The Bones Don't Lie

A quiet Mother’s Day ride on a Colorado mountainside turns into one of the most confounding true crime sagas of recent years. We retrace Suzanne Morphew’s disappearance from the tossed bike and planted helmet to surveillance oddities, a shifting alibi, and the forensic breakthroughs that changed everything—starting with a veterinary tranquilizer meant for big game and ending with a discovery in a high desert field fifty miles from home.

We dig into the heart of the case: the strained marriage and final texts, the deleted messages, and the digital timeline that narrows to a chilling window of minutes. Then the science takes over. Forensic anthropologists conclude the body was moved. Toxicologists find BAM—the deer tranquilizer—in Suzanne’s bone marrow, along with its metabolite, signaling it entered her bloodstream while she was alive. Prescription records show only one private citizen in the region held the drug at the time. That thread pulls tight through hunting expertise, a needle cap in the laundry, and an indictment that returns after the first prosecution collapsed.

Along the way we examine the legal roller coaster—venue changes, a rebuked DA, a dismissal without prejudice, and a $15 million civil suit—before arriving at today: a renewed murder charge, a not guilty plea, and a trial set for October 2026. Beyond the headlines, this story exposes the risks faced when someone tries to leave a failing relationship and how modern forensics can speak when witnesses cannot. It also asks us to hold two truths at once: the presumption of innocence and the relentless pull toward justice for a woman who deserved better.

If this deep dive moved you, follow and subscribe for updates as the case heads to trial. Share the episode with a friend, and leave a rating and review so more people can find the show.

If you have any information about this case, call 719-312-7530 or email cdps_Suzanne Morphew_tipline@state.co.us

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Transcript

Welcome To Dark Crossroads

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Welcome to Dark Crossroads Podcast, hosted by Roxanne Fletcher. This is your stop for all things true crime and paranormal. From the infamous story of the New Bedford Highway Killer to the chilling tale of the Black Eyed Children. Dark Crossroads Podcast is a truly deep dive into the stories that frighten and fascinate you. All links to the show will be provided in this episode's description. And don't forget to let us know what you think of today's episode. This episode discusses the murder of a woman, including details about drug intoxication and evidence of a domestic relationship that is in crisis. Listener discretion is strongly advised. The air is still, the peaks around Salita are wearing the last of the winter snow. And somewhere in a million-dollar home, tucked along the Puma Path in Maysville, a quiet mountain road just west of town, two teenage girls are packing bags for a church camping trip. Their mom, Suzanne, sees them off. She's 49 years old, and by all accounts, she's warm, devoted, the kind of woman that makes everyone around her feel seen. It's Mother's Day, and she's going to have a rare day to herself. Her husband Barry left early that morning, heading to a landscaping job in Denver, he later told investigators. So Suzanne is home alone, so she decides to go for a bike ride. But she never comes back home. Today we're going deep into one of the most twisting, layered, and frankly jaw-dropping true crime cases this country has seen in recent history. A case that began with a missing bike on a Colorado mountainside, and has stretched across five years, two arrests, a dismissed murder trial, a$15 million lawsuit, and bones found by accident in a field fifty miles from home. This is the story of Suzanne Morphew, and nothing about this story is simple. To understand what happened on that Mother's Day, you have to understand where Suzanne Morfew came from and where she ended up. Suzanne grew up in Alexandria, Indiana, a small town, the kind of place where everybody knows everybody. And one of the people that she knew was a boy named Barry Morphew. They'd grown up in the same hometown, gone to the same school, and after Suzanne graduated from Purdue University, the two got married in August of 1994. At this time she was twenty three years old. Over the next several years, they built what looked like a storybook life. Barry ran a landscaping business, and they had two daughters, Mallory, who was born in 1999, and Macy, who was born in 2003. In 2018, they made a big move. They packed up and relocated to Colorado, where they nestled in the central Rocky Mountains, and they paid one point five seven million dollars for a sprawling home on a private mountain road. They finally had a house with views that you would put on a postcard, and by all outward appearances they had everything. Court documents that would later become public paint a very different picture of the Morphew marriage. We know from text messages, messages that investigators would later find deleted from Barry's phone, that by early May of twenty twenty, Suzanne was done. On may sixth, just four days before she disappeared, Suzanne sent Barry this text message. I'm done, I could care less what you're up to and what you have been up to for years. We just need to figure this out civilly. That message was recovered from Barry's phone. She had apparently sent it and then he deleted it. But there was something else investigators would uncover. Something that complicated everything. Suzanne had been involved in a two year affair. She'd been exchanging dozens, sometimes hundreds of messages with other men. On the morning of May ninth, the day before she vanished, fifty nine communications were exchanged between Suzanne and her boyfriend. The last message she ever sent him was at two eleven in the afternoon on may ninth. Thirty two minutes later, according to investigators, Barry's truck pulled into the driveway. After two hundred eleven PM that Saturday, Suzanne Morphew's phone was never used again. May tenth of twenty twenty, Mother's Day, Barry Morphew told investigators he left the house around five AM to drive to Denver for a landscaping job. The girls left for their camping trip, and Suzanne was left alone. At some point that day she apparently decided to go for a bike ride on a dirt road not far from their home. We know this because later that evening, her blue mountain bike would be found, not left neatly on the side of the road, but thrown down a hillside, off of a dirt road, less than a mile from their house. A deputy on the scene later said, and this is a quote, it looked like the bike had been purposely thrown into this location. There were no signs of a crash, no blood, just a bike abandoned in a ravine. At around five in the afternoon, a neighbor had called Barry, who was supposedly still in Denver, to let him know the girls couldn't reach their mother. Barry, according to this neighbor, told them to check the house, look for the bike. When neither Suzanne nor the bike could be found, Barry told the neighbor to call the sheriff, and so the search began. What followed was one of the largest search operations this county had ever seen. The FBI got involved, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, or CBI, came in. There were canine units, tactical mountain rescue teams, water rescue teams. Over the following weeks, hundreds of tips poured in. Investigators conducted nearly a dozen large scale searches. Four days in, Suzanne's helmet was found. It was teal colored and on the shoulder of Highway 50, about a mile and a half from the Morfew home. Inside of the helmet, somebody had tucked a paper with Suzanne's name, address, and phone numbers for Barry, Mallory, and Macy. But there was no sign of Suzanne. But there were some very strange signs pointing to Barry. Surveillance footage from around Mother's Day weekend captured Barry Morphew walking around, getting into his truck, and driving to various locations. And at one point at a Holiday and Express, cameras caught him walking into the hotel at one time, wearing one shirt, and then walking out 19 minutes later wearing a completely different shirt and carrying a trash can with unidentified items inside of it. He later claimed that he had been shooting chipmunks around the house that weekend. Investigators said his cell phone appeared to be pinging near the house on Mother's Day, and not in Denver as he had claimed. When authorities searched the Morphew home, they found something curious in the dryer. Tucked in among wash sheets and clothing was a small, clear plastic cap, a needle sheath, one that investigators said was consistent with a syringe used to load a tranquilizer dart. Barry said he had no idea how this got there. One week after Suzanne had vanished, Barry posted a video to Facebook. And if you have not seen this, I want you to picture this. A man, clearly emotional, looking into the camera, making a plea for his wife's return. He said, Oh Suzanne, if anybody is out there that can hear this, that has you, please we will do whatever it takes to bring you back. We love you, we miss you, your girls need you, no questions asked, however much they want. I will do whatever it takes to get you back. Honey, I love you, and I want you back so bad. He also offered a hundred thousand dollar reward, which a family friend quickly doubled to two hundred thousand dollars. Now I want to pause here for just a second. True crime audiences have been trained, maybe overtrained, to read grieving relatives with suspicion. And I'm not going to tell you what to make of this video. What I will tell you is that later evidence would raise serious questions about the marriage, about Barry's behavior, and about his claims of being in Denver that day. But I also want to be honest with you. At this point in the investigation, Barry had not been charged with anything. He had maintained his innocence from day one, and he still does to this day. Months passed, and the case stretched into 2021, with no body, no definitive crime scene, and no confession. And then something bizarre happened, a separate issue that would cast Barry in a completely different light. Election officials in Colorado discovered that Barry Morphew had illegally cast Suzanne's ballot in the 2020 presidential election. He had filled it out and submitted it on her behalf, months after she had disappeared. When investigators asked him about it, Barry reportedly said that he did it because he wanted Trump to win, and his words, figured all these other guys are cheating. He was charged with forgery, and he later pled guilty and received 32 hours of community service and a one year deferred sentence. A man who had a missing and presumed dead wife voted for president in her name. I'll just let that sink in there. On may fifth of 2021, almost exactly one year after Suzanne had vanished, Barry Morphew was arrested on the side of a road near his home. The charges were first degree murder after deliberation, tampering with physical evidence, and attempting to influence a public servant. No body had been found at this point. Prosecutors laid out a theory in the arrest affidavit that Barry could not control Suzanne's insistence on leaving him, and so he, and this is a direct quote, resorted to something he has done his entire life hunt and control Suzanne like he had hunted and controlled animals. That is a striking line, and it points directly to something we need to talk about. Barry's history with tranquilizer guns. Let me explain something that becomes absolutely central to this case, a drug compound called BAM. BAM is a mixture of three powerful sedatives used to tranquilize large wild animals, including deer, elk, that sort of thing. It is tightly regulated and it is only sold by prescription from a single company in the United States, and it is not approved for use on humans. Barry Morphew had been a deer farmer in Indiana before moving to Colorado. He admitted to investigators that he had used BAM in Colorado as recently as April of 2020, just one month before Suzanne had disappeared. He said he used it near the breezeway of their home to tranquilize a deer so he could cut off its antlers. His garage was filled with deer heads and a pile of antlers. He was, by all accounts, an avid hunter who knew exactly how to load a tranquilizer dart, how to fire a trinket gun, and what these drugs could do to a large animal. And investigators believed that he had turned those skills onto his wife. The theory they developed, on the morning of may 10th, 2020, Barry did not go to Denver. He stayed near the home, and at some point he found Suzanne, or lured her outside, and shot her with a trink dart loaded with BAM. The drug takes several minutes to cause sedation. Authorities believed that she would have been conscious, panicked, and maybe even fighting back, which could explain the scratches on Barry's hands that investigators had photographed, and the broken door frame that they found. Eventually the drugs would have been overwhelming for her system. She would have lost consciousness, and according to investigators, that's when Barry took her somewhere, and that is where she died. But here's the thing, without a body, without any trace of the drugs, this was all just a theory. And Barry's defense argued aggressively, and not entirely without merit, that this theory was built on assumption and not evidence. In September of 2021, Barry posted$500,000 cash bail and was released. His daughters Mallory and Macy were by his side. What happened next is one of the stranger chapters in recent American legal history. The murder trial was scheduled, but the case kept hitting snags. In December of 2021, the presiding judge rescued himself due to a conflict of interest raised by the defense. The trial was moved from Chaffee County to Fremont County because of the intense pretrial publicity. Then things started to unravel. In April 2022, just days before the trial was supposed to begin, prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss, and not because Barry was innocent, but because the case had been, in the words of one judge, handled and properly. The dismissal was without prejudice, meaning charges could theoretically be refiled. But the message was clear. The first attempt to prosecute Barry Morphew had fallen apart. District Attorney Linda Stanley would later be recommended for disbarment by a disciplinary board due to improper public statements that she had made to the media that contributed to a ruling to change the venue. A whole separate office of the Colorado Supreme Court had to investigate the complaints against her. Barry Morphew walked out of the courthouse holding his daughter's hands. His attorneys celebrated. His defense had long argued that investigators fabricated evidence and conducted a reckless investigation. And then Barry moved to Arizona. And then he filed a$15 million civil lawsuit against Chaffee County, DA Stanley, and a long list of investigators and agencies claiming wrongful arrests, emotional distress, reputational damage, and the loss of his home and his business. He was suing the people who had tried to put him in prison for his wife's murder. One federal judge reviewing the lawsuit wrote something that I think is worth reading carefully. He said, and I am paraphrasing, that everyone involved now seems to agree Barry should not have been arrested at that time, and that the prosecution did fail to live up to its duty to be careful and candid. But then crucially he also wrote, Suzanne Morphew certainly deserved better. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed, and as of that moment, Barry Morphew was a free man in Arizona. His wife's killer, if he was her killer, was unpunished. And nobody even knew for certain where Suzanne's body was. September twenty second, twenty twenty three, three years, four months, and twelve days after Suzanne had disappeared. Agents from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation were conducting a search in a small agricultural town in the wide San Luis Valley about fifty miles and forty five minute drive from the Morphew house. They were searching for something related to a completely different case, and that is where they found Suzanne. Her remains were located in a shallow grave in a high desert field, far from the mountain road where her bike had been thrown, far from the home where she had last been seen alive. Five days later, the El Paso County coroner confirmed the identification. It was her. Barry's attorney at the time said that Barry and his daughters were struggling with immense shock and grief, and maintained that this news didn't change anything about Barry's innocence. Now here is where things get really significant forensically, because investigators didn't just find Suzanne's bones. They found a story written in these bones. Forensic anthropologists examined the remains and noticed something off about the decomposition patterns. The way a body decomposes is influenced by insects, weather, soil, animal activity, and what they found at this site didn't match what should have been there if Suzanne had been in that field since May of 2020. Their conclusion was Suzanne Morphew's body had decomposed somewhere else first and then had been moved. The indictment that would later be filed alleges her remains were moved at least twice before she ended up in that field. She had been buried, dug up, and reburied again. Or she was moved more than once by some other means. The investigators don't tell us exactly where she was first or second, but the evidence of movement was there in the bones themselves. In April of 2024, the official autopsy results were released. The cause of death was ruled homicide by unsuspected means in the setting of BAM intoxication. BAM, the deer tranquilizer, found in Suzanne Morphew's bone marrow. Now let me explain why this is so significant. Bone marrow is protected inside of the bone. If BAM had merely contaminated the burial site after death, if, say, the drug had been present in the soil, it wouldn't get into the bone marrow. The fact that it was in her marrow means it was in her bloodstream when she was alive. It was administered to her while she was living and breathing. And there was more. Toxicologists found a metabolite, a byproduct your body creates when it is processing certain chemicals. The metabolite of BAM was present. That means that Suzanne Morphew's body had begun breaking down the BAM before she died. She had been alive long enough after receiving the drug to partially metabolize it. So she didn't die instantly. She suffered. No investigators had the body. They had toxicology proof of the murder weapon, and they started working backwards. Who in the entire region of South Central Colorado had access to BAM? They searched prescription records. They looked at every government agency, every wildlife vet, every private citizen in the area between 2017 and 2020. Colorado Parks and Wildlife had some. The Bureau of Land Management had some. Neither reported any missing supplies. No private citizen in the entire region had purchased BAM, except for one citizen, Barry Morphe, who had openly admitted to using BAM to tranquilize a deer, who had admitted that the last time he had used it was April of 2020, just one month before Suzanne disappeared. Who had a tranquilizer gun and accessories in his home. Who had a needle cap in his dryer? Prosecutors put it bluntly in the new indictment. Ultimately, the prescription records show that when Suzanne Morphew disappeared, only one private citizen living in the entire region of this state had access to BAM. Barry Morphew. On June 18th, 2025, a grand jury in Alamosa County returns an indictment charging Barry Morphew with the first degree murder and the death of his wife Suzanne. Two days later, on June 20th, law enforcement caught up with Barry in Gilbert, Arizona. He was arrested for the second time on murder charges. This time, though, his bond was set at$3 million, cash only. His new attorney, David Beller, issued a statement. Yet again, the government allows their predetermined conclusion to lead their search for evidence. Barry maintains his innocence. The case has not changed and the outcome will not either. Barry waived extradition. He was brought back to Colorado, and on January 12th, 2026, Barry Morpheus stood in court in Alamosa and pleaded not guilty, for the second time, to murder charges. And the death of the woman that he had married in 1994, the mother of his daughters. His jury trial has been set for October 13th, 2026. It is expected to last up to six weeks. Now there are still things that we don't know. The indictment paints a compelling circumstantial picture, but it is still largely circumstantial. There are no witnesses. There's no murder weapon recovered with Barry's prints on it. There's no confession. And Barry's daughters, Mallory and Macy, have stood by their father throughout all of this. They have lost their mother, and they may now be on the verge of losing their father to prison. Whatever happened in that house on Puma Path, those two young women are living with the weight of it every single day. I want to step back for a moment and talk about what this case represents. Because I think it's more than just a story about one family. Suzanne Morphew disappeared on Mother's Day in 2020. The world was in the grip of the pandemic, and yet this case captivated people almost immediately. True crime podcasters drove to Colorado. Online communities built timelines and analyzed evidence. People who had never been to Salita, Colorado cared deeply about what happened to a woman that they had never met. And why? I think because Suzanne's story touches something primal. She was a woman trying to leave a marriage. She was building a private life. She was having an affair, building plans for your future, text messages that said that she was done. And according to investigators, the very act of leaving may have gotten her killed. There's also the legal drama of the first failed prosecution. The district attorney recommended for disbarment, the case that collapsed days before trial, the audacity of the defendant filing a$15 million lawsuit against the people who tried to prosecute him. One judge even wrote in dismissing that lawsuit that the investigators did fail in their duty, but also that Suzanne herself deserved better from all sides. And then there is the science. Bone marrow. Decomposition patterns that say a body was moved. This is forensics telling us something happened, even when no one saw it. Even when no one will admit to it. The bones don't lie. If prosecutors are right, here is what happened on Mother's Day, 2020. A man who had spent his life hunting and controlling animals turned those skills on his wife. He drugged her with the same tranquilizer that he used on deer. She didn't die immediately. Her body was breaking down the drugs as she fought to survive. And then he made her disappear. He staged her bike on a hillside, he drove back to Denver or appeared to. He offered$200,000 for her return. And then for three years, she lay somewhere in the Colorado landscape while investigators searched, and her daughters grieved, and her killer, allegedly, went on living. Until a team of CBI agents looking for somebody else entirely found her in a field. Barry's trial is scheduled for October of 2026, and I will be following it closely, and I will bring you updates as they come. But here's what I keep coming back to. Suzanne sent a text message to her boyfriend at 211 in the afternoon on May 9, 2020. Thirty-two minutes later, her husband's truck pulls into the driveway. And after that, just silence? She had daughters that she loved. She had a life she was trying to claim for herself. She had gone for a bike ride on a sunny Mother's Day in the mountains. She deserved better. And she deserves justice. If you have any information about this case, Colorado investigators have maintained a tip line. Call 719-312-7530 or email cdps underscore Suzanne Morphew underscore tipline at state.co.us. If this episode resonated with you, please leave a review, share it with somebody, or find us on social media. It genuinely helps more people find the show. All statements characterized as quotes from court documents and indictments are sourced from public court filings. Barry Morphew has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Thank you for hanging out again today. You can also find us on all social media platforms. Don't forget to like, share, rate reviews, subscribe wherever you're listening to us. You can subscribe to the podcasts for bonus information. There is a link in all episodes and the notes that will send you to our subscription page. 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