A Portland jury has convicted a self-published romantic novelist who once wrote an essay entitled “How to Kill Your Husband” – for fatally shooting her husband four years ago.
The jury of seven women and five men on Wednesday found Nancy Crampton Brophy, 71, guilty of second-degree murder after deliberating for two days over the death of chef Daniel Brophy, KOIN-TV reported.
Breaking: The jury found novelist Nancy Brophy guilty of second-degree murder. She was accused of killing her husband in 2018. Brophy wrote an essay entitled “How to Kill Your Husband” in 2011. https://t.co/ViAqbb65MO
– Liz Burch (@LizBurchTV) May 25, 2022
Brophy, 63, was murdered on June 2, 2018 while preparing to work at the Oregon Culinary Institute in southwest Portland. He has been working at the school since 2006.
Crampton Brophy showed no visible reaction Wednesday in the courtroom full of Multnomah County courts.
Lisa Maxfield, a Crampton Brophy attorney, said the defense team plans to appeal.
Prosecutors told jurors that Crampton Brophy was motivated by money problems and a life insurance policy.
Crampton Brophy said during the trial, however, that she had no reason to kill her husband and that her financial problems had been largely solved by charging a portion of Brophy’s retirement savings plan.
She possessed the same make and model of weapon that she used to kill her husband and was seen in the images of the surveillance cameras coming and going from the culinary institute, judicial exhibits and judicial witnesses were shown.
Police never found the weapon that killed Brophy. Prosecutors alleged that Crampton Brophy changed the barrel of the weapon used in the shooting and then discarded the barrel.
Defense attorneys said the weapon parts were an inspiration for Crampton Brophy’s writing and suggested that someone else might have killed Brophy during a robbery that went wrong. Crampton Brophy testified during the trial that her presence near the culinary school on the day of her husband’s death was a mere coincidence and that she had parked in the area to work on her writing.
Crampton Brophy’s com-dos treatise detailed several options for committing an inevitable murder and expressed a desire to avoid being caught. Circuit Judge Christopher Ramras finally ruled out the trial trial, noting that it was published in 2011.
“Any minimum probative value of a long-written article is substantially offset by the danger of unfair prejudice and confusion of topics,” Ramras said.
A prosecutor, however, alluded to the subjects of the trial without naming him after Crampton Brophy took up the position in his own defense.
Crampton Brophy has been in jail since her arrest in September 2018, several months after her husband was shot. His sentence is scheduled for June 13.
In an online biography showing her work, Crampton Brophy writes that she is “married to a chef whose mantra is: life is a science project.”
“As a result, there are chickens and turkeys in my backyard, a fabulous vegetable garden that also grows tobacco for an insecticide and a hot meal on the table every night,” he wrote. “For those of you who have desired this, let me warn you. The old adage is true. Be careful what you desire, when the gods are really angry, they grant us our desires.”
Neighbor Don McConnell told KOIN-TV in 2018 that Brophy did not appear to be upset after Brophy’s death. “She takes it well, and that’s what I said, you know, I said maybe some people can handle things better than others,” McConnell said.
Crampton Brophy kept busy preparing to move, McConnell said. “Even after she said, ‘I’m a suspect,'” she said, “I just thought oh, yeah, well, they always suspect the opposite spouse.”