Colorado mom Suzanne Morphew’s husband arrested for her murder for the second time

…

But the mother of two’s disappearance had become the biggest story in Colorado.

49year-old Suzanne Morphw remains missing.

Home of a missing woman from Chaffi County is now being searched.

Teams are combing the terrain, even brought in boats to search the local waterways.

And we’re going to fan out and we’re going to work that area very carefully.

Okay.

4 months in, Suzanne’s brother, Andrew Mormon, organized a citizen search.

He said he felt he had to do something, anything.

I’d hoped to find her alive.

and and at some point you have to realize when somebody’s missing after so long that the chances of that diminish dramatically.

The thought that Suzanne may have been abducted hit the peaceful picturesque town of Salida hard.

I came home every day and my wife asked me, “Have they found her yet?” Dan Rydenower has covered the story for his local morning show.

Hippie Radio 975 with Dan R.

Good morning.

827.

Now Barry and Suzanne Morphw were not known well in Salida, Colorado.

They had only been here for a couple of years.

Before moving to Colorado in 2018, Barry and Suzanne grew up in the small town of Alexandria, Indiana, where they met in high school.

Suzanne competed for homecoming queen.

Barry was a star baseball player who was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays.

Injury ended Barry’s dreams of a major league career.

They both attended Purdue University and married in 1994.

He started a landscaping business.

Suzanne taught middle school before becoming a full-time mother.

They had a couple of daughters, one in college and they had a daughter in high school.

Macy, 16 years old when her mom disappeared, lived at home.

Her sister, Mallerie, attended college, and the morphuse told some friends they moved to a home just outside of Salida to be closer to their older daughter.

But there were also rumblings about the state of the Morphwus marriage.

Maybe a new place, a new home, new scenery around them would strengthen their family and therefore strengthen their marriage.

But the move did not appear to improve the relationship.

It was a tough time, says her sister, Melinda Mormon.

My sister had um sent me a text message.

It was very lengthy.

It was very powerful.

It was very revealing.

In this Zoom interview, Melinda said she received Suzanne’s text two days before she disappeared and it was boiling over with anger toward Barry.

The text read in part, “He’s also been abusive emotionally and physically.

I feel more angry now.

Anger at what I’ve allowed.

” Barry was very dominant in the relationship and my sister was a very passive, gentle soul.

He had a great tendency to overpower and intimidate people to get what he wanted.

And what kind of boss was he? You know, he was real quiet, stern.

He knew what he was doing cuz that’s what he did in Indiana.

Cody Cox was part of Barry’s landscaping crew for nearly 2 years when Barry first arrived in Colorado.

I talked pretty highly about Barry cuz I was with him all the time.

He’s like inspiration to me almost.

He was a real cool guy.

Cody said he regularly heard Barry talking to Suzanne as they drove in Barry’s truck.

They seemed to communicate pretty well.

She is a sweetheart.

She is a real kind lady.

She’s almost like an angel, like something you’d see off a Hallmark movie, you know, like real nice, almost too perfect.

So when I heard about the news, I didn’t believe it.

I heard it actually on the radio and I was like, did they just say Suzanne? And I was like, oh my gosh, who would even want to hurt her? The first day authorities searched for Suzanne, they found her mountain bike close to the Morphw home.

Where was the mountain bike found? It was found right over this little cliff right here, resting on these boulders.

She was new at mountain biking, so an accident is certainly plausible.

I would only ask where’s Suzanne.

She would have been injured.

Yeah, she would have been injured.

Investigators believe the scene was staged.

And days later, they discovered Suzanne’s helmet roughly a mile away off Highway 50.

The helmet was found on the south side of the road, this side of the road, which would be to our left.

So, is the thought somebody threw it out of a window? Perhaps.

That’s the thinking.

Yes.

It appeared as though Suzanne could have been abducted.

And that’s when Barry made that public plea.

Please, we’ll do whatever it takes to bring you back.

In those early days, Barry had a theory about what happened to Suzanne that he shared with Tyson Draper, who has his own YouTube channel.

They happened to meet at the site where Suzanne’s mountain bike was found.

And Tyson secretly videotaped Barry.

Um the first night there was a mountain lion.

The officer seen it walk by the car.

So we thought maybe she got attacked by a lion.

A mountain lion killed her.

If that happened, there would have been signs of that.

There would have been blood.

There would have been struggle.

So that was a very short-lived speculation.

Authorities began to doubt that Suzanne even took a bike ride, especially after her sunglasses and hydration backpack were found in her car.

Investigators also found her driver’s license and credit cards in her Range Rover, but her cell phone was missing.

Did Barry Morphw cooperate with investigators during the course of this? He had been interviewed by investigators through the course of it and he talked to investigators almost every time.

11 News reporter Ashley Franco is live at the Chaffi County Court.

Ashley Franco who reported on the case for the CBS affiliate in Colorado Springs has read the police documents and she says Barry has repeatedly told the same story.

He came home around 300 pm on May 9th, 2020 and had a pleasant evening with Suzanne.

The next morning, Mother’s Day, Barry says he drove to a job some three hours away.

He says the last time he sees his wife is when she’s sleeping in their bed.

As investigators began trying to verify Barry’s alibi, they were pulled in a new direction.

Suzanne’s spy pen had surfaced with that intimate conversation.

Now they needed to figure out the identity of Jeff, Suzanne’s lover.

Could this man have had something to do with Suzanne’s disappearance? It was just days after Suzanne Morphw went missing when investigators make that intriguing discovery.

They discover a spy pen.

A spy pen.

A spy pen.

A Gruber is a professor of law at the University of Colorado and a former defense attorney.

She has closely studied all the public investigative files in the Morphew case.

She knows it was not easy for investigators to find Suzanne’s secret lover, a man named Jeff.

She hid that affair so well that it took agents 6 months to find the man she was having an affair with.

Jeff turned out to be Jeff Libler, and he had a wife and six children in Michigan where he lived.

He and Suzanne had a one-time fling after high school.

Decades passed until Suzanne reached out to Jeff out of the blue in 2018.

When Suzanne and Barry moved to Colorado, Suzanne messaged him on Facebook.

And what did she message him? Howdy, Stranger.

And from that moment, they had talked almost every single day non-stop.

In the months after Suzanne went missing, Jeff kept quiet.

He only began cooperating after he was located by investigators who learned Jeff had taken steps to hide the nearly 2-year affair.

What he did was delete all his social media accounts that he had used to communicate with Suzanne.

He’s got a lot to lose if revelations of this affair come out.

Jeff told agents he only took those steps because he did not want to tarnish Suzanne’s memory and worried he might lose his family and job.

He was also worried agents considered him a suspect.

He asked the agents, “Am I a target?” Although he did not come forward on his own, Jeff did assist agents after they found him.

He agreed to provide access to his DNA, phone records, and his passwords for those deleted accounts.

By looking through the couple’s iCloud accounts and phone records, agents were able to piece together their relationship, including the times they met in person.

Investigators also found that Suzanne, on several instances, had gone on vacation to meet up with Jeff in many different states, ranging from Louisiana to Florida.

Investigators also discovered they’d sent intimate photos to each other, talked of becoming husband and wife, and even mentioned leaving the United States.

Jeff and Suzanne had talked about moving away, moving to Ecuador at one point.

If you were an investigator instead of a law professor, what would you want to know about this Jeff Libler? Everything.

I’d want to know everything about what he was doing, what he was thinking.

Here is somebody who arguably had the last communication with Suzanne before she went missing.

The love affair between Suzanne and Jeff became a key part of the investigation as agents tried to figure out what happened to her on that Saturday, May 9th.

the day before Mother’s Day.

Records show that Suzanne and Jeff messaged each other 59 times that day, much more than usual, authorities say.

At one point, Suzanne sends Jeff this selfie.

Investigators dub it her last proof of life photo.

Barry was not home as the lover’s texts heat up.

At 2:05 pm, Suzanne writes, “I’m just in love with you.

What you up to? Jeff’s response at 2:06 pm want to strip down and get naked? Lol.

She responds by saying she’ll load up her WhatsApp account.

And then at 2:11, Suzanne writes, “Okay, I’m on WA.

” Then at 2:26 pm, Suzanne gets a text from Barry that he’s heading home.

Done.

Headed back.

No one knows if Suzanne saw that text or was preoccupied with Jeff, but she does not answer.

Barry follows up, appearing to wonder where Suzanne is.

Did you leave? There was still no response from Suzanne, and investigators speculate the next few moments are when Barry returned home.

They noticed that Barry’s cell phone appears to be pinging all around the outside of his house.

Was he chasing Suzanne before a final and fatal confrontation? Investigators asked Barry to explain that unusual phone activity.

And he says, “Well, let me think about that.

I was probably walking around my house shooting chipmunks.

” You heard right.

It was perhaps the world’s first chipmunk alibi.

Barry says the chipmunks were a constant nuisance at his house, and he’d been running around shooting them that day.

And then that confession to shooting chipmunks becomes a major piece of incriminating evidence against him.

There was no evidence of any chipmunk shootings around Barry’s house.

Part of his problem, Aas says, is that Barry granted between 30 and 40 interviews, all without a lawyer to everyone from a county detective to members of the FBI.

Would you have allowed him to do all these interviews? No.

Absolutely not.

Meanwhile, Jeff Libler was cleared.

He told agents he was in Michigan that weekend and his alibi checked out.

When investigators tell Barry of the affair, he denies knowing anything about it.

But if Barry knew nothing about Suzanne’s affair, what motive would he have to kill her? One clue may be a deleted text that investigators found on Barry’s phone sent by Suzanne just days before.

I’m done.

I could care less what you’re up to and have been for years.

We just need to figure this out civily.

So the only thing that makes sense is that Barry Morphw lost it when Suzanne finally said, “I’m leaving you.

” Barry knew that his daughters would be away on their camping trip that Saturday afternoon, and authorities say he took advantage of that opportunity to kill Suzanne and clean up the crime scene.

From 2:47 pm until 10:17 pm, just under 8 hours, Barry’s phone goes into airplane mode.

What do authorities believe was happening during that time? Authorities say that they believe when his phone went into airplane mode that he was disposing of possible evidence.

Unable to track Barry’s cell phone, investigators tapped into a relatively new investigative technique, digital vehicle forensics, to pull a stream of data out of Barry’s Ford truck.

And Barry’s truck told a different story than what he was telling investigators.

They were using Barry’s own car against him.

Ben Lamir is an expert in the new field of vehicle forensics.

Give me a sense of how your technology from your company helps solve criminal cases.

So, a lot of times it’s used to, you know, locate bodies, brings Lamir is the CEO of the Burla Corporation.

helps uh get people convicted.

Um and it’s helped get people not convicted.

Investigators from Scotland Yard to the FBI have learned how to use Burla’s software to tap into the dozens of computers in a car.

It’s accurate enough to be used as evidence in court cases.

Correct.

Yes, sir.

It’s uh it’s used every day in cases around the world.

cases like the disappearance of Suzanne Morphw.

Investigators created a burla report, meaning they tapped into the data in Barry’s Ford truck to track its movements after his cell phone went into airplane mode.

A couple of the pieces of evidence that I think are very harmful to his case um come from the data in the car.

The prosecution’s case is that Barry snapped at one point the day before Mother’s Day.

Authorities believe Barry killed Suzanne that afternoon.

He told agents he went to bed around 8:00 pm that night, but the data pulled from the truck shows that the truck was put in reverse and moved some 96 ft closer to his house around 9:30 pm Investigators think that’s when he could have loaded Suzanne’s body.

Initially, Barry told police that he set his alarm for 4:30 am on Mother’s Day and left the house by 5 to drive to a job site in Broomfield, a town near Denver, 150 mi from Salida.

But the truck’s computers showed that someone was opening and closing the truck’s doors around 3:30 am Investigators believe Barry began driving toward Broomfield much earlier than he claimed, but there is a 4-hour window, approximately 4:00 am to 8:00 am when no activity was recorded by the vehicle’s computers.

There are events in the car that aren’t recorded, so they can’t give sort of a full chronological picture.

And if Barry hid Suzanne’s body during that 4-hour window, the truck’s data does not provide answers.

Why is data missing sometimes? Well, it gets overwritten.

Um, you know, it is a computer and you know, log files, they only last so long.

But Barry helped fill in some of the missing data.

He told agents he took a left upon leaving his home instead of a right because even though it was dark, he remembered seeing some elk.

He saw a herd of elk and he’s a hunter, so he was interested and he wanted to get an uplose look.

That admission was significant to agents because it put him in an area where a key piece of evidence had been recovered.

Investigators found Suzanne’s bike helmet up that road.

So, they believe at that point when he turned left instead of turning right that he could have been ditching her bike helmet.

At 8:10 on Mother’s Day morning, the truck’s computers again began recording data, and by then, Barry’s cell phone had also come back to life.

Agents are able to track Barry’s cell and truck movements and can see that he first pulled over at this Broomfield bus stop where he discarded something in a garbage can.

And then he moves on to a hotel trash can, a McDonald’s trash can, a dumpster in a Men’s Warehouse parking lot, and then back to the hotel and dump stuff in a dumpster there.

Investigators believe that during these trash runs, he was disposing of evidence in different places within the Denver area.

This is a surveillance shot of Barry on one of those trash runs, but investigators could not see what he was throwing away.

It may have looked incriminating, but Barry claims it was just another day at the office.

He told agents he was merely being cheap, not criminal.

and his claim, well, I just always have a lot of junk in in the vehicle.

I don’t like to pay to have it uh disposed at a landfill.

I This is just what I do.

But it’s suspicious that you would go to five different trash areas to dispose of several things.

Why not just do it at one? After checking out the work site, Barry headed back to his room at the Holiday Inn.

And investigators say he stayed there from 12:42 to 6:03 pm By then, he’d already spoken to older daughter Mallerie, who told him she could not get in touch with her mother.

That’s when the Morphew neighbors were contacted and could find no sign of Suzanne.

Barry asked him at that time if the bike was there to go check on her.

Her bicycle is not here.

Barry asks his neighbor to call 911 and that’s when the call to 911 was placed that Suzanne is missing.

Barry doesn’t head home immediately and he is dropping some tools off for his co-workers.

Tools including a shovel.

With Suzanne now officially reported missing, Barry tells his workers there’s a family emergency and arranges hotel rooms with one of those workers taking over Barry’s room.

When the employee was interviewed, he told investigators that the room that Barry checked out of it had a strong smell of chlorine or bleach, which suggests what? That he could be cleaning up a crime scene.

Just after 6:00 pm, Barry starts driving back to Salida.

On the way, Barry speaks to sheriff’s deputies who advise him they found Suzanne’s bike, and he arrives at that ravine at around 8:40 pm And investigators say that when he arrived there, he was pretty emotional for a few minutes.

By Sunday night, Suzanne’s daughters were back home, but Suzanne is nowhere to be found.

no questions asked, however much they want.

Barry offered a $100,000 reward for information that was later doubled to $200,000.

Investigators later discovered many texts from Suzanne to a close friend that apparently revealed her tormented feelings about Barry.

He won’t speak of divorce.

I feel no peace when he’s here.

I wouldn’t feel safe alone with him.

Barry became the prime suspect.

And investigators think they know how he killed Suzanne.

The large Morphew home remains sealed off and disappearing.

While investigators searched the Morphw home and the family’s cars and trucks, Barry continued to talk seemingly to anyone with a badge.

Weeks and months went by and Barry remained at the center of the investigation.

Police are absolutely correct as a statistical matter to look at intimate partners when they suspect that a woman might have been harmed or murdered.

It’s something like eight out of 10 times when a spouse dies, the other one’s involved.

Absolutely.

Sometimes the smallest item will turn an investigation.

And in this case, agents seized on this clear plastic cap that a forensics team had found in the family’s dryer.

Prosecutors believe the cap was from a syringe used to fill a tranquilizer dart.

How do prosecutors interpret that? The prosecution’s theory is that at some point when Barry came home on the 9th and snapped and decided to murder Suzanne, he used a tranquilizer dart that you would use on animals.

There was no working tranquilizer rifle found in the Morpheuse home, but Barry told investigators he was an experienced tranquilizer dart gun shooter.

He knew how to load darts with paralyzing chemicals, having used them to illegally sedate deer and remove their antlers to sell.

This is a photo of the inside of Barry’s garage with his collection of deer heads and a pile of antlers.

We asked Dan Rydenower to read some of what Barry told investigators.

Barry said, “The first thing I thought of when I came here and saw deer in my yard with big horns, I’m like, I’m getting them horns.

And I’ll tell you exactly what I did.

I shoot them.

They go to sleep.

I cut their horns off.

It’s totally illegal.

But you’re going to find tran darts around my property because I’ve done that.

” Experts say it can take between 4 and 20 minutes for an animal the size of a deer to drop after being shot with a tranquilizer dart.

Agents theorized that Barry’s phone had pinged from various locations around the house, not because he was shooting chipmunks, but because he was chasing Suzanne after he shot her.

And what are you holding? What I’m holding is a Teladart model uh 706 rifle.

They use this a lot in parks throughout the country.

Andrew Kaders, owner and CEO of Animal Care and Equipment Services, showed us a tranquilizer rifle he’d typically use on animals.

So, if Suzanne had been struck by one of these darts, it’s right here.

Would she have time to run around, try to escape? She could, but I don’t think she would get very far.

For a human being, it could be lethal, for sure.

Bolstering the theory that Barry and Suzanne had a confrontation the day she disappeared were apparent scratches seen on Barry’s left arm.

Agents took the circumstantial evidence they gathered, Barry’s apparent suspicious behavior, his contradictory statements, the puzzling data from his truck, Suzanne’s disturbing texts, and those five trash runs, and brought it all to the district attorney.

On nearly the anniversary of Suzanne’s disappearance, Barry is arrested.

The moment captured on a cell phone by a passer by in May 2021.

Tonight, the husband of Suzanne Morphw is behind bars accused of killing her.

The Chaffi County Sheriff says Barry Morphw was arrested this morning.

Suzanne’s body has never been found and prosecutors assume she’s dead.

Despite the lack of a body, Barry was charged with first-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence, and a variety of other allegations.

He was held without bail and eventually pleaded not guilty.

In their arrest affidavit, prosecutors spelled out what they believe happened to Suzanne.

It had become clear that Barry could not control Suzanne’s insistence on leaving him and he resorted to something he has done his entire life.

Hunt and control Suzanne like he had hunted and controlled animals.

Suzanne’s sister Melinda reacted to the news of Barry’s arrest.

There are no winners in this story.

There are two families who are suffering deeply.

Barry ultimately hired high-profile lawyers from Denver.

And in the summer of 2021, Judge Patrick Murphy heard the prosecution’s evidence in open court.

He decided to hold a preliminary hearing to see if this case had enough evidence to go to trial.

The defense tried mightily to blunt the state’s case, countering that the clear plastic cap found in the dryer means nothing because no one could say how long it had been there.

Furthermore, Barry’s DNA was not found on that cap.

And as for that chlorine smell in Barry’s hotel room, one of the managers from the Holiday Inn had actually communicated to agents that this smell of chlorine existed before Barry Murphy was there because that room’s directly above an indoor pool.

And there was one more crucial issue the prosecution had to deal with, one that its own forensic team uncovered.

DNA evidence made public for the first time now threatened to destroy the case against Barry.

This DNA discovery is so significant.

The agents swabbed the inside of Suzanne Morphw’s car and they found male DNA on the glove box and it wasn’t Barry Morphw’s DNA.

He was eliminated.

The DNA also did not match Suzanne’s lover, Jeff Libler.

But it was a partial match to the DNA of an unknown male who had attacked other women.

And it raised a disturbing question.

Had Suzanne fallen into the hands of a sexual predator? In September 2021 at the Chaffi County Courthouse in Salida, Judge Patrick Murphy heard arguments about whether there was enough evidence to try Barry Morphw for murder.

The judge named off three different scenarios, saying Suzanne Morphw left willingly.

Barry Morphw could have killed his wife or someone else abducted Suzanne and killed her.

He said it was unlikely Suzanne had run off on her own, even though she and lover Jeff Libbler had discussed moving to Ecuador.

The judge says that because of the evidence that’s been presented about how loving Suzanne was toward her daughters and toward her family that she could never do that.

But the abduction theory could not be so easily dismissed, especially after that mysterious DNA was found in Suzanne’s Range Rover.

Investigators learned that DNA at least partially matched the profile of an unnamed man connected to three unsolved sexual assault cases in Tempee, Phoenix, and Chicago.

So, how can that DNA end up in her car? Well, that DNA can end up in her car if she was the victim, for example, of a serial killer or there could also be potentially an innocent explanation.

But it is very very curious.

Barry Morphw can stand up and say, “I’m not your killer.

The man whose DNA is in my wife’s car tied to past sexual assaults, that’s your killer.

” Barry Morphew absolutely could say that and that’s what his defense is banking on in this case.

In frank language, Judge Murphy gave his opinion of the state’s evidence.

I find that the proof is not evident, nor is the presumption great that Mr.

Morphew committed first-degree murder.

Despite that, the judge ruled there was probable cause to go to trial.

But this judge was very careful to say, “Look, I’m finding probable cause here, but it’s only because I am looking at all the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution.

” At that point, Barry had spent months in jail.

The judge says $500,000 cashonly bond.

And are they monitoring him in some fashion? Barry Morphw is wearing an ankle monitor for them to track him to make sure that he is staying in Chaffi County.

A few days later, on September 20th, 2021, Barry Morphw and daughters Mallerie and Macy are all smiles as they leave the jail.

Barry, how does it feel? How does it feel to be out? They stand firmly behind their dad.

Barry declined our request for an interview.

Barry Morphw’s homicide trial was to begin on April 28th, 2022.

But in the months leading up to that date, Judge Murphy recused himself and Judge Ramsay Lama replaced him.

and Barry’s defense team, led by attorney Iris Eton, filed motions asking that prosecutors be sanctioned for failing to produce discovery in a timely manner, including some potentially exculpatory evidence, like the male DNA found in Suzanne’s Range Rover.

There’s DNA that is placed on all the critical items of evidence in this case on the bike, on the bike helmet, in the house, in the car that is linked to unknown males.

In April 2022, Judge Lama ruled that prosecutors repeatedly had missed deadlines and had failed to turn over important information in the discovery phase.

The judge wrote that while he did not find those actions quote willful, the court does find this pattern to be negligent, bordering on reckless unquote.

The judge’s penalty was to knock out 14 prosecution witnesses, including experts in DNA and cell phone and vehicle data recovery.

They would not, he said, be allowed to testify.

This case is incredibly unique.

Law professor Ya Gruber said the case was going to be an uphill battle for prosecutors even before she heard about the most recent sanctions.

There are not many murder cases where the defendant has been charged with first-degree murder where there is no body, no blood evidence of any foul play, no eyewitnesses.

On April 19th, 2022, as a pre-trial hearing was about to begin, District Attorney Linda Stanley filed a motion to dismiss the murder charges against Barry Morphw without prejudice, meaning the case could be refiled at a later date.

In her motion, the DA pointed to the court’s decision to bar several key witnesses.

Without this crucial evidence and without the victim’s body, the people cannot move forward at this time in good faith.

Neither Barry, his daughters, nor his lawyer had any advanced warning.

I didn’t know a dismissal was coming today, although the writing was on the wall.

In her motion for dismissal, DA Stanley told the judge that officials believe investigators are close to discovering the location of Suzanne Morphw’s body.

Court papers specifically mention a remote and mountainous region nearby the Morphw residence that will be excavated after 5 ft of snow melts.

Where is Suzanne Morphw’s body? That is the million-dollar question.

Remember, there was an approximate 4-hour gap not recorded by the computers in Barry’s truck on Mother’s Day morning 2020.

Whether investigators ultimately were able to recover some of that missing data or received a tip about the location of Suzanne’s remains is not known.

The San Isabel National Forest, again, is 1.

1 million acres.

There’s plenty of places to dispose of the body.

Defense attorney Eton denies Barry has any involvement in his wife’s disappearance.

Barry Morphw loves Suzanne Morphw.

He loves her and he misses her and he wants to know where Suzanne Morphw is.

After the judge granted the motion to dismiss homicide charges against Barry, he walked out of court a free man, flanked as usual by his loyal daughters.

Suzanne’s sister Melinda says she agrees with the request to dismiss charges against Barry at this point.

She said she hoped that with more time, searchers will find Suzanne’s body and win a solid conviction in her murder.

This would dispel all rumors of her whereabouts.

And whatever else happens with the case, Melinda says she hopes her nieces keep one thing in mind.

Mallerie Macy, your mother would have laid down her life for you girls.

She would never leave you.

She would never forsake you.

She loved you with her whole being.

48 hours.

Don’t miss an episode.

Heat.

Hey, Heat.

The document hit the floor before the echo of the door had died.

Clara Ashworth stood in the middle of Aldis Prior’s front office with ink still wet on her fingers and her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her back teeth.

She had read the numbers.

She had read every last one of them.

And every last one of them was a lie.

Sign it, Prior said.

No, sign it or I will have you removed from this property, this town, and this territory.

Clara looked at him.

She set the pen down on his desk.

Then remove me.

If you have ever stood your ground when everything was against you, this story is for you.

Subscribe to this channel and follow Clara’s journey all the way to the end.

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I want to see how far this story travels.

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The door of Aldis Prior’s office opened from the inside and Clara Ashworth came through it the hard way with Prior’s hired man’s hand around her arm and her traveling trunk scraping against the floorboards behind her.

They put her on the boardwalk outside with enough force that she had to grab the porch railing to keep from going down to her knees.

And then the door shut and the lock turned and that was the end of that.

She stood there for a moment.

The Nevada sun hit her face like a flat hand.

Red fork stretched out in front of her one long street of false fronted buildings and dusty horses and people who had stopped what they were doing to watch.

Clara straightened her spine.

She smoothed down the front of her dark brown dress with both hands.

She picked up her trunk by the rope handle and she walked.

She did not know where she was walking to.

She walked anyway.

The station master’s office was at the end of the main street, a low building with a green painted door that had seen better decades.

His name was posted above the window.

Esharp station master.

She pushed the door open.

The man behind the counter looked up.

He was old wire thin with spectacles perched on the end of a nose that had been broken at least once.

He took one look at Clara and her trunk and the expression on her face and set down his pencil.

Help you, miss.

I need to know if there is a boarding house in this town.

Widow Garrison takes borders.

Dollar a night meals included.

He paused.

You the woman prior sent east for I was.

Clara said I am not anymore.

Sharp’s mouth pressed flat.

He had the look of a man who had seen this particular kind of trouble before and did not enjoy seeing it again.

What happened if you don’t mind my asking? He asked me to sign documents that were not what he represented them to be.

Clara set her trunk down beside the door.

I read them first.

He did not expect that.

Sharp was quiet for a moment.

What kind of documents? property transfer records dressed up to look like household accounting ledgers.

She kept her voice level.

The signatures were forged.

The boundary descriptions did not match the original survey records I had reviewed on the train.

Two parcels of land that appear to belong to neighboring ranchers had been quietly folded into Prior’s holdings through a chain of amended filings that would take most people a year to untangle.

She paused.

It took me 40 minutes.

Sharp stared at her over the rim of his spectacles.

You read survey records for entertainment.

I read everything.

She held his gaze.

I was a legal accounting clerk in Cincinnati for 6 years.

I have read more fraudulent documents than honest ones.

Mr.

Prior’s work was not subtle.

Sharp was quiet again longer this time.

He picked up his pencil and set it down again.

He took off his spectacles and cleaned them with his shirt and put them back on.

Miss, he said slowly.

You understand that Aldis Prior is the business partner of Sterling Vance.

I gathered that from the letterhead.

And you understand that Sterling Vance is the deputy land commissioner for this county.

I gathered that as well.

And you still said no? I said no.

Clara agreed.

Sharp looked at her for a long moment.

Something moved behind his eyes.

Not pity, something else.

Something closer to respect the kind that comes with an edge of worry attached.

Dollar a night at widow garrisons, he said again quietly.

Third house passed the livery.

Blue door.

Thank you.

She reached for her trunk.

Miss.

She stopped.

Sharp had come around from behind the counter.

He stood in the center of the small room with his hands folded in front of him and the look on his face of a man about to say something he had been holding for a long time.

There’s a ranch about 3 mi east of town, Callaway Place.

Nate Callaway has been running that land since his daddy died near on 8 years.

Good man, honest man.

He paused.

Vance filed a boundary dispute against him 4 months back.

says the eastern 40 acres of the Callaway property overlap a parcel that belongs to the county land office.

Another pause.

Callaway’s been fighting it alone.

His hands quit when the legal trouble started.

Bank won’t extend his credit.

And the county assessor is Vance’s brother-in-law.

Clara stood very still.

Why are you telling me this? Because you just told me you can read survey records.

Sharp met her eyes.

And because Callaway is going to lose that land inside of 30 days if somebody doesn’t find the hole in Vance’s filing.

And I have been watching that man get taken apart piece by piece for 4 months and I am too old and too uneducated to stop it myself.

The room was quiet.

Outside a horse went past at a slow walk.

Hooves soft in the dust.

I have $2.

14.

Clara said the Callaway place isn’t hiring.

I don’t think he’s got anything left to pay with.

That is not what I asked.

Sharp looked at her.

No, he said.

I don’t suppose it was.

The walk east took the better part of an hour in the midday heat.

Clara carried her trunk as far as the edge of town, and then she left it with widow Garrison, who opened the blue door before Clara knocked, looked her over once, and said, “Dollar a night.

You look like you could use the meal that goes with it.

” “I may be back tonight,” Clara said.

I may not.

Widow Garrison looked at the direction Clara was facing.

Callaway Place.

Sharp told me about it.

The older woman was quiet for a moment.

She was broad-shouldered and darkeyed and had the kind of stillness that comes from having already survived the worst thing once.

“I knew his mother,” she said.

“Good woman raised that boy, right?” She paused.

Vance is going to take that land, miss.

Everybody in this town knows it.

Knowing it and stopping it are two different animals.

I know, Clara said.

I would like to see the documents before I make up my mind.

She walked east.

The Callaway Ranch came into view just as her feet were beginning to protest the distance.

She heard it before she saw it.

Not sounds of activity, but sounds of absence.

No cattle loing, no horses moving in a corral, no voices of hands working, just wind and the creek of a weather vein that needed oil.

The house itself was solid.

Whoever built it had known what they were doing.

The porch was straight, the roof intact, the windows unbroken, but the corral fence had a section down at the far end.

The garden beside the house was brown and unwatered, and the front door was standing open in the kind of careless way that meant the person inside had stopped noticing whether it was open or closed.

Clara walked up the porch steps and knocked on the open door.

Nothing.

She knocked again louder.

Go away.

The voice came from inside to the left.

Male flat with the particular texture of a man who had been saying those two words for long enough that they had worn smooth.

Mr.

Callaway.

Clara stayed in the doorway.

My name is Clara Ashworth.

I arrived in Red Fork this morning on the eastbound train.

I was supposed to be married to Aldis Prior.

I am not going to be married to Aldis Prior.

I have been told you have a land dispute with Sterling Vance and that the relevant documents are here on this property.

I would like to look at them.

A long silence.

Who told you that? The station master.

Another silence longer.

Then the sound of a chair scraping back.

Boots on floorboards.

A man filled the interior doorway and Clara took him in fast, the way she had learned to take in everything fast.

Because the first 30 seconds of looking at a thing told you more than the next 30 minutes of studying it.

He was tall, lean, in the way of a man who had been missing meals without mentioning it.

Dark hair pushed back from a face that had good bones under too much tension.

His eyes were brown and sharp and currently fixed on her with an expression that was equal parts suspicion and exhaustion.

He was wearing a shirt that had been white once and trousers that had been pressed once and boots that had been polished once, and all of those things had happened a while ago.

His right hand was wrapped in cloth from the knuckles to halfway up the forearm.

Bruised skin showed at the edges where the wrapping had shifted.

Not a working injury.

The placement was wrong.

The pattern of bruising was wrong.

Someone hit you, Clara said.

He looked at his hand, walked into a fence post.

You walked into someone’s fist.

His jaw tightened.

What do you want, miss? What did you say your name was? Ashworth.

Clara Ashworth.

She did not move from the doorway.

She had learned that standing in doorways gave you options.

I want to see the county’s boundary filing and your original deed and whatever correspondence you have had with Vance’s office in the last 4 months.

I can tell you within an hour whether the filing is fraudulent and what the specific mechanism of the fraud is.

He stared at her.

You can tell me that.

Yes, you are a woman who just got off a train.

I am a woman who spent six years as a legal accounting clerk reading documents exactly like the ones that are currently being used to take your land.

His expression did not change.

His eyes moved over to her face with the same careful assessment he probably gave horses he was considering buying.

Looking for something that would tell him whether the thing in front of him was what it claimed to be or something else entirely.

Prior sent for you.

He said he did.

And you didn’t sign whatever he put in front of you? No.

Why not? Because it was fraudulent.

She held his gaze.

And because my father lost everything he owned to a document just like it, and I have spent 10 years making sure I could read the kind of paper that destroyed him.

The silence stretched.

A fly buzzed somewhere inside the house.

The weather vein creaked.

Nate Callaway stepped back from the interior doorway.

Papers are on the table, he said.

The table in the main room had been cleared of everything except the legal documents which were spread across it in the pattern of a man who had been rearranging them for months, trying to find something he did not have the training to find.

Clara pulled the nearest chair out and sat down.

She did not take off her gloves yet.

She looked at the documents the way you look at a river before you step in, reading the surface for what the current was doing underneath.

How many parcels is Vance claiming overlap your land? She asked.

One, the eastern 40 acres, says the original survey from 1871 placed the county boundary line 200 ft west of where my deed says it is.

Does he have a copy of the 1871 survey? Filed it with the county assessor’s office.

Certified copy.

Did you request a copy of that filing? tried.

Assessor’s office said the document was under review and not available for public inspection.

Clara looked up from the papers.

They told you a certified public land record was not available for public inspection.

Nate’s mouth was flat.

Yep.

And your attorney couldn’t afford to keep one after the bank pulled my credit line in January.

She looked back at the papers.

Who is the assessor? Man named Doyle.

Walt Doyle married Vance’s sister 12 years back.

Of course he is.

She turned over the top page of correspondence.

Vance’s letter head was thick and expensive, the kind that was meant to communicate permanence and authority.

She read the first letter through once without stopping, then went back to the second paragraph and read it again slowly.

Mr.

Callaway.

Nate.

She looked up.

He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and his wrapped hand tucked against his ribs and his eyes on her face.

Nate.

She turned the letter around and placed it in front of him.

Read me the second paragraph out loud.

He pushed off the wall, came to the table, bent over the letter.

His voice was careful.

The voice of a man who read but did not read often.

Pursuant to the boundary correction filing of March 14th, 1884, the original survey notation of record dated September 9th, 1871, and bearing assessor’s stamp number 4471 supersedes all subsequent deed recordings for the affected parcels, he straightened.

What does that mean? It means Vance is claiming the 1871 survey overrides your deed.

Clara reached into her traveling bag and removed a small notebook and the stub of a pencil.

What is the date on your deed? 1873.

My daddy bought the land in the spring of 1873.

From whom? Territory land office.

Direct purchase.

Do you have the original purchase receipt? He was already moving crossing the room to a wooden box on the shelf above the fireplace.

He pulled the box down and set it on the table beside the documents.

Clara watched his hands as he sorted through the papers inside.

His fingers knew where everything was.

He had been through this box many times.

Here.

He put a yellowed rectangle of paper in front of her.

She read it.

Then she turned back to Vance’s letter.

Then she opened her notebook and wrote a number down.

Then she wrote a second number beside it.

Nate.

She turned the notebook around.

He bent over it.

The number on the left is the assessor’s stamp number that Vance cites in his filing, 4471.

The number on the right is the stamp number on your original purchase receipt, which was issued by the same territory land office 2 years after that survey was allegedly conducted.

He looked at the numbers.

They’re the same number.

They are the same number, Clara said, which means either the territory land office assigned the same stamp number to two separate documents issued two years apart, which doesn’t happen.

Which does not happen.

She set her pencil down.

Or the 1871 survey that Vance filed with the county assessor’s office was created after 1873 using a stamp number copied from a legitimate document and backdated to 1871.

The room was very quiet.

Nate stood up straight.

He looked at the two numbers in her notebook and then he looked at her and his expression had changed.

The exhaustion was still there, but underneath it something else had woken up.

Something that had been asleep for long enough that it moved slowly, blinking, unsure of the light.

You got that from one receipt and one letter.

He said it is a starting point, not proof.

Proof requires the original filing from the county assessor’s office and ideally the stamp registry from the territory land office which will show when stamp number 4471 was actually issued and to what document.

She looked at him steadily but it is enough to know that the hole exists and if the hole exists it can be found.

He was quiet for a long moment.

his hand, the wrapped one, came up and pressed flat against the table beside the papers, and she noticed that his knuckles were white.

“Why?” he said.

“Why? What? Why are you doing this?” His voice was not suspicious anymore.

It was something else, something more careful.

You don’t know me.

You walked 3 miles from town to look at papers for a stranger.

You had a place to be this morning, a whole life you thought you were walking into, and instead you’re standing in my house reading county filings.

He paused.

Why? Clara looked at him.

She thought about her father’s face the morning the sheriff came.

She thought about the document he had signed because he trusted the man who handed it to him and did not know enough to read the fine print.

She thought about how he had looked at her afterward, not angry, just emptied out like the thing that had kept him upright had been quietly removed.

“Because I can read them,” she said.

“And you cannot, and there is a man in this county using that difference to take something that belongs to you.

” She picked up her pencil again.

My father could not read the document that destroyed him.

I made sure I would never be in that position and I made sure no one around me would be either if I could help it.

She turned back to the papers.

Now, do you have any correspondence from before January letters from Vance’s office before the formal boundary dispute was filed? He went back to the box.

They worked through the afternoon.

Nate pulled papers and Clara read them and she asked questions and he answered them.

And gradually the shape of what Vance had done began to emerge from the documents.

The way a body emerges from fog outline first, then detail, then the specific features that make it undeniable.

It was worse than she had thought.

The Callaway property was not the first.

She found references in the correspondence to two other ranches names, only no details, but enough to see the pattern.

Vance had been running the same mechanism for at least 3 years, filing fraudulent boundary corrections, using his brother-in-law’s office to make the filings unreachable, then leveraging his relationship with the bank to cut the affected landowners off from credit until they had no choice but to sell or lose.

The Callaway property was just the most recent and the most valuable.

The eastern 40 acres sat directly over a water source that three other properties depended on.

Whoever controlled that water controlled everything east of the ridge.

“He doesn’t want your land,” Clara said.

She had been quiet for a long time, and her voice came out rougher than she intended.

“He wants the water.

The land is just the vehicle.

” Nate was sitting across the table from her.

He had been sitting there for the last hour watching her work, not interrupting, bringing her a cup of water at some point that she had drunk without looking up.

He looked at her now.

I know, he said.

You knew.

I figured.

Couldn’t prove it.

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