A Capital Trial Begins With No Lawyer and No Jury, Barry Morphew's Bond Goes to $10 Million Cash, and What Was in Matthew Exton's Pockets

0:03 Calaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Monday, September 14th, 2026. This morning in Largo, Florida, a 47-year-old plastic surgeon walks into a courtroom to defend himself against a first-degree murder charge in a case where the state is seeking the death penalty. He has no attorney. He fired them all. He has no jury because he gave that up too, for both phases. He has no motions to suppress because he withdrew the ones his own lawyer filed. And he has no objection on file to being executed because he withdrew that as well. When the judge asked him why he did not want a jury, he said, I really have to answer that? And the judge said, I guess not. In Colorado, Barry Morphew's bond went from $ 3 million to $ 10 million cash only, after prosecutors finally got the full GPS data and found out what a work exception actually looks like in practice. And the Matthew Exton case out of Toledo has gone properly viral this week, mostly as a piece of black comedy about a divorce lawyer. I want to talk about that because the comedy is real, and it is also hiding something.

1:21 Let's get into it. Stephen Causey was 41 years old. He was an attorney in Largo, Florida. On March 21st, 2023, he walked into his office building wearing a red sweater. There is surveillance footage of him going in. There is no footage of him ever coming out. He had stepped away from his desk to use the restroom. Prosecutors say he was killed in that bathroom. His body has never been found. The state's theory is that it was driven to the Everglades. At the time he disappeared, Stephen Cozy was representing a client in a civil lawsuit against a plastic surgeon named Tomasz Kosowski. Kosowski was representing himself in that civil case. Kosowski is 47 and Dartmouth-trained. He has been in custody since March of 2023. He has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and he is presumed innocent.

2:15 Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. The state says investigators recovered a bag containing brass knuckles, a stun gun, duct tape, and masks, and that Kazi's DNA was found in the trunk of Kosowski's vehicle. Those are allegations. They have never been tested at trial. And that is the thing, because today they finally will be. In front of one person. Let me walk you through what Tomasz Kosowski has done to his own defense over the last few months, because I have never seen anything like it and I have been reading these dockets for years. He has gone through multiple sets of attorneys. At least one team withdrew citing ethical reasons. A fourth attorney asked out. In the email that outgoing attorney sent the court, there were two lines that should have stopped everybody in that building. That Kosowski refuses to sign consent forms for a doctor's evaluation, and that he did not want evidence presented in his defense.

3:11 Last month, he told Judge Joseph Bologna he would represent himself at his own capital murder trial. Two weeks later, he sat alone at the defense table. His former lawyers had filed motions arguing the death penalty is unconstitutional and illegally applied in Florida. He withdrew all of them. He withdrew every objection to being executed. Then he came back and withdrew the motions to suppress evidence that his previous attorney had filed. That is the machinery that keeps improperly obtained evidence out of a trial. Gone, at his own request. And then prosecutors raised a request to bring jurors to the office building to stand in that bathroom. A jury view is enormously powerful for the state. 12 people in the actual room is worth more than any photograph, and defense attorneys fight it hard. Kosowski did not fight it.

4:02 He removed the jury. He asked for a bench trial. Judge alone, guilt and penalty both. In Florida, a capital defendant has to waive a jury twice, separately, because the state considers those decisions that serious. He waived both. Lawyers who follow capital work describe a dual waiver like that as exceptionally rare. Ballone asked him why. He said, I really have to answer that? And the judge said, I guess not, and accepted it, finding that a Dartmouth-trained physician understood his rights and was choosing knowingly. Legally, that is correct, and I want to be clear about it. The right to counsel is yours to waive. The right to a jury is yours to waive. A court cannot force a competent adult to mount the defense a judge would prefer.

4:47 The alternative, where the state decides which defendants are permitted to make their own choices, is far worse than what we have. But I'm going to say the uncomfortable thing again because today it stops being theoretical. Add it up. Four sets of lawyers gone. Refuses to sign consent forms for a medical evaluation. Tells his own attorney he does not want evidence presented on his behalf. Withdraws every objection to his own execution. Withdraws the motions that might keep evidence out. Gives up a jury for both phases. Declines to say why. That is not a trial strategy. Nobody has ever drawn that up on a whiteboard. I am not a doctor, and I am not diagnosing anybody from a studio. Competency to stand trial is a specific legal test, and a judge who has watched this man in his courtroom for three years has found he meets it, and that judge knows vastly more than I do. It is also true that a person can be entirely competent and still be making catastrophic choices out of pride or exhaustion or a belief that the whole thing is rigged. But a man is systematically removing every protection standing between himself and an execution chamber and refuses to be evaluated and will not say why. And starting this morning, one judge in Pinellas County is the only thing between him and that outcome. There is one more consequence of a bench trial that almost nobody has mentioned. Judge Bologna has been presiding over this case for three years. He has read the suppression motions that got withdrawn. He knows what is

6:17 in them. He has heard the pretrial arguments. Normally, all of that is invisible to the people deciding guilt, because a jury walks in knowing nothing. Today, the person deciding guilt is the person who already knows everything. Judges are trained for exactly that, and they do it constantly. And I am not suggesting Bologna cannot do it. But Kosowski just handed the fact-finding in his own capital case to the one human being in that building who has already seen the material a jury would never have been shown. Stephen Causey was 41. He was doing the most ordinary thing a lawyer does in this country, which is represent a client in a lawsuit. He went to the bathroom at work and never came home. His family has never had a body to bury. There is footage of him walking into that building in a red sweater on an ordinary Tuesday in March. That is the last image anybody has of him. And there is a reason a case with no body got charged at all, which is worth understanding.

7:18 Florida does not require a body to prove murder. It never has. What the state has to prove is that a person is dead and that the defendant caused it, and that can be built entirely on circumstances. The last known movements, the forensic traces, the motive, the absence of any innocent explanation for a man vanishing from a bathroom in the middle of a workday. Those cases are hard and they are winnable, and prosecutors bring them when they believe they have enough. Stephen Kazi, someone has to say his name. That trial starts this morning and it is expected to move fast because there is no jury to select and no jury to instruct. We will be on it every day this week. When we come back, $ 10 million cash only. Suzanne Morphew was 49 years old, a mother of two daughters, and she disappeared on Mother's Day in May of 2020 after reportedly going out for a bike ride near Maysville, Colorado. Her remains were not found until September of 2023, about 45 miles away in a shallow grave, by investigators searching for a different missing woman.

8:32 Her husband, Barry Morphew, was charged in 2021. That case was dismissed in 2022 over problems with the evidence. A grand jury indicted him again in June of 2025. He has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, he denies killing her, and he is presumed innocent. Trial is set for July of next year. He has been out since January on a $ 3 million bond, wearing an ankle monitor, allowed to leave his home essentially for work, medical appointments, his lawyers, and court. We told you Wednesday that a private citizen emailed the judge about a hit and run in Denver on August 26th, that Judge Amanda Hopkins watched the video herself and said the man in it was very clearly the defendant, and that she confined him to his house with no exceptions. Then Boulder County deputies arrested him Thursday night on a warrant, and he went to jail. Tuesday was the hearing, and it did not go the way his lawyers wanted. Here is what prosecutors put in front of that judge, and this is the part that is new.

9:31 They finally got complete GPS data from the private monitoring company for the week of August 26. Not a summary. The whole week. And what it showed, according to the prosecution, is that Barry Morphew worked on Monday and Tuesday. And then he did not work. They described trips to trailheads, restaurants, a Whole Foods, hotels in the Cherry Creek area, and a drive to Denver International Airport, which his attorney said was probably to pick up his daughter. The prosecutor's line was that after the airport, he comes back to Cherry Creek, goes to a couple of hotels, and is just out and about with his day. No work whatsoever. That is the whole case in one paragraph. The work exception was the only thing letting this man leave his house and prosecutors say he was using it to run errands. Prosecutors also told the court something that should alarm you regardless of what you think of Barry Morphew. Neither the court nor the district attorney's office knew the hit and run had happened until a local news station aired the footage.

10:37 A man on a $ 3 million bond in a first degree murder case wearing a GPS monitor paid for by a private contractor allegedly fled the scene of a crash, and the system designed to watch him did not notice. A television station noticed. Judge Hopkins raised the bond to $ 10 million, cash only. And her reasoning from the bench was about as blunt as judges get. She said Morphew has shown time and again that he has no respect for any order of this court, and that he is not going to comply with an order if it is inconvenient to the lifestyle he wishes to live while out on bond. The defense had asked for home confinement with no work exception at all, which tells you they saw this coming. Even if he posts $ 10 million in cash, he cannot leave the San Luis Valley, and he cannot leave his home except for his attorneys, court, or a medical emergency requiring an ambulance. Both of his daughters listened to that hearing virtually. So did Suzanne Morphew's sister and brother.

11:35 I want to be careful and precise here, because this is a bond hearing, not a trial. Barry Morphew has not been charged with anything arising from the Denver incident. He is presumed innocent of murdering his wife, and nothing prosecutors described on Tuesday has been proven to a jury. What happened this week is a judge deciding he cannot be trusted to follow her orders, which is a different question entirely. But the pattern the prosecution described is the one that matters at a bond hearing. They argued that fleeing the scene of a crash the moment police were mentioned is a preview of what he might do if things go badly at trial. There is a larger point here that goes well beyond one defendant, and it is the second time in two weeks I have had to make it. Electronic monitoring is the entire justification for releasing people charged with serious violent crimes before trial. The argument judges make, and it is often a good argument, is that somebody should not sit in a cell for two years awaiting a trial when technology can watch them instead.

12:38 That argument only works if the technology is actually being watched by somebody. In this case, the data existed the whole time. Every trailhead, every restaurant, the airport, the hotels. It sat on a private company's server while a man accused of murder ran his week. Nobody looked at it until prosecutors went and asked for it after a news broadcast. A monitor that records where you are is not supervision. It is a receipt you can read afterward. Trial is 10 months away. His next hearing is a virtual one on November 3rd. Suzanne Morphew has been dead for six years. She lay in a shallow grave for three of them. And this week, the hearing about her husband was not about whether he killed her. It was about Whole Foods and a trailhead, and whether a man can be trusted to stay in his own house, Suzanne Morphew. Someone has to say her name. When we come back, the Toledo lawyer case is everywhere, and the funny part is not the real part. We covered this case last Tuesday when the verdict came in, and since then, it has taken off online in a way I did not expect. Matthew Exton, 43, was convicted on September 5th in Lucas County, Ohio, of attempted murder, two counts of felonious assault, and multiple firearm specifications.

14:01 He was acquitted on one remaining assault count. He faces up to 25 years when Judge Gary Cook sentences him on September 21st. And the internet has decided this is the funniest criminal case of the year. I understand why. Let me lay out the parts people are sharing. He is a lawyer. He was licensed in Ohio and had previously worked as a prosecutor in Michigan. And the areas he practiced in, by his own testimony, were divorce, family, and bankruptcy law. A divorce attorney. Who did this over his own divorce? He walked into a restaurant on its opening night, where his ex-wife and her parents were having dinner. ordered a drink at the bar, sent a drink over to their table, and then spat toward them on his way out. Then he came back with a Colt Defender.

14:49 He aimed it at her from a few feet away and pulled the trigger repeatedly. Nothing happened because the safety was engaged. A waiter tackled him. That gun had one round in the chamber and seven more in the magazines. And here is a detail from the court record that I had not seen until this weekend, and it is the one that ends the comedy for me. Two days after this happened, his ex-wife filed a petition for a protection order. In her written statement, she described him pointing the gun at her chest and pulling the trigger multiple times. And she described the sound it made. She wrote that the gun made rapid clicking noises as he pulled the trigger. Sit with that for one second. She was seated at a table with her mother and her father. A man was standing over her with a pistol against her chest.

15:38 And what she heard over and over was clicking. And then he testified in his own defense and explained himself. He said he wanted her to know he was serious about her following the court order, about getting him his share of the proceeds from the sale of their house. He said he needed it. He said he was hurt. He said he did not fire and he did not hurt her. So a divorce lawyer in a restaurant brandishing a handgun he could not operate over a house sale to enforce a family court order. Then during closing arguments, he would not stop interrupting the prosecutor, shouted about a gun, made a gun shape with his hands, and the judge threw him out of his own trial. He watched the verdict come in from a holding cell on a video feed.

16:23 I get it. As a set of facts, that is absurd. And before I get to the rest, I want to tell you about the waiter because he took the stand in this trial and almost nobody has quoted him. He was the second witness the state called. He has not been named publicly and I am not going to try. He testified that he saw the weapon in Exton's hand pointed at the table and that he acted without thinking. He said he rushed at him because he did not want her to die. Then he described the tackle. and he described it the way people describe things that actually happen to them, rather than the way people describe heroics. He said he tackled him, but the guy was bigger than him, so he kind of fell on him, and he grabbed the gun and tried to hold it with his hand over it. His hand. Over the gun. And when he was asked what he was doing in that moment, his answer was two words. Not die. That is the whole thing. That is a man in an apron on opening night on the floor underneath somebody bigger than him, with his palm wrapped around a loaded pistol, and what he is doing is not dying. Now let me tell you what Exton had on him when that waiter took him down, because this is the part nobody is sharing.

17:39 Prosecutor Rosemary Mock listed it for the jury. Two Michigan driver's licenses, one Ohio driver's license, his birth certificate, his social security card, his passport. $ 620 in cash, and handcuff keys. She told the jury he had enough to buy a plane ticket and enough bullets in that gun to take out the entire table. That is not a man who lost his temper at dinner. That is a man carrying a go-bag in his pockets. And prosecutors put in one more thing. A voicemail he had left previously in which he quoted a Johnny Cash lyric. Sooner or later, God will cut you down. The judge allowed it for the limited purpose of showing motive, intent, preparation, and plan. Mock told the jury this was not a cry for help.

18:27 She called it a calculated attempted public assassination. So here's my problem with how this case is traveling. Every viral version of it is about the incompetence. The safety was on. The lawyer who could not work his own gun. The guy who got kicked out of his own trial. And the reason he is not a murderer is not that he changed his mind. It is a mechanical safety catch and a waiter who ran at a firearm instead of away from one. Take either of those away and three people at that table are dead and nobody makes a single joke about it. And I want to say something about why the funny version travels and the real version does not. Absurdity is shareable. A guy who forgot the safety is a punchline you can post in four seconds.

19:12 A woman sitting at a table with her parents while her ex-husband pulls a trigger at her face repeatedly is not a punchline. And nobody shares it. And so the version of this case that reaches 10 million people is the one where the only real character is him. She becomes a prop in a story about a clumsy man. That happens constantly, and it is worth noticing when it does. This is a domestic violence case. It has every marker. Years of escalation, a separation, a financial dispute, threatening messages before the act, documents and cash, and an escape plan in his pockets. And a man who, by his own account, believed that pointing a loaded weapon at a woman's face was a reasonable way to resolve a disagreement about money.

20:00 He knew better than almost anyone alive. He was a prosecutor. He practiced family law. He has sat across from people in the worst weeks of their lives and told them to stay calm and let him handle it. And a fair number of the clients he advised over the years were probably women in exactly the position his ex-wife was in. One more thing, and then I will leave it. I have seen a claim going around this week about something Exton supposedly said on the stand about his occupation. I went looking for it in the trial coverage, in the wire reports, and in the local reporting from the courtroom. It is not there. What he actually testified was that he handled divorce, family, and bankruptcy cases. So if you have seen that line, somebody made it up or misheard it, and we are not repeating it. That happens with every case that goes viral. Somebody mishears a line, somebody else screenshots it, and within a day, it is a fact that everyone knows and nobody can source. We have already watched that dynamic put a father through a defamation campaign over his own children's deaths. The real facts here are strange enough. Nobody needs to improve them. I am not naming his ex-wife or her parents on this show. She survived an attempted murder, she testified about a man pointing a gun in her face from a few feet away, and she is a private person who was eating dinner.

21:19 As for the waiter, he has not been named publicly either, and he did not ask for any of this. He came to work on an opening night, and he is the only reason this is a story about a viral video instead of three funerals. I hope somebody in Toledo has bought that man a drink. Whoever you are, I do not know your name, and nobody listening does. But you put your hand over a loaded gun so that a stranger could go home to her family, and I am going to think about that for a long time. That's the show for Monday, September 14th. If you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment about the Florida case. A man facing execution just gave up his lawyer, his jury and every objection he had. Should a judge be able to stop somebody from doing that? Or is the right to make terrible choices about your own life exactly what a free country is? And if you're on Apple, look up at the top of your screen for the button that says listen uninterrupted. Five dollars a month gets you this show with no ads, plus thousands of others from Calaroga Media. The first 30 days are free, so it costs you nothing to find out whether you like it, and it genuinely helps us keep doing this every morning.

22:30 Stay with us this week. That bench trial in Largo runs daily, and we will have it. Matthew Exton is sentenced a week from today, and he is facing up to 25 years. And on the 29th, Lindsey Clancy is back in front of Judge Sullivan, when we should finally learn whether Plymouth County is going to try that case all over again. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing. On the Florida case, Tomasz Kasawski has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. The items described as recovered by investigators and the reported DNA finding are the state's allegations and have not been tested at trial. Our account of his former attorney's concerns comes from an email read into the record at a hearing. A judge who has presided over this case has found him competent to waive counsel and to waive a jury. And nothing in this episode is a suggestion otherwise or a diagnosis of anyone. On the Colorado case, Barry Morphew has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and is presumed innocent. He has not been charged in connection with the August incident in Denver. The description of that incident and of the GPS data comes from a judge's written order and from prosecution filings and arguments at a bond hearing, not from any finding of fact. His attorneys have said the airport trip may have been to pick up his daughter. This week's ruling concerns his conditions of release only. On the Ohio case, Matthew Exton has been convicted and has not yet been sentenced, and he retains the right to appeal.

24:01 His account of his own intent is his testimony, which the jury rejected. We have chosen not to name his ex-wife, her parents, or the restaurant employee who intervened. The description of the gun being pointed at her chest and of the sound it made comes from her own written statement in a petition for a protection order filed two days after the incident. The waiter's account comes from his testimony at trial. Several additional claims about Exton's testimony have circulated on social media in recent days. We could not find them in any trial coverage, wire report, or local reporting from the courtroom, and we have not repeated them. This episode discusses domestic violence, the death penalty, and the killing of a missing person. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available around the clock at 1-800-799-7233.