The county clerk immediately knew something strange was going on. A mail ballot had arrived from Suzanne Morphew, a woman missing since May – more than five months earlier.
“There’s posters all over our town,” said Lori Mitchell, the clerk and recorder in Chaffee County, a Colorado community of about 20,000 rocked by Morphew’s disappearance last Mother’s Day. “Constant things in the news about her. There’s people at the grocery store passing out fliers.”
The ballot didn’t have Morphew’s signature as required, Mitchell said. But someone had signed on the “witness” line: The woman’s husband, Barry Morphew.
“I was stunned,” Mitchell recalled. “I couldn’t believe it. I was like, what in the world is going on?”
For a long time, she said, it was just something fishy that her office reported to law enforcement. Then Barry Morphew was charged this month with murdering his wife. This week, things got stranger still: Barry was also accused of casting his wife’s ballot in a fraudulent vote for President Donald Trump.
