Husband Smiles in Court, Thinks He's Untouchable - Then the Spy Pen is Found

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]He walked into court smiling widely, like all of this was funny, like it wasn't a hearing that might take away his freedom forever. Barry Morphew's wife had initially gone missing, but he had nothing to do with it. At least that's what he claimed. And who wouldn't believe him? They'd been married for nearly three decades, even had two daughters together. Surely he couldn't have had any hand in it. But then, two years later, her remains were found outside a shallow grave. And forensics found something in her body, something only he knew about. This is the disturbing case of the Indiana husband who allegedly murdered his own wife, then went on Facebook to offer $100,000 to anyone who found her. If you've never heard this story, brace yourself because by the end of this video, you'll have to rewrite everything you thought you knew about family ties, infidelity in marriages, and the role that luck sometimes plays in solving cold cases.

[00:00:51][music] And the worst part is, the truth of this crime would have never come to light but for Morphew's overconfidence and a few accidental loose ends. This is the case of the Colorado Mother's Day murder. Suzanne Morphew was 49 years old when it happened. She had been married to her high school sweetheart, Barry Morphew, for the last 25 years of her life.

[00:01:11]They both grew up in the small town of Alexandria, Indiana.

[00:01:15]Both of them had been popular. Barry had been a star baseball player, good enough to get drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays.

[00:01:22]Unfortunately, an injury ended his major league career dreams. So, instead, after attending Purdue University with Suzanne and marrying her in 1994, he decided to pursue a career in landscaping.

[00:01:34]While Barry started his own business, Suzanne taught in middle school. But after a few years of teaching other people's children, she decided she wanted to stay home and raise hers. So, she quit.

[00:01:45]The couple had two daughters, Mallory and Macy.

[00:01:49]Family photos show a happy bunch, and friends say all four of them looked perfect together, at least at first.

[00:01:55]Barry was a hands-on man, the perfect small-town husband. In 2018, the family moved to a home in the mountains just outside of Salida, Colorado, so they could be closer to their older daughter, Mallory, who was attending college nearby. That was a story the Morphews told everybody, but what they didn't say was that for a while the marriage wasn't really going great. In fact, it was on its last legs. And so, husband and wife had thought that maybe a change of environment might be a breath of fresh air on their marriage. This new house in the hills meant Barry would be able to pursue his hunting hobby, and Suzanne could take advantage of the terrain to keep fit through runs and exercises.

[00:02:33]Maybe, just maybe, things might get better between this embattled couple. It didn't work. This is a weird question, but um did Barry and Suzanne get along pretty well?

[00:02:45]Uh You can answer honestly.

[00:02:48]>> You know, I think I think they've had some problems. Okay. Yeah, in the past.

[00:02:52]>> Like just normal >> Normal husband and wife type deals.

[00:02:57]>> like talked about separating or anything like that?

[00:03:00]>> yeah.

[00:03:01]I would yeah. For months, Suzanne told close friends she was still unhappy in her marriage, that she wanted a divorce.

[00:03:07]She told them Barry was playing Jekyll and Hyde in their home. Once they got through the front door, he was explosive, loud, sometimes even violent.

[00:03:16]There was one occasion where he lost his temper and hit Suzanne with his hand, drawing blood from her nose. Another time, the couple got into a fight and he pushed Suzanne into a closet, held a gun to his own head, and asked her, "Is this what you want me to do?" At one point, Barry Morphew even threatened to not pay for treatments for his wife, a two-time cancer survivor. But whenever they were out in public, he'd put up a front, the perfect charming husband. What's even worse is that Barry would drag their daughters in the middle of their arguments and then turn around completely, blaming Suzanne for the tension. Suzanne had gotten herself a notebook where she would keep notes of the problems she was suffering during the relationship. Every day the list grew longer until on the 6th of May, 2020, she finally decided she'd had enough. Suzanne texted these words to Barry. I'm done. I could care less what you're up to and have been for years. We just need to figure this out civilly. In response he said, "I promise you you were wrong about all the crazy thoughts about me.

[00:04:15]Why would I want another? Only a fool would stray from an angel like you."

[00:04:19]When that didn't work, he became downright suicidal. He texted her saying, "Going to see my savior. This life on Earth is a mere grain of sand compared to eternity." The marriage was now beyond saving and any last possibilities of redemption disappeared on the 10th of May, Mother's Day, 2020, when Suzanne disappeared. Although they'd been having serious marital troubles, Barry would tell investigators that the night before they'd had dinner together, even made love. But that Sunday, Barry had to leave her early between 5:00 to 5:30 a.m. as he had a big job some approximately 150 mi away in Broomfield, Colorado. Their two daughters had gone off to a camping trip, so it was only Suzanne at home that day. But it was Mother's Day and as soon as Barry and the girls remembered, they sent her happy Mother's Day greeting texts. Barry's text came in just before 7:00 a.m. "You up? Happy Mother's Day. I love you." She didn't respond to Barry. She didn't respond to her daughters either. The girls got worried and called their father to tell him about it. He calmed them noting that the reception around their house wasn't exactly very good. Then around 5:00 p.m.

[00:05:24]a neighbor called Barry. There still hadn't been any sign of Suzanne yet.

[00:05:29]This time Barry told them to look around the house for Suzanne's bike. Maybe she'd gone for a hike. But the bike was nowhere to be found, same as Suzanne. A missing person's report was filed with the Chaffee County Communication Center.

[00:05:41]By 5:46 p.m. police arrived in the area of County Road 225 and West Highway 50.

[00:05:48]The Morpheus home was locked. No signs of forced entry at all.

[00:05:52]Suzanne was now officially missing, but something weird happens here.

[00:05:57]Where is it?

[00:05:58]Where's the bike? Oh, it's right there.

[00:05:59]Where was it? It was like just right down here in this little embankment. You can go down there.

[00:06:03]>> Was it a crash?

[00:06:04]I mean, the bike worked the way it was laying, it kind of looked like it, but there's not really that much damage to the bike. That's the thing. Lying?

[00:06:12]Yeah, it was just laying there lying.

[00:06:13]>> not lying? Yeah.

[00:06:15]I I didn't see anything that would indicate >> and they're they're not letting us go over this side. What you've just seen is body cam footage of Barry arriving at the house, but that footage was taken at around almost 9:00 p.m. that night.

[00:06:28]Barry hadn't left work immediately when he heard of Suzanne's disappearance.

[00:06:32]He had first dropped off a shovel and some other tools for his co-workers at the hotel they were staying in. And not only that, he immediately started suggesting possibilities like he'd rehearsed this. Pretty odd behavior for a man whose wife of nearly three decades had just gone missing, but he had an alibi and for the time being, it held.

[00:06:50]Besides, he seemed committed to finding his wife. Well, Suzanne, if anyone is out there that could hear this that has you, please we'll do whatever it takes to bring you back. We love you and we miss you. Your girls need No questions asked. However much they want I will do whatever it takes to get you back. Honey, I'm a I want you back, Suzanne.

[00:07:15]Later that same evening, police found her bike on the side of a cliff off a road less than a mile from her home.

[00:07:28]Some four days later, her bike helmet was discovered a mile and a half away from the Morpheus home about 10 m off the side of Highway 50. Now, here's where things become interesting. When Suzanne's bike and helmet were found, there was no blood, no clothes or any evidence of struggle. However, when Barry had come home, he'd immediately suggested that she'd been attacked by a wild animal. Instead, her sunglasses and hydration backpack were found perfectly safe inside her car. That's when investigators began suspecting foul play. Had someone staged the scenes? Had Suzanne ever even gone for a bike ride that Mother's Day morning? In the meantime, search efforts were still in full force. Everything from scent tracking dogs to drones was being used to search for her. In late August, Suzanne's brother led a search party.

[00:08:12]Barry had offered a reward of a hundred thousand to anyone who could find her.

[00:08:16]Even the FBI got involved, and still Suzanne remained at large. That was until police found a single tiny piece of evidence that would blow this case apart, a pen. 10 days after Suzanne was declared missing, police found this spy pen in the Moorman master bedroom. Turns out, Suzanne had gotten it to spy on Barry as she suspected that he was cheating on her. It backfired. When officers found the pen, they couldn't catch any evidence of Barry's infidelity. But the pen had recorded a lot of evidence of Suzanne's affair with a certain Jeff Libler. All three of them had known each other in high school, but after a one-time hookup between he and Suzanne back then, they never spoke again. Suzanne got married, and Jeff did too, with six children in Michigan, until one day in 2018, shortly after moving to Colorado, she found him on Facebook. Then she sent him a single text. Howdy, stranger.

[00:09:09]From then on, they spoke almost every day. By February 2019, the pair met physically in New Orleans, then Michigan, Dallas, Florida, and even Indianapolis. There were even plans of getting married. Both of them wanted to move to Ecuador at some point. In 15 months, the pair called each other 738 times. That's around 50 calls daily.

[00:09:31]Suzanne was so good at hiding things that it took FBI agents six full months after her disappearance to even figure out who he was. When they finally found him, Libler was cooperative with authorities. He provided them with DNA samples, access to accounts he deleted to cover up the affair, and passwords.

[00:09:48]Once officers pieced it all together, his alibi actually held. He'd been in Michigan that weekend. Receipts from a HomeGoods store corroborated it. But you're probably wondering, for someone who claimed to love Suzanne, why hadn't he come out earlier? Well, Jeff was afraid that if he came out, he'd lose both his job and family. Plus, he also wanted to protect her legacy in her children's eyes. Yet even though Libler's name was in the clear now, it revealed something investigators couldn't ignore. In the months leading up to her disappearance, Barry had grown very suspicious. In January 2019, he grabbed Suzanne's phone to try and figure out who else she was talking to.

[00:10:24]September that same year, a close friend of Sheila says that Barry had been stalking Suzanne at their own home.

[00:10:30]Remember Suzanne's list? Turns out she'd listed the wedding ring Barry had allegedly taken and melted, the other women he claimed were good for business on Facebook, and even listed an incident in Mexico where he grabbed her phone to look through it. There was no longer any semblance of trust between these two.

[00:10:46]Instead, it had become a cat-and-mouse game of who would slip up first.

[00:10:50]Interestingly enough, just two months after Suzanne's disappearance, Barry was already living with another woman, 51-year-old Shoshona Dark. And even before Mother's Day 2020, Barry had been active on the dating site Ashley Madison, which is mainly for people who want to step out of their marriages. The contrast between what was really happening and what Barry was claiming was the beginning of the end. During interviews with investigators, he claimed he and Suzanne had been having the best possible relationship. But the hard evidence, the notebook, the spy pen, painted an entirely different story. But it was really the phone records that nailed him. The day before Suzanne's disappearance, she and Jeff exchanged 59 messages, far more than usual. She was alone and sent Jeff a selfie of her sunbathing at home at 2:07 p.m. That was her last known proof of life. She didn't respond to the text messages he sent at 2:44 p.m. At exactly that moment, Barry's phone pinged repeatedly and erratically all around the inside of his home. The pings were rapid, the sort of movement you'd expect from someone running. Barry's explanation, he'd been shooting chipmunks. He claimed there'd been a group of chipmunks bothering them on the property that he'd been hunting that day. But a clean sweep of the property and the area surrounding it showed no signs of any hunting activities whatsoever. 3 minutes after the pings, his phone went into airplane mode. It stayed that way for nearly 8 hours.

[00:12:09]Suzanne had been involved with two men before her death, Barry and Jeff, but their alibis were very different.

[00:12:15]Barry's story kept changing. At first, he said he'd driven straight to Broomfield for work without taking any detours, but later, CCTV footage caught his truck in a completely different area. So, he could accommodate this new plot twist, his story changed again. He said he'd gone out of his way because he had spotted an elk crossing the road.

[00:12:33]This elk chasing detour happened to take him towards the spot where Suzanne's bike helmet was later recovered. A revision that convenient was too hard for investigators to ignore. And then, there was the elephant in the room, the digital trail. Telemetrics showed that Barry's Ford truck had been put in reverse and moved some 95 ft closer to his house around 9:30 p.m. That's a very convenient position to load a body into the truck's trunk. Also, while recounting the events of the night before Suzanne's disappearance, Barry had said that he and his wife had eaten a steak from separate plates. But when the home was searched, only one dirty plate was found in the dishwasher.

[00:13:11]Again, when Barry got to the hotel in Broomfield, he was supposed to leave a key to the hotel room he and his co-worker, Jeff Puckett, would stay in.

[00:13:18]But when he tried it, the room wouldn't open. So, another co-worker came to help him get in. However, when they got in, the room reeked of so much chlorine that it made Morgan, the other co-worker, start having watery eyes. Barry would claim the chlorine must have come from the hotel's pools, but this was during COVID and nobody was using the pools.

[00:13:37]There was also the question of a damaged door frame officers found while searching the house. The original owners of the home confirmed there wasn't any such damage when they'd sold the home to the Morpheus, but Barry couldn't explain how it came up. It's highly likely that he was trying to break through a door to get to Suzanne as she ran. Again, Barry had told police that he had set an alarm for 4:30 a.m. that day and left the house 30 minutes later for work, but around 3:30 a.m. someone kept opening and closing the truck's doors. He must have started his drive much earlier than he'd claimed. Even when he got to work, things just kept getting weirder. Barry was never supposed to be at work that day. It was Mother's Day. Outdoor Services would not have allowed it had they known work was being done without a permit. Besides, nobody works on a Sunday holiday. Barry's Sunday appearance wasn't necessitated by the job. He'd done it solely for the alibi.

[00:14:29]Also, a contractor who worked with Barry said that when they arrived at the site on Monday, it looked as though Barry had done only about half an hour of work.

[00:14:38]When he reached Broomfield, CCTV footage caught him making trash stops. Not one, not two, but five. The first was at an RTD bus stop, then a hotel trash can, then a McDonald's trash can, a trash can in a men's warehouse parking lot, then another trash can near the Holiday Inn he'd checked in. Although it was never discovered what exactly he was disposing of, it's likely that Barry was trying to dispose of evidence during those trash runs. Also, he'd changed clothes multiple times during those runs. But there was another chilling piece of evidence that Barry had forgotten to dispose of, a plastic cap from a tranquilizer dart found in the family's dryer. Before coming to Colorado, Barry had been a deer hunter and had extensive experience with using such weapons to hunt animals with. At first, he claimed he had no idea how a needle cap ended up in his dryer, but as with everything else, his story changed and he later confessed to investigators that as early as late April 2020, he'd used tranquilizers on a deer near the breezeway of his home. From everything they'd discovered, investigators built a plot. When Barry returned home that afternoon, he went to the garage, loaded a syringe into a tranquilizer dart and shot his wife with it. The gap in between when his phone went into airplane mode and when it came back on was more than enough time for him to have disposed of her body. Suzanne was still missing, but police finally felt they had enough to name her killer. So, on the 5th of May, 2021, nearly a year since his wife had gone missing, Barry Morphew was arrested on charges of murder after deliberation, tampering with physical evidence, and attempting to influence a public servant. But, the question you're probably asking is why would Barry Morphew have killed his wife? The answer is quite difficult to arrive at. You see, from all indications, Barry didn't know about Libler and it's unlikely that Suzanne knew about his shenanigans either.

[00:16:31]However, that singular text, "I'm done.

[00:16:33]I could care less what you're up to and have been for years. We just need to figure this out civilly." that Suzanne sent on the 6th of May must have been what set him off.

[00:16:43]He had already threatened her with committing suicide and it's likely that he had a rethink and decided to kill her instead.

[00:16:50]Since he knew their daughters would be away for a trip, he decided to take advantage of the opportunity and murdered her. However, when the case went to trial, things were much less black and white. Prosecutors could not keep up the pace with court deadlines and despite the evidence and Barry's hole-ridden alibi, their case against him was still weak. Mostly because Suzanne's body was still at large. For all there was, she might still be alive and had probably just run away from her family or she might have been kidnapped or killed by a wild animal as her husband had kept suggesting. In April 2022, the case against Barry Morphew was dismissed. The 11th Judicial District Attorney, Linda Stanley, filed a motion to dismiss without prejudice, meaning prosecutors could file charges again at a later date. But barely 2 years later, she got disbarred, largely due to her conduct during the Morphew case. She had conducted inappropriate interviews with YouTube true crime shows while the case was active and even launched an investigation of the judge in that case due to rulings against the prosecution.

[00:17:52]But we feel like we can finally take our first steps in healing, which is a blessing.

[00:17:58]And yeah, we know we just know our dad better than anyone else.

[00:18:05]And we know he was not involved in our mom's disappearance.

[00:18:08]>> my girls.

[00:18:10]And I love my wife.

[00:18:12]And I just want her to be found. By May of the following year, Barry hit back with a $15 million lawsuit of his own against Chaffee County, its Sheriff's Department, District Attorney Linda Stanley, and local and state investigators.

[00:18:27]He claimed investigators had fabricated evidence, engaged in a conspiracy to charge him, conducted a reckless investigation, and withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. He seemed vindicated. No trial, shaky prosecution, and no body. All the evidence available was still circumstantial and couldn't exactly be pinned towards him. He was innocent, or so it seemed. But evil never stays hidden forever. On September 22nd, 2023, while authorities were searching for another missing woman, Edna Quintana, they found a distinct pair of remains in the Moffat area, some about 40 miles from where Suzanne had been declared missing some 3 years earlier.

[00:19:08]The bones were quickly ascertained to be female and were found in a remote field of sagebrush and grasses. From the look of things, the person's remains had been buried in a shallow grave before being scattered. They had died from undetermined means. Just 5 days later, forensics had pulled up a name, Suzanne Morphew. And this time, there was something that would further implicate Barry. During tests, coroners found a powerful mix of sedatives, butorphanol, azaperone, and medetomidine, better known as BAM, in Suzanne's body. Now, BAM is often used for sedating animals during medical treatment or movement.

[00:19:45]And remember who admitted to using a tranquilizer dart earlier?

[00:19:49]What was even more implicating was the fact that at the time of Suzanne's disappearance, only two entities had access to BAM, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the National Park Service, and Barry Morphew. He was the only individual who had BAM in his possession. Forensics would reveal that Suzanne hadn't died where she was found.

[00:20:08]In fact, it's likely that her body had been moved more than once.

[00:20:12]On June 18th, 2025, Barry was indicted with first-degree murder, and just 2 days later, he was arrested in Arizona before being extradited back to Colorado. At his arraignment on January 12th this year, he entered a not guilty plea and waived his right to a speedy trial. Morphew, I I I I I do believe, Mr. Beller, that they have fully discussed your right to a speedy trial with you, but I do need um to make sure you understand that right and understand why you are waiving. So, if you'll have that microphone, please and bring that closer to you.

[00:20:56]Mr. Morphew, you have a constitutional right to a speedy trial, which in Colorado means you have a right to a trial within 6 months of entering a not guilty plea, which you have done today.

[00:21:07]No one, including your attorneys, can make you waive that right if you do not want to. However, there's many reasons why it might be beneficial for you to do so. The trial is expected to last 6 weeks and will start on October 13th. At the moment, Barry is on strict house arrest after posting his 3 million bond to be released from Alamosa County Jail.

[00:21:27]This October, the trial will start. And with the conclusive new evidence that is Suzanne's dead body, it's highly likely that the case will reach a conclusive end this time. The conflict Suzanne's children and extended family must feel at the moment must be unimaginable. But one can only hope that by finally seeing her body and with the final judgment, they will find some semblance of closure knowing that Suzanne's killer gets the punishment due him.