Found Deceased CO - Suzanne Morphew, 49, did not return from bike ride, Chaffee County, 10 May 2020 #51

[Boxer]

Indeed they are -- they must be based on good solid evidence or other reasons to get a judge or magistrate to sign-off the issuing of a warrant.
Oh, how I wish we could see the Probable Cause write-up!!

Right. Warrants are not issued because you might fit a public health profile.
Statistics are used for developing prevention policies.

 

[10ofRods]

We disagree about what the study shows, and that's perfectly OK. I encourage others to look at the CDC study and reach their own conclusions. I suggest bookmarking it. IMO, the study helps us to understand more accurately the complex phenomenon of spousal murder. I hope that information will help dispel stereotypes that commonly appear in discussions on Websleuths and elsewhere, and inform our analysis of these cases.

Here's the thing.

That study covers 11 years. We have data that cover 120 years (with good data for 100 years and excellent data of the same type cited for 60 years, at least). The study cited takes a period in which homicides were declining (they've been rising since 2014 - it will be a while before the CDC takes a look at that, the FBI has the data). If I had more space (this is already a very long post), I'd say more about why I prefer NCADV data.

So the CDC study wasn't "the largest study ever," the study cited is actually a small study of 18 states and in a time when the US/CDC was thinking that its violence problem was...getting better. One could even say that the time period was a bit...cherry picked.

We on this forum have discussed our views on DV in Suzanne's case exhaustively and if you want to go back through the threads, you can, but many of us have already thought through our position on that aspect of the case. I believe AM has also thought it through. I believe it's a very important element of this case.

So, if you were police, you would be looking at BM in either case (55% chance he's the murderer if no DV, 70% or even higher if he's also abusive). Keep in mind that the CDC doesn't conduct research independent of death certificates and legal documents.

How many women are murdered by abusers whose abuse is not documented legally? There's a large literature on it, from sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists. There are even entire books on the subject, over time. If abuse is established via non-legal means (for example, I tell my clinical psychologist about it and get included in a clinical psych study), it will not appear in the CDC data. So the CDC data is, sadly. a rosier picture.

Even more important, though, is the fact that this is a missing persons case.

Not a single no-body homicide is explained in that article.

I am unwilling, at this point, to go with "head injury/wandered off," "mountain lion," or "abduction." Or "ran away."

And I don't think Suzanne staged her own suicide.

Of course, you can think those things if you want and you can even try to figure out how the 45% of murdered women in the CDC study were killed. Having "homicide" on a death certificate doesn't mean that the murderer was ever prosecuted, so there's a batch of who-dunnits out there - how many of the unsolved murders come back to IP?

The data is highly suggestive - suggestive enough that scholars have taken on this topic as a primary field of study. For example, in my own work, I was fortunate enough to be allowed to interview women referred to me by psychiatrists, parole officers, student health clinics, psychologists and pastors (all of whom had experienced unreported DV).

But the data can't come from the CDC - it has to come from elsewhere. The CDC can never have "the largest study" (and would never make that claim - it's a short term snapshot of the problem (try looking at the 1930's or 1970's for a very different view - longterm is always a larger project).

You cannot study or interview the missing. We merely extrapolate.

What a good cop does, IMO, is keep the husband on their radar (if domestic violence is suspected, it may be as high as an 80% chance that the husband did it; if no domestic violence has ever been reported to police, it's 55% - in either case, the husband is obviously the main suspect which was my point - you decided to make it about something else, so here we are). Which was my point - and really, what I wanted to discuss is how astonished I am that in this day and age, spouses much younger than I am do not appear to know this. Any spouse who gets antagonistic with LE, as BM has done IMO, is apparently clueless about life in the US - or they have another motivation.

My current interest is in missing persons, particularly missing women. Suzanne is missing and feared dead. Murdered. Somehow. That's my view on the case. Once she's in that category, the stats on known murders are only suggestive, as we have no stats on the cause of death of people who have never been found.

But I submit to you and to the readers here, that many of the adult women who are missing right now - the pages and pages of women here on Websleuths, were murdered (see numbers below). Some are suicides. The literature we have (not from the CDC - but from academia) suggests that as many as 25% are suicides (clinical psychology case studies have to be read one by one and tallied - and yes, people do that).

So what happened to the other 75%? Doesn't that number at least remind you of another number (the number of women murdered by an abuser?) What if it's only 50%?

Can wilderness misadventure or unseen urban accident really account for 25% of missing women? Are 25% of missing women actually hiding someplace under a new identity? No study shows that. It's really hard to do. I've only been able to find a few cases of women in California where they were actually disappearing themselves and hiding (obviously, they're hard to find, but again, read above about where my data come from). Sex trafficking? (The CDC has no data on sex trafficked adult women that I can find, and the academic literature reveals it's almost entirely children and adolescents, as far as we know - so let's make that less than 1%).

As to whether there was domestic violence (or abuse, because I think we'd find the numbers are similar for non-physical abuse) in Suzanne's case is completely conjecture. But I don't think it's mere hunch or intuition to regard it as likely - likely enough that, yes, BM is a suspect. I think good investigators think about the probability of spousal involvement being higher, even if the abuse did not result in a call to police (although do we know for sure that there was never a call for help from the Morphew household? we do not).

Which was my point.

BM needed to adopt an adult persona and cooperate fully with LE.

He should have allied himself with them (unless he's guilty, of course) and realize that in order to find Suzanne, he has to be ruled out completely - not just by LE but by the community, otherwise, tips keep pouring in that occupy LE time and lead no where.

Anyone who hasn't at least considered BM as a suspect has to have some other bias in their mind, is my point. So BM needed to realize that and act accordingly, as thousands of spouses have done. Innocent people are under the microscope every time a child goes missing (but it's often a parent or parents who are responsible). Ditto for when women go missing. I could provide him with a script if he asked (many people could). LE certainly isn't going to help him think up how to get out of the scrutiny, that's for sure. But there are many things he could have done and didn't do.

In 2019, 62,823 women over the age of 21 went missing and remained missing at the end of the year.

This is an enormous number, dwarfing the number of homicides in the CDC study, which offers no explanation whatsoever for missing persons, but does point us in a direction, I think.

Rounding off, 63,000 adult women were reported missing. What happened to all of them? So many will remain unfound. Cause of death will never be known. No death certificates will ever appear (if a person dies without an identity, such as a homeless person, they do not get a DC with a name on it, but their death, if a homicide, would appear in some future CDC study - and account for some of the 45% of women for whom it is not known whether they suffered DV).

CDC says 25% of women suffer "domestic violence" but 33% of women suffer "sexual violence" (some of that is at the hands of IP - but it is classified so that it would not appear in the study you cited, because I don't believe it's divided up according to the relationship with the attacker).

NCADV disagrees with CDC. It says that at least 33% of American women have suffered DV (which is my sense of it, after years of this type of research - maybe a bit higher than that, since women define DV very differently in the field). This doesn't include seizing control of financial assets, surveillance of the woman, limitations on where the woman can go, marital rape (studied separately with no good studies on overlap with "regular" forms of violence), transmission of sexual diseases due to unfaithful partner, and other incidents that occur rather more often but are not "DV" (women locked out of their houses, money stolen by an IP, women frightened out or pushed out of a car in the middle of nowhere or on a busy highway, etc).

Anyway, I think there are much larger studies. I think the decade-ish period of time chosen for the study you cited is one of the best in US history in its rosy picture of declining crime - a period which is now 6 years over, with 2020 being perhaps one of the worst on recent record (the 1920's and 30's were actually worse; the 1940's saw a real drop both in homicides and in DV - I'm sure we can all figure out the reasons). Why is crime going up again? Why is crime against women consistently underreported? Those 63,000 missing women speak to a much larger problem on our hands.

There are some very good retrospective large scale analyses being published this year, and last. The areas in which the methodology of studying this huge public health problem are being revised.

The CDC is always useful for the generation of hypotheses - but rarely has the answers nor the funding to conduct the kind of research needed. Research funding (NIMH in particular) has been slashed. This is behind a pay wall, but it's the kind of thing that actual researchers are taking into account - in trying to figure out what's happening to missing women. I think the story of murdered missing women is grim, more grim than any of the figures we've been discussing.

Data Missingness Patterns in Homicide Datasets: An Applied Test on a Primary Data Set

There's also interest in "micromarkers" of DV...which provides an entirely different window into these phenomena. As it turns out, the number of women who abuse their male partners may be higher than we realize (but homicide is still a very unusual outcome).

Did Suzanne's friends (and family) notice some of the micro-markers? We know for sure they noticed some of the markers...of DV and abuse/control...

 

[Deleted member 102539]

Interesting article -- thanks. It's a lot to take in.

It is also interesting to see the pregnancy stats... We have agreed many times that pregnancy seems to be a trigger in some situations. SMH. At least we see that a lot here on WS. SMH. Maddening and sad.

Pregnancy of the wife or pregnancy of her rival, IF there is one? Maybe, both versions are dangerous?

 

[mom2chloe]

I considered a rival’s pregnancy early on in regards to if one life could be saved. Since we have heard zero about a mistress by this point, I gave up that possibility. MOO

 

[Knox]

Thinking of Suzanne's family during their first Christmas without her. Hoping 2021 brings an arrest and justice, I hate the thought of the responsible party going about life with no consequences.

 

[Yesiamapirate]

I know it's happened in a couple of other cases over the years, but to use such a machine to get rid of a body would be incredibly messy, and just leave SO much evidence scattered & nearly impossible to collect and dispose of.

If you were trying to hide evidence, it seems to me that a wood chipper might be the last thing you'd use.

jmo

Exactly. Why leave literally thousands of pieces of evidence when you have untold amounts of places nearby to dispose of just one piece?

 

[nyvictoria]

I considered a rival’s pregnancy early on in regards to if one life could be saved. Since we have heard zero about a mistress by this point, I gave up that possibility. MOO

I agree. I thought at first it was more than likely there was another woman and speculation about the female coworker added to my suspicion. After hearing her interview, I changed my mind. I didn’t think someone who was involved romantically would go against the “recommendation” of his buddies and turn her phone over to investigators. I also felt a mistress wouldn’t have willingly sat for an interview with LS. Then, as you noted, the months went by and nothing further was heard about it.

IMO if BM is responsible, I think the motive was primarily financial, with a side of general unhappiness at being stuck in the marriage. The notes from Suzanne, that he felt he had to share with the public, convinced me that he was not happy and Suzanne felt it. I’m still on the fence WRT pre-planning.

 

[casesensitive]

Here's the thing.

That study covers 11 years. We have data that cover 120 years (with good data for 100 years and excellent data of the same type cited for 60 years, at least). The study cited takes a period in which homicides were declining (they've been rising since 2014 - it will be a while before the CDC takes a look at that, the FBI has the data). If I had more space (this is already a very long post), I'd say more about why I prefer NCADV data.

So the CDC study wasn't "the largest study ever," the study cited is actually a small study of 18 states and in a time when the US/CDC was thinking that its violence problem was...getting better. One could even say that the time period was a bit...cherry picked.

We on this forum have discussed our views on DV in Suzanne's case exhaustively and if you want to go back through the threads, you can, but many of us have already thought through our position on that aspect of the case. I believe AM has also thought it through. I believe it's a very important element of this case.

So, if you were police, you would be looking at BM in either case (55% chance he's the murderer if no DV, 70% or even higher if he's also abusive). Keep in mind that the CDC doesn't conduct research independent of death certificates and legal documents.

How many women are murdered by abusers whose abuse is not documented legally? There's a large literature on it, from sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists. There are even entire books on the subject, over time. If abuse is established via non-legal means (for example, I tell my clinical psychologist about it and get included in a clinical psych study), it will not appear in the CDC data. So the CDC data is, sadly. a rosier picture.

Even more important, though, is the fact that this is a missing persons case.

Not a single no-body homicide is explained in that article.

I am unwilling, at this point, to go with "head injury/wandered off," "mountain lion," or "abduction." Or "ran away."

And I don't think Suzanne staged her own suicide.

Of course, you can think those things if you want and you can even try to figure out how the 45% of murdered women in the CDC study were killed. Having "homicide" on a death certificate doesn't mean that the murderer was ever prosecuted, so there's a batch of who-dunnits out there - how many of the unsolved murders come back to IP?

The data is highly suggestive - suggestive enough that scholars have taken on this topic as a primary field of study. For example, in my own work, I was fortunate enough to be allowed to interview women referred to me by psychiatrists, parole officers, student health clinics, psychologists and pastors (all of whom had experienced unreported DV).

But the data can't come from the CDC - it has to come from elsewhere. The CDC can never have "the largest study" (and would never make that claim - it's a short term snapshot of the problem (try looking at the 1930's or 1970's for a very different view - longterm is always a larger project).

You cannot study or interview the missing. We merely extrapolate.

What a good cop does, IMO, is keep the husband on their radar (if domestic violence is suspected, it may be as high as an 80% chance that the husband did it; if no domestic violence has ever been reported to police, it's 55% - in either case, the husband is obviously the main suspect which was my point - you decided to make it about something else, so here we are). Which was my point - and really, what I wanted to discuss is how astonished I am that in this day and age, spouses much younger than I am do not appear to know this. Any spouse who gets antagonistic with LE, as BM has done IMO, is apparently clueless about life in the US - or they have another motivation.

My current interest is in missing persons, particularly missing women. Suzanne is missing and feared dead. Murdered. Somehow. That's my view on the case. Once she's in that category, the stats on known murders are only suggestive, as we have no stats on the cause of death of people who have never been found.

But I submit to you and to the readers here, that many of the adult women who are missing right now - the pages and pages of women here on Websleuths, were murdered (see numbers below). Some are suicides. The literature we have (not from the CDC - but from academia) suggests that as many as 25% are suicides (clinical psychology case studies have to be read one by one and tallied - and yes, people do that).

So what happened to the other 75%? Doesn't that number at least remind you of another number (the number of women murdered by an abuser?) What if it's only 50%?

Can wilderness misadventure or unseen urban accident really account for 25% of missing women? Are 25% of missing women actually hiding someplace under a new identity? No study shows that. It's really hard to do. I've only been able to find a few cases of women in California where they were actually disappearing themselves and hiding (obviously, they're hard to find, but again, read above about where my data come from). Sex trafficking? (The CDC has no data on sex trafficked adult women that I can find, and the academic literature reveals it's almost entirely children and adolescents, as far as we know - so let's make that less than 1%).

As to whether there was domestic violence (or abuse, because I think we'd find the numbers are similar for non-physical abuse) in Suzanne's case is completely conjecture. But I don't think it's mere hunch or intuition to regard it as likely - likely enough that, yes, BM is a suspect. I think good investigators think about the probability of spousal involvement being higher, even if the abuse did not result in a call to police (although do we know for sure that there was never a call for help from the Morphew household? we do not).

Which was my point.

BM needed to adopt an adult persona and cooperate fully with LE.

He should have allied himself with them (unless he's guilty, of course) and realize that in order to find Suzanne, he has to be ruled out completely - not just by LE but by the community, otherwise, tips keep pouring in that occupy LE time and lead no where.

Anyone who hasn't at least considered BM as a suspect has to have some other bias in their mind, is my point. So BM needed to realize that and act accordingly, as thousands of spouses have done. Innocent people are under the microscope every time a child goes missing (but it's often a parent or parents who are responsible). Ditto for when women go missing. I could provide him with a script if he asked (many people could). LE certainly isn't going to help him think up how to get out of the scrutiny, that's for sure. But there are many things he could have done and didn't do.

In 2019, 62,823 women over the age of 21 went missing and remained missing at the end of the year.

This is an enormous number, dwarfing the number of homicides in the CDC study, which offers no explanation whatsoever for missing persons, but does point us in a direction, I think.

Rounding off, 63,000 adult women were reported missing. What happened to all of them? So many will remain unfound. Cause of death will never be known. No death certificates will ever appear (if a person dies without an identity, such as a homeless person, they do not get a DC with a name on it, but their death, if a homicide, would appear in some future CDC study - and account for some of the 45% of women for whom it is not known whether they suffered DV).

CDC says 25% of women suffer "domestic violence" but 33% of women suffer "sexual violence" (some of that is at the hands of IP - but it is classified so that it would not appear in the study you cited, because I don't believe it's divided up according to the relationship with the attacker).

NCADV disagrees with CDC. It says that at least 33% of American women have suffered DV (which is my sense of it, after years of this type of research - maybe a bit higher than that, since women define DV very differently in the field). This doesn't include seizing control of financial assets, surveillance of the woman, limitations on where the woman can go, marital rape (studied separately with no good studies on overlap with "regular" forms of violence), transmission of sexual diseases due to unfaithful partner, and other incidents that occur rather more often but are not "DV" (women locked out of their houses, money stolen by an IP, women frightened out or pushed out of a car in the middle of nowhere or on a busy highway, etc).

Anyway, I think there are much larger studies. I think the decade-ish period of time chosen for the study you cited is one of the best in US history in its rosy picture of declining crime - a period which is now 6 years over, with 2020 being perhaps one of the worst on recent record (the 1920's and 30's were actually worse; the 1940's saw a real drop both in homicides and in DV - I'm sure we can all figure out the reasons). Why is crime going up again? Why is crime against women consistently underreported? Those 63,000 missing women speak to a much larger problem on our hands.

There are some very good retrospective large scale analyses being published this year, and last. The areas in which the methodology of studying this huge public health problem are being revised.

The CDC is always useful for the generation of hypotheses - but rarely has the answers nor the funding to conduct the kind of research needed. Research funding (NIMH in particular) has been slashed. This is behind a pay wall, but it's the kind of thing that actual researchers are taking into account - in trying to figure out what's happening to missing women. I think the story of murdered missing women is grim, more grim than any of the figures we've been discussing.

Data Missingness Patterns in Homicide Datasets: An Applied Test on a Primary Data Set

There's also interest in "micromarkers" of DV...which provides an entirely different window into these phenomena. As it turns out, the number of women who abuse their male partners may be higher than we realize (but homicide is still a very unusual outcome).

Did Suzanne's friends (and family) notice some of the micro-markers? We know for sure they noticed some of the markers...of DV and abuse/control...

Great post, and it gives us a perspective on how one can google and find a site that is legit, but excludes details that are relevant to the real statistics. I appreciate the researched information you have provided <modsnip>

 

[Warwick7]

I'm not looking at the data in any study to come to the conclusion that it's likely BM murdered SM.

I'm looking at the way the CCSO has handled this investigation into her disappearance, from day 1.

Sheriff Spezze didn't have to say "we suspect BM has something to do with this", all they had to do was show up at his worksite and start digging.

That very action tells the world, that they have probable cause to "suspect BM has something to do with this".

Search warrants requiring probable cause, are very compelling.

jmo

Bam!!
And now add:

"And we hope he continues to cooperate."

 

[jondaba]

I click "watch thread"
Then when I log in next time, I click "new posts", then click on whatever thread I want to read, and it takes me right to where I left off.

 

[jondaba]

Thank you!

 

[jondaba]

Disarticulating a body is messy, even with the correct tools and the detailed cleanup afterwards is time consuming. I doubt that someone inexperienced in it would have the knowledge to clean up every microscopic spot of forensic evidence. I would think outside of PP. If in fact this is what occurred, it speaks volumes about the actor. Same with the wood chipper scenario. I am betting that the forensic teams went over PP with a fine tooth comb. If any biological evidence had seeped under cabinets, between floor boards and lodged in drain joints, it would have been found. I'm still in the "body is in the back 40 behind PP camp". All the other locations were to lead LE in other directions. Why go to all the trouble to cut up a body or transport it miles away when you can travel a half hour into the wilderness behind your house (without your cell phone) and deposit the remains in a well hidden hole and be back home with no one the wiser. Then it's off to plant false leads and act all panicked and out of sorts.

Is it true that BM used to hunt animals and dissarticulate them?

 

[Momofthreeboys]

Is it true that BM used to hunt animals and dissarticulate them?

My guess is when he hunts he field dresses and takes his game to the processor.

 

[K9Enzo]

Is it true that BM used to hunt animals and dissarticulate them?

It appears BM enjoys hunting. I can quickly name 4 people in my own family who hunt. The public is safe from them. IMO

 

[Boxer]

MOO BM "hunted" in packaged experiences.
Assume he got skills field dressing his trophies, but would need more information to know.

 

[LietKynes]

MOO BM "hunted" in packaged experiences.
Assume he got skills field dressing his trophies, but would need more information to know.

Somewhat like in the movie, "A Sound of Thunder" ?
I think you may be right.
Imo.

 

[Daisyeve]

Who is wearing, hiding or selling Suzanne’s jewelry ?

 

[Gigi3]

MOO BM "hunted" in packaged experiences.
Assume he got skills field dressing his trophies, but would need more information to know.

LOL- this is exactly what my hubby thinks too!
BM seems like the type to pay for a trophy hunting experience IMO.

 

[Ontario Mom]

Who is wearing, hiding or selling Suzanne’s jewelry ?

Has there been any mention of her jewelry in any LE statement or MSM article?

 

[nyvictoria]

Who is wearing, hiding or selling Suzanne’s jewelry ?

This is a great question. Did Suzanne wear certain pieces every day no matter what her activities? I wear a diamond band that I take off only when I shower. I know questions were raised and discussed here when the pic of Suzanne with the large diamond was shown. I hope family have accounted for all of of Suzann’s jewelry, especially if any were Moorman family heirlooms. I believe LE would have contacted jewelers and pawn shops if any large and/or distinctive pieces were missing.