A jury found her guilty on Wednesday of second-degree murder for the 2018 death of her husband, chef Daniel Brophy, who was murdered at the cooking school where she taught cooking classes.
Crampton-Brophy, who once wrote a notorious essay entitled “How to Kill Your Husband,” showed no visible emotion when the verdict was read in a courtroom in Portland, Oregon.
Prosecutors argued that the couple was struggling with debt – Crampton-Brophy’s self-published novels weren’t big sellers – and that her death could have left her with more than a million dollars in life insurance and other assets.
Jurors were told that Crampton-Brophy followed her husband to work and shot him with a 9mm Glock pistol. Investigators found two 9mm carcasses at the scene. He had also bought a “ghost gun” mounting kit that investigators later found in a warehouse. “Ghost guns” are unregistered and untraceable firearms.
She was the only person who had reasons to kill her husband, Multnomah County District Attorney Shawn Overstreet said in the final arguments this week.
“That didn’t work for Nancy,” Overstreet said. “It’s not just about money. It’s about the lifestyle that Dan couldn’t give him.”
Crampton-Brophy, 71, took the witness stand and dismissed the claim, saying she was better off financially with her living husband. She also stated that she did not remember all the details of the morning that killed her husband and that the observation of her minivan near the cooking school that morning was a mere coincidence.
About why he had bought a gun and a ghost gun kit, he said it was part of the search for a new book.
“What I can tell you is that it was for writing,” he said. “It wasn’t, you think, killing my husband.”
The jury did not buy it. Crampton-Brophy faces a minimum of 25 years in prison in his sentence, set for June 13.
She painted a picture of a perfect life with her husband
Crampton-Brophy’s books were stories of attempted murder, lust, crime, and infidelity, all common themes in suspense romance novels. In “The Wrong Husband”, a woman tries to escape her abusive husband by hiding in Spain during her birthday trip.
“My stories are about handsome 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,” she wrote on her website.
Her husband’s murder was a plot twist that could have been ripped from one of her books. And when she became suspicious, it was a startling development for a woman who had represented life with her husband for almost two decades as anything but wrong.
The couple lived in a quiet suburb of Portland, where they raised turkeys and chickens, tended a vegetable garden, and enjoyed preparing hearty meals for her.
“I’m a bad person, Dan was a bad person … together we made a very good team,” he said.
Then came the morning of June 2, 2018, when someone shot Daniel Brophy in the kitchen of the Oregon Culinary Institute. The students came to class and found him bleeding on the floor.
In court documents, prosecutors said the 63-year-old had been shot twice: one in the back while standing in front of a sink filling buckets of ice and water for students, and then a second time in the chest within walking distance. With him was found Brophy’s wallet with cash and credit cards, and there were no signs of theft or forced entry.
The murder remained a public mystery for months. Then came Crampton-Brophy’s arrest in September 2018 and the image of the couple’s happy marriage collapsed.
The couple had financial problems, prosecutors said
Prosecutors allege in court documents that the Brophy were facing financial difficulties and had exhausted their retirement account two years before the shooting. Crampton-Brophy, whose books were not economically lucrative, devised a plan to kill her husband to raise more than $ 1.5 million in multiple life insurance policies and other assets, prosecutors said. .
“Dan Brophy was happy with his simplistic lifestyle, but Nancy Brophy wanted something more,” prosecutors said in court documents. “As Nancy Brophy became financially desperate and her writing career fell apart, she was left with few options …
At the time of Brophy’s death, she was alone in school, prosecutors said.
The school had no security cameras, but nearby traffic cameras showed Crampton-Brophy’s Toyota pickup truck on city streets near the high school around the time of the shooting, prosecutors said.
Investigators also found that she was the beneficiary of “numerous” life insurance policies taken out by her husband, prosecutors said.
“Dan Brophy was worth almost $ 1.5 million to Nancy Brophy if she died and was worth a lifetime of financial hardship if she stayed alive,” prosecutors said in court documents. “Nancy Brophy planned and carried out what she believed to be the perfect murder. A murder that she believed would free her from the clutches of financial despair.”
But defense attorney Lisa Maxfield described the case as circumstantial.
She argued that Crampton-Brophy loved her husband and had nothing to do with the murder. The couple had made several romantic getaways during the months leading up to Brophy’s death and were planning a summer trip to Mount Rushmore, the defense said.
The assassination drew new attention to Crampton-Brophy’s writings
News of the murder and the resulting criminal charges were headlines everywhere, in part because of an essay Crampton-Brophy wrote seven years before her husband’s death.
In 2011, she published it in a well-known blog post entitled “How to Kill Your Husband.” the post began. It was published on a blog called “See Jane Publish” which has since been made private.
The essay was divided into sections detailing the pros and cons of killing a bad husband.
“If the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail,” Crampton-Brophy wrote. “And let me make it clear, I don’t like monkeys and orange is not my color.”
The trial judge ruled that the essay would not be allowed as evidence because it was written years ago as part of a writing seminar and could unfairly harm the jury.
As a result, the jurors did not need to read it to reach their verdict.