After months of judicial non-disclosure, color photos, text messages and maps from last year’s four-day preliminary hearing in Barry Morphew’s ongoing high-profile murder case were released to the public by 11th Judicial District Judge Ramsey Lama Friday. Following the August 2020 evidentiary hearing, Morphew was released on bond in a September decision by former 11th Judicial District Judge Patrick Murphy. At that time, Murphy also bound the case over for trial.

Information disclosed from the evidentiary hearing is not new, but former Denver Chief Deputy DA Craig Silverman says public disclosure is important for the transparency of the courts, ““It is great that the public can now see the basis for the court rulings on probable cause and whether Barry Morphew needed to remain behind bars until his trial. It’s only right that the public can formulate opinions about the performance of the judicial system.”

Now available to the public for the first time are screen shots of text messages  which tell a story of a woman who was preparing to leave her husband. In some of them, Suzanne Morphew confided to a friend who lived out of state about her failing marriage and about how hard their spiraling relationship had been on the couple’s two daughters.

One text message included in the court release is a message which prosecutors said was key to her disappearance. She wrote it the morning of May 6,2020, three days before her last known communication.

At 10:17 am that Wednesday, Suzanne Morphew texted her husband: “I’m done. I could care less what you’re up to and have been for years. We just have to figure this out civilly.”

That message was retrieved by investigators from Barry Morphew’s mobile phone. Mrs. Morphew’s cell phone was never recovered.

The prosecution has also been ordered to release video and audio evidence in the case which may include at least 20 interviews with Barry Morphew in the year before he was arrested. Mrs. Morphew, was reported missing on Mother’s Day of 2020. Her body has never been found.

During courtroom testimony, the identity of Mrs. Morphew’s texting confidante, Sheila Oliver, was revealed. On Day One of the hearing, former Chaffee County prosecutor Jeff Lindsey questioned FBI Agent Ken Harris about the nature of the emotional communication. Harris interpreted the texts through interviews he had with Oliver.

In the months before she disappeared, Mrs. Morphew wrote in a text to Oliver, “He’s not stable. It’s guilt and desperate measures he’s taking.”

Lindsey asked Harris what was meant by the word “unstable” and Harris answered “Sometimes would set Barry Morphew off and he’d be angry and other times he’d be fine. Suzanne didn’t know when he’d be mad.”

In another text exchange with Oliver, Morphew appeared to be ready to leave the marriage.

“I feel like I’m crazy. I just had a conversation with him. Pretty much told him I can’t be health and stay in this.”

Photos released in the document dump also help tell the story of Suzanne Morphew’s disappearance, including one of her bicycle after it was recovered from the side of a slope on May 10, the day she was reported missing. There’s also a photo of her turquoise bicycle helmet by itself on a mountainside. It was found a week after the bike was discovered just under a mile away.

Other prosecution photo evidence includes injuries to Barry Morphew hands and scratch marks on his upper left arm. Morphew told investigators that he got the marks after looking for his wife in the dense trees near their Chaffee County home.

Defense exhibits include Bera vehicle forensic reports which show where Morphew’s 2013 Ford 350 model truck was parked on the day prosecutors say he killed his wife. That data reveals that his truck did not leave the driveway of the couple’s Maysville home from the time Morphew got home from work that day until the next morning when he took off for a landscaping job in Broomfield.

There is also a screenshot taken from Mrs. Morphew’s iCloud account showing that she was learning to say romantic messages in Spanish after defense attorney Iris Eytan said she and her lover discussed running off to Ecuador.

“Of course I’ll marry you. I love you so much,” was keyed into an ap called Language Corps.

and

“I love you so much. I can’t live without you.”

During the next hearing in the Morphew case set for Feb 1, a motion filed by the defense for a change of venue will be on the table for discussion. That motion has not been made public, but Silverman said that the Friday’s document release should not be a major concern for a possible jury pool. “There is so much out there on the internet already. If the judge asked jurors to set aside pictures they saw in January, I’d bet most jurors could do that.”

Find defense exhibits here and here.