The Intriguing Case Of Nancy Brophy — ‘How To Murder Your Husband’ Author Accused Of Killing Her Spouse
Nancy Brophy wrote in 2011 blog how the murderer wife must be 'organized, ruthless & very clever' because 'if the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail'.
New Delhi: In 2011, romance novelist Nancy Brophy authored a fiction work, “How to Murder Your Husband”, putting words to her thoughts on different methods of spousal murders and possible police investigation angles in those cases. The wife must be “organized, ruthless and very clever”, she purportedly wrote in the blog post. Seven years later, on June 2, 2018, her husband Daniel Brophy (63), a chef, was found brutally murdered. Nancy Brophy was charged with the murder three months later, and is now being tried in a US court.
According to US media reports, Brophy was never financially successful as a writer, and she mostly self-published her novels, such as ‘The Wrong Husband’ and ‘The Wrong Cop’. The reports also said she had “impending financial issues”, which might have been a reason why she allegedly killed her husband.
Chef Daniel Brophy’s body was found on the floor of a culinary school in Portland where he taught. He had been shot in the back, according to police.
The Case Against Nancy Brophy
When 71-year-old Brophy took the stand in her defence in the Multnomah County Circuit Court earlier this week, she narrated stories of her “happy” marriage with Daniel, with whom she had spent nearly 25 years, The New York Times reported. She also said they planned to retire soon and travel the world.
While testifying in the court, the report said, Brophy sobbed describing how she felt after losing her husband. She remembered her husband as “smart, funny, kind and humble”. She said they never had serious conflict, and they never doubted their commitment to each other.
The couple reportedly met in the early 1990s after Brophy, then Nancy Crampton, moved to Portland. They got married and started living in the Portland suburbs. While Daniel Brophy continued to work at the Oregon Culinary Institute and tended to chickens and grew spices in the backyard of their home, Nancy Brophy did different jobs from selling life insurances to writing romance novels, which she apparently took up seriously.
“My stories are about pretty men and strong women, about families that don’t always work and about the joy of finding love and the difficulty of making it stay,” Brophy wrote in her bio on nancybrophyauthor.com, where she also praised her husband and the life they lived together for over two decades.
Testifying before the jury this week, she said about Daniel: “His weaknesses were my strengths. My strengths tended to be his weaknesses.”
The prosecution, however, has a case against the writer who they accuse of killing her husband using the same “brutal cunning” she speculated in her blog — how to not leave a trace, choosing the time of attack and collecting the husband’s life insurance policies within days of the crime — for a murderous wife to evade conviction and enjoy the fruits of her labour, the NYT report noted.
In her blog, she had purportedly written: “After all, if the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail…And let me say clearly for the record, I don’t like jumpsuits and orange isn’t my color.”
Giving details of the police investigation, the NYT report said how the investigators initially believed her to be a grieving wife, even after finding a gun in her house that she said she owned to “feel safe” after a school shooting nearby, and also for research for her writing.
However, while the scene of crime did not have surveillance cameras, a nearby pizza restaurant could produce footage that had a snapshot of the street outside, and a jarring image from the video showed an old Toyota minivan, like the one Brophy used, driving by the culinary institute around the time Daniel was murdered, the report said.
She was charged with the murder three weeks after the crime.
While testifying in court this week, Brophy said she had no recollection of the June 2018 morning, or of what happened later since she was still in shock after learning that her husband had been murdered.
The Investigation
The investigators had found out that Brophy procured a “ghost gun” kit to make an unregistered firearm, and bought a slide and barrel assembly on eBay to modify her gun, the NYT report said. While she had turned over her gun to the investigators, that assembly was never found.
According to prosecutors, she may have attached the slide and barrel to her gun and swapped it out after commiting the murder so investigators would not to able to link the unique markings on the bullets to her gun.
In her testimony before the court, Brophy admitted to buying the ghost gun kit and the slide and barrel assembly, but claimed it was for the research of a new book that she was writing. She told the court that the book was about a woman who was in an abusive relationship with her lover and was acquiring gun parts in phases to gradually build a complete weapon as she planned a revenge, the report said.
The NYT report also mentioned how Brophy asked one of the investigators, four days after the crime, if he would give a letter to her saying she was not a suspect. She apparently told the detective that her insurance company was demanding the verification for a $40,000 life insurance claim.
“They don’t want to pay if it turns out that I secretly went down to the school and shot my husband because I thought, ‘Hey, going into old age without Dan after 25 years is really what I’m looking for,’” Brophy said, according to an audio recording of the conversation with the investigator.
A New York Post article published on May 9 said, quoting a local media report, Nancy Brophy had in an alleged slip-up confessed to the shooting during a conversation with another inmate. She apparently made the comment to a cellmate accidentally, and then “corrected herself”. Quoting a prosecutor, the report said the inmate told detectives that Brophy appeared to be embarrassed after making the comment.
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