole story: a crying husband and a $200,000 reward, a "chipmunk alibi," a deleted "I'm done" text, a deer tranquilizer called BAM, a district attorney who got disbarred, unidentified DNA tied to unsolved sex crimes in two states, and a cremation order police stopped one day before it happened.

As one law professor put it: nothing is what it seems.

I tell you what's documented, what's prosecution theory, and what the defense disputes — and I keep them separate, so you decide for yourself.

ACTIVE CASE: Barry Morphew has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent unless proven guilty at trial. This episode is sourced entirely from court filings, the grand jury indictment, preliminary-hearing testimony, the autopsy, and established news reporting.

In this episode:
- Who Barry and Suzanne were, and a marriage quietly falling apart
- The spy pen, the affair, and the last 24 hours
- BAM, the needle cap in the dryer, and "the only private citizen"
- The unidentified male DNA in Suzanne's car
- The disbarred DA and the collapse of the first prosecution
- The boneyard, the autopsy, and the second arrest under an alias
- The cremation order — and where the case stands now

TIME KILLER FILES: Have a case from your own hometown? A cold case, a small-town mystery, a story nobody talks about? Send it to me — I read every one.
Email: JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com  (Subject: TIME KILLER FILES)

New episodes of Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and YouTube. True crime, conspiracy, and the stories the official version leaves out.

Sources include court filings and the grand jury indictment in People v. Barry Morphew, the El Paso County Coroner's autopsy, preliminary-hearing testimony, CBS News and CBS 48 Hours, the Colorado Sun, 9News, the Mountain Mail, Fox News, and others. Full source list on the YouTube version of this episode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Before I start, I want to dedicate this one. This episode was written for my coach and mentor, Rick Cheever. Rick believed this show mattered before I had any proof that it did. So, Rick, this one is for you. Now, let me tell you about Suzanne Morphew. On the Saturday before Mother's Day 2020, a 49-year-old woman in the Colorado Rockies sent a man she loved, a selfie, at 11 minutes past 2 in the afternoon. 32 minutes later, her husband pulled into the driveway, and by dawn, the next morning, her phone went dark and stayed dark. That afternoon, she sent the selfie is the last proof that we have that Suzanne Morphew was alive. What you're about to hear has a missing woman on a bike and a husband who cried on camera and offered a $200,000 reward. It has a spy pin, a wife hid to catch her cheating husband that ended up recording her own secret affair instead. It has a deer tranquilizer found in a dead woman's bones. It has a district attorney who got disfarred. It has a $15 million lawsuit, and it has unidentified male DNA in the victim's car that matched a string of unsolved sexual assaults in two other states. It has a body found by accident. Three years later, in a field, locals call the boneyard, and it has a cremation order signed by the husband that police stopped one day before it was supposed to happen. A law professor named Aya Gruber read thousands of pages of this case for CBS. And she said the thing that became the title of this episode. She said, This case is incredibly unique. When you start to dig a little deeper, nothing is what it seems. So hold on to that. Nothing is what it seems. Because both sides of this case have used it. The prosecution thinks the simple story, the husband did it, is the true one hiding under a pile of noise. Now the defense thinks the noise is the truth, and the simple story is the lie. By the end of this, you get to decide which it is. And I'll tell you why this got under my skin. You know, I'm a Kansas girl, and I grew up in a town where everybody kind of knows everybody's name. You know, so when Barry and Suzanne came out of a small town in Indiana, um, it seemed just like something I would have seen here in Kansas. So we've got this dart gun and a vial of animal trainhoiser, which isn't some movie villain prop. We've got people in the state who sedate livestock and game for a living. So when I read this file, I didn't see anything foreign. I saw a familiar kind of life, a long marriage, quiet plan to leave, and a skill that half of my neighbors have. And I watched it turn into the strangest murder case I've covered in a long time. And that's why I wanted to do this one right. You're listening to Just Killing Time. I am Elizabeth Stanton. This is a true crime and conspiracy and stories that keep us up at night. This case is still moving. The trial has not happened. So what I'm going to do is what I always do. I'll tell you what's documented, and I'll tell you what the prosecution theory, and I'll tell you what the defense disputes, and I'll keep those three things separate so you always know which one you're hearing. Here's what's isn't in dispute at all. Suzanne Morphew is dead. The coroner ruled it a homicide. The wildlife tranquilizer was in her bones, and her body was moved at least twice. Now Barry Morphew says he had nothing to do with any of it, and his two daughters stand beside him. So let's start at the beginning. Barry Morphew and Suzanne Morphew, well, her maiden name was Mormon, grew up in the same small town, Alexandria, Indiana. About 5,000 people, the kind of place where everybody knows everybody in your high school years follow you for the rest of your life. Suzanne, she was the popular one. She ran for homecoming queen, and people who knew her describe her the same way over and over. Warm, funny, devoted to her fate, and her two girls. Now, Barry, he was a star athlete. Good nuts at baseball, Toronto Blue Jays drafted him. And that's not a small town legend. That's a professional organization looking at a teenager from rural Indiana and saying, We want you. An injury, though, ended it before it started. And so he went to Purdue. So did Suzanne. They married on August 5th, 1994. She was 23, a Purdue graduate, and a school teacher. They had two daughters, Mallory, born on the 4th of July, 1999, and Macy, born in August of 2003. Barry built a landscaping business and Suzanne taught middle school, then left to raise the girls. And on the surface, for a long time, it was a normal, successful, church-centered Midwestern life. Barry had one other line of work, which matters to this whole story. He was a deer farmer. He raised deer in Indiana, which meant he was licensed and experienced with the tools of the tree, including the sedatives you use to knock a deer out cold. So I want to flag that. Deer farming early. Because most people hear deer track wise are a picture of something exotic. It isn't around here knocking a big animal out cold. To move it, treat it, or work on it is just a Tuesday for a lot of normal folks. A guy who can load a dart, hit a deer from a window, and have it down in a minute isn't a mad scientist. It's somebody who's done it a thousand times. That's the trap in this case. The very thing that makes Barry look guilty to a jury in a city, he had the drug, he had the gun, he knew how to use it, is the same thing in forn life and farm country that would barely raise an eyebrow. So when you hear the prosecution say he was the only private citizen for miles with this compound, you have to hold both of those ideas at once. It is genuinely damning, and it is also just what he did for work. So keep that tension in your head the whole way through. In 2018, the Morphews left Indiana for Maysville, Colorado, a speck of a community on Highway 50 tucked into the Rockies near Salida. The reason they gave their older daughter Mallory was she was going to go to college nearby. And their home was on Puma Pass, a private mountain property, beautiful, the kind of place that looks like from the outside, like the reward for 30 years of hard work. Behind that, though, the marriage was coming apart. And Suzanne was keeping records. FBI agent Kenneth Harris describes text between Suzanne and her best friend Sheila Ulver in the ambient, and this is what the text said. She said she couldn't handle the unstableness and complaining of him being Jekyll and Hyde and that something would quote unquote set him off, and she never knew what that might be. She also said she wanted out of the marriage, but wanted to wait until Macy was out of the home. And Macy was 16. She was still living at home. And she kept a journal and she texted her friends back home and she was building a private record of what was happening in that house. And according to prosecutors planning her exit, she talked to a close friend about divorce and she was looking at her options, and she was carrying a secret of her own that had been going on for two years. Now, the spy pin is one of those details that sounds made up. It was a voice activated recorder built to look like an ordinary bulbpoint pen. Suzanne hid it in her walk-in closet. She wanted to catch Barry because she was convinced he was the one cheating. Ten days after she disappeared, investigators found it. They played back what it had captured. There was nothing on it about Barry having an affair. What was recorded instead was Suzanne talking to a man named Jeff. So it took the FBI six months to figure out who Jeff was. His name was Jeff Libbert Libler. Both Barry and Suzanne had known him back in high school in Alexandria. He lived in Michigan now, and he had a wife, and he had six kids. In 2018, right after the move to Colorado, Suzanne found Jeff Libler on Facebook and sent him one line. Howdy, stranger. And that turned into daily messages, and then phone calls, then video calls, and a lot of it routed through secret accounts on WhatsApp and LinkedIn. And in February of 2019, they met in New Orleans and it became physical. For the next two years they messaged almost every single day. She told her best friend she was in love with him. They talked about marriage and they talked about moving to Ecuador. And she looked up how to say, I love you in Spanish. So now here's a term that matters. Investigators cleared Jeff Leibler completely. He was in Michigan, his alibi held. And here's the part the prosecution leans on hard. They found no evidence that Barry even knew the affair existed. Think about what that does to the motives. If Barry didn't know about Jeff, then this was never about another man. The prosecution's motive isn't jealousy. It's the oldest one there is. She was leaving, and he couldn't stand to lose control over that. When investigators pulled Barry's phone apart, they found he had deleted a text exchange with Suzanne. Forensics recovered part of it, and it was dated May 6, 2020, four days before she vanished. And this is what it said. Suzanne Morphew text to Barry. Fine, done. I could care less what you're up to and have been for years. We just need to figure this out civilly. Now Barry told investigators their marriage was the best. He called Suzanne, his angel, he said they were happy. Then he deleted that text, the one he tried to erase, and that says something very different. So in the 2025 grand jury indictment, Barry versus people versus Barry Morphew. The prosecutor's theory said this. It had become clear that Barry could not control Suzanne's insistence on leaving him. And he resorted to something he had done his entire life. Hunt and control. And Suzanne, like he had hunted and controlled animals. And that is the prosecution's whole case in one sentence. The defense rejects every single word of it. Barry has said from day one he had nothing to do with his wife's disappearance, and that the state built a story and then went looking for facts to fit it. And we'll get to see how good that defense actually is because in this case it's better than you think. Here's the first thing that surprises people. The prosecution doesn't think Suzanne was killed on Mother's Day, the day she was reported missing. They think she was killed the day before. Saturday, May 9th. The timeline they've built from phone records, cell towers, and Barry's own truck tells a very specific story. So Saturday, May 9th, 2 43 p.m., Barry arrives home. From there, his phone starts pinging towers all over the property again and again in different spots. Twice that day, Barry put his phone into airplane mode and investigators flagged both. Now at 8 50 p.m., Suzanne's Facebook security codes reset, suggesting someone was getting into her phone. And at 9 30 p.m., Barry's truck computer logs, the truck being put in reverse, back towards the house. When investigators showed Barry the records of his phone pinging all over the property that afternoon and evening, he had an explanation ready. He said he was shooting chipmunks. He told them chipmunks were a constant nuisance up there and that he'd shot 85 of them in the two years they'd lived on the property, and that's why his phone was bouncing around. He was chasing chipmunks. Chipmunks are so cute. So law professor Aya Gruber said on that explanation, she goes it was perhaps the world's first chipmunk alibi. And then that confession to him shooting chipmunks becomes a major piece of incriminating evidence against him. So the prosecution's version of those same pings is not a man chasing rodents. It's a man chasing his wife around the property after he'd put a tranquilizer dart in her, watching the drug take hold, and then starting the long work of cleaning up what he had done. Now, Sunday, May 10th. At 3 25 a.m., Barry's truck and computer logs the doors opening and closing. His phone moves towards the spot where Suzanne's bike will later be found. At 4 23 a.m., Suzanne's footone pings the tower for the last time ever. And at 5 a.m., Barry says he left for a work trip to Broomfield while Suzanne was asleep, and he says he didn't wake her to say goodbye. An employee says the two of them were supposed to drive to Broomfield together. Barry left alone without telling him. At 5 38 PM, a neighbor reports Suzanne missing after the daughters can't reach their mom on Mother's Day. By the evening, deputies find Suzanne's bike on a steep hillside near County Road 225 in Highway 50. No damage, no blood, no skid marks, no sign of a crash or a struggle. At 8 46 PM, Barry arrives at the scene and he asks, Where was the bike? Then, was there a crash? And he suggests a mountain lion. He never calls 911 and he never joins a law enforcement search. Barry's truck became one of the most important witnesses in this case, and it never said a word out loud. Investigators pulled the data off of his onboard computers, a technique called digital vehicle forensics. The truck told them where it had gone, when the doors opened, when it backed up, and when the engine ran. As one investigator put it, the truck talked. And a few details though from inside that hole that the jury will hear. Investigators photographed injuries on Barry's hands and scrapes on his body when Suzanne disappeared. They found an unused 22 caliber round sitting next to Suzanne's bed. And at one point in the interviews, before he'd been charged with anything, Barry asked the investigators a question. And Barry said, What about immunity? I sit with that question, you know, what about immunity? And I go back and forth on it, and I want to be fair about that. If you're innocent, maybe you're just watched enough TV to be kind of scared of being maybe railroaded? And the word just falls out of your mouth, I guess. People say dumb things to the police out of beer all the time, but it's a strange thing to reach for when your wife has just vanished and you supposedly have no idea why. That's the thing about this entire case. Almost every fact in it can be read, you know, two completely opposite ways. You're going to feel that whiplash this whole episode. That's not being me being like wishy-washy, it's just the actual evidence. On Mother's Day, Barry was three hours away in Broomfield for work. Hotel surveillance from a holiday in Express showed him walking to his room carrying a trash can, wearing a different shirt than the one he'd arrived in. He came back out a short time later. He was also recorded around town tossing trash, not in the hotel bins, but in separate dumpsters around Broomfield. When investigators asked, he said he often did that to avoid landfill fees. The prosecution thinks the work trip was the whole point, a built-in alibi. So Suzanne's disappearance would look like it happened while he was conveniently out of town. Now the response to this was enormous. The Chaffee County Sheriff's Office served more than 135 search warrants. They interviewed more than 400 people across several states and they ran down more than 1,400 tips. The FBI and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation were in early. A week after Suzanne vanished, Barry posted a video to find Suzanne Morphew Facebook page. And here's what he said. Suzanne, if anyone is out there that can hear this, that has you, please will do whatever it takes to bring you back. No questions asked. However much they want, honey, and love you and what you back. So he held back tears. He choked up. He offered a reward that grew to $200,000. Hundreds and hundreds and thousands, I'm gonna say, people watched it, a lot of them came away saying the same thing. That man looks her broken. Now investigators watching that same exact video wrote down what he didn't do. He didn't offer to volunteer to search. He didn't organize the community. And when Suzanne's own brother, Andy Mormon, brought volunteers in from around the country to comb the mountains, Barry didn't go up with them. Now Andy says this, my sister was murdered, and then she was hidden within a three and a half hour window. So I can draw a circle on that and tell you she's within that circle. He had the radius right. He was just looking in the wrong direction. Here's a detail that cuts the other way, and I'm putting it in because a fair episode has to. Barry's own attorney say that when he offered investigators a piece of Suzanne's clothing for a trekking dog, the dog followed her sit from the bike down to a rushing river and lost it at the water. And on the other side, cadaver dogs, the ones trained to smell human decomposition, were run on Barry's truck. They did not alert. Nobody had been in that truck as far as those dogs were concerned. And if you've ever heard, you know, the prosecution's greatest hits, the chipmunk with deleted text, the truck that talked, you'd think this would be open and shut. But the dogs were a good example of why it wasn't. A tracking dog losing Suzanne in the river and cadaver dogs finding nothing in his truck are exactly the kind of facts a defense attorney builds on a reasonable Dow case. Whether they add it to anything is a jury's call, but they're real and you deserve to have them. Now, May of 2021, a full year after Suzanne disappeared and with no body found. DA Linda Stanley charged Barry Morphew with first degree murder. The case went to a preliminary hearing in Salida that don't exist, four days after 20 hours of testimony. And the judge ruled there was enough to take it to try. Trial. It was moved to Cannon County, sorry, Cannon City on a change of venue, and they prepared to summon thousand jurors. And then the whole thing came down. In the run up to trial, the judge sanctioned the prosecution for repeatedly failing to turn over evidence to the defense. The discovery they were legally required to share. And as a penalty, he barred most of Stanley's expert witnesses, around about 14 of them. And without those experts and still without Suzanne's body, the case was gutted. On April 19th, 2022, nine days before trial, Stanley moved to dismiss without prejudice, meaning she could refile if she ever got what she needed. Barry walked out of the courthouse with his daughters. His defense attorney held a press conference and said this. And he's not going to be charged ever again. It's over. There's a strange footnote though. From the months right after the charges were dropped in the summer of 2022, Barry pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. He cast a ballot in his missing wife's name in the 2020 election, mailing in Suzanne's ballot. And when an FBI agent asked him why, he gave a reason I could not make it up if I tried. He said this. I figured all these other guys were cheating. Dang. So he bleeded guilty in July of 2022 and was fined about $600 and saved served no jail time over casting that mallet in his wife's name. Now, what happened to Linda Stanley, the DA, is its own scandal. In September 2024, Colorado disbarred her. The ruling ran 83 pages and found she'd broken the rules of conduct in several ways. Improper public statements about an open case, blown discovery deadlines, then the part that still makes the jaw drop. She secretly launched an investigation into a judge handling the Morphew case, apparently trying to get him removed. And when that turned up nothing, she dropped the charges. Reporting later, she showed that she'd also been in contact with true crime YouTubers and podcasters about the open case. She finished her term and is no longer allowed to practice law in Colorado. I'll be blunt about that part. Linda Stanling nearly handed Barry Morfew, something almost impossible to undo. If she'd done her job and turned over the evidence and kept her experts and left the judge alone, this might have gone to a jury trial back in 2022. Instead, she ran it into the ground and got herself disbarred. Whatever you believe about Barry's guilt or innocence, what she did was a failure to Suzanne's family and to her own community. And it's a big reason this case took five more years to get back into a corporate. If you only know the headline version of this case, you'd probably never heard this little part. And to me, it's the single biggest reason the title of this episode is the title of this episode. When investigators processed Suzanne's Range Rover and her bike after she vanished, they found male DNA that did not belong to Barry. It wasn't in one spot. It was on her glove box, on her bike, on her bike helmet, on the handlebars, in the backseat of her car, even on sheets that were in the dryer. Barry was excluded from that sample. Then they ran that glove box sample through CODIS, which is the national DNA database, and got a hit rather subtle. So preliminary hearing testimony from Colorado Bureau of Investigation CBI agent Joseph Cahill in August of 2021 said this male DNA recovered from the glove box of Suzanne Morphu's vehicle partially matched DNA profiles in several sexual assault cases in three cities Chicago, Phoenix, and Tibby, Arizona. Barry Morphu's DNA was excluded. Read that back. An unidentified man's DNA in the missing woman's car that lines up with a pattern of unsolved sexual assaults across two states. That is not a small thing to leave in the file. And here's where it gets worse. According to the defense, investigators identified a man living in Phoenix as a partial match. The deputy DA reached out to him, and the man refused to cooperate and got a lawyer. The agent who collected the original sample, Cahill, went on military leave and never personally followed up on the matches. He testified that he'd asked a Chicago detective to chase one of them and just never circled back to see if it happened. The defense has argued for years that this DNA evidence, evidence pointing at an actual alternate suspect with a possible history of sexual violence, was buried and not disclosed to them until after the preliminary hearing was already over. And I'm going to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of detail that gets twisted online. Unidentifying DNA in a car is not proof of who killed Suzanne Morphe. DNA gets placed innocently. A mechanic, a passenger, a transfer from a gas pump, a partial match in a database is not the same as an A. And the prosecution would tell you it's a distraction from the tranquilizing found in her bones. But you cannot tell me with a straight face that male DNA, timed unsolved sex crimes, found in the victim's vehicle with the possible suspect in Phoenix who refused to talk isn't worth running all the way into the ground. The defense says it never was. And if that's true, that should bother every single one of us, no matter who we think did this. Now file that one under nothing is what it seems. And notice the city that keeps coming up, Phoenix, because it shows up again later for a completely different reason. So now fast forward, we're September 22nd, 2023, three years, four months, and twelve days after Suzanne was reported missing. Agents from the KBI are searching a remote stretch of Seguchi County. I'm probably saying that right real wrong. It's S-A-G-U-A-C-H-E. Saguchi? Near the little town of Mofat in the San Blue Valley, and here's the gut punch. They weren't even looking for her. They were searching for a different missing woman. And they found human remains in a shallow grave down a dirt road in a flat, empty place locals call the bone yard, about forty five minutes south of the Morphew home, less than an hour's drive. The remains were significantly bleached. Partially clothed, Suzanne's cancer port, the implanted device from her cancer treatment was still there. Some of the bike clothing was there. Some of the small bones of her feet were missing, and so were her bike shoes. A forensic anthropologist looked at the site and reached a conclusion that changed everything. The pattern of decomposition, the lack of insect activity, the absence of animal scavenging on the bones, none of it matched a body that had been lying in a field since 2020. She hadn't decomposed there. Her body had been somewhere else first and then moved to this spot. Likely moved at least twice. Once from where she was killed, once to the bone yard. Somebody knew that empty country well enough to use it. Now, according to the El Paso County Coroner's autopsy, which was released April of 2024, the manner of death was homicide. Cause of death, undetermined, means in the settling of butifornal azoperna I'm terrible with prescription drugs. And medotendamine intoxication. None of that sounds like it should be something you should be consumed or shot up with. Translation. The coroner is certain this was homicide. The exact mechanical cause, how she physically died, can't be read from the bones alone. But that bam was present and it was contributing to her death. And the chief toxologist found that all three drugs that make up BAM were present in her bone marrow. So there's one more thing finding in this autopsy that I just can't shake. Suzanne's body had started to metabolize the BAM before she died. In plain terms, the drug had time to work. She was alive for some stretch after it entered her. She was sedated, she was helpless, and then she died. Not in an instant. What happened in those minutes the bones can't tell us. There's no soft tissue left. There is no answer in the file for exactly how Suzanne Morphew died. Only that she was poisoned with a tranquilizer made for animals and that it was rule a homicide. The tranquilizer bones launched a brand new investigation and it asked one question who in this part of Colorado could even get their hands on this stuff. Now, BAM isn't something you buy at a store. It's a prescription compound. We're just going to call it BAM. And you can only get it through a licensed veterinarian. Zoos use it, wildlife biologists use it, large animal vets use it. It's not approved for people, and it can kill a person. So investigators pull the prescription records, not just for Chaffee County, but for every adjacent county for the years 2017 through 2020, wildlife agencies, vet clinics, Colorado Parks and Wildlar, the Park Service, private individuals, and the indictment lays out what they found. And this was from the 2025 Grand Jury indictment, People versus Barry Morphew. And it says, ultimately, the prescription records show that when Suzanne Morphew disappeared, only one private citizen living in that entire area of the state had access to ban. And that was Barry Morphew. Government agencies had it. No other private citizen or business in the surrounding counties had purchased it from 2017 to 2020. But Barry, he didn't just have it. He told investigators he'd used it on the property a month before Suzanne disappeared. He described darting a deer from the breezeway window between his garage and the laundry room, sedating them, and then cutting off their antlers to sell. He said it himself. Barry Bolt Morpheus said, It's totally illegal, but you're gonna find sink darts around my property because I've done that. And in the locked safe in his garage was the tranquilizer rifle and the darts, and in the clothes dryer, in a pile of laundry that included the shorts he'd been wearing on May 9th, a single clear plastic needle cap from a tranquilizer dart syringe. Now the defense colour, because it's real. Barry's DNA was not on that needle cap. And no ban was found in the home during the 2020 search. He told investigators he had no idea how the cap got in the dryer. The cap is either the most quietly damning object in the entire case or proves nothing at all, and it depends entirely on who you believe. Barry's defense has now changed hands. His original attorney was Iris Eaton, carried the case for years. In the summer of 2025, a Denver attorney named David Beller took over as lead, and Beller had been drawn to this with a fard line on the science. He said the claim that Suzanne Morphew had BAM in her system is not true. That's the trial in a nutshell. The prosecution says the toxology proves a wildlife tranquilizer was in Suzanne's marrow, and only Barry had access to it. The defense says the testing is junk science, that they had intended to put their own experts up against the states, and that the evidence hasn't changed since the first case fell apart. So neither should the outcome. On June 18th, 2025, a grand jury in the 12th Judicial District, a different district, a different DNA, DA, not DNA, DA, a different team than the one that botched it the first time, indicted Barry again for first degree murder. Two days later, officers arrested him near Phoenix, Arizona. He wasn't going by Barry Morphew. He was living as a man now named Lee Moore. His attorney said that was obvious self-protection, the case that had made him a recognizable face, that he just wanted to live in peace. The prosecution said it was the behavior of a man who knew the charges might come back and was setting himself up to slip away. He was extradited to Colorado, and at his arraignment in January of 2026, he pleaded not guilty and waived his right to a speedy trial. He posted bond the equivalent of $3 million. And as of this recording, he's living under GPS monitoring and house arrest conditions in the Salida area, the same mountains where his wife was last seen alive. This case kind of hits me a little close because my husband and I love to vacation in that area. It's simply beautiful and magical. And, you know, there's the San de Cristo Mountains that is the blood of Christ. And they actually turn bright red. It is phenomenal. Depending upon which side of the mountains you're on, it turns bright red in either the morning or the evening. And it is gorgeous. And so I this case just kind of strikes me because it's right there in that Salida area where we love to vacation. And it's our calm place, it's our happy place, you know. So I'm gonna tell you, I saved this detail for near the end because it just happened and because it's one of the strangest turns in a case that is nothing but strange turns. In early 2026, the question came up who controls Suzanne's remains while the case heads to Trump? And here's the documented sequence. January 29th, 2026, Barry Morphew signs off on releasing Suzanne's remains from the El Paso County Coroner's Office to a Colorado Springs funeral home. Prosecutors say he then paid to have her cremated before his experts had filed their opinions and before the court had ruled on whether the remains could be tested again. February 17, 2026, law enforcement is notified that the remains have been released and starts the process of seizing them as material evidence. February 18, 2026, a court authorizes a search warrant for officers to take custody of Suzanne's body. That's powerful. I mean, if you were to put yourself in that position and you were potentially a victim, would you not want your remains to be able to be tested? Like being laid to rest is not that important as it is for justice for your death. I just think that that particular detail just doesn't sit well with me. So from the prosecution's filing, the defendant in a murder case authorized the release of the murder victim's remains prior to pending motions, litigation, and jury trial, and paid to have them cremated prior to the disclosures of his experts' opinions and court rulings on admissibility of scientific testing regarding said remains. And then came another turn I did not expect. In February, Barry's daughters, Macy and Mallory, filed their own motion trying to force the state to release their mother's remains to them. And then in March they withdrew it. As of this recording, the remains stay in evidence, and the trial is still set for October this year. So let me be careful because this is live and I don't want to overstate it. Here's what the cremation would have meant plainly. If those remains had burned the physical evidence, the bone marrow, the toxology samples would all be gone. The prosecution could still use the reports they already have, but nobody could ever test the actual remains again. Not the state. And this is the part the defense would want you to hear, not Barry's own experts either, who are the ones calling the science junk. So you can read the cremation order more than one way. And some of those ways are perfectly innocent. A grieving family wants to lay someone to rest in the most humane theme. And then the prosecution looks as a murder defendant signing to burn a body before it can be retested. And then I just have no words for it. So I'm not going to tell you which one is. I'm telling you a judge and a jury are going to have to. So where we are as I record this, the defense is fighting hard with a single juror is seated. In April of 2026, Barry's team filed 31 separate pretrial motions trying to keep big categories of evidence and testimony out of the courtroom. Among the 31 defense motions, there was bar witnesses from saying Barry looked guilty, looked untruthful, looked suspicious, or looked like he was hiding something. So they just didn't want the witnesses to see. They also wanted to exclude testimony about his mental state or his credibility. They wanted to keep certain statements attributed to Suzanne out of the trial. And then they wanted to limit profiling and victimology testimony and expand jury questioning. DA Ann Kelly says she'll fight many of those. Motion hearings are stacking up through this summer, and the jury trial is set to begin October 13th, 2026 in Alabosa, with both sides bracing for a long, long trial. So there's two prosecutions, a disfard BA, a $15 million lawsuit, a body found by accident in the boneyard, unidentified DNA tied to an unsolved sex crimes, a traqualizer made for deer, and a cremation order stopped one day short. Whatever a jury decides this fall, this much is fixed and final. Suzanne Morfu is gone. She was 49. She had two daughters who loved her, and she was quietly, carefully, bravely trained to start a new life when hers in it. Now, time killers. I know you've got opinions on this one, and I want them. So did you follow this one from the start? Were you one of the people who actually drove to Colorado to search for Suzanne? Do you think the BAM evidence is enough? Or does the unidentified DNA that was found in Suzanne's Range Rover put a crack in this whole thing? Or if you've got just a time killer file of your own, a small town mystery, a cold case, a story your hometown never talks about it. This is where it goes. Tell me what happened, just tell me where, tell me whether you want your name used or not. And send it to Just Killing Time Podcast at gmail.com, subject line, time killer files. I read every single one. So Suzanne Borfew, she knew her marriage was failing, and she was handling it in a very careful way, keeping notes, tracking what happened, waiting until forgiveness one was grown so she could leave clean. She was also quietly in love with someone else, planning a future she never going to have. She sent that man a selfie eleven past two on a Saturday afternoon in May. Thirty-two minutes later, her husband came home. Before sunrise, her phone went silent for good. Three years and four months later, Cabones turned up in a remote field she'd almost certainly never see. Moved there from somewhere else with a deer tranquilizer in her marrow and a coroner's stamp that read homicide. Barry Morphew says he didn't do it. His daughters believe him. Suzanne's daughters believe him. His trial starts October 13th of 2026, and I'll be following it. And whatever the jury decides, Suzanne is gone. And the people who love Truer are left standing in the middle of a story with no clean inning in it anywhere. So before I go one more time, this episode was made for Rick Cheever. Rick, you told me this show mattered before there was any reason to believe it. You kept me going when the work has been hard and nobody was listening yet, and this one's yours. So thank you. I'm Elizabeth Stanton. This has been just killing time. Thanks for killing time with me.

SPEAKER_01 45:45

Alexa, what is a chemtrail? Cantrail. Trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.