Suzanne Morphew Planted a Pen That Caught HER Secret

Tony Brueski (0:00)

Just because they seem normal doesn't mean they are. Welcome to HiddenKillers With Tony Brueski.

SPEAKER_2 (0:10)

The last confirmed outgoing communication from Suzanne Morphew was a text message at 2:11 p.m. on Saturday, May 9th, 2020 Barry Morphew arrived home at 2:43 p.m., 32 minutes. That's the gap between the last time Suzanne reached out to another person and the moment her husband walked through the door. Every account of what happened after 2.43, what they did that evening, what they said to each other, what happened overnight, what happened before dawn, comes from one person, the man who would later be charged with her murder.

He described an ordinary Saturday. Dinner, time together, his wife asleep when he left in the dark for a job across the state. Investigators would spend the next 5 years pulling that account apart. This is who they were before those 32 minutes became permanent. Before the search teams and the press conferences and the posters with her face on them. What their marriage looked like from the outside, what Suzanne was telling the people she trusted, what Barry says he didn't know, and why the last documented days of this relationship looked nothing like the life they showed their community.

Suzanne Renee Mormon was born on April 30, 1971 in Alexandria, Indiana, a small city east of Indianapolis. She and Barry were high school sweethearts. They married in 1994

Suzanne had been a teacher. She left teaching to raise their two daughters, Mallory and Macy. The family lived in Indiana for more than two decades. In April 2018, they made the move that would change everything. A house in the Maysville area near Salida in Chaffee County, Colorado. The kind of place where people know each other's trucks.

Suzanne loved the mountains. She was a cyclist and a hiker, active despite years of managing her health. She rode the roads around Chaffee County regularly. The outdoor life fit who she was. Before she became a missing person photograph, Suzanne was a woman with friendships that stretched back decades. The connection she maintained, with her sister Melinda Baumunk, with her longtime friend Sheila Oliver, with a man named Jeff Libler, would become the primary record of what was actually happening inside her life. Not because those people went looking for attention, but because Suzanne told them things she wasn't telling anyone else.

The Suzanne the community saw was a mother managing her health, supporting her husband's business, settling into a new state. The Suzanne in the investigative record was keeping private accounts that didn't match the public version.

Barry Lee Morphew was born on October 17, 1967 According to news profiles, the Toronto Blue Jays drafted him in the 42nd round of the 1986 draft out of his high school in Alexandria. He played one minor league season with Medicine Hat in 1987, a prospect with a draft number, not a ball player with a career. Baseball didn't last. What replaced it was physical work, construction, landscaping, a company called Sunset Farms LLC, a deer operation back in Indiana. The deer operation involved managing captive animals, a business that required access to specialized veterinary chemicals for sedation and handling. That access would later become relevant for reasons that wouldn't surface for years. At the time, it was a side business, with access to drugs most people would never hear about.

The family's move to Colorado put them in a mountain home in a rural area outside Salida. Barry worked for Deasland Structures, a local construction company. He volunteered with the Chaffee County Fire Protection District. He hunted, worked outdoors, and fit the community. Neighbors saw a man who contributed, fought fires, showed up, built things with his hands.

That's the verifiable biography. A man with a business, a family, and a spot in a mountain community. The character claims people would later attach to him, devoted husband, concerned father, grieving spouse, came from somewhere else. What the documented record shows is a man who moved his family across the country and had a wife privately telling people she needed out. Barry, according to investigators, had his own version of the marriage he wasn't sharing. Suzanne had recurrent follicular lymphoma, a slow growing blood cancer. Follicular lymphoma forms in the white blood cells of the lymphatic system, it goes into remission and comes back. There is no permanent cure. The treatment is designed to push it back and keep it suppressed for as long as possible.

Her autopsy would later document complete remission with maintenance rituxan treatment. Rituxan is a standard immunotherapy, an infusion given at regular intervals to keep the cancer from returning. She wasn't terminal, she was managing a chronic disease that required ongoing medical care for the rest of her life.