Episode 449: The Murder of Daniel Brophy

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at a high school in upstate New York. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast. What's the answer, and what do you do if they tell you it's all in your head?

Hysterical, a new podcast from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Hey Weirdos, I'm Ash and I'm Caleb.

And this is Morbid, a special edition of Morbid with Caleb.

I would also like to acknowledge the fact that Pepper is here. You might hear him every so often if you're so lucky. He's a very, he's a very, uh, dapper dash hound. He's like the most dapper.

He is, he's a beautiful man, he has a sweater, he has a diaper, but that doesn't matter to the audio listeners. My bad.

I mean, it does matter. They need to know, like, set the scene. Caleb has a Christmas sweater on. I just have a lavender sweatshirt.

Pretty dashing. Today, I almost wore a Santa hat you should have, I can.

I mean, I like the Turkey 100 hat, I can't lie. shout out, Turkey 100. Oh, go listen to scream. Um, but yeah, so Caleb's joining me today because Alayna is busy at some kind of award show, getting awards for her book and stuff.

I know things, um, but yeah, Caleb was nice enough to join me. While Alayna is in New York, being fancy with John and actually getting some husband-wife time, so happy for her. What a, you know, a book writing gal, just a real gem.

Just writing books, kicking ass, taking names. I love that girl, period, period, all right.

So I invited Caleb on to tell him the story of Dan and Nancy Brophy. And I actually picked this case cause I was watching, um, this is embarrassing, but I was watching Married at first sight on lifetime. Have you ever seen that? I have? yeah.

I'm like, wildly addicted to it, um, but I was watching that. I don't watch a lot of lifetime anymore, that's like the only thing that I will watch on there. But when I was younger, I used to watch lifetime movies all the time.

So when I see the commercials now, I'm like, Damn, that shit's wild. And I saw a commercial for this lifetime story, which is the Nancy Brophy story. And I was like, What the hell is happening there? And so, yeah, the last name Brophy is crazy. Uh, this woman is also completely delusional.

Um, yeah, yeah. The fact that she thought she was going to get away with this is wild. Sorry to. Um, alert you up front. She did it. I mean, yeah, she, she definitely did it.

She definitely wrote about it, um, the fact that she wrote about it, she, so she wrote about it before it even happened. We're we're going to get into all of that. But first, I got to tell you about Nancy when she was born, so okay, tell me about when she was born.

I'll tell ya Nancy Crampton Brophy.

On June 16th, 1950, which makes her not only a Gemini, but the middle child of her parents. So it was off from the start. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a little. There's a few problems there, yeah.

Gemini, Middle child out here, Wildin. So. Both her parents were lawyers, and they decided that they wanted to raise their family. In Wichita Falls, Texas, which is my favorite place to say. It is a very fun name. Wichita is a. Is there more Wichita's?

Is it, is it just the one in Texas? I feel like there's other ones, there's more Wichita's, right, I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, there's like, many Wichita's I feel like there is.

I think I've heard of that name often, like when you said Texas, it kind of threw me off. Cause I feel like I've heard of a Wichita somewhere else, I think there might be a Wichita, Kansas.

Wichita is going to stop being a word any second now, this is Wichita with Caleb and Ash. But anyway, after graduating from high school in 1968, Nancy, she went on.

And there she majored, I don't know why I said it like that, I was in Texas, I guess. She majored in economics, and she ended up graduating in 1972, now, not long after graduating from the University of Houston. She got married to her first husband, who was a police officer, and, according to her later testimony, she was not. Or he was not allowed to keep his gun in the house.

She wouldn't let him, okay, which is interesting when we get to later. Because she claims that she's obsessed with guns, but weird that she was like, No, he couldn't leave his gun in the house. Like, I didn't like that. From what I saw about this, it seems like she kind of flip-flops, too.

She'll be like, No, I'm not, I don't like guns at all, it's not a thing, but she's like, Well, everyone had a gun. So like, you know, we just had it, and then she was like, Oh, well, we shouldn't have.

Yep, that's exactly what she does, She's. she's a flip-flop-ish. She's definitely a flip-flopper she is.

How long their mass marriage lasted, or when it ended? But by the end of the 1980s, she was divorced and she was ready to shake her life up in a real big way. And so she moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1990. She just really wanted to put, like her old life behind her, start over completely, so she decided to try something new.

She said I'm gonna enroll in culinary school. Okay, yeah, I feel like that's a fun thing to do. So she didn't know.

That was her thing, too interesting. Yeah, she didn't know this for, like, a minute. So she enrolled in the Western Culinary Institute, which is now Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts. That's another fun, fun set of words.

Le cordon bleu, Yeah, le Cordon bleu, le cordon bleu, um. But it was there that she ended up meeting Daniel Brophy.

Oh, okay. He was also born in June, but he was born a little bit later, in June, June 27th, 1954, which makes him a cancer. But he was born in Valley City, North Dakota. And after he graduated high school in 1971, he went to the University of Sioux Falls. Graduated from there in 1976. And then he started his own culinary career shortly after that. Now, go him right.

His passion for food and cooking eventually led him to Portland, Oregon, where he became. I feel like you're going to love this. He became a mushroom hunter and gardener. Oh no, I don't love that. No, no, I hate mushrooms. Oh well, yeah, but I just thought you would love that like lifestyle.

Like, he was just like, You know, I'm going to go find out about mushrooms. I'm against it, I don't think they should be harvested, I don't think they should be made.

I don't think they should be in existence. I don't like smelling them, you don't like smelling mushrooms. I feel like they don't really have much of a smell. They smell like fungus because they are a fungus.

They, you know, they're just dirt. I don't like them. OK, well, you might not like them, and I might, I like.

I go back and forth with mushrooms, but Daniel, he loved mushrooms, and he was good at mushrooms. Like, like picking out which ones you could harvest and eat and which ones you shouldn't, and it is a very interesting thing. There are a lot of mushrooms out there, there are.

I've even, like, in Elena's yard, there's like several different kinds of mushrooms. That is true, and I'm like, kids don't eat those because I am not an expert on shroomies. These are weird.

I could never imagine just walking out and going, like, all right, I'm going to eat this weird looking phallic thing. Growing out of the ground, kids will eat like anything on the ground. But I mean, Elena's kids do not eat the mushrooms on the ground. But I feel the need to be like, don't touch that, you know, mushrooms just seem like something I shouldn't eat.

Yeah, but. But it's good to know which ones you can and cannot eat, like if you're, like, stranded somewhere and you're hungry.

I can see that, yeah, so, you know, Daniel, he knew all about that. And actually, he got so good at it that he would eventually start. Leading tours and giving lectures on the region's mushrooms, herbs and other local ingredients. And once he became a full blown chef, he honed his craft at restaurants like Jake's famous Crawfish, which is a Portland landmark that has been in business for more than 125 years. Wow.

OK, it's a lot of crawfish over that time, that's a lot of restaurant over that time. But outside of work, Daniel was really committed to his community. He not only worked at a soup kitchen every week, but he would also bring his own ingredients to the soup kitchen to make sure he could cook up something special. This wasn't like regular soup kitchen food.

It was Daniel's soup kitchen food. Yeah, he put a lot of love into his food, He did, it really seems like he did, and he loved cooking.

He was super knowledgeable in his field. He was like a really easy going man in general, and he just wanted to share his passion and his smarts with other people. So because all those things were really working for him, he decided that he'd like to become a culinary instructor. So he started at that Western culinary institute, the one that would later become Le Cordon Bleu.

And he was in his first year as an instructor when he met Miss Nancy. OK, not a good time, not a good time. She, you know, I have all the Nancy's I've come across.

But they've been a problem, and this Nancy just kind of confirms it for me. I only have ever really dealt with one Nancy in my life that I can think of. And she's the only person that I ever requested not to work directly. So I agree with you.

So guys, I'm sure there's a few of you good Nancy's out there and shout out to you, but these Nancy's I don't know so far. It's like, Karen's, there's great Karen's, but then there's Karen, Karen's.

Yeah, but then you feel bad for the great Karen's because they're like, Jesus Christ, I want to change my name. Yeah, some of these Nancy's are just, you know, they're, they're making it bad for other Nancy's.

Needle and Nancy's, You know, I don't know if that's the best I could come up with. Yeah, no, I got it. She's a metal and Nancy. Because she was immediately taken with Daniel, she thought he was a fine instructor and a fine man.

And it started to become very clear to everybody else in the class just how much she liked him. But there was a big issue Daniel was married. Hmm, OK.

He couldn't be out here with Miss Nancy, Nance, now Nancy's roommate at the time, Tanya Medlin. She warned Nancy about getting too close to Daniel because, you know, he was married and all. And she told her, Don't be dipping your candle in somebody else's wax, which I love. That's like a that's a real quote.

That's a that's a crazy way to put it. Don't dip your candle in somebody else's wax. I love it. Let's break that down.

No, not even the that side of it, the candle side of it. Why would you? Oh, do you dip your candle in somebody else's wax in the first place? It's already wax, it's already a candle.

That's the thing you already, it's already a marriage, it's already them two together. Stop dipping into it.

That's, that's what my good girl, Tanya, was trying to say. It's a saying and a half, you know? But Nancy responded Well, that's not going to last. Which, like, don't ever be that girl like you don't know his wife anything about her.

And even if you do like, stop meddling in people's marriages. But unfortunately, Nancy was correct. The marriage would end just a few years later, in 1994, and once it did, Daniel Brophy began dating Nancy. Now, he kept building his career at the same time as a chef instructor with the culinary school.

And Nancy actually opened up her own catering business, Chef du Jour Catering. It was a really successful catering company in northwest Portland by the late 1990s. Things actually were going really well for the both of them as a couple, because Nancy's catering business had grown really considerably. At the time, they were employing 25 people and they were earning half a milli per year. Damn.

OK, right? And then, in 1999, eight years after they met, Dan and Nancy held what they called a large marriage ceremony, and they started calling each other husband as what husband and wife.

And it took them until June of 2016 to file the legal paperwork. OK, I don't know if they were just doing that paperwork because, like, that's really relatable for me. But I was going to say, I mean, some people just, you know, I'm bad at paperwork.

I'm bad at getting back to things like that. Whenever my accountant is like, it's time to look through your taxes, I'm like, I don't know what those are, I don't have those. Trust me, I'm horrified about that.

I hate taxis and it freaks me out because I'm like, where did I put that little slip of paper six months ago, literally? So maybe that's what happened with Dan and Nancy here. They were like, Fuck, we had that marriage certificate, we don't know where it is.

And then they found it and they filed it. But you get to it when you get to it, yeah, now, just like a lot of people. Dan and Nancy hit a little bit of financial trouble when the economy downturned after 9-11, Nancy had to lay off at least 10 people from the catering business.

So, to help supplement their income, Dan kept teaching, but he also started moonlighting as a chef at a retirement home. Now, they also, on top of that, ended up refinancing their house so that they could get money from their equity. I don't really know how any of that works, but things started improving financially. Over the next couple of years. Daniel got a better job. He got hired actually as lead chef instructor at the Oregon Culinary Institute in 2006..

And immediately, people freaking loved him there. Students especially, really loved him, and they said he was, quote, the most active faculty member, leading field trips, organizing student projects and speaking in the community. So he's like, one of the favorite teachers, sounds like a stand up guy.

Shout out, Brody. He really does. Now. Not long after he started working at OCI, the college there, he and Nancy moved to Beaverton, which I love the name of that town. It's a small city just outside of Portland.

Nancy decided to dedicate as much time as humanly possible to her passion for writing. You guys had no idea Nancy is a writer now. In the past, she had written some small pamphlets in college. She made some money as a technical writer, but she always wanted to pursue her interest in writing fiction. And now she kind of had the chance.

Since graduating from culinary school in the early 90s, she joined a few writing groups, and she said that she had quote spent years dabbling in literary crafts. But she never really thought it would be something, or could be something that she would take very seriously. But she I, because I don't know enough about all this part. Is she a successful writer? Like, was she fairly big? how? um, in the grand scheme of things, how did it go for her?

I don't really think she didn't make a lot of money doing it. She may have been successful in the way that she did write several books, which is more than I can say.

I don't, I don't think they were like, in in in the crazy amount of success, yeah, because I think we'll get into it later. But one of the books, she wrote, it seems like it has one of those names. That seems like it's pretty popular, but it also seems like it's just. She called it that because something like that is already really popular, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I think that's exactly what it was. And I think she was also writing in a genre that is probably, I'm just assuming here, probably hard to get into. Because I think there's so many books that in the genre that she's writing already. Exactly. But we'll get there, don't jump ahead yet.

OK, Ok, Ok, so she, she really. When social media started like happening and the internet started becoming more mainstream. Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, it made it easier for writers to reach an audience through websites and blogs and self-publishing. So Nancy decided to give writing an honest try for, like the first time ever. Now we're going to get into some of what she wrote.

Nancy Crampton Brophy. She would eventually pen nine romance novels, including a five book series with titles like The Wrong Husband, The Wrong Cop, and The Wrong Lover. My God, I've seen this time and time again. Standard lifetime, standard lifetime.

And these were self-published books, and they were sold online. They were pretty much all within. I've never heard of this, but it's called the bodice ripper genre. What is that? I think it's like when you rip off your corset, probably, or something like that.

It's a whole genre for that. Isn't that just an action? I don't really know, man, I'm not in that genre. But it featured quote unquote, Rugged men, strong women and a good story. And that was, according to her website.

And then all of the novels had covers. That quote depicted handsome heroes and at least one heroine with chiseled bodies and dark coiffed hair.

Coiffed, coiffed or coiffed? Actually, it was coiffed. my bad, their hair is coiffed, coiffed. I don't even know what coiffed hair is.

I think it just means it's like, in place.

It just seems like a very, uh, I don't know, very lifetime explanation. It's very like Nicholas Sparks kind of writing and like kind of genre I feel. And also it's taking me back to a place of the America's next top model shoot, where Fabio joins. I don't know if you ever watched that, I'm not.

I've just been, honestly, my brain is getting fried lately. Because all I've been watching is 90 day fiancé. And since I got into this rabbit hole, I've realized that there's like 36 like offsets of 90 day fiancé. So really, it's a hole you can dig yourself into, I don't think it's.

It's not a hole you can dig yourself, it's a hole you can't dig yourself out of. That's really actually that's exactly what it is. That's what I should have said.

It doesn't end like there's so many. My grandma, you should talk to Kath next time you're here.

Loves 90 day. She's like, Did you watch the other night? I'm like, I don't watch it. Ma, she's so cute. I didn't know that Ma loves 90 day.

I mean, me and Ma already get along well, but once we start getting into 90 day, I mean, it's not going to stop. It's about to go off. Ma's the one that got me into Bravo in the first place. She doesn't really watch it anymore, but 90 day, I don't think she'll ever give up on 90 day.

I feel her, dude, I get it well. It's kind of like how Nancy wasn't going to give up on writing bodice ripper novels.

Writing fulfilled her personally, but, like you were kind of asking earlier, it didn't really do it for the couple financially. She wasn't making a lot of money doing this. And very soon, they were struggling again. To the point where in 2014, they started dipping into Daniel's 401K. Which, like, I don't really know a lot about that. But I don't think that's something you want to dip into if you can help it. But yeah, that's basically the standard practice. Yeah, that's the take.

So they were dipping into it, like, obviously, like good intentions, they wanted to fix up their house and eventually subdivide the property and sell off the various subdivisions. And they actually even went as far as to have Nancy's name taken off the deed. Which reduced the amount of income reported by the homeowner. Who now, at that point, was just Daniel. Basically, I was trying to figure out, like, what that would save them.

And I think it just saves them taxes. Mm Hmm, if you're like, or if your income is, like, less than what you were originally reporting. I would think it was just tax time like things, but I don't really know. I'm sure you guys listening will know if you're into taxes and things like that.

All you people that are into taxes out there, you just you do your tax things, all you CPA brothers and sisters.

Shout out, CPAS, shout out. Even though there was a steep decrease in income, Nancy. She was investing on her writing. She was writing full time at this point, but now she was spending money quite frequently on her writing. And quote unquote research for her novels. She would spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on all kinds of things for this research.

Like one time when she bought a Victorian era Chastity belt for research to research what exactly modest ripper genre?

I don't know, do you can't just like google that stuff? Well, that's the thing I think. Maybe she had like a shopping problem or something like that.

Or, I don't know, maybe she just really liked these things and wanted them. But then, like, wrote it off as research so her husband wouldn't get mad at her. I would just love to be a fly on the wall just to see what she was doing with this chastity belt, I would.

I would not like to be a fly on the wall for that. Oh, it's not for pleasure, it's purely for science, just for writing it down and doing experiments later, of course.

But in addition to her spending on research, she and Daniel actually started investing heavily in life insurance policies, and that was starting in 2014.

That was a red flag, right? When people are just like gambling on their life insurance. Yeah, definitely.

Definitely not. You don't need to have, like, multiple, multiple life insurance policies. I think like one or two will cut it. Something I really know a lot about. Yeah, to me, it just seems like starting a life insurance policy seems fairly standard to a certain extent.

But then you used a few keywords that made it sound like they're doing this many different times. And just kind of throw in life insurance policies around, and that seems worrisome.

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like, at my locker and she came up to me and she was like, stuttering, super bad. I'm like, stop around, She's like, I can't.

A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast, like doubling and tripling. And it's all these girls with a diagnosis. The state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back.

Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, now it's hysteria, it's all in your head, it's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating.

Is this the largest mass hysteria since the Witches of Salem, or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here, something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline, and everyone was trying to solve the murder.

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That was a really good question because between 2014 and 2017, they had acquired six life insurance policies. For Daniel, like, not for Nancy. for Daniel, I'm like, Uh oh. And they had to be faced, these life insurance preparers, how do they even allow that? They should just be like, OK, wait, are we sure about this? I think it's because they were going like different places.

So the other life insurance brokers, I guess, is what you call them.

But they already had five others taken out. This is crazy. It does so. They had six life insurance policies between 2014 and 2017 that they took out.

And they had a base payout of $400,000 and an additional $320,000 in the event that Daniel's death was accidental. Is this from each of them? Um, I think it was like a majority of them, OK, like, at least, but I think between all of them, that's what would have happened. So can you just do that?

Like, can you just have multiple life insurance policies? And just like I don't take them all out, I don't know enough about life insurance? Is what I'm realizing right now. I would think that that would be some kind of fraud if you had multiple.

But right, I don't know. I mean, like, people aren't going around with, like, you know, three different car insurances, you know what I mean, right? You have to get approved for all of them.

Also, fun fact getting life insurance is really fucking hard. And it's really fucking annoying. Because you have to answer like a bunch of questions like if you've ever done drugs, are you overweight? do you smoke cigarettes? You must have a physical. Some lady has to come to your house and you have to pee in a cup and give it to her.

It's awful. Wow. And to do that six different times, I'm like, you couldn't pay me money and like you would be, but you couldn't.

So by September of 2017,.

I had gone through almost all of Daniel's 401K, and as of that month, there was only about $35,000 remaining. Now. Obviously, $35,000 is a lot of money, but I think when it comes to to a 401K, not very much. You can't really live off of that for the rest of your life.

No, and that's, that's exactly it. But Nancy had been pushing Daniel to sell the house and the land, thinking that that would wipe away their debts and kind of give them a fresh start. But the problem was, after consulting with a financial advisor, she was informed that even if they sold the house and the land, they would still come out of that deal with negative cash flow. So basically, her spending habits, and I mean, really inability to generate income had put her and her husband deeply in the red. Financially speaking, and not even selling the house would generate enough money to get them out of it.

So basically, they're fucked pretty much. Basically. Nancy should have, just like, reopened her catering business, yeah, or done anything really aside from, um, the wrong mister and the wrong Chastity belt.

At the end of the day, if that's not bringing you in enough money to support you and your husband. And like, in addition to his income, that's a hobby. You're not, you know, like, you gotta get something to supplement this if you're in the red. So the morning of June 2nd, 2018, we're flash forwarding here and fast forwarding, um.

Sorry, let me cut you off real quick. What? What timeline were we at before that? Uh, before that, we were between 2017 or 2014 and 2017. Oh, okay, yeah.

They started having money problems after Nine 11, cause like the economy went down and stuff like that, but then they were able to kind of regain, but then they kind of started floundering again. When Nancy stopped the culinary business and started writing, Okay, okay, so 2017 is when things got, like, really, really bad financially. Like, even if you sell the house, even if you sell the land and subdivide all these properties, you're still going to end up with some debt and like, a good amount of debt.

So now we're in 2018, it's June 2nd, 2018. And this morning started off pretty regular for Daniel Brophy, like pretty much like every other morning had, he woke up early.

He went out back to feed the chickens in the backyard. He just seems like a very wholesome man, like working at a retirement home, working at a soup kitchen, feeding his chickens. He takes the dogs for a walk, comes back home, takes a quick shower, and then he heads off to work. So he got to the Oregon Culinary Institute OCI a little after 7am. And since he was the first one to come in the building, he disabled the alarm and headed to kitchen One, which was his usual kitchen classroom.

That was another thing, too. He was pretty much always there every morning, he was the first one there every morning, really early. Yup, he loved getting there early and just like being able to set up the kitchen before all the people came.

Now, a coworker arrived about 10 or 15 minutes later. They were going to be the one that was going to unlock the doors for the students and kind of greet them when they started filing in. And then they would go to their classroom, where Daniel had everything set up. So in kitchen, one, like I just said, he was setting everything up for the day, starting the coffee maker, making other arrangements. He was at the sink, filling up pitchers with ice water, though, when somebody snuck into the classroom quietly and shot him one time in the back.

And when he got shot with that one shot, the force of the bullet caused his body to spin around 180 degrees, at which point his killer fired again. Quote directly center Mass to his chest, Jesus, which sent a second bullet, tearing through his torso, ultimately piercing his heart. Ah damn, it was brutal, brutal as fuck. And just like out of nowhere. This man is just at work, setting up for the day. You would never expect this.

And for his culinary class? Yeah, right, exactly. And here's the thing.

Students are starting to come in. And clearly, like, nobody really heard this because there wasn't that many people around us, like, right when it happened. So he's laying there on the ground as students are filing into the kitchen just after seven 30. And they are completely shocked to find their instructor lying on his back in front of the industrial sink, unconscious and bleeding profusely from two gunshot wounds. And I did watch a little video about that, I think, how it happened.

And I'm not sure who I heard speaking. They were in court and they were explaining, like, you know, this is the building, this is the back door that we were all lined up at. Blah, blah, blah. I'm not sure if it was one of the students, or I think to my knowledge, I might've been another one of the teachers. Like another one of the culinary teachers.

I think there's only like a few, cause they were doing like weekend classes, Saturday and Sunday type thing, um. But she said she saw a bunch of students, like, lined up out there and was like, That's weird. They're usually all in there because he's early, he lets them in really early. But the door was locked, none of them came in.

And then another, like, Um, one other worker or something something like that, came over to the side. Let all the kids in and then after they're in, I think they walked around for a bit. And eventually one of them goes, Hey, call nine, one, one, there's a body over here, like, found him over there. Can you imagine? You're just like filing into your classroom and you're like, Oh, I got to take a Saturday class?

And that's what you stumble into. Yeah, like, 911 call is pretty crazy, too. I can never listen to 911 calls. It's not one of those like.

Really, really, I mean, they're all horrific, you know, but it's not one of those ones. It's like, you know, it makes you want to, like, break down while you're listening to it, but it is still pretty fucked up. And you know, you're listening to it. And they don't really realize that he's dead at first.

They're like, Hey, he's unconscious, like, he's down here, I don't think he's. He's breathing. But then after a while they go, Oh shit, like he's bleeding from his chest.

Right? And then, you know, it goes on, and then they realize, Yeah, he's gone, so sad. So yeah, like you said, one of the students just called nine, one, one, the police and the emergency responders. They raced to the scene. But again, like you just said, by the time they got there, it was too late.

He was dead, dead on arrival. So Portland detectives Anthony Merrill and Darren Posey arrived at OSI. Excuse me, around eight 30 in the morning, and at that point the school had been placed in lockdown. Crime scene technicians had started processing the scene. So when the detectives entered the kitchen, they found, so sad, the metal ice scoop lying on the floor where he had dropped it when he was shot.

And then nearby, they discovered two nine millimeter shell casings on the floor. Which meant that whoever had killed Daniel most likely wasn't a professional killer. Merrill told interviewers from Dateline They wanted to get in quick and get out quick. Yeah, so within two hours of the murder, somebody. A friend had called Nancy to let her know that the police were converged on OCI. So she immediately drives down to the school. Detectives meet her and they usher her into a room that they started kind of using as a command center.

And they kind of, you know, go through their series of questions like, what was your husband doing this morning? what does he usually do? like, blah, blah, blah, what were you doing?

And after several minutes, they finally gave her the news They told her, We believe it's Dan that's been killed now. She barely skipped a beat and said to them, Yeah, I got that when everybody gave me the sad sack look.

Like, weird response, weird energy, weird response. Now. What followed was typical behavior, what you would call it. She was bewildered, she was grief stricken.

She was crying. That is the kind of reaction that you would expect from somebody, but again, me and Alina say it all the time. Like, you can't chop. Like, somebody's guiltiness up to how they react to something right away, cause not everybody's going to cry right away.

Some people are going to, you know, freeze. Yeah, everyone has different reactions, man. Yeah, Nancy just makes weird comments and then she cries.

But anyways, they were like, Okay, um, like, you can go for now and we're going to talk to you later today, like we'll be in contact. Cause they were still working on the scene. So by the next day, the news had made its way around the OSI community, and there was a wave of stunned and shocked responses. Current and former students were on the internet, just sharing their surprise and grief.

They were posting comments to social media. One said Oregon Culinary Institute lost a top notch chef instructor that touched so many lives. And another one said Daniel was also one of the smartest, most thoughtful people I've ever met and would take the time with whatever you needed. So sad. So then it seemed like a good dude.

He really did. And then Nancy shared her thoughts online. Um, and in my opinion, this is a pretty strange Facebook post. But she wrote For those of you who are close to me and feel this deserved a phone call, you're right. But I'm struggling to make sense of everything now.

Your loving responses. I'm overwhelmed. Please save calls for a few days until I can function.

Just weird, like, I don't know, a bizarre, a bizarre post in my opinion. Yeah, I mean, I guess again, I guess I don't know what to chop it up to, because, I mean, I guess I already know the outcome of the story. And she's a scumbag.

Yeah, I guess, in hindsight, looking at it, but I don't know, I guess if I didn't know what I knew. It might not be that odd of a statement like, Hey, you know, leave me alone kind of thing. Give me a little while, like, I can't talk about this like, I get it.

I appreciate it, but I don't know it is. It's a little odd, no, but that's a solid point. I'm looking at it through the lens of like, I already knew. And again, we already said it at the beginning, like, clearly, she did this.

So when I read that, I was like, Well, that's weird, but if I had read that and she didn't, if she wasn't the one that did it, maybe I would feel differently. Yeah, you might just think like, Hey, you know, she's tired of hearing about this and she's trying to grieve. She doesn't want to, like have her phone blown up all day when she's going through it.

Yeah, but to reiterate, that's not what's happening. She's a piece of shit. Yeah, not the case.

Fuck Nancy, so. A candlelight vigil was held in Daniel's honor a few days later in the parking lot at the school. And Nancy reiterated her grief and her shock to the students and the faculty, saying I just can't wrap my head around it. Dan was one of the very few people I've known that knew exactly what he wanted in life and loved doing it, which is really sad.

When again, we know that she's the one that is doing this. She's standing in front of all of these grieving people saying I can't wrap my head around it. He was the nicest guy, he knew what he wanted and he was doing it. It's like, Okay, so like.

Then why did you kill him? He was happy he was doing what he wanted to do, like, what like?

That's just some people have no shame, they truly don't so. Back to the investigation, as they surveyed the scene, detectives Merrill and Posey were rather perplexed. There was no sign of a struggle, no sign of forced entry.

Daniel still had his wallet, phone keys, His car was still parked in the parking lot. So pretty much right away, those factors ruled out the whole robbery gone wrong scenario. To them, it seemed like somebody had snuck into the culinary school to murder him and then snuck out without disrupting or taking anything.

But they were stumped because they were like.

Daniel was super well liked, so they were having a really hard time coming up with anybody who disliked him, especially enough to kill him or have him killed. Yeah, I mean, you get a culinary chef who's just there for his like weekend job at an institute. Like, someone walking in and killing someone like that is pretty wild.

Yeah, just like very sudden and out of the blue, and then to have all of his things still with him, you're like, what? like, Yeah, crazy. So. Detective Posey told Dateline There was people that were like, he's tough, but nothing that, you know. Somebody had it out for him because they, like, had their career ended by him or anything like that.

So many people knew Daniel Brophy to be a very direct person who, quote, wasn't afraid to have conversations that many instructors might shy away from. And also his dry sense of humor. And he did have kind of, like, a rigid personality that did did tend to rub people, like certain people, the wrong way.

I was just saying that somebody would want him dead for something he said, or anything he did. It was just like, I'm trying to, I honestly. He kind of reminds me of my grandpa, like, you know, like, just like, a very direct guy. Yeah, like, he might like, piss you off because he's not going to like, beat around the bush. But it's like, hey, he's not like, he's not a bad murder material.

You know, no, exactly not that anybody is, but no, no, and that's, I think that's exactly like you put it so perfectly, like he's not going to beat around the bush.

Like, he's just going to tell you how he feels. So with a case like this, where somebody is killed seemingly for no reason, as we all know, the spouse is the one that they look into first. So when Nancy was questioned shortly after the murder, she told investigators that she'd woken up briefly when Daniel came in after walking the dogs that morning. But she said she fell asleep soon after he had left. And otherwise, she had just gone about her morning leisurely until she got the call about what happened.

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Now, detectives outwardly seem to accept her description of her movements that morning. But they also knew right away that she was lying, even as she was telling them her version of that morning's events. Because by the time they sat down to question her, they had already found surveillance footage that contradicted her story. So she says she's sleeping and that she just woke up when Daniel came in with the dogs and then fell right back to sleep and just had a chill morning. Nope, at 7 0, 8 a.m. when she was supposedly at home sleeping. A surveillance camera from a business across the street from the culinary school captured Nancy driving by the school in her minivan. I mean, the dude's been an idiot every step of the way.

Seriously, this dude, Nancy leaving shells at the scene, just driving by, running around with cameras all over you? She's like, Oh, no, I'm, I'm sleeping, I was in bed. I don't understand. 2018. And you don't realize that we are being videoed every fucking second of every fucking day.

Like, when you were driving around in your car, you were being caught on surveillance footage everywhere. You can't just say that you're at home sleeping. You should have said, Oh, I got gas across the street from the culinary school. I can't believe that happened while I was there. I mean, again, I'm not giving you like a an alibi, but still.

No, but we're just saying she's a giant idiot and she could have said anything else if she was really, you know, a giant idiot. And was able to, like, you know, come up with some kind of alibi. I mean, I'm glad that she's a bozo and got caught, but but come on man now again that she was not snoozing, like she said.

She was because that same camera where she was caught at 7 0 8.

Minutes later in front of the school, and then about 10 minutes after Daniel had deactivated the alarm system at the school, and then five minutes before his body was discovered in the classroom. So she was discovered left, right and center on this fucking surveillance system, so the other thing is. Her story about being home and in bed at the time of the murder was not her only suspicious behavior in the days and weeks following the murder. Just three days after Dan was killed.

He got a phone call from Nancy asking if he would produce a letter confirming that she was not a suspect in the murder so that she could assure the insurance company she wasn't involved in the death. Okay, buddy, aka let me get my insurance payout, yeah, like, hand me the check and then we'll figure out what else is going on.

Exactly so. Posey clearly had never been asked for such a letter by anybody. And he was like, Yeah, girl, like, that's not going to happen.

He literally sent her. He goes, the way you clear somebody is, you arrest somebody else and take them to trial. Like, you're not going to get a letter until I have tried somebody for this murder that's not you. So she just like, Wait, so her quote wasn't, Yeah, buddy. No, no, not the direct quote.

Okay, but it wasn't just detectives who found her reaction to Dan's death to be unusual. There were neighbors who were also pretty put off by her behavior. Don McConnell, who lived in the house that abutted Daniel and Nancy's property, told reporters. Quote She never showed any signs of being upset or sad. I would say she had an air of relief.

Like, it was almost a godsend. McConnell asked whether the police had been keeping in touch with her, and Nancy told him No, I'm a suspect. Like, damn girl now. Other neighbors had also noticed her odd behavior, too, when she was taking picture in and out of or out of the house. She had started telling people that she was seriously thinking of putting the house on the market. Because she was, quote, haunted by Dan's side of the bedroom.

She said thinking about him upset her and she wanted to get away from the house. Okay, which if my neighbor said that to me after their husband was murdered? I feel like I'd be like, I don't think I would consider that strange. Like she's haunted by his side of the bedroom, that makes sense.

But putting the house on the market, that's like, that's abrupt.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know again. I guess when I look at it through the lens of maybe she, you know, like something, she's actually going through something. I could see that happening because I've had friends who have lost spouses who have had very similar reactions, so I mean, I don't know. I guess it's just kind of out of character at this point. Because she was so sporadic and terrible about, like, you know, leading shells at the scene. Like being caught on camera everywhere, just saying like, Oh, I'm in bed. But then when it comes to this, I don't know, I feel like I almost feel like she did react.

Kind of well for someone who's trying to hide the fact that they killed their husband. I think there are times where she does, and then I think there are times where she slips up. Oh, I think she slips up basically all over the place, yeah.

I think more often than not, she's slipping up. But as technicians began digging into Dan's personal life, they only found more evidence, leading them back to Nancy as they were searching through his cell phone for clues, they discovered an article bookmarked on their shared iTunes account, so this iTunes account was shared by Dan and Nancy. And the article they found was titled, 10 Ways to Cover up a Murder.

Okay, now. Not long after, they also discovered another suspicious article, this one written by Nancy herself. In 2011, she had written this article for a blog called See Jane Publish, and it was titled How to Murder Your Husband. That's, that's the one I was referring to earlier, unreal.

Unreal, like, I don't know, I don't know Nancy again. Maybe maybe don't, if that's your goal, but, you know, maybe don't.

Even if that is your is not your goal, like, don't write about how to murder people, it's that's something else. So this this article was written kind of like in an essay format, and it detailed the methods that somebody might use to kill their spouse in a romance novel.

Nancy wrote Divorce is expensive, and do you really want to split all your possessions? or if you married for money, aren't you entitled to all of it? The drawback is the police aren't stupid, they're looking at you first. If the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don't want to spend any time in jail.

I wish I said, the police aren't stupid, but I am, yeah, literally. Then she launched into the pros and cons of the five methods of murder. The essay recommended against hiring a hitman to do the job because, quote, an amazing number of hitmen, hitmen rat you out to the police. How many hitmen do you know?

Thank you, Nancy. What statistic is this? She made it up. She then cautions against using poison, saying Who wants to hang out with a sick husband? Yeah, that's. That's the only downside to poisoning your vans.

I'm sorry, what? And then she ends the essay by saying, I find it easier to wish people dead than to actually kill them. I don't worry, I don't want to worry about the blood and brain splattered on my walls, and really, I'm not good at remembering lies.

I mean, I guess this is a fairly. It's not even a good script for a movie about a psychopath. it's a very bland script. It's a very wish them dead. I'm sorry, yeah.

This is a weird list. even for someone who is a terrible person and does terrible things, this is odd. Like, I love that.

She's like, you know, I would just rather wish people dead because I don't really want to, like, clean up my walls. And I'm really bad at remembering lies. Not like I have a conscious and I would never murdered someone like, Oh, I get what this is now. She wrote this so she could show it to the police later and go, No, no, no, see, this is me saying I would never do.

I acknowledge that you guys aren't stupid and I knew you'd be looking at me. Of course, it's not me. Maybe it was, honestly, that's not a bad point, like, that's crazy, Nancy.

But I can see that being like, her kind of logic, you know? And this is probably, yeah, no, her, I mean, cause we'll get into it. We already have a little bit. Her logic is wild logic.

But so they find all of that and they're like, Okay, well, this is plenty of evidence. And then detectives learned that the couple owned a Glock nine millimeter handgun, which was the very same caliber used in Daniel's murder that it was. But it gets tricky. According to Nancy, she had purchased the nine millimeter as research for one of her novels.

And she claimed that neither her or Daniel had ever fired it. So see, and I heard another side, too, where she was like, Oh, all my friends had one, and then we felt like it was stupid because we didn't have one. Because friends just kept showing up to our house and they were like, Oh, we have a gun, actually.

But sure, interesting story. I don't think that ever happened. Nancy, I think you're just cray cray. But so she said that they had never fired it, that it was for research. Blah-dee-da-doo.

Or it was because her, all her friends had one, and she just had to get it like, it's a new pair of nikes. But investigators took the gun into evidence and they had it tested, but forensic technicians determined it probably was not the gun used in the shooting. Now later, but that. But maybe it was because later detectives learned that this wasn't the first gun Nancy had purchased. In late 2017, she had purchased what's called a ghost gun kit online, which would have allowed her to make her own untraceable gun.

Now, apparently, the kit was actually too difficult for her to complete, and that's when she purchased the glock. But through the course of their investigation, detectives would also learn that while the glock wasn't a match for the casings at the scene on the day of the murder. It might've been used because Nancy had purchased additional parts for a glock nine millimeter on eBay. And she had swapped several components of the gun before handing it over to detectives. So that's where she, actually, like, is kind of a scary mastermind.

How did she manage to do all of that? But she goes, No, I was asleep, I have no idea. Also, like, Mama, they're gonna look at your search history, yeah.

I mean, you bought it on eBay, come on like, that's very traceable. I mean, like, the thing that she did, like you said, that's kind of impressive, that's kind of crazy.

Right, I don't know how many people would think to do that, but uh, maybe people that are like more into guns. But I don't know. Like that's still just that's crazy, this chick writing murder mystery, fucking lifetime novels about killing her.

And she's saying she's going to wish people dead, but then she thought to do this, that's, that's something else. It's wild and I also love that. She was like, Yeah, the ghost gun kit online was too hard for me, but I was able to switch out several components of another gun.

She's an enigma, for sure, she really is. So. After months of quietly following leads and collecting evidence, detectives had assembled what they believed was a pretty strong case against Nancy Crampton Brophy for the murder of her husband. She and Daniel were way behind on their mortgage.

They were living well beyond their means, and it was mostly, especially when it came to Nancy's spending habits, she was really the one pushing them above their means. Uh, then there were the multiple life insurance policies that would pay out nearly $400,000 in the event of Daniel's death. And also she's spending all this money. How much money are they spending on six different life insurance policies?

And I have to wonder if he knew, I don't think he knew about those, I think she was probably buying those and like, keeping it secret from him. And then the fact that should Daniel die, the house and all of his assets would be transferred directly to Nancy. So she had the most to gain from his death. And then, finally, the most damning evidence of all. And the reason why they were actually able to get a probable cause affidavit in the first place was the surveillance video footage proving that. Contrary to her statement, Nancy was at the school during the very short window of time in which Daniel was killed.

So so can I actually play you a clip that I think is very um interesting kind of regarding that? Yes, you may. This is, uh, like from one of her, uh trials, I believe did not shoot my husband. You were there in the area at the same time.

Girl, that's the thing. It's like you were there in a very small timeframe. You have all the means, all the motives to do this, but it wasn't you.

And then why? why were you lying about sleeping?

You really put it out there, like, pretty straightforward, within a six minute timeframe. And she goes, Nope, your defense terrible, dog shit, what do you mean? why? why is the defense terrible?

Cause it doesn't work in her favor, that's the thing. So it's so crazy. On the morning of September 5th, 2018, just three months after the murder of her husband, police arrested Nancy at her home that previously the couple's home and Beaverton. She was seemingly shocked and asked, You're arresting me?

You must think I murdered my husband, No, Nancy. We thought that you actually stole some cheerios from the stop and shop down the street, so you're being arrested for that. This has nothing to do with your husband's murder. No, this is just from something that happened, like two decades ago.

You know, when you you grabbed the skittles from the Kroger, you just like, had a couple unpaid parking tickets. Nance, it's we're just going to take you downtown. Like, Yes, they think you murdered your husband, of course.

That's why they're arresting you, and don't they literally say, like, you're being arrested for the murder of Ball? Yeah, for sure, there's no way. Remain silent.

Anything you say can be a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So she's really quick on the uptake there. But despite all the strong evidence against her, like we just heard in that crazy ass clip. Nancy maintained that she was innocent, but still offered zero explanation for her presence outside the school on the morning of her husband's murder. But strangely enough, her arrest actually shocked almost everybody who knew her and Daniel, especially the people closest to them. Her old roommate, Tanya, she said I was absolutely shocked. I don't think she did it.

And I would be embarrassed if I was them if they can't prove this now. Daniel's son, Nathan Stillwater, was among those most stunned by Nancy's arrest. He told Dateline They were, you know, they had started making some plans for what was going to happen in their life. And while it hadn't been nailed down yet, it seemed like they were onto some exciting ideas.

Honestly.

We were coming to terms that this would be an unsolved murder. It doesn't make any sense.

Wow, so at first, I think before they knew what the evidence was, people in their lives were just like, No, there's no way Nancy could have done this. But then they're sitting there through the trial and they see the surveillance footage, the multiple life insurance taken out, the the different gun parts like. And they're like, Holy shit. I knew this woman and like, this is what she's capable of. So Nancy was arraigned in Multnomah, I believe, is how you say it. Circuit Court on September 7th, and a week later, on September 13th, a grand jury indicted her on one count of murder with a firearm.

To which she pled I'm sure you'll be amazed. not guilty. I'm not amazed at all. No, exactly, I was being sarcastic. So, while she was sitting in jail waiting for her trial, the story was circulating online and eventually made its way to the national news outlet and the Late Night Cycle.

And, of course, they were all chomping at the bit to get the story out about the woman who wrote The wrong husband and how to murder your husband.

But reporters were actually having a tough time lining up any interviews with the Brophy's friends, family, or anybody at the school. Their requests to those people went almost entirely ignored. And actually, Daniel's students and his friends had, quote, made a pact to stay silent out of respect for a man who in life valued his privacy. Which I think is cool. So yeah, that was good stuff, yeah.

Good stuff, so, in the months after Nancy's arrest, the county judge imposed a protective order, actually, which barred the release of any information or evidence related to the case on the grounds that it might jeopardize the investigation. But by April 2019, the news had gone national. And because of that, Nancy's attorney tried to have the protection order extended. Essentially arguing that if any more coverage or any more information got released, Nancy wouldn't get a fair trial. But the prosecutor, Sean Overstreet, completely disagreed.

And he argued all of the information being shared was fact. It was just damning and that's why the defense wanted it left out. So ultimately, the judge agreed with the prosecution and the order was lifted as it should be. Yeah.

Agreed? So as the prosecution and the defense did their thing, detectives actually kept on investigating and gathering more and more evidence against our girl, Nance, who was not our girl at all. It was during this time that they discovered several more life insurance policies that Nancy had taken out in Daniel's name. And they discovered the replacement glock parts that would later be essential in prosecuting Nancy, according to the prosecutor, the gun confiscated from Nancy was the exact make and model used in the killing of Daniel.

But the ballistics testing found out that the bullets taken from his body were not a match for Nancy's gun, but the match of gun. But mismatch of the bullets seemed too much of a coincidence for the investigators, so they dug deeper into Nancy's activities and they found a possible explanation. And that's where they ended up finding out that. She had bought separate parts for a Glock nine millimeter handgun on eBay, meaning the gun could be a match for the murder weapon.

It just had a different slide and barrel, and that's why Nancy thought she was going to get away with it. I mean, like.

She couldn't even have had someone else buy it for her on eBay. Like, I don't know, like, I'm not trying to give you ideas. Uh, potential Nancy's out there, but come on, no, you're right, though. Like, you have to sit there and you're like, Oh my God.

But then at the same time, it's like, wow, she literally thought to like, replace different. I would, I don't. I don't even think I knew before this that you could replace different parts of like, mix match gun parts. I thought they all just had to like, line up together, like a LeGo set or something. But I mean, like, I knew that that was a thing. I'm not like super into guns or anything, um, but like, I knew that was a thing. But I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have thought to, like, you know, be like, Oh, that could be a thing in a case where you're switching it around.

For like, you know, the investigation purposes. Like, I wouldn't have thought of that, and I don't, I don't know. Maybe other people listening, they're like, Oh, of course, you think of that, but I wouldn't think that Nancy would think of that. That's the thing.

And why is she so cocky, thinking she's going to get away with this when she's going to get away with this? But you didn't, you didn't prep anything else, that's the thing I don't understand. I think, like you were saying at the beginning. I think she just had to have been delusional. If she thought she was going to get away with this, she is fully delusional.

I mean, as the case is held together by band-aids, according to her, it's like, No, it's tied together by actual surveillance footage of you outside of a murder scene. But the case ended up finally going to trial on April 4th, 2022. There were tons of delays because of Covid. Lawyers actually tried to get her released from prison because of, like, Covid complications. They were like, she's in danger.

And this is like a violation of her rights, and they were like she waived a bail hearing. So unless you want to have a bail hearing, like we can talk then. But if not, you're sitting in prison, and even if you do talk about a bail hearing, you're most likely sitting in prison.

You're awaiting trial for murder, yeah? But they were off to the races, with prosecutor Sean Overstreet arguing on behalf of the state and Lisa Maxfield arguing for the defense. Now, by the time the case was ready for trial, the judge actually had decided to exclude the How to Murder Your Husband blog post from the evidence. On the grounds that quote any minimal probate of value as substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice and a confusion of the issues. So I think basically what he was saying is that, like, it might be confusing to the jury.

And that's kind of what I got out of that. I don't agree, but I can see where, like, maybe it would have been an issue. Because it's like, it's like a fiction novel type thing, or like a blog post or whatever it happened to be, exactly.

And I think they were well in the prosecution. They were okay with that because they had actually planned in their argument to minimize that post anyway because they had stronger evidence. So they were okay with it being omitted. And better shit to work with.

In his opening statement, Prosecutor Overstreet told the jury that even though a good amount of their evidence was circumstantial, they planned and believed that they could show that. It was greed that motivated Nancy to kill her husband back in 2018.

He told them and would later tell Dateline as well. Quote Nancy wanted more, Nancy wanted a lifestyle that Dan couldn't give to her. I think she thought, if I could do this, I'll get enough money that will allow me to change that lifestyle.

We never thought that she didn't love him, things had worked out differently, but when they didn't, he was a problem for her.

Ultimately, Nancy's out for number one, right? Exactly, it's tale as old as time. She thinks she's entitled to a certain lifestyle, she's going to do whatever she needs to do to get there.

And I think she also got more and more desperate as they were losing more and more money. And she wanted to be able to spend money on things that she wanted. But she couldn't because he was the only person making money, and she was not. Is she at this point? She's like, I want to say, she's like in her late fifties, early sixties, that's just, I don't know.

At that point, like, I don't know, is this where just I feel like material things mean less and less. The older you get, you know, I think that it depends on who you are. I think if you've gotten what you, if you've gotten what you wanted out of life so far, and when you get to, like age.

That material items would mean less to you, but I guess if you're not getting what you want out of life, then it's going to mean more to you. I think it just, I think it really depends on the kind of person you are and how much material things mean to you. I think she was a very materialistic person, it seems.

Yeah, that's true, and I, and like you were saying, I think she was always out for number one. She's definitely out for number one. Nancy, you suck, right?

Crazy and as over street again. Dan Brophy was worth almost $1.5 million to Nancy if he was dead, but worth a life of financial hardship if he stayed alive. Damn so fucked up, either, like it's.

Either way, it's your husband, I know, and it. It sucks that, you know, they get to that point where they have to put it out there. Like that. It's like, Hey, yeah, I don't want to say this. But he was just a number to her.

Yeah, like, I can't imagine, like, like, putting a value on how much Drew is worth to me, like a a money, a monetary value, right? Like, that's crazy.

Way more than that, like, I would, what it's like, Hey, this, this is also a human, you know? Do you remember that part? Exactly? Not really for your monetary gain, but thank you.

So over the course of 11 days. The prosecution supported their argument by showing the surveillance footage of Nancy at the school on the morning of the morning of the murders. And then the search history and data from her computer, which showed the purchase of the additional parts for the Glock. The multiple life insurance policies that would have provided a payout altogether once they found the other ones of nearly $800,000. And then the jury also heard from 47 witnesses, including everybody from the OCI, which, by the way, I think I said OSI earlier, I'm sorry, I meant to say OCI.

Culinary Institute. I definitely did. Yeah, you guys got what I was saying. But they heard from the facilities manager at the school. Several of the students who actually were the ones to find Daniel. They heard from Daniel's father, Jack Brophy, and several of the couple's friends.

Now, one of the witnesses that helped the prosecution significantly actually came from a financial analyst named Steven Santos. He testified that Nancy and Dan's retirement plans were financially unsustainable and that the life insurance policies taken out in Daniel's name would have been more appropriate for a couple with more discretionary income. So basically saying, because again, when they met with that financial advisor earlier, they said. Even if you sell your house, even if you sell your land, you're still going to end up in the red. I think she had gotten them so much in the red that even with the money that she would have gotten from Daniel, she like, she still potentially could have been in the red. I'm sure she would have been.

I mean, it sounded like it wasn't going well, no, and eventually, I think. Even if, even if she, like, did end up in the green a bit, it was only a matter of time before she ended up in the red again. For sure, I mean, she's obviously wanted to get rid of him to keep spending.

So I don't think that was going to slow down, I think, if anything, it was going to ramp up. Yeah, and I mean, it's crazy, I'm sure, like, how fast that money could go?

Like, you see it when people win the lottery and like stuff like that. Like, obviously a million dollars is a lot of money, but when you are spending it with, like, absolutely no regard. I'm sure it's going to go quickly. Yeah. So Lisa Maxfield, the defense attorney, she tried to poke any hole that she could in the state's court case about Nancy.

She told the jury in her opening statement The state will present a circumstantial case that begs you to cast a blind die to the most important circumstance. LOVE Nancy Crampton Brophy has always been thoroughly, madly crazy in love with Daniel Brophy, and she still is to this day for Nancy Brophy. He was perfect.

Wow, it's like, Yeah, why'd she murder him then? Yeah, it kind of, it kind of shatters once you, uh, like.

Why was she outside of school when he got killed then? That doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. Why'd she, uh, write a whole entire article on how to murder your husband while she was married to a perfectly great husband? Why'd she write a letter to the insurance and go, Hey, uh, can I get that money? Uh, post haste.

No, she literally not. That wasn't even to the insurance, that was to the detective, she said. Can I get a letter clearing me as this? Like saying, I'm not a suspect? And they were like, No cause, you're a suspect.

That's fucking crazy, insane. Like I said, the woman is delusional, truly is the definition of the word. And then she went on to try and explain every point that the prosecution had made away.

She said The ghost this is the defense attorney, the ghost gun kit and the glock were merely research for Nancy's writing. I'm like, I host a true crime podcast and never have I ever bought a Glock on eBay. Yeah, I mean, really anything that you need to research about it.

If you ask a friend who has one or something to be like, Hey, can I just look at this for like, a little bit or something like anything else? I don't think you need to go out and get a gun license if you just want to look at a gun for a little while. Exactly. And you were saying, all of her friends had this specific kind of gun.

So use theirs for your fucking research, and if she's saying like, Oh, it's research is research this and that, but I've never fired it. How much research are you doing? You're not even going to shoot the thing that you're researching, like, don't you want to see how a thing functions if you're researching it?

There's a lot of levels to that, which I think she's full of shit. I agree, giant asshole, I agree. And then she also said that the internet searches, uh, for how to cover up a murder were also just for research.

Yeah, fair. And then she offered the alternative theory that Brophy had actually been killed by a local unhoused man seen in the area that morning. Yeah, you always know it's going well when, uh, they start offering up their own theories. Yeah, exactly.

The theory was very quickly dismissed by Detective Anthony Merrill, who told the jury he and his partner had located the man and determined he was never a threat. And he pointed out Daniel had been shot, but nothing had been taken. Yeah, like, hello. And then he said there. She was also being a little racist when she did this. Because the UM detective ended up saying later, they're asking you to consider the black guy in the neighborhood as the killer without any evidence.

You should be offended, like literally said that you should be offended, it's true now. The most dramatic moment came on day 21 of the trial, when Nancy took the stand to testify in her own defense.

And as we know from the clip, you showed us this was a big yikes, yeah. During questioning from the defense, she tried to explain away the more damning aspects of the prosecution's arguments. She told the jury she was a very thorough researcher. She and Daniel were very much in love and they were working on solving their financial problems. And then she admitted, yes, she had a purchase that replacement glock, barrel and slide from the seller on eBay.

But it was because she was, quote, obsessed with gun parts, and that the missing part were parts were surely in storage somewhere.

Okay, well, what do you think? Her plan was in that moment to draw them up, like she was going to order them again? That's definitely what she was going to do, right?

I don't even think she had a plan, I think she was just talking out of her ass. I think if it went down to it, she was going to order them again and she's going to go, look, they're right here. And then they were going to go, Um, it says, right here. That Tuesday, you just ordered a second set.

So where's the first set? She'd be like, I don't know what you're talking about, surely she'd be like, my my account was hacked.

Ridiculous, so some of her testimony seemed some plausible.

In some way, but other parts were downright ridiculous. She said she had no memory of leaving the house on the morning of the murder, and she didn't know what she was doing. On the surveillance camera footage, she said You know, maybe I was struggling to write and I went out to clear my head.

And a psychiatrist for the defense testified. It was possible that Nancy was suffering from what's called retrograde amnesia from the later trauma of learning that her husband had been killed. And that's why she didn't remember what she was doing that morning. So the prosecutor challenged that claim and said to Nancy If you can't remember anything, how could you be sure that you didn't kill your husband?

She goes, Uh, she was like, Uh, she said. I see Dan every day, I talk to him every day. This is not a man I would have shot because I had a memory issue. It seems to me. If I shot him, I would know every detail.

Okay, okay, buddy, that's also just a strange explanation. Yeah, I mean, like I said, she's the king of flip-flopping.

So, after 25 days of evidence and testimony, closing arguments were presented on May 23rd, 2022.

So, not that long ago, Overstreet focused on Nancy's convenient claim of amnesia. The physical evidence, the forensic evidence that linked her to the crime, including the purchases of the guns, the surveillance footage. And in closing, he turned the defense's argument back onto them and reminded the jury no one would want to hurt Dan. Even Nancy herself told that to detectives.

So nobody else had a motive, but Nancy did.

Now, literally the only person in the world.

Now, in closing arguments for the defense, Nancy's attorneys focused on the purely circumstantial nature of the case and reminded the jury that the prosecution's case couldn't be proven beyond a trial. Instead, they emphasized that throughout the trial, the jury repeatedly heard how happy Nancy and Daniel were together. Maxfield even said at one point that the best proven fact during the trial was that Nancy and Dan loved each other.

That doesn't, nah, I think that she murdered him, and then after she was like they loved each other, she was like. There were other possible assailants in the area. Then, she claimed the police had ignored them, which was not true.

And also, why are you saying there are multiple other assailants when the only person you brought up in the first place was just an unhoused man minding his own business? You Dingus?

You said, assailant, you're not wrong. I thought I was going to move past that.

So on May 25th, 2022, after eight hours of deliberation, I can't even believe it took them that long. The jury returned with a unanimous guilty verdict for the second degree murder of Daniel Brophy. Sentencing was held on June 13th. And that's when they did victim impact statements. Um, Daniel's son Nathan did an impact statement and said to Nancy, you opted to lie, steal, cheat, fraud. Ultimately killed the man that was, for some reason, still unbeknownst to me. Your biggest fan?

You executed my father in an act of cold-blooded, premeditated murder, the man that did everything for you. I was actually curious on if they had kids or not. That's heartbreaking.

Yeah, yeah, it's really sad. So, before pronouncing his sentence, the judge addressed the family, saying, I think the thing that you can take away, which I hope gives you some small measure of solace, is that. He was a mentor and a teacher to many. And hopefully they will, and hopefully they will turn and have an impact on others themselves as they teach. And with that said, he sentenced Nancy to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after.

And then Lifetime went on to make the movie called How to Murder Your Husband The Nancy Brophy Story, which I have not watched.

Wow, they took the name, took the name. That's crazy. Just like a really sad story overall, because it just didn't need to happen.

No, I mean, what an idiot dude. I mean. I'm glad she's in jail. I'm kind of disappointed that she has the possibility of parole in 25 years. But hopefully she'll be like withering and dying at that point. But Caleb, thank you so much for joining me. Doggy, of course, dude.

Thanks for having me, I hope. Uh, did all right. My my, uh. It's been a while since I've done a true crime anything, really. I think it's been like three years. For those of you who are listening, we hope you keep listening and we hope you keep it weird.

But not so weird that you murder your husband and write a blog post about it, because that's really too weird, it's a little too weird.

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