Colorado Homicide Cases

Barry Morphew has pleaded not guilty for a second time to first-degree murder in the 2020 death of his wife, Suzanne Morphew, entering the plea through his attorney during a brief Jan. 12 hearing in Alamosa, Colorado. Morphew was first arrested in 2021, but prosecutors dropped that case in 2022 after a judge sanctioned them for repeated failures to turn over evidence, including barring key witnesses, and Suzanne’s skeletal remains were later found off a dirt road in southern Colorado in 2023. A new indictment obtained after the remains were located alleges that a wildlife tranquilizer cocktail known as “BAM” — butorphanol, azaperone and medetomidine — was detected in her bone marrow, and that Barry Morphew was the only person in the area outside wildlife officials with a prescription for the drug. The coroner ruled the death a homicide by unspecified means tied to intoxication with those three drugs, and a forensic anthropologist cited in the indictment theorized that her body likely decomposed elsewhere and was moved based on the condition of the remains and clothing. The case, now handled by a different district attorney in the jurisdiction where the body was found, continues to draw scrutiny over the strength of the forensic evidence and past prosecutorial misconduct that derailed the first trial.