Found Deceased CO - Suzanne Morphew, 49, did not return from bike ride, Chaffee County, 10 May 2020 #15

[KLM6]

Knox, is this type of silence rare in these types of situations? I'm not a crime fighter, just have free time because of the virus.

Welcome Jimbythelake. I have only followed a few cases on here, but my opinion is that usually we at least have more press conferences and/or interviews to maintain attention and keep tips coming in. Of course each case is unique so I guess each has its own explanation. That said, it is normal for steadfast followers to get restless when we dont hear enough, especially when we hear nothing at all - from anyone. The silence here is definitely curious.

 

[EggSalad]

In the “interview “ with TD, BM says the girls texted mom, mom never responded, girls called the neighbor, and the neighbor called BM. BM asked neighbor to contact the police. MOO

About minute 7:00

What an unusual series of events.

First, the girls called the neighbor instead of their own dad? And this is on a Sunday afternoon/Mother’s Day no less?

Then, when the neighbor calls BM, BM asks the neighbor to call 911 for his own wife?

I can think of various scenarios of how this could happen but none of them seem logical if BM is completely innocent.

 

[Truecolors]

What an unusual series of events.

First, the girls called the neighbor instead of their own dad?

Then, when the neighbor calls BM, BM asks the neighbor to call 911 for his own wife?

I can think of various scenarios of how this could happen but none of them seem logical if BM is completely innocent.

It is a very strange series of events.

It looks bad for BM, IMO, but it’s also straight out of his mouth.

Maybe there is a reasonable explanation for all of it. Or maybe it looks bad because it is bad. Time and evidence will tell.

It’s not difficult for me to understand why people were alarmed enough to call the police (the girls, the neighbor). This was past 5 pm on Mother’s Day, and she was presumably expecting the girls, who were calling (according to BM) because they were running late. With this timeline, it sounds like Mother’s Day would be just about over by the time they finally made it home. Of course they were alarmed when she couldn’t be reached at all.

MOO

 

[kkdj]

It is a very strange series of events.

It looks bad for BM, IMO, but it’s also straight out of his mouth.

Maybe there is a reasonable explanation for all of it. Or maybe it looks bad because it is bad. Time and evidence will tell.

It’s not difficult for me to understand why people were alarmed enough to call the police (the girls, the neighbor). This was past 5 pm on Mother’s Day, and she was presumably expecting the girls, who were calling (according to BM) because they were running late. With this timeline, it sounds like Mother’s Day would be just about over by the time they finally made it home. Of course they were alarmed when she couldn’t be reached at all.

MOO

Iirc SM was known to take her bike rides in the morning, before church. So, if for instance, the girls were expected to arrive at 5:00, tried to call because they were running late, no answer multiple times, then yes. That would cause concern. They would have expected her to be home waiting for their arrival. So, they called the neighbor to check on her. Her car was there but not her bike. So, naturally they wondered if she had a bicycling accident. I'm sure there was also communication with their dad who decided to ask the neighbor to call 911.
moo

 

[oviedo]

Going on week five. I know the drill, but the silence from LE and the family is frustrating.

ITA - we just are in a wait mode now IMO.

 

[oviedo]

We never wanted to let her down': Meet the investigators who helped solve Kelsey Berreth's murder

I posted this a few days ago - it may help to understand what may be happening while we are getting no news.

 

[oviedo]

And our own @Angleterre posted this - and I was trying to find @riolove77 post about "one bite of the apple" where the prosecution viewpoint was posted. all very informative. IMO

I don’t know if the following post will help my fellow Websleuths members with regards to how a major investigation is run . I have tentatively mentioned this in a previous post but I have had quite a few questions privately in response so I decided to tidy up and expand my previous post ...
Here goes ....

With any major enquiry wether that be a murder / Homicide or a missing person , a dedicated team of detectives is set up with a SIO ( senior investigative officer) as the lead .
Certainly in the UK, a policy book is commenced and everything that you know , everything that subsequently happens, every decision taken and every action followed up, is written into the policy book . Every decision made by the SIO and the justification behind such a decision, has to be written into the policy book .
I was responsible for leading a number of murder investigations and Missing persons investigations and I would lead teams of detectives and forensic experts etc
A twice daily briefing would be held where everyone has an input as to what has happened that day , any evidence found , any witnesses spoken to etc and a summary of the day’s investigation would be written up by the SIO.
Each investigation has a strategy and that strategy is followed from the Murder and Major Crime investigations Manual .
So at the start of the investigation, there will be various strategies drawn up to encompass all of the different strands of the Investigation.
They are :
1.Victim - what do we know ?
2. Suspect - Do we have any?
3. Circumstances of last seen
4. Intelligence - What do we know ? What can we find out?
5. Cell phone analysis
6. Forensics - what do we have ? How are they to be prioritised? Submissions to laboratory and cost?
DNA evidence
Fingerprints
7. Search parameters and recovery of evidence to include continuity of retrieval
8. CCtv - What’s available ? How do we prioritise it?
9. Cell Phones - Victims, Suspect’s, Family etc
10. Family History
11. Actions - those raised that need investigation and those that are considered but not deemed to take the investigation further ( but it still all needs recording )
12. Forensic mapping
13. Witnesses
14. Interviews - suspect/s?
15. Exhibits/Property Officer - to record everything brought into the enquiry and the continuity of that evidence
16. File of evidence - Who will create the file of evidence for submission to CPS/DA
17. Warrants - allocated officer to swear all warrants
18. Disclosure - Officer allocated to start a disclosure record ( court process )
19. Family liaison officer - Officer allocate to be the go between for the family and SIO
20. Media strategy - controlled release of information to press
I could go on but I think that you get the drift that any investigation of this type is massive and takes time and has to be that way to get it right so that by the time it gets to the Court process, there’s no room for doubt or for weaknesses in the investigation to allow the accused to get off on a technicality or procedural issue .
Then if there is a suspect you need to start thinking of who will do the suspect interview and the downstream monitoring and alibi checks .
And on top of all that, the biggest and most onerous task besides cell phone evidence retrieval, is CCTV ! And that is a biggie ... it takes Detectives hours upon hours to go through and watch CCTV to enable them to ascertain if there is anything of evidential value on each individual recording and that can be CCTV from the street , from a shop, car park, toll booth , buildings, churches , Public CCTV along a route and individual CCTV in peoples driveways or on their mobile phones etc
You start to get the idea of just how much work is involved in a major investigation and that’s before you go to a judge to swear out warrants and arrest the perpetrator. Once an arrest takes place, you then have interviews and downstream monitoring in real time of the interviews and then liaison with the CPS in UK and DA/attorney general I think maybe in the USA? And then putting the whole file of evidence together and ensuring full disclosure to the defence ... it’s massive workloads and it goes on and on ...
Cell phone data is also massive because of pings of location and subsequent searches and data dumps of all cell phones active within a specific MAST area and tracing who those numbers belong to and ascertain what they were doing in the area. And I can tell you that the evidence from one cell phone alone can run into thousands of pages for my detectives to read through and decipher what, If anything, is relevant to the case . So can you imagine when you have numerous people involved in an investigation, wether it to be rule them in or out or as an alibi or a victim, just how onerous this task is? And it is just one small part of the investigation.

Also the CCTV , people ask why now , 1 month later ? Well you don’t know what evidence that LE already have and if they had nothing else then the individual private residence CCTV would have been done immediately but it is a massive task and takes officers hours and hours to sit and watch every piece of CCTV that comes into the enquiry so it’s now easier to say , keep hold of your own individual residential CCTV and if you think that you have something of importance then let us know immediately otherwise we will get round to looking at it when we can because EVERYTHING has to be prioritised.

In the UK we have HOLMES ( home office Major enquires system ) and everything is entered into the system and looked at by three officers working with admin staff and any actions deemed necessary as a result of those 3 officers painstakingly going through every piece of information, item, cell phone number, cctv , search recovery evidence etc and allocating actions ( work ) to officers to compete before they are given another action . And some officers are individually given specific roles for example CCTV, Cell phones, Intelligence, Statement takers , Family liaison .

So this gives you an idea of just what is going on behind the scenes .
And the information released has to be protected and provenanced to ensure accuracy and the SIO doesn’t want information released unless absolutely necessary because the perpetrator may slip up and say something that hasn’t yet been released to the public and that then becomes dynamite to the investigation.
I hope this helps you all to understand the process , procedures and time for any major investigation to bear fruit .

Regarding technology- People do not realise just how much electronic tracking there is in our everyday lives and the footprint that we leave . Let’s take for example the obvious ones like public CCTV and residential / business CCTV and street CCTV , shop and bank and fuel CCTV, road surveillance CCTV to monitor traffic flow and speed camera CCTV etc The list is endless! Then there are tracking devices on the car if there is one , then there is the cell phone and text message/social media footprints alongside Pings
But - there are some footprints that we either don’t think about or are not aware of for example I own a luxury ( ish ) brand of car and I don’t have a key , I have a black plastic fob that I carry around which activates the car but without inserting it anywhere within my car console. Now when my car has a problem and I go to the dealership, this fob is inserted into their computer and it tell you every journey I have made and the status of the car throughout that journey, if the fuels low , if the seatbelt warning is activated, if any warning lights come on , if tyre pressure is low etc
I was gobsmacked just how much information that could be obtained and to be quite honest, I am a law abiding citizen but it scared even me , just how much we are being monitored. Then there is ANPR both mobile and static and lets not forget that it’s not only your cell phone that can be pinged and calls traced but LE can go to any mast and triangulate all mobile cell phones that ping off a particular mast at a given time and they can cross reference the data from this to any of the contacts in your phone and see if there are any patterns . So just from this you can start to see how many avenues are open for LE to look at. And then we have instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp and snapchat and Twitter and email and fit bits and apple watches and you start to get my drift .....
Edited to add: We have family Life 360 so that we can see where our children are and vice versa and my DH decided to turn his location permissions off
BUT although it does not now tell me his location in words, it does show him driving down the various roads and highways when he’s out and about. So another form of surveillance and if somebody was going to commit a heinous crime, they cannot possibly erase all their electronic footprints

Then we have Amazon Alexa and Smart devices ...
The list is endless!


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[OldCop]

Good post, but I'd like to say a little bit more about the bike, as I think it's one of the keys to this case. I personally think LE found the bike, and I'll explain why I think that in a moment, but I am curious: why do you think it matters who found the bike? Maybe you think it matters because if BM found it, that would explain how he knew what way the wheel was facing? Maybe, but again, I think there's reason to believe that LE found it and that they found it before BM got home.

Let's look at what BM said in the interview with Tyson Draper. "The bike," he told Draper, "was found at the bottom of the hill by that tree where the peak is." He indicated which tree he meant when he said "that tree" because Draper later made a video in which he walks down the hill to the tree in question. Later in the interview, Barry began describing how the bike was situated when it was found. Of this he said, "it was on the ground. The wheel was facing---," and then he cut himself off and changed the subject as if he has just thought of something. It's at this point that he began criticizing LE's handling of the scene, saying, "the sheriff's department ... they screwed everything up ... they shouldn't have touched it. They should've left it. It's evidence. They pulled it up and we had cars over here." He continued to criticize LE's handling of the scene as follows: "They were walking all over this area, which if somebody abducted her they would have had foot tracks. They would have fingerprints on the bike. They let ten other people touch the bike. I mean we was really upset that first night." It is then at this point that he said: "I was in Denver, so I didn't get here until nine o'clock that night." That, for me, implies that the events above transpired before he arrived home.

Thus I believe one can infer at least two things from BM's words above: one, that it was LE that found the bike; and two, that LE found the bike before BM got home that night.

Interview Between Draper & Morphew [w/ transcript]

Thanks for your thoughts on this @J.M. Bee. If indeed LE found the bike and it was before BM got home, who reported to him? I can see LE saying to him when he arrived on the scene, “We’ve found your wife’s bike, but we haven’t found her yet.” I can’t see them telling him that they really screwed up, that they trampled all over the scene, and oh by the way, “we let ten people touch it”.
If I arrived there and it was my wife I would be asking, “Are you sure she’s not there?, Have you searched all around here?”
My thoughts on why it may be important who found the bike: If Barry found it that close to the home, when he got back from Denver after dark and after LE had already been searching for a couple of hours, it would be suspect to me. If LE found it but didn’t tell him all the particulars, how did he know how and where it was found as well as the position? Was it possibly because he left it there? His hesitation and cutoff sentence during the interview with TD made me think, oops, he slipped up. He knows things he shouldn’t know. Also his statement, “We had cars there”..... who’s we?
If it wasn’t BM and it wasn’t LE who found the bike, where was it and what were the circumstances? Were some of the neighbors, like the one who made the 911 call, searching at that time?
I often wonder why BM’s nephew TN urged the public to ask LE in what condition was the bike found. What would he deduct from that information? If the bike had been hit by a vehicle, either by accident or as part of an abduction, there would be paint chips. By now we would have had a request for information on a ___ colored (year, make & model) seen in the area on that date.
BM’s statement to TD regarding LE’s ineptitude really seemed contrived to me. It was a bit manic and over-hyped. If LE was that careless, what a relief it must have been to BM that they didn’t find evidence if it was he who placed the bike there.
There was a lot of discussion during the Gannon Stauch case as to why LE didn’t immediately do this or that. The thing is, when LE gets a call for some type of incident, they arrive on the scene prepared to initially handle the incident as it was reported. In Gannon’s case, he was reported as a runaway. In Suzanne’s case it was reported that she didn’t return from a bike ride. I’m sure when LE arrived on the scene, they asked if SM had a regular bike route. They would have asked when she was seen and how the neighbor knew she was on a bike ride. They would know they had only a couple of hours of daylight left so they probably started looking along the route for any signs of her or her bike. We know that that evening the sheriff called in other agencies and tracking dogs. Was that before or after they found the bike? Once the bike was found, LE would spread out in a circumference around it and work outwards to see if she was laying injured nearby. They probably were calling her name and looking for signs. They may have not even touched the bike at that point. They may have visually examined it for clues as to how it ended up in that location. It may have been fingerprinted and photographed before it was moved. The point is, we don’t know anything about the bike and LE has chosen to keep all that they know to themselves. They have also chosen not to talk about the other “personal items” they found several days later?
For whatever reason, LE decided to bring in both the CBI and the FBI within the first couple of days of her disappearance. This is around the time they ruled out animal attack, accident, etc. This tells me that what they found, (or didn’t find), led them to certain conclusions. It may take minutes, several hours, or several days before it becomes apparent that something just doesn’t add up in a case.
Sorry for the long ramble. I think most of us here keep playing out this case in our heads trying to figure out the rhyme or reason for Suzanne’s disappearance.
ET correct spelling.

 

[Knox]

Knox, is this type of silence rare in these types of situations? I'm not a crime fighter, just have free time because of the virus.

Each case is unique primarily due to the LE Agency who is investigating. Some are more open, others are virtually silent. So to answer your question no, it's not rare.

 

[rainbowshummingbird]

Knox, is this type of silence rare in these types of situations? I'm not a crime fighter, just have free time because of the virus

My take on the silence, LE doesn’t need anything from the public.

 

[FelicityLemon]

RBBM

Where did this tidbit of information come from? Any particular reason that you are alluding to it??

JMVHO

I read it as just an example.
Similar to "LE isn't looking for a 3' 8" freckle faced redhead."
LE hasn't announced any details at all.

 

[DizzyB]

If the bike had been hit by a vehicle, either by accident or as part of an abduction, there would be paint chips. By now we would have had a request for information on a ___ colored (year, make & model) seen in the area on that date.

Maybe the paint chips matched a certain pickup. I can see the defense. Accidentally hit her while driving out of the residence, panicked, and in his grief and mental breakdown, after realizing what he had done, tried to hide all evidence. He could not face what had happened to the love of his life, the mother of his children. Something in him snapped.

 

[Janeumayer]

In my opinion, and this is just me coming up with this after a month of us chewing at everything but straws. This is one of those rare cases that occur in a small town and persons may know each other or know of each other. So they may know the background of the person missing, even the type of relationship they had with their spouse. I think this is the reason such a huge LE, CBI, FBI (among other agencies) deployment and effort occurred from the moment that call was made saying Suzanne was missing.
If LE is quiet, it’s for a damn good reason.

 

[chinablue1]

My thoughts .... On the silence ... If LE is building a case against BM, it probably is not a good idea to go public now, until they have a solid case because of the children. I also think, as I stated in an earlier post the silence is one way to make someone feel the heat.


Just my moopinion

 

[chinablue1]

DBM

 

[Feistyomi]

Then why haven’t they shut down tip line, and why are they (re) canvassing? IMO, even if there is a very strong case, there is always room for another nail in the coffin. Citizens continue to be the invaluable eyes on the ground. Hopefully today, more information will come out.

 

[chinablue1]

DBM not sure what happened ,computer froze after restart I had three postings

 

[Feistyomi]

Double post DBM

 

[borndem]

I have an idea - remember writing 101 - school when you had to write about whatever topic - whether you necessarily agreed with it or not - what if there was a ‘theme’ day of sorts (or hour) where even those who believe *whomever* did *whatever* had to look elsewhere...smart minds could find something that finds SM.

Interesting point.

Welcome to Websleuths,
CzarinaR !!​

 

[Fireflize]

He reminded me of Maynard G. Krebs. Cool, but sort of not cool. Maybe it's a generational difference. IMO
Maynard G. Krebs was television's first hipster

Thx Dave ! Loved Maynard