Suzanne Morphew--cancer survivor, wife of 27 years, and mother of two daughters--went missing in Colorado on Mother's Day 2020. Her husband, Barry Morphew, will stand trial for her murder in July 2027.

These facts still baffle me. They probably always will. Barry's my first cousin and childhood hero. I'll be attending his trial and hope to publish essays about it in this newspaper.

I was largely estranged from the vast Morphew family when Suzanne went missing. My father died in 2018 after not communicating with me for years, after never meeting or acknowledging my son. (I'm my father's only offspring. My wife and I live in Los Angeles and have two children: a 13-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy.)

I wasn't completely estranged from Barry on Mother's Day 2020, but wasn't interested in keeping in touch either. The last time I'd seen him was at a family reunion in Indiana in 2012, where he'd shown my pregnant wife and me around his large estate, which included a stable of multipoint bucks he kept so he could harvest their sperm. When I asked how that worked, he said he used a tranquilizer gun. The rest was left to my imagination.

I liked that part of our visit. I'd always admired Barry, largely for his ferocious drive. When he was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays, he was still in high school in Indiana, and I was an aspiring junior high basketball player in Arkansas. He accomplished something that I was only dreaming of.

His drive runs deeper than that, and always involved violence. When we were kids, Barry set traps every day all over his family's Indiana property. During trips to Indiana, I'd accompany him in the mornings to collect his kills--squirrels, raccoons, rabbits. A fox if he was lucky. He'd skin the animals and sell their pelts for tiny sums of money. That's how he bought his first car--a red cherry Cutlass Supreme. The kill-mobile.

On summer mornings at home in Arkansas, I didn't kill rabbits; I watched them in cartoons. I hadn't yet begun my bumbling journey through countless minimum-wage jobs, where I was as incompetent as I was recalcitrant. I would have never worked those jobs if I hadn't been forced to by my parents and their second spouses. Nothing in the adult world appealed to me, including the acquisition of money. I never witnessed an adult doing anything I wanted to do. None of the grownups I........

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