#Husband of missing mom Suzanne Morphew left hotel reeking of chlorine: report

The husband of missing Colorado mother Suzanne Morphew stayed in a Denver hotel prior to her disappearance and left his room smelling of chlorine, according to a report.

Morphew, a 49-year-old mother of two, was reported missing by a neighbor on Mother’s Day after not returning from a bike ride. Her bicycle was discovered later that day on a bridge near the $1.5 million home she shared with her husband in Salida, the Daily Mail reports.

Morphew’s husband, Barry, was in Broomfield, Colorado, at the time, working on a landscaping job some 150 miles away for transportation company RTD-Denver.

A coworker, Jeff Puckett, claims Barry Morphew had summoned him to a Holiday Inn hotel room in Denver on May 10 where Morphew stayed the night before and left behind a pile of mail, as well as an intense smell of chlorine, according to the report.

He said he was told the landscaping work Morphew needed help with was urgent.

“I got there Sunday night and the room smelled like chlorine real bad,” Puckett, 49, of Salida, told the outlet. “It was his room and he’d taken a shower — his towels were all over the floor.”

A manager at the hotel, where rooms go for as little as $92, said workers do not use chlorine to clean rooms. Security footage from the hotel from the weekend of Morphew’s disappearance has since been turned over to FBI investigators, according to the report.

Puckett said he also discovered a letter about property insurance within a stack of mail inside the room.

“His mail was in there and I gave it to the FBI. I thought it was kind of odd to have it there. Some of it was from an insurance company, like insuring your property, that kind of thing,” Puckett said, adding that he also found no tools inside the hotel room.

He then claimed he waited around the hotel for two days for Morphew, without ever visiting the work site, and returned to Salida two days after Suzanne Morphew’s disappearance.

He has not heard from Barry Morphew — who told him he had to leave “due to a family emergency” — since that time, he told the Daily Mail.

“It’s kind of weird,” Puckett told DailyMail.com. “My first thought was that this must be like an alibi. That’s what it felt like.”

Puckett’s version of events has been shared with investigators, according to the report.

A message seeking comment from the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office was not returned early Wednesday.

Puckett’s account comes after Barry Morphew, 52, said last week that he sat for 30 hours of interviews with police and accused investigators of mishandling the investigation, according to the report.

Suzanne Morphew’s brother, meanwhile, is now organizing a planned five-day search for the woman, saying his family has waited more than four months for answers in her disappearance, The Herald Bulletin reports.

“I’ve got to find my little sister, and I have to bring closure to my family,” Morphew’s brother, Andy Moorman, said Saturday during a vigil in the missing mom’s hometown of Alexandria, Indiana.

“We were quiet for a while because the investigators asked that of us, but it’s time now to rally the troops and go west and find her.”

Moorman said he hopes to recruit more than 1,000 volunteers to scour the mountainous area near Maysville, about 150 miles southwest of Denver, where his sister was last seen.

“It’s been rough,” Moorman said. “We just can’t get any closure on this thing.”

A reward for information about Morphew’s whereabouts has reportedly reached $200,000, including $100,000 put up by Barry Morphew, who pleaded for her safe return in a Facebook video one week after she vanished.

“Oh Suzanne, if anyone is out there that can hear this, that has you — please we’ll do whatever it takes to bring you back,” Barry Morphew said in May. “We love you. We miss you. Your girls need you.”

Chaffee County sheriff officials said in early July that the department had followed up on hundreds of tips and conducted several searches in hopes of finding Morphew. More than 600 tips were also sent into a tipline dedicated to the case.

“This case remains very active, as more than a dozen investigators are aggressively working this case on a daily basis,” Chaffee County Sheriff John Spezze said in a July 9 statement. “And until we determine what happened to Suzanne, we can’t discount any scenario or formally eliminate anyone from suspicion.”