American author Nancy Crampton-Brophy features plots about crime and infidelity in her romantic suspense novels. Unlike protagonists in her steamy thrillers, however, she has not gotten away with murder. In 2011, she wrote an essay notoriously titled “How to Murder Your Husband.” Last week, a jury in Portland, Oregon found her guilty of murdering her husband in a true life plot that could have been ripped from one of her books.
Ace news network, CNN, reported that the jury held Nancy, 71, guilty of second-degree murder in the 2018 death of her husband, Daniel Brophy, a chef gunned down at a culinary school where he taught cooking classes. The couple had lived in a quiet suburb of Portland where Daniel raised turkeys and chickens, tended a vegetable garden and liked to treat Nancy to lavish meals. But in June 2018, someone shot him in the kitchen at Oregon Culinary Institute, with students who arrived for class finding him bleeding on the floor. In court documents, prosecutors said the 63-year-old was shot twice – once in the back as he stood at a sink, and a second time in the chest at close range. Daniel’s wallet with cash and credit cards was found with him, and there were no signs of robbery or forced entry. The murder remained a mystery for months until Nancy got arrested in September 2018 for complicity.
During the trial, Nancy insisted that the couple was an item: “I’m a flawed person, Dan was a flawed person…together we made a really good team,” she said. Prosecutors, however, argued that only she had a motive for the killing. They alleged in court papers that the Brophys were struggling financially and had drained their retirement account two years before the shooting. Nancy, whose books were not big sellers, hatched the plot to kill Daniel and collect more than $1.5million from multiple life insurance policies and other assets, they said. Among evidences adduced were that even though Daniel was alone at the school at the time of his death and the school had no security cameras, nearby traffic cameras showed Nancy’s Toyota minivan on city streets near the institute around the time of the shooting. Daniel was shot with a Glock 9mm handgun, and investigators found that Nancy bought a “ghost gun” assembly kit close to the time of the murder (“ghost guns” are unregistered and untraceable firearms). Prosecutors had wanted to tender Nancy’s notorious essay as additional evidence but the trial judge objected, ruling that it was written years before for a seminar and could unfairly prejudice the jury. As it turned out, jurors didn’t need to read it to reach their verdict.