Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Suzanne Morphew Death: Homicide, Animal Tranquilizer in Her System

Episode Date: May 5, 2024

From Mother's Day 2020 until September 2023, only one person really knew that Suzanne Morphew wasn't just missing, she was dead. In September 2023 the remains of Suzanne Morphew were found while investigators were working a different crime, An autopsy was done on the remains and on this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan will explain how doctors were able to create a toxicology report using only bones, and why Susanne Morphew's death has been ruled a homicide.   Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Transcribed Highlights 00:42.91 Introduction of Suzanne Morphew 03:21.30 Talk about autopsy of bones 06:54.40 Discussion of remains  10:43.53 Discussion of Mountain Lions 14:37.94 Talk about the disappearance of Suzanne Morphew 18:16.37 Discussion of darts and animals 20:55.11 Talk about the depth of a hole for remains 26:25.13 Discussion of co-mingling of bones 30:06.14 Discussion of decomposed body 35:20.28.Talking about the bones in the arms 41:21.60 Discussion of darts and toxicology 47:03.48 Conclusion of the Suzanne MorphewSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Four years. Roughly, that's 48 months, just so that we can kind of frame that out just for a quick second. Four years I've been waiting. I've been waiting to find out what happened to Suzanne Morphew. Well, the day has arrived. I can't say I'm completely satisfied but I felt like it was time to sit down

that Dave and I have a conversation for a special episode that's going to deal with this complex scientific evidence that we have laid out before us right now I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this

is Body Bags. Dave, let me reach something real quick before we dig into this. I'm going to give you five names. I'm going to give you five names, and these are names that we need to keep at the forefront of our mind when talking about Suzanne Morphew. They are as follows. Dr. Emily Russell Kinsley, Dr. Leon Kelly, Dr. Allison Cooper, Dr. Jared Murdoch. Dave, five. Five physicians. Five physicians signed off on what amounts to a four-page report that we're looking at right now. And I'm sure that everybody else around the country

will eventually have this in their hands. And as I always tell everybody that talks to me, don't believe what I'm saying. Don't. Look it up. Look it up for yourself, man. Go check it out. All right. Before we go too much further, why were there so many doctors involved?

And today we're dealing with the death of Suzanne Morphew, who went missing on mother's day four years ago you can you believe it's been we're we're that close joe we're a what couple of weeks away from mother's day yeah yeah we are that close we we certainly are and uh and i started covering this as a missing persons case when she that's why this is so important to me i remember the day yeah i remember sitting there and talking it was immediately after mother's day yep nancy had me on yes and on her show and i was i was chatting about this and i remember distinctly thinking about and this is when they found the bicycle i think they had the helmet if i'm not mistaken found they found the bike the day of the day she went missing they

found the bike that night it was the helmet they found a couple of days later and a mile away. Right. And it was dispersed. And I remember talking on air to Nancy about this case. At that time, you said missing persons. And, you know, what I was thinking is, first off, how in the heck this bicycle could get so far off the road and but from a forensic standpoint was there any kind of trace evidence that you could that you could recover off of this thing uh you know points of contact where people are putting their hands people's people's hands other than suzanne morpheus you know where you could find dna

evidence of some type was there any blood evidence on there because you know when i when i hear bicycle i'm thinking bicycle versus motor vehicle and it's a strike and guess who always loses in that yeah it's gonna be the person on the bicycle yeah but there was there was no body no there was no body and this thing is like concealed i mean it's off's off. It's, it's not like it's just like down in the ditch. You know, this thing is like, it's off the road. The bike. And so, yeah. Yeah.

It was down a ditch. Actually, it was on the side of a cliff. I've, I'm not kidding when I, now backing up to the day we did this, it was the weekend. We had gone through mother's day where we have a missing person. We've got very suspicious activity and a bike that is found that night. And the bike, it was found halfway down a cliff. Now, if you've ever done any mountain biking, you know there are some dangerous areas. But this was just off of a road and it had gone down.

But the bike showed no damage. The bike shows no damage whatsoever. It had been basically it rolled down the hill and stopped. But the helmet's not there. They don't find the helmet right away. They're looking for things. But the things that Suzanne Morphew, and by the way, she was not a longtime mountain bike enthusiast. It was a fairly new thing.

She was a cancer patient. Right. And that actually came into play in the autopsy. Yeah, it was a port that they used to administer medication. Yeah. But it was reported that you have a woman missing 50 ish. And he was just 49 at the time and cancer patient. And they're setting it up, say maybe she just decided to take herself out and do away with herself. That was how it was kind of being put out there to some.

But when her bike was found that night, it was found halfway down a cliff. Her helmet is nowhere to be found. The other thing she normally took when she was biking left in her car. Immediately, people start looking at the inner circle, you know? Yeah. Things look suspicious. So we started looking at Barry, her husband, at the inner circle. You know? Yeah. Things look suspicious. So we started looking at Barry, her husband, Barry Morphew. We've talked about that extensively, about the circle of intimates.

You know, those people that would be in her orbit. Because, David, I've got to tell you, you've heard that old term they got a pipe in sunshine uh beautiful area however it's not like you've got random acts of violence that are going on all the time right and i know where her body was found that there was uh and you know there there were other cases of people that had been found apparently adjacent to that location. And they used all kinds of very theatrical terms. Killing field, I heard somebody say. And there were a boneyard. There were all kinds of things.

But come on, let's get real. Yeah. All right. This is not, you're not going to have somebody that's going to go out and maliciously kill this woman, stranger on stranger kind of event, you know? And, and so automatically as an investigator, you're going to look, we won't ask you this show. You find the bike, the bike has it. The bike is down a Hill. There is no body.

I've had a bike wreck before. And by the way, my body was near the bike. It wasn't close, but it was nearby, you know, because I wasn't dead. I was alive and I walked up the hill. Now my bike stayed at the bottom of the hill, but I was found. Okay. She wasn't found. They found her helmet days later in a mile away.

It immediately says, did somebody run her off the road and then take her body and throw the bike down the cliff? Did they run her off the road and she crashed down there and they went her body and throw the bike down the cliff did they run her off the road and she crashed down there and they went down there and got her body up and took her off i mean so it makes no sense for her bike to be found halfway down a cliff but there's no sign of any grass being trampled there's no sign of anybody walking back up the hill any sign of people walking down there's nothing in the dirt indicative of a car running her off the road or by the way, not even trail in the dirt. By the way, this is that night. This is 730 that night. They think she went biking at eight o'clock that morning. Yeah. There's a reason. There's a reason they're

called hit and run because when people hit a subject, whether they're pedestrian or a bicycle or even a another motor vehicle they leave right they don't stay around to collect a body and haul it off somewhere which is you know just so super bizarre in this case i think that that's one of the things that has all kind of befuddled but there was one thing that was said that night her husband he had a good idea mountain lion mountain lion yeah he said it that night when the when he meets with the cops at 7 30 or 8 o'clock 9 o'clock whatever time it was that night they found the bike at 7 30 he was on his way back from wherever he claimed to be bottom line he suggested well a mountain lion how about a mountain lion that i knew that that was BS the moment I heard it. And not necessarily BS because it's coming from him.

I thought that it was an absurd suggestion. Let's roll with bear as well while we're at it. I had to study mountain lions, Joe. You know what I found? What's that? Mountain lions are severely territorial. They also don't run in packs. And when a mountain lion stakes out an area and that is his or hers. They are solitary't run in packs. And when Mount Lion stakes out an area,

and that is his or hers. They are solitary. And that's it. The reason I knew this going back many years is that I actually was in the presence of a presentation, probably the most gas, and by my standard, one of the most ghastly things I've ever seen. I was actually at the American Academy of Forensic Science meeting, and there was an odontologist from, you guessed it, of all places, Colorado. And he presented a case that he had worked of a jogger. And I'm going to get this wrong probably, but I think it was in Boulder where this young lady had taken off down a trail. guess what she ran under she ran under an outcropping of a rock that and this is this trail is set up for people to walk and run on and there were two guys in the parking lot that left after her it was like a lunchtime jog kind of thing they head out and

when they get probably two to three minutes into their run, Dave, they're by that outcropping. Yeah. And the mountain lion has his teeth sunk into her back in the middle of the trail. And they scared the thing off and left her. Holy moly. And the injuries were so ghastly. And this is the other thing that I took away from that. Based upon what I was seeing, you know what you would see a lot of? Blood.

There would be a blood trail. You would see perhaps evidence of drag marks. And I'm not talking about just like where you're carrying dead weight. I'm talking about if an individual had been attacked in the middle of the road and drug off and they were not dead, they'd be fighting. It's just a natural response. And you would see brush torn down, all kinds of things. And you just, that, that wasn't coming up. And so it wasn't an animal, wild animal attack. It just, it just didn't register. But I do know this. We have finally got an actual autopsy report. Listen, it's not robust, but it's more than we had yesterday. We knew that it was coming, but I got to tell you, for our purposes here on Body Bags, it reveals quite months back.

Well, I guess we were in 2023. It's more than a couple months. When the news came out that they had discovered at that time, what they believed to be Suzanne Morphew's remains. And then they confirmed that they were, in fact, her remains. Cause I got to tell you, I got to tell you, Bobo, I was thinking they're never going to find her. And again, I go back to this idea of isolation because this place is so very isolated. And there's any number of locations that she could have been hidden because this is not densely populated.

I don't know if people understand how vast this area is out there and the fact that that these remains were found is just dumb luck as far as i'm concerned and i thought about it at that time i talked to other people about it and they kind of we came to that consensus and the fact that they have them wow i didn't see that coming i bet whoever did this because i gotta tell you i'll go ahead i'm not i'm not burying the lead here but i'll go ahead and tell you right now what we're looking at. They've, they've ruled her death as a homicide, but there's a few qualifiers here that we're going to have to get into. Really curious as to how you're going to do this, Joe, because look, just to give you an idea.

And if the refresher course on the more, the disappearance of Suzanne Morphew right before she went missing mother's day of 2020 on may the 6th she sent a text message to her husband of 25 years barry morphew by the way they knew each other in high school he was a high school baseball player got drafted out of high school by the toronto Jays. She was a school teacher and they got married, had two girls. Once she had the girls, she decided to take time off from her teaching duties to raise her girls and started a landscape company. They ended up moving to Colorado as one of the daughters, Mallory, I believe, went to college there. And so here we are. It's May 6, 2020.

They've been out in Colorado a couple of years. Some people said it was to save their marriage. Their marriage was not doing well. And sure enough, May 6, three days before she goes missing, four days rather, she sends a message to him. I'm done. I could care less what you're up to and have been for years. We just need to figure this out civilly. Suzanne Morphew wrote that to her husband four days before she went missing.

Now, the reason this is important is because during their investigation, police found this. But what they found is that Barry Morphew had gone through great effort to delete that text message from her phone and from his. But the thing is... Why would you do that? Yeah. May 9th, the morning, according to court documents, 59 communications were exchanged between Suzanne Morphew and a man she was dating.

She had been seeing somebody behind her husband's back for a couple of years. They'd gotten together in New Orleans and Florida. He was from Michigan. Somebody she had known for many, many years, a couple years. They'd gotten together in New Orleans, in Florida. He was from Michigan. Somebody she had known for many, many years, a long time. She just had her fill of Barry Morphew. Barry Morphew, you're going to find out, was charged with murder. Not today, not yesterday.

All the evidence put together led police to Barry Morphew, and they arrested Barry Morphew and charged him. However, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the guy, one of the lead detectives on the case, at the time they charged and arrested Barry Morphew, he was against it. Don't do it. It's the wrong move. We do not have enough evidence to do this. And sure enough, as they started going through the motions in court, they got it moved out of Chaffee County into a different county, you know, because of the attention and the lack of people to choose from in Chafee County. And once they got into a new county, they're getting ready to start arguments. We're getting ready to follow this case. And all

of a sudden the defense pleads with the judge to drop this, get this out, kick it out. Judge looks over everything and sure enough, the judge dismissed it. We're talking a couple of weeks away from getting this trial underway. The judge dismissed the case against Barry Morphew in April of 2022. The 11th Judicial District Attorney filed a motion to dismiss without prejudice, which means it can be charged again. Yeah, yeah. And I knew that that was, they have that in their back pocket.

Yes. So this is, as far as I'm concerned, this situation is far from over. But I think that one of the things that we have to consider is now that this assessment has been done you know we've got we've got little beams of light that are now beginning to kind of spread out and show forth here about what do they have to work with well the arrest warrant when they got him yeah is your light ray i read it just before we taped this today please hold forth man the things they found inside that house the evidence they found that made them want to charge very more for you after the autopsy report today made incredible sense joseph scott morgan incredible sense they found um you know the gun you used to fire darts that tranquilize animals? Yes.

Found one of those. They found a cap that goes on the end of that needle in the dryer, in the laundry. Why would you have that unless you'd recently shot one? They found an unspent.22 caliber shell, or a bullet rather. Found a few other things around the house, too, that now that we actually have something to talk about with regard to an autopsy it makes a lot of sense so i gotta ask you joe they only found bones right that's all we found because she had been from may of 2020 until september when they at 2023 last september they found her bones right yeah they did and at the time at time, we didn't know what the status of it was. All right, because there were commentators that came out and said that, oh, yeah, well, there's a potential that we're still going to have what's referred to as soft tissue. And what that means is that you'll still have skin, you'll have muscle, You'll have fat. And all of the components, even if they're in an advanced state of decomposition, that was being put forth.

I've never held that opinion. I always felt as though that her remains would essentially have been skeletonized. And my thought was, are they going to be scattered to the point where you're not going to have a complete skeleton? And I cannot say that they do in fact have a complete skeleton, but they've got, they've got enough. And, um, it's painstaking work because when you're in kind of a, oh, let's see, how can I put this? When you're out in an area like this and you have a body that is in what they have framed, Dave, as a shallow grave, her body is not just laid on top of the earth. She's in a shallow grave.

Now, we don't have any specifics in the autopsy report as far as greatest depth of this defect in the ground, which I'd be very keen on knowing. I want to know because, you know, the deeper the hole is in the ground, that goes to time, doesn't it? Because it takes more time. And what I did here, and you might find this quite interesting, Dave, the soil out there is not like going into your grandma's tomato garden and turning over, you know, topsoil and loam and manure and all that. No, this is hard, hard work that you're talking about. It would require exertion. As a matter of fact, I'd heard one fellow in an interview say that if you're going to show up to dig a hole out here,

you need a pickaxe with you. And my God, I was thinking a pickaxe. Yeah. And then, then you need a really sharp shovel in order to, you know, complete the deal because it's so firm. And so you would, in order to generate a hole, first off, you got to be vested. You got to be vested. You've got to be somebody that wants to bury this woman's remains. Well, and then you think about how are you going to know about this area? How are they going to have specific knowledge of this particular location where she is found? And then you have to show up with the right tools because whoever went out there would know that, okay, I'm not just, you know, I'm not going to, you know, have the, have the shovel here that, uh, you know, I picked up at the local box store, you know, I, and is hanging on the rack with all the other ones. I'm going to need something hefty, something robust.

I'm going to need other tools to break loose this soil. And so that, again, requires a lot of effort. Can you imagine being out there and you're digging a hole and could you be seen by the main road? Would somebody see a truck or a car that's out there parked on the side of the road, or was her body removed from the road and then taken many, many yards away from the road, and you got a lone figure out there digging away, working hard? Were you going to do that in the daylight?

Well, it's not necessarily a robust population around there. Maybe you could get away with it. I have no idea. But I think that someone would have had to have accomplished this probably at nighttime, Dave, in order to facilitate this. But who could have put their hand to the plow, as it were, relative to this to facilitate it. So the fact that they recovered her in this hole and the remains appear to be concentrated around that specific defect, which, by the way, they did in fact identify, they wound up having to recover the remains out there. And another interesting part to this is that they recovered what they believe

are animal bones that are out there as well. So you've got this kind of commingling of remains or skeletal remains that are going on. And so that requires not necessarily simply a, you know, I've talked about the five physicians early on that signed off. You're going to have to call in a forensic anthropologist. Matter of fact, I want a forensic anthropologist out there at the site with the agents. I want them conducting the excavation because they're trained to do this. And they're also trained, and this is kind of an amazing

feat to me. One of my dear friends is a PhD forensic anthropologist. And that boy could walk down the road and he never looked up. He never looked to the left or the right. You know where he always looked? At the ground. And he could find things just laying on the ground. We were walking across a parking lot one day. He found a matchbox that I didn't see. It was corroded and it had clay on it where they were doing work. Dave the Sing had an image engraved on it of a hunter with a dog. And it turned out the circle of the thing was like 1888. And he just happened to look down and he's seeing this thing. They have

forensic anthropologists. We hear about the body farm and all this sort of thing. They are amazing with the way they can, like you and I might see a clot of dirt or rock. That's not what they see. They see something completely different. And it takes years and years of training in order to appreciate the environment and kind of understand it. But they did recover these remains. And so everything has to be examined. And in the case of Suzanne Morphew, one of the things that would have to take place is that they would try to reconstitute her skeleton on one table. And I guarantee you, Dave, they took pictures of this there. And there's, for those that

don't have the actual, the actual list actual list and from just bear with me here, be patient. Um, there is actually here, here are the, they collected everything in three bags. Um, and they have these things broken down so that they collected in their first week, they have collected day one. There's a day one bag. And then there is a second day one bag that actually contains the skull. So they've kept the skull separate from whatever it was that they found on the first day. And so on day two and three, they went out and found more remains, which they bagged together. So they wound up with three bags of remains. It's commingling of these remains.

And you can't really kind of understand that, you know, when you're out there. You have to take it back to a laboratory environment to break everything down. And, you know, plus you've got dirt and they also found wood. And wood, many times, Dave, can actually look like bone but here's here's what we came up with this is kind of the inventory just so that everybody's on the same sheet of music here so here we go we have a skull with a mandible which is actually the jaw we have the sacrum which the sacrum is it's not it involves the coccyx, but it's, it's that last destination going down your spine, that big flat bone that is literally that comprises your tailbone.

They've got multiple ribs. It's surprising to me many times, uh, that they actually find ribs because ribs animals love these things. So they've got bilateral, uh, radius and ulna, which are the two bones in the forearm. They've got the manubrium and they've got the sternum. And of course the sternum is that plate that covers your heart right in the center of your chest. You can feel yours. They've got the right scapula, which is, you know, that kind of wing shaped bone that's onshaped bone that's on your back. Okay, so the right one, they've got one of the clavicle, which is your collarbone.

They've got the right and left femoral bones. They've also got the right and left tip fib, which are the two bones in your lower leg. And then they've got multiple vertebral bodies as well. And here's the kicker. And this is what this leads to, Dave. There was no, and I mean no, soft tissue left. I thought that, I really thought that what we were going to see was that we were going to have some semblance of soft tissue because many times, particularly in more of an arid climate like this, you can have natural mummification that takes place and you'll have soft tissue, the remainder of the skin that will kind of be dried out and thinly stretched over the

skeletal remains. But at the end of the day, the answers are actually going to rest in the bones. When you have a decomposed body, and when I say decomposed, the body is essentially in a state that is, first off, unrecognizable most of the time. As you can imagine, it's very pungent. It's swollen. Skin is real greasy. You've got skin slippage going on. All of these changes have taken place for a protracted period of time. But the saving grace here, scientifically, is that you still have soft tissue. And even though you might not get tox results from blood, because the blood has gone through such decomposition, what we would do, Dave, many times is take a slice, particularly of the liver. You can do it with a brain too, but with the liver and you place the liver into that slice

of liver into a, a tube, like a test tube, and you put it on a centrifuge and you spin it down, you spin it down to the point where it liquefies and you can draw that up and you can perform toxicology. And here's another little known fact that if you think that was bad, the next one I'm about to give you is really bad. I was thinking if you start talking about fava beans and candy, I'm really going to lose my, you know, no, no, no. I'm going to talk to you about maggots though, because one of the things that we can do with

maggots is if we can extract maggots from the body, guess what they do? Particularly with opiates and cocaine, they will begin to metabolize those drugs that are contained within the body. If you can collect the maggots, you can spin those down and actually find out what was going on in the system of the deceased. Now you can get a in the system of the deceased. Now, you can get a qualitative amount most of the time, but you're not going to be able to get a quantitative amount. Like, that will say, okay, you're in lethal levels, not like blood. But you're still talking about having tissue, right?

Yeah, that's with tissue. And so that's, you know, the five physicians that I mentioned just a moment ago? Right. That's a conundrum here. There, and let me address this real quick. I know that we're going long on this, but I, this is a great moment that everybody can learn from. Um, the reason you have five physicians on this thing, Dave is first off, they, they're no fools. They know what the, the, the heat of the spotlight is like, right. And they're not, they're not going to try heat of the spotlight is like right and they're not they're not going to try to put the responsibility off on the other these guys are physicians so what they do is they

sit around in morning meetings and i've been in them and they talk about cases of the day dude they've been talking about this case for a long time at this office. And so what has happened is, can you imagine this? If you ever wrote a report and you didn't just have like one of your colleagues review it, you got five reviewing it. And they're going to pick this thing. They're brutal. I mean, they're brutal and they need to be. Well, you got to find the truth. You have to because you say, I wouldn't have come to this conclusion. But whatever occurred, you've got validation by five separate subjects here

that are saying scientifically we're signing our name on this thing and we agree with your diagnosis here. And I got to know how they came up with it because you just went through the whole thing about how we're going to get toxicology reports from a liver that you run through a centrifuge and through skin centrifuge and through skin and blood and things like that. But from everything we're seeing, you know,

you started off with the Raiders of the lost art guys going out there and getting the bones, right? That's all we've got. We've got bones and we do have some clothing, but we don't have any soft tissue. We don't have any tissue. We don't have any,

we have nothing other than hard bones, Joe, a skull, a femur. we don't have any tissue we don't have any we have nothing other than hard bones joe a skull a femur we don't i'm not saying i've looked at this whole report how are you going to get toxicology when all you have are bones okay everybody find your hip joint okay uh up at the top the top of your femur okay where your your femur actually fits into that ball and socket. That joint right there, the head as it's referred to, the head of the femur is arguably one of the most robust, dense bones in the body, but guess what else it contains? It has vessels in there, okay? And so anything that is in there is, there is a possibility that you can actually, there's a possibility that you can actually extract data from there, if you will.

I know that sounds very computer-like, but, you know, data is really what we're looking for. And it's interesting here, kind is really what we're looking for. And it's interesting here, kind of backing up just for a second, one of the things that was done, and this is a quote, the right femoral head, femoral fragment and femur head, is retained for toxicology testing prior to release for forensic anthropology examination. So what they did, Dave, is given the status of this bone, one of two things happened. Either the head of the femur was fragmented off and they retained it, or, and I've seen this done before, they went to the shaft just beneath the head of the femur

and they used a striker saw and they cut the thing right into, and they held onto the entire head of the femur. And if you're holding onto the entire head of the femur, when you begin to test this thing, because you're going to, it's a destructive test. It's you, I don't, you know, people talk about destructive and non-destructive. This is a destructive test. So you want the biggest opportunity of sample at that point in time. So they're going to retain. And that's because once you ruin it, you don't get to put it back together. It's gone, baby. It's gone. And so that's, that's apparently what they did here. They retained that and then they turned everything over to, to the forensic

anthropologist. So they would have had a sit down with a forensic anthropologist, say, listen, we did this to the bone. I don't want you to think that some kind of dismemberment has taken place or anything like that. And there is a forensic anthropologist that's actually mentioned in the autopsy report, and it would have been their job to examine the bone. So they're examining essentially a headless femur or fragmented femur that has been extracted. It was fragmented and they tried to contain everything. But how do we get to this point? Well, what has to happen is essentially I'm going to try to put this in as simple as terms as possible.

They take a solid sample of bone and they will drop it into a tube. And they're essentially going to bombard this thing and use a methodology that's called ASE. It's called accelerated solvent extraction. And the idea is to bring out as much of the content of that bone that can be analyzed. And they're going to throw this thing into a mass spec machine, mass spectrometry, to take a look and see what they can find in there. Because there's certain base elements you're going to find in bone. And we always hear about this. You need to, you know, eat plenty of calcium and you have calcium in your diet and all this. You're going to expect to find minerals like that. But what you're not going to

expect to find is animal tranquilizer. And in this particular case, hold on to your hat, that's what they found in the head of this femur. So I cannot imagine, I can only imagine right now, because this, again, you've got a doctoral level forensic toxicologist at the state crime lab that's involved in this now. And I can just imagine they're sitting there in their lab, they're in their white lab coat. This thing has been taken to the state lab. The forensic toxicologist is sitting there and they had like this, all of a sudden this clarity came upon when they began to read this test. And they were like, holy smokes, look what's contained. I think there are people out there that would like to know this information. Immediately they're picking up the phone. The five doctors, they're calling the five doctors

at this point in time, say, hold on a minute, Haas. We've got something to tell you that you're not going to believe. We're going to send the full report, but I got to tell you, just over the phone, this is a gigantic piece of information because, Dave, the compound that we're talking about here is used in tranquilizer darts. For animals. To literally sedate animals. What was it you told me about? One of the compounds, there's essentially, I think, six compounds in here. Yeah.

One of the compounds, you said something about a large animal. Dude, I'm not trying to be disrespectful when I say dude. No, no, please. I don't even know how to pronounce this thing. Okay. But it's a sedative. I looked it up. It's a sedative used, commonly used for pigs and elephants.

Who is going to ingest a sedative for pigs and elephants when you can find human ones not far away yeah yeah it's uh it's it's certainly well it's certainly uh intriguing i think from from an investigative standpoint and yeah i think dave the the one that you're actually referring to here is the azeprone, which is actually, it's used. Okay, let me paint this picture for you. Please. You've got to help me understand it, Joe, because this has really messed with my head in the last couple of hours. Well, just imagine you've got a charging elephant coming at you, but you don't want to kill the elephant. All right. Now, it's certainly going to take a higher dose, say, for instance, than if you were shooting, I don't know, raccoons or squirrels or foxes in your backyard.

But it would it would it has been used to sedate elephants, Dave. And so it's and it's not just that it doesn't simply just kind of stand alone. There are other elements to this compound, uh, that all mix in and every single one of them has, has something to do with sedation, anti-anxiety, all these sorts of things. So if you hit somebody up, say for instance, with this substance, pretty quickly, they're going to get weak-kneed, David. They're going to get to the point where they're not going to be able to function. If anyone out there has ever had anesthesia, that first burst of drugs that they give you to kind of get you ready for surgery, where you kind of get that milky, warm feeling. It's one of the best feelings in the world. You know, you don't care about anything else.

There's no anxiety. You're going to go through that and then all of a sudden because of these other compounds that are in here when you mix them together darkness is going to wash over you and there ain't a damn thing you can do about it because it's in your system your body begins to metabolize this thing you're uptaking this stuff and it's hard it's hard to know I know that there can be a lethal level with these substances. I think that more is going to come out because, look, we still don't have the toxicology report at this point. We don't even have the anthropology report.

All we have is this four-page report that was issued from the medical examiner to all interested parties. There's going to be a lot more of this to come. But not only did they recover bones out there, they've got remnant of clothing as well that's found in this grave with Suzanne Morphew. And a lot of it is kind of fragmented and ragged. But what really struck me, Dave, was the fact that they found a bullet.

They found a bullet out there. So what sense do we make of this? Can we actually appreciate a gunshot wound in bone? Possibly. But here's the rub. It has to have passed through a bony structure and have left a fracture that would have occurred not post-mortem but anti-mortem and they can suss that out they can actually make sense of that um and can you tie that projectile back to a very particular weapon because here's another thing that wasn't mentioned we don't know what caliber is we only know that we've got a weathered

projectile that is found there in the dirt adjacent to this woman's body that is now skeletonized with tattered clothing and she's got tranquilizers in her in the head of her femur she got four different types joe and this and the bullet those two things come to mind because you found the the cap for the needle that's used in a dart gun they found that in the dryer and by the way barry morphew said he did that he used these tranquilizers for deer that he would shoot them so that he could harvest their antlers. I'd never heard that before. I haven't either. Yeah, that's why they found the cap in the dryer. It must have just been in my pocket.

Of course, that doesn't explain anything else, but they also found the bullet next to the back. Well, down in these parts, good old boys put on their boots and their blue jeans, and they go walking through the woods. You can find racks just laying on the ground if you know where to look and you're looking for rub on the tree and all that sort of thing but you're telling me you're going to tranquilize a deer which i think out there they have mule deer which are bigger than our whitetail deer i guess you can get whitetail too i guess you're going to take what are you going to do take a saw and saw it

off their head i don't know i i've never i've never heard this i heard it you know when these initial reports came out but i'm fascinated by this because yeah we've got the tranquil we've we've got the elements that go along with this thing but bubble we've got we've got this doggone round that's out there i want to know what the caliber is. And also the status of the round. Is it deformed in any way? Did it pass through multiple bony structures in the body? Is it, is it a round that could have been a hollow point that mushroomed? Is it a tiny round? I don't know, like a 25 caliber, a 380 or a 22 caliber. I'd be very fascinated by that.

I'd want to know. Or is it a rifle round? You know, if it's a rifle round, it's going to be kind of robust, you know, 7.62 perhaps or less so 5.56. I want to know, you know, what this round was and what type of weapon was it fired from. And also, if you've got a projectile, if you've got a projectile, to me, that means that they used a metal detector out there. How big a sweeping area did you cover out there when you're doing your search all over the place? Did you recover a spent casing? If it's a spent casing, then we automatically know that this is a semi-automatic handgun, if it is a handgun,

and it ejected, didn't find it. But if it's a revolver, if it's a revolver, that means that whoever fired this projectile walked away with the spent casing still contained in the cylinder of that revolver. And that's one of the things that you're looking for here. I think that there's a lot more to come on this case, David, but I don't know if it offers anybody really any peace. I think that maybe we're less, we might be a bit less confused, but I know this. It seems as though that when her body, Suzanne Morphew, her body was removed from that hole in the ground, in that hard, hard soil,

with her came some answers, but also a mountain of questions. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bag. This is an iHeart Podcast.