Found Deceased CO - Suzanne Morphew, 49, Chaffee Co, 10 May 2020 *Case dismissed w/o prejudice* *found in 2023* #110

[mrjitty]

But how was there ever an "Arizona suspect"? There were no suspects or POI's in this case, until Barry Morphew was arrested. The partial match from the Glove Box was to a rape kit in AZ, and two elsewhere. AFAIK, no actual person has been matched to the "sex offender" via the partial match.

RSBM - right. There are no DNA suspects. The partial DNA might have been useful corroboration in some circumstances but it's very existence is not probative evidence.

Whole thing is silly and I hope Cahill takes some classes in DNA forensics (along with the Court TV reporters).

IMO.

Luckily the prosecution can handle this properly from the outset this time.

Of course IE will still make the same claims for the Jury - we've seen it in other cases.

 

[Lyanna]

I've been thinking about the dog-freeness over the past few days, how strange you should mention it.
There was no dog ever, was there?

Because the dog would probably get more attention than Barry would, and if it ain't all about Barry then it's not worth it.
Gonna start calling him L'Oréal.
(Other skin care/hair care products are available)

moo

 

[steeltowngirl]

But how was there ever an "Arizona suspect"? There were no suspects or POI's in this case, until Barry Morphew was arrested. The partial match from the Glove Box was to a rape kit in AZ, and two elsewhere. AFAIK, no actual person has been matched to the "sex offender" via the partial match.

I am reluctant to listen to reporters and people not involved in the case repeat their limited understanding about what the record actually shows. The Glove Box DNA is NOT of a sex offender, so even if that person had been located in AZ or elsewhere, they are only a partial match to the person who touched the Glove Box. They didn't do it. Didn't need to be cleared (but since that person is not actual a felon in the CODIS data base, they couldn't be a suspect?) That's what I derived from the evidence.

There was, at the time, an "Arizona suspect," but it wasn't the rape kit partial match. It was someone else and it was based entirely on rumor, IMO.

Here are my comments on the middle part of that video:

The commentator treats all the "foreign" DNA (whose word is that, I wonder? It's certainly not a technical term and has some strong connotations) as if it came from one stranger male. It didn't. At least, there's no actual evidence in the court documents to indicate that. How would the reporter know that? "Male DNA" could be 1 male or several (it could even be mixed, as sometimes happens). The only people excluded from being the source (according to this reporter) are Barry and the investigators (which sounds right - that is how it proceeds). But the reporter has no way of knowing whether the other samples all came from one person or from four (or more). Cahill "comes to believe" that there are multiple males who committed the crime. Why? What's his evidence? If in fact he ends up deciding four different men touched Suzanne's Ranger Rover - how is the Ranger Rover involved in this crime? How does he make the leap that all four men were there at the same time and the DNA is recent? Cahill doesn't sound very knowledgeable about forensic DNA analysis.

Then the reporter goes back to speaking as if there's just one male (the Glovebox match).

I'm done with this Court TV reporting and won't be watching the rest (THANK you so much for directing me to the right place - how you remembered that actual timestamp, I have no idea, but wow).

Whole thing is silly and I hope Cahill takes some classes in DNA forensics (along with the Court TV reporters).

IMO.

1000 likes for this post @10ofRods !!

 

[waldojabba]

Iirc

Cahill ( yes the state) was the problem at the prelim regarding the dna. He was clear as mud. And Imo came into court loaded with attitude.
I believe he was also the one who told IE that the case got filed too early ( maybe he told her in his phone call with IE when she called him the night before the testimony) - he was away for his reserve training and never read nor signed off on the entire AA doc. Many thought he was butt hurt that the AA was filed seemingly without him being consulted .

As a side note - who on the P side picks up a phone call from IE on the D, the night before their testimony?
Imo someone with very poor judgement and an ax to grind. Also imo an example of “sabotage”.
Cahill was reassigned elsewhere and taken off the Morphew team after his court testimony. The msm speculation was that although he was prepped for his testimony at the prelim, he went totally rogue/off script and LS wanted him off the case.

The question about the codis hit/dna that Cahill had said was open at the prelim I believe is the reason judge murphy granted bail.

I recall the dna being buttoned up after the prelim.

(Cahill also went on the shoot himself ( in the foot?) with his own service revolver later that year. IMO... he was going through some things)
JMO

 

[girlhasnoname]

Iirc

Cahill ( yes the state) was the problem at the prelim regarding the dna. He was clear as mud. And Imo came into court loaded with attitude.
I believe he was also the one who told IE that the case got filed too early ( maybe he told her in his phone call with IE when she called him the night before the testimony) - he was away for his reserve training and never read nor signed off on the entire AA doc. Many thought he was butt hurt that the AA was filed seemingly without him being consulted .

As a side note - who on the P side picks up a phone call from IE on the D, the night before their testimony?
Imo someone with very poor judgement and an ax to grind. Also imo an example of “sabotage”.
Cahill was reassigned elsewhere and taken off the Morphew team after his court testimony. The msm speculation was that although he was prepped for his testimony at the prelim, he went totally rogue/off script and LS wanted him off the case.

The question about the codis hit/dna that Cahill had said was open at the prelim I believe is the reason judge murphy granted bail.

I recall the dna being buttoned up after the prelim.

(Cahill also went on the shoot himself ( in the foot?) with his own service revolver later that year. IMO... he was going through some things)
JMO

Agreed, Cahill came to the stand with a chip on his shoulder. He was working against LE I believe. Wasn't he deployed in National Guard or something and was upset that they were charging BM and he wasn't fully in the know?

MOO

 

[steeltowngirl]

Iirc

Cahill ( yes the state) was the problem at the prelim regarding the dna. He was clear as mud. And Imo came into court loaded with attitude.
I believe he was also the one who told IE that the case got filed too early ( maybe he told her in his phone call with IE when she called him the night before the testimony) - he was away for his reserve training and never read nor signed off on the entire AA doc. Many thought he was butt hurt that the AA was filed seemingly without him being consulted .

As a side note - who on the P side picks up a phone call from IE on the D, the night before their testimony?
Imo someone with very poor judgement and an ax to grind. Also imo an example of “sabotage”.
Cahill was reassigned elsewhere and taken off the Morphew team after his court testimony. The msm speculation was that although he was prepped for his testimony at the prelim, he went totally rogue/off script and LS wanted him off the case.

The question about the codis hit/dna that Cahill had said was open at the prelim I believe is the reason judge murphy granted bail.

I recall the dna being buttoned up after the prelim.

(Cahill also went on the shoot himself ( in the foot?) with his own service revolver later that year. IMO... he was going through some things)
JMO

Yes. Cahill admitted that he was distracted and that he had ‘f’ed up’.

https://www.courts.state.co.us/userfiles/file/Court_Probation/11th_Judicial_District/Freemont/Morphew/MORPHEW%20D17C%20EXHB.pdf

 

[Megnut]

If there is an upside to IE's PR campaign, it's that she bills BM for her time, LOL!

And on that note, can anyone offer a ballpark estimate for IE's (legal) services to BM ??

IMO, immediately after Suzanne's disappearance, BM cashed out and liquidated their assets, but then embarked on a spending spree including luxury rentals, new vehicles, deluxe vacations, veneers, cosmetic injections, replacing discarded items, supporting his daughters, taxes, etc. Then along came $$ IE $$.

In the event of a new trial, the prosecution may dump terabytes of information on the defense during discovery as a precaution to ward off sanctions. The highly skilled IE will require time to sort through alllllllll of that information. Do defense attorneys charge by the hour or are clients charged with homocide offered a package deal ??

Bbm

A package deal?

Want me to send SD to retrieve it?

 

[Boxer]

What is a utility pole access catwalk?

The rough road they make under power poles so line repair trucks can drive under the lines and get to any pole in the line of poles.

 

[mrjitty]

What was also interesting about the Civil Suit is IE has revealed she does not have much of a substantive defence to the prosecution case.

The digital evidence is what sinks BM. So what does she have to say about it?

On the face of it, the data shows the left turn, the chipmunk hunt, and the 'digital death" of SM.

For the purposes of probable cause, IE notes that the states digital expert acknowledges that the location data can be explained in 2 different ways. In other words, the data might show BM moving left but actually it was just a false read. She claims it was unfair to ask BM wether he turned left, without telling him that maybe the data was inaccurate. Ditto it was unfair to show him a map of the chipmunk location data without warning him that perhaps it was just the GPS reading skipping about

While I think these are weak sauce in a civil rights claim, I think they are laughable at trial.

IE cannot testify or speculate against her own client's evidence. In order to say he didn't turn left, BM really needs to testify. In order to say he wasn't running around, BM really needs to testify. In order to give a believable account of Saturday afternoon, BM really needs to testify.

The problem is, IMO he cannot testify, because there are simply too many things that cannot be accounted for or reconciled - e.g. the missing kilometers, eg Foos Hike, eg Bloomfield dump runs, eg shooting dear from inside the house e.g deleting text messages

These things are bad enough pre-trial, but in testimony he will have to directly answer the questions

 

[mrjitty]

Yes. Cahill admitted that he was distracted and that he had ‘f’ed up’.

https://www.courts.state.co.us/userfiles/file/Court_Probation/11th_Judicial_District/Freemont/Morphew/MORPHEW%20D17C%20EXHB.pdf

Conspiracy theories aside if you look at the actual ways law enforcement banjax cases, this is how they do it.

Sometimes it is intentional corruption, sometimes incompetence, or other 'reasons'

If they really had wanted to fit up Barry, they wouldn't have done it by hiding a dart cap in the dryer

 

[Seattle1]

In that TF case there was police incompetence (possibly corruption) in the investigation.
IE was able to use it to win acqittal.
TF was a correctional officer and MOO between help to cover up by his parents and responding officers and detectives not looking into glaring red flags in TFs claim that his wife committed suicide, he got off.

And then there's the neighbor outside, beneath the window, who heard TF confess to the shooting to his father.

 

[mrjitty]

As an experienced hiker who’s spent a lot of time in this part of Colorado and is familiar with the areas pertaining to this case, it seems to me on a cold, dark, early May night, with the window of time that he had, that it’d be a lot easier to dig a shallow grave in an enormous, flat, very sparsely populated valley less than an hour away, at an elevation 2,000’ lower than Maysville, than it would be to do so in the very mountainous, wooded terrain closer to home, where the temps are cooler and the ground is likely still frozen. The level of physical effort at 9,500’ vs 7,500’ above sea level is also much higher due to the thinner air. Just a few thoughts from a different perspective.

hi @Queen Quads

Interesting thoughts here - i tend to agree.

Sometime ago, at the behest of @MassGuy i read No Stone Unturned about Necrosearch who specialise in finding hard to find bodies. What struck me, especially about cases in this region, is the outdoors is so big, you really do need quite specific intelligence to locate a hidden body

When a body isn't found, we tend to come up with complex explanations including very clever disposal, but in fact a featureless waste land is just as good because of the vastness of space.

The real key is the body will tend not to be far from vehicle access.

 

[hexicon]

Greetings, I am new to this case. I have a question that likely has been answered somewhere in the previous 100+ threads but I am hoping someone knows it.

Question: What happened to the security cameras? I thought at some point Suzanne told her friend that Barry had cameras everywhere. Was part of the chipmunk hunt the task of taking down the cameras? Or did he take them down in advance? If the security cameras were monitored by an app, wouldn't there be evidence of that in his phone or computer records?

Aside: I try not to make too many assumptions about the psychology of the accused, because a lot of what we do here is projection. But based on what I have read here, Barry seems like the epitome of toxic masculinity. So many malignant, narcissistic traits--yet ordinary at the same time. He's not a a freak of nature. In a way, he is boring. He just takes all the mundane bad traits and feelings that might briefly flash through a regular person's thoughts and takes them to the nth degree.

 

[rainbowshummingbird]

Most of you here are much more experienced in crime and court procedures than I. If there is evidence found from Suzanne’s remains or grave, linking BM to her death, do you believe BM will likely be recharged? And if there is no new evidence recovered from her remains, do you believe he will still be recharged?

 

[SteelCity91]

But how was there ever an "Arizona suspect"? There were no suspects or POI's in this case, until Barry Morphew was arrested. The partial match from the Glove Box was to a rape kit in AZ, and two elsewhere. AFAIK, no actual person has been matched to the "sex offender" via the partial match.

I am reluctant to listen to reporters and people not involved in the case repeat their limited understanding about what the record actually shows. The Glove Box DNA is NOT of a sex offender, so even if that person had been located in AZ or elsewhere, they are only a partial match to the person who touched the Glove Box. They didn't do it. Didn't need to be cleared (but since that person is not actual a felon in the CODIS data base, they couldn't be a suspect?) That's what I derived from the evidence.

There was, at the time, an "Arizona suspect," but it wasn't the rape kit partial match. It was someone else and it was based entirely on rumor, IMO.

Here are my comments on the middle part of that video:

The commentator treats all the "foreign" DNA (whose word is that, I wonder? It's certainly not a technical term and has some strong connotations) as if it came from one stranger male. It didn't. At least, there's no actual evidence in the court documents to indicate that. How would the reporter know that? "Male DNA" could be 1 male or several (it could even be mixed, as sometimes happens). The only people excluded from being the source (according to this reporter) are Barry and the investigators (which sounds right - that is how it proceeds). But the reporter has no way of knowing whether the other samples all came from one person or from four (or more). Cahill "comes to believe" that there are multiple males who committed the crime. Why? What's his evidence? If in fact he ends up deciding four different men touched Suzanne's Ranger Rover - how is the Ranger Rover involved in this crime? How does he make the leap that all four men were there at the same time and the DNA is recent? Cahill doesn't sound very knowledgeable about forensic DNA analysis.

Then the reporter goes back to speaking as if there's just one male (the Glovebox match).

I'm done with this Court TV reporting and won't be watching the rest (THANK you so much for directing me to the right place - how you remembered that actual timestamp, I have no idea, but wow).

Whole thing is silly and I hope Cahill takes some classes in DNA forensics (along with the Court TV reporters).

IMO.

Agreed. Great post @10ofRods And again..we said it before (and we will keep saying it) but it all comes down to this DNA on the glove box is irrelevant to how Suzanne went missing. IMO doesn’t fit into any scenario.

 

[kittythehare]

more on the infamous Cahill

CBI agent in Barry Morphew murder case resigned amid internal affairs investigation

Joseph Cahill, a Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent who testified in the murder case against Chaffee County’s Barry Morphew, resigned from the agency last month amid an internal affairs investi…

www.denverpost.com

 

[BeachSky]

Suzanne Morphew's older sister shares her story

“Suzanne was my gift on my 15th birthday,” Melinda Moorman said. “I was born on April 30, 1956 and she was born 15 years later on April 30, 1971. She

www.themountainmail.com

On the Friday before Suzanne disappeared, Melinda received a text from Suzanne that she has
shared only with authorities.
In that text Suzanne shared the struggle she was having with Barry. That text message, Melinda said,
is only for a court of law.

——-
I have not been able to find the contents
of that text. Even the DM doesn’t have it.
So when BM does go to trial, hope it is powerful with the jury.
JMO & hope

 

[kittythehare]

Most of you here are much more experienced in crime and court procedures than I. If there is evidence found from Suzanne’s remains or grave, linking BM to her death, do you believe BM will likely be recharged? And if there is no new evidence recovered from her remains, do you believe he will still be recharged?

No information released on what was found with her remains , if anything.
Unable to answer your other 2 Q's cos we haven't a clue how they're thinking or who is in charge of the 'thinking' or whether other lines of inquiry are being investigated.

I do suspect the latter is ongoing..

 

[10ofRods]

Greetings, I am new to this case. I have a question that likely has been answered somewhere in the previous 100+ threads but I am hoping someone knows it.

Question: What happened to the security cameras? I thought at some point Suzanne told her friend that Barry had cameras everywhere. Was part of the chipmunk hunt the task of taking down the cameras? Or did he take them down in advance? If the security cameras were monitored by an app, wouldn't there be evidence of that in his phone or computer records?

Aside: I try not to make too many assumptions about the psychology of the accused, because a lot of what we do here is projection. But based on what I have read here, Barry seems like the epitome of toxic masculinity. So many malignant, narcissistic traits--yet ordinary at the same time. He's not a a freak of nature. In a way, he is boring. He just takes all the mundane bad traits and feelings that might briefly flash through a regular person's thoughts and takes them to the nth degree.

I am not sure if the question was answered, but we did spend a lot of time discussing it (to the point that, well, I think most of us believe that part of Barry's running around was...removing security cameras). They were trail cams, IIRC (although I don't remember how we know that - I just know that it was the first time I learned much about trail cams). Barry came up with the turkey and chipmunk stories in order to explain what he was doing.

Another odd thing involving the house exterior was the still bloody hacked off antlers leaning against the north wall of the garage, I believe. He was "cleaning" them. But Andy Moorman reported that a mountain lion was seen right at Puma Path by a policeman, I believe he said. I believe Barry put the bloody skull top and antlers (elk, I think) out there to attract a mountain lion. It's possible or likely that he hunted out of season (I can't remember) but taken all together, it looks to me as if Barry wanted to capture a mountain lion on the trail cam, but probably ended up having to throw those cameras away on one of his five trash dumps, as he had no time to download and edit any footage from them (Barry Morphew has many plans, but he is quite wonky when it comes to executing them).

IMO.

 

[waldojabba]

Deep in my heart, I totally agree with you. I am speaking as a non-lawyer.

But recently, any sort of push-back by Prosecutors has ended up in appeals and even overturned convictions.

The side represented broadly by the Defense is going to do way more PR than the other side, as a result. They definitely hire PR people (I know quite a few - and some of them are *extremely* well paid).

Prosecutors rely on law and justice, because if they embark on a heavy duty PR campaign, it wlll be known. Their budgets are ultimately a matter of public record. It's hard to disguise PR as something else, if you're a Prosecutor, whereas the defense can claim they're just filing motions/asking questions.

I think we have a kind of weird stalemate. Are juries learning to see through it? Maybe. More likely, most jurors are not aware of all the Defense PR attempts (at least, not consciously). Judges need to be *very* aware, or they will end up influenced by the cleverness of PR campaigns.

Indeed, any attempt by the State to influence things via PR will be called "jury tampering" or "attempts to influence the jury pool" by the Defense. Sadly, most criminal defendants don't have the money that Barry Morphew flung at this case (it leads to exoneration of better-heeled people). THAT is a civil rights violation, IMO (not Barry Morphew's property being kept too long for investigators to examine).

IMO.

Thanks @10ofRods
Of course my logical mind knows all this. It only matters what happens in court and the P needs to keep all above board etc. But ...emotionally I am so damn sick of no one ever having having Suzanne's back with any type of consistency in life and now in death. And since I am a fixer ( recovering lol) by nature I always want to right all the wrongs, so of course
I am forever letting go ...of that which I cannot control.

JMO