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Suzanne Morphew and Barry Morphew appear in images distributed by the Chaffee County, Colo. Sheriff’s Office.
Agents with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation stumbled across human remains that were identified as 49-year-old Suzanne Morphew, who has been missing since Mother’s Day 2020.
The CBI agents were searching an area in Moffat in Saguache County on Friday regarding a different case when they located the body. The El Paso County Coroner positively identified them as belonging to Morphew on Wednesday, said the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office in a press release.
The sheriff’s office declined to release the specific location of the remains. No arrests have been made since the body was discovered.
“While this case has garnered attention from around the world, it has touched our community and the sheriff’s office deeply,” said Chaffee County Sheriff John Spezze. “We have never stopped our investigation and will continue to follow all leads in pursuit of justice for Suzanne.”
Spezee said locating Morphew’s body is critical to the investigation, but investigators are still “left with many more questions than answers.”
Morphew vanished during a bicycle ride on May 10, 2020. Authorities located her bicycle but she was nowhere to be found. Prosecutors with Colorado’s 11th Judicial Circuit charged her husband, Barry Morphew, with murder, but they had to drop their case after Judge Ramsey Lama slammed them for an “obvious and egregious violation” of one discovery protocol — and other lesser violations — and limited the state’s ability to present evidence at the upcoming trial. The most serious violation, Lama wrote recently, surrounded the state’s alleged lack of complete candor regarding a CODIS match to a possible unknown suspect’s DNA. CODIS is a federal database that contains DNA evidence connected to criminal activity.
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation found what Lama referred to as “unknown male DNA” on “various items of the crime scene: the interior cushion of the bike helmet, Mrs. Morphew’s bike, the glovebox and back seat of Mrs. Morphew’s Range Rover.”
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“Mr. Morphew, along with other investigative personnel working the scene, were excluded as the source of the sample,” the judge continued. Rather, “the unknown male DNA partially matched DNA found in three out-of-state unsolved sexual assault investigations: Tempe, Phoenix, and Chicago.”
Lama allowed the case to move forward but curtailed the amount of evidence the state could present at trial.
Text messages Suzanne Morphew sent to a friend before she died suggested that she believed her husband was dragging one of the couple’s daughters into the troubled relationship between the husband and wife. The messages also suggested that Suzanne Morphew believed Barry Morphew was manipulating at least one of the girls to stay on his side.
“He’s not stable,” she wrote in an apparent reference to her husband. “It’s guilt and desperate measures he’s taking.”
Prosecutors dropped their case without prejudice, meaning they can re-file charges against Barry Morphew in the future.
The body was discovered in Moffat, around 75 miles south of Chaffee County. Moffat is in the 12th Judicial District and District Attorney Anne Kelly has been notified. It’s not clear which district would prosecute the case now that Suzanne Morphew’s body was found.
Aaron Keller contributed to this report.
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