Exclusive: Barry Morphew responds to explosive claims regarding the disappearance of wife, Suzanne | FOX21 News Colorado
For the first time, on record with FOX21 News, Barry Morphew has agreed to share his side of the story.
“Listen,” Barry said during a Thursday morning phonecall, “Jeff Puckett was in prison for nine years.”
Still, Barry confirmed he had hired Puckett for a project in Broomfield on Mother’s Day Weekend this year. They needed to fix a wall, Puckett said.
“I said listen, I need to do this job, I will pay you good money to come and help me,” Barry said of Puckett. “I gave him a job and an opportunity.”
It was not a last minute project, Barry explained, the job had been in the works for a month.
“That has nothing to do with Suzanne missing,” he said.
Puckett agreed to the work and traveled to Broomfield, where Barry had paid for a room. Puckett told FOX21 he walked inside and was immediately struck by a strong smell of chlorine.
“I mean, I’m not going to beat around the bush, it did,” he said. “I mean it smelled real strong. I’m like, damn, that’s just what I thought.”
Puckett also found signs that the room had been used in some capacity, and reasoned Barry had been inside at some point.
“The bed hadn’t been slept in or laid in or nothing, it was just kind of laid on or something,” Puckett said. “Maybe he got in, took a shower, and then that was it – just washed up and left.”
Puckett said he was told Barry had to leave for a family emergency that Sunday night, May 10.
<snip>
Barry said he left in a hurry, when he learned his wife was missing.
“I rushed home, left all my tools at the hotel called my workers and said, ‘I have a family emergency, you’re going to have to figure this out on your own,'” he said.
But Puckett said the crew couldn’t finish their work.
“We had nothing to work with,” he said. And he described what would have been necessary in order to complete that particular job.
“Once you build [the wall] up, you run a layer block, some dirt, get [it] inspected, then you keep continuing until the next level – and there was nothing like that to work with,” Puckett said. “That kind of pissed me off, so I come on back.”
<snip>
“I did nothing wrong in the hotel,” Barry said. “There’s cameras all over the hotel, I did nothing wrong.”
The hotel isn’t the only location where the presence of a strong smell has been mentioned.
Suzanne’s older brother, Andrew Moorman, brought up something he’d heard, following a search of the Morphew family home.
“From what I understood secondhand, they said there was an
overwhelming smell of bleach in the home,” he said.
That information had apparently been relayed to him by initial investigators.
“I’ve heard the FBI lie and I know that they can legally do that in their investigations,” Barry said. “But it just pains me to know that they are doing this to me and my family.”
Moorman said CBI agents brought up other concerns as well.
“They did ask us, ‘why can’t we find any coolers at the house?’ And I said, ‘well I have no idea. I don’t know how many they had to begin with,” he said. “But I assume, as a hunter and a guy that maybe camps, he would have a few, and they couldn’t find a single one.”