Stranger than Fiction | 5

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If you didn't know that they were jail calls, you wouldn't suspect that she's making them from jail while being held for murder.

We're playing Scrabble here with some of the most interesting words you've ever seen in your entire life. And I keep saying, what? What is this word? What? What is this word?

I listen to a lot of jail calls and not everybody talks about their case, but, you know, they're depressed or they're upset or they're, you know, sad about their situation. And they miss their family and friends and they feel bad about what is happening and the position that they're in.

I got a fan letter and they sent me this, oh, a great artist like you should not be incarcerated, blah, blah, blah. What do you need? What can I send you? I'll send you all the kinds of details about myself. And you don't want to say, really, don't.

We started thinking, like, does she have some sort of mental illness? I mean, is there something wrong here? She doesn't think that she's going to actually be held responsible for this. She thought she was smarter than everybody and she thought she can get away with it.

If you're looking for a deeper dive into Nancy Brophy's story, you should check out retired FBI agent and criminal profiler Candice DeLong's coverage of the case in the latest episode of Killer Psyche. Stay tuned until the end of this episode to hear a preview of Killer Psyche.

You know, as far as how to manipulate them and use them.

Starting in late 2017, Nancy became especially interested in one particular kind of gun. The unregistered, untraceable kind. Ghost guns. She finally bought one on Christmas Eve. A little stocking stuffer for herself.

I'm going to speak with Mr. Dove, please.

The detectives found the name of Kermit Dove, a local gunsmith, in Nancy's search history.

I'm Mr. Dove, this is Detective Anthony Merrill with Portland Police Bureau Homicide Detail.

It wasn't hard for Kermit to remember Nancy. She'd called him to ask about building a gun from a kit. She wanted to know... If she got stuck, could she get help from a professional like me? Kermit told her no.

Maybe she thought the ghost gun was going to be the perfect weapon because it was untraceable. But then, when she opened it up and realized all the work that went into putting this thing together, maybe it was beyond her capability.

Then she reaches out to a gunsmith and learns she's on her own with it. So that February, she changes course and buys a licensed gun at a local gun show.

The theory is she came up with a plan to buy a gun. that would be all legit. There would be paperwork showing her purchase of it. She had a reason, because there were school shootings and Dan worked in the school.

Then, on the day of the murder, Nancy freely hands over that licensed gun to the police. She tells Merrill and Posey that she and Dan had bought it but never used it.

They got it, they looked at it, and they were just like, oh my God, what did we do? I can't even touch it. This thing is too dangerous.

Merrill and Posey went back through their earlier conversations with Nancy.

Some of the ways she reacted at certain questions were strange to us.

And so it's still on my closet shelf and it still has that little plastic band around the shooter thing. There's a name for this.

There's a name for this? I've read Nancy's books. She knew it was called a trigger.

At the time when we first gave the death notification, we thought this is a poor older lady that just learned her husband of 20-some years was brutally shot to death at this place of work. We believe it's Dan that's really killed her.

Yeah, I kind of got that when everybody gave me the exact quote.

It seemed okay, because we know everyone reacts differently to extreme stress, but she had some weird responses to certain things.

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, it's really what I'm looking for.

And then, when you put it together with all these other pieces that we've assembled up to this point, it's super weird and everything looks very suspicious.

Have you got enough things that you really think you know, or you think you've got the potential to solve it? at this point? Even if he finds who shot him, he's not going to bring him back.

And I want him back. That's the part I want. I don't care about who shot him.

I just want him back. I don't want him dead.

You start peeling away the layers, and that's how you discover that something much more nefarious is going on.

About a month after Nancy's arrest, detectives Merrill and Posey were burning the midnight oil at the office.

Most everybody's already gone home from the detective division. I'm on the computer looking through stuff.

Posey was scouring through Dan and Nancy's electronic records.

I want to get it. I want to get that piece of evidence.

Merrill was across the room working at a different cubicle.

I had another homicide that I'd just gotten after the Brophy case, so I was slammed over there trying to figure things out.

Suddenly, Merrill heard something. It was coming from Posey's direction.

Darren would do this thing. He'd get this thing where he's excited about something, and he'd go, phew, phew, phew.

That's the sound of Detective Posey's finger guns. Merrill hurried over.

I'm like, what are you doing? What's going on? Right? And he's all smiling ear to ear.

Posey showed Merrill his computer screen. In Nancy's inbox, there was an email from eBay. It contained a receipt from a purchase.

A Glock 9mm barrel and slide.

A separate barrel and slide for a Glock handgun.

I was like, OK, this is it. This person has done this, and I found how she did it.

All right, so here's a little anatomy of a gun for you. Picture a typical semi-automatic pistol. When you take a shot, there's a part on the top half of the gun that springs back during the recoil. That's the slide. Now, the barrel is housed inside of the slide and is the long metal tube that the bullet travels through to hit the target.

You can take this barrel and slide by itself. Then you can go and take the receiver of another Glock handgun, just the bottom part. with the handle. You could put two of those items together, and that'll be a functional handgun.

And here's the real kicker. The barrel from the gun Nancy had given them is what their forensics team used to rule it out as the murder weapon. They looked at the markings and indentations on each spent shell casing and treated them kind of like a fingerprint. Their working theory was every single gun would leave a different pattern, and that pattern was specifically created by the barrel of the gun.

So you change the signature if you have a different barrel and slide on the receiver of that gun by switching them out.

Pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Nancy bought the unregistered ghost gun, couldn't put it together, and then bought a fully assembled gun at the gun show. Only problem was, it's a registered weapon, which can be traced back to her. So she got creative.

The theory was she used the receiver from the gun show gun.

That is, the bottom half of the gun.

Went out and got this barrel and slide, switched them out, committed this murder.

And then Nancy replaced the new slide and barrel with the original one. She handed over the gun on the day of the murder, knowing that the shell casings wouldn't match.

She thought she was smarter than everybody else. She thought, I can get away with this because I'm smart.

And it was possible she still could get away with it.

All we have at this point is a purchase of a barrel and slide, and, seeing that it had been mailed and paid for by a credit card by Nancy Brophy. If you do not have the correct slide and barrel, you do not have the evidence needed for that forensic lab scientist to make the comparison to those impressions on the casings.

There's a big difference between a smoking gun and a receipt for one.

It was one of those cases where we knew we had to try to think a little bit like we believed. maybe Nancy had been thinking. She started to seem like one of the characters in her books to me.

Fortunately for them, assistant DA Nicole Herman had just gotten back from her honeymoon.

She talked about one of her books that one of the characters in the book had hidden a piece of evidence in a wall in their house.

Merrill was all ears.

So it was like we were trying to think outside of the box and be creative.

Or in this case, maybe they needed to take the whole box apart and look inside.

Wondery.

63-year-old Daniel Dan Brophy had a routine. Every morning he would wake up at dawn, feed the chickens, and then walk his dogs over to Starbucks to buy his wife, 68-year-old Nancy, a cup of coffee. He would then take a shower and get dressed. And after kissing his wife goodbye, he'd head to his teaching job at the Oregon Culinary Institute. On Saturday, June 2, 2018, Dan's day reportedly began as it normally did.

You can listen to Killer Psyche early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

You know, secret compartments, hiding stuff, whether it's in a trunk or a secret room. I think one book has some mention of there being like a hidden alcove under some stairs.

Nicole also knew that after Dan's murder, Nancy had done a lot of work on the house, trying to get it ready for sale.

So she's not only clearing stuff out, putting stuff in storage units and pods, but she is like doing work on the yard, doing work on the house. And so we got concerned that perhaps, given the combination of her mind, what she's written about, and the fact that she's done work on the house, is it really that far removed to think that she may have hidden the murder weapon, which is really what we are looking for, right? In a wall or somewhere else in her house.

Posey and Merrill started their search in the master bedroom. They slowly walked the perimeter of the room, then inspected the walk-in closet. And that's when they saw it.

It looked like a section had been cut out and somebody had drywalled it.

They got right to work. Posey and another member of the team began cutting into the sheetrock.

And they're searching all through the wall and, you know, trying to get in there, and they're just digging, digging, and they find absolutely nothing.

They moved their search to the kitchen.

Some of her characters hid components of weapons and stuff in and around the voids around kitchen appliances.

They searched every inch and crevice of the dishwasher, checked around the fridge, opened up the stove.

We looked at all kinds of things.

Then we started thinking, well, maybe that garage again had some hidey hole spot that we didn't see.

It didn't. There was no hidey hole spot. And there was no sign of that slide and barrel.

She had plenty enough time to be able to dispense of that item.

They'd been hoping her books would lead them straight to it. But in this case, Nancy had kept her fiction and her real life separate.

And we know that people can get rid of guns fairly easily if they really put their mind to it. You could throw them in the ocean, you could throw them in the river, and they may never be found ever.

They had to come to terms with the fact that they might never find the murder weapon.

Do we have enough? We obviously believed without a doubt that she killed her husband. That was never a question in our mind.

But without that murder weapon, did they have enough to convince a jury?

There's always a little bit of, I think, worry when you don't have.

They had their work cut out for them. They were going to have to weave thousands of hours of investigation and interviews into a story. And it would need to be clear enough, persuasive enough, that everyone in the courtroom could follow along.

Am I connecting the dots for them? Can they see it all there?

So they did what a lot of writers do when we're trying to craft a story. They broke out the post-it notes.

And so we would say, OK, murder scene was one post-it note up at the top.

They added post-it notes for witnesses.

Who's going to tell this part of the story? Who's going to tell us about the insurance? Who's going to tell us about the guns?

The grid on the wall kept growing. But there was one name that kept coming up again and again. Someone who'd been close to both Dan and Nancy. Someone the defense was probably eyeing, too.

She was this little old lady.

Nancy's defense attorney.

She didn't really come across as a lawyer. She almost came across as, like, I felt like she was Nancy's friend. Like, I can't imagine this woman getting up there and getting down fighting with another lawyer.

But Lisa had come prepared. Tonya showed her into the living room, and Lisa handed her a handkerchief. A handwritten letter. It was from Nancy. Dear Tonya, I was so glad to hear from you.

I hope you're doing well. I miss talking to you. I miss our coffee dates. I love you. I miss you.

Tonya had been thinking about her friend, too. She had a lot of questions for Nancy's lawyer.

They said, all we can tell you is that Nancy's innocent and that it'll come out at trial. But we, without a doubt, believe she is innocent, Tonya, with all our heart.

Nancy's lawyer also had a special request. The defense wanted Tonya to testify on Nancy's behalf.

They wanted me to be a character witness for Nancy.

So, months later, when the subpoena arrived at her door, Tonya knew what she had to do.

Nancy was a close enough friend of mine. Nancy's never done me wrong. Like, she's always looked out for me.

Soon after, Tonya was asked to come downtown to meet with Sean and Nicole. It was pretty apparent to Nicole that Tonya didn't want to be there.

She was very clear with us. I am going to be honest. I am going to tell the truth about everything I know, whether it helps the case or doesn't help the case, because I am just, that is who I am. I'm going to tell it all.

Maybe Tonya was hoping her honesty would turn them off. But it didn't.

My luck is going to be. I'm going to probably get served on both sides, which is exactly what happened.

And as much as she wanted to believe her friend was innocent, she still had questions.

Why was her ban at the school if she didn't do this? Like, I asked her where the hell she was. She said she was at home in bed sleeping. How can you be at home in bed sleeping and your van be around the school at the same time? Like, just answer me.

Behind bars, Nancy seemed to be sorting through a few questions of her own.

I'm kind of stunned because, you know, my response is, you know, I'm on TV. That must mean I'm guilty. No, you're not. No, you're not. Do not do that.

As weeks in jail became months and then years, Nancy was changing.

Some people certainly don't believe it. You know how Dan and I were. I know. You guys loved each other. Yeah.

She began to sound more worried. Sad, even. Over the crackle of the prison phone, family and friends delivered more bad news.

I was hoping, Nancy, that I wasn't going to have to share this with you until you were out. I need you to know that PB passed several months ago.

PB was Nancy's beloved dog, Peanut Butter.

And I'm so sorry, Nancy. That is just one more thing.

She'd lost relatives, and she'd also lost the support of friends.

Kim never came, and so I kind of dropped her from the list.

One of those friends was Nancy's writing partner, Kim Wullenberg.

I thought Kim would be there for you. One of the things somebody said to me yesterday, they said, Nancy, one of the things you find out in jail is who stands with you and who doesn't.

I could have written her more, but I just didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to somebody like that? I thought, well, I don't want to tell her about my life, that I felt was going well when she's where she's at. I thought, how fair is that? So, it's like, well, what do I say?

I'm about halfway through it on the first draft.

She'd been scribbling page after page and passing them along to her friends on the outside to type up.

But what's interesting is I stopped writing because I wasn't sure where the plot was going. And I sat down and I said, what do I like about the books I read? And I said, you've got to come up with a twist. And all of a sudden, I didn't repeal him. And how?

But Nancy's mind wasn't just on her latest book. She was also thinking about the most important story of her life. The story her lawyers would tell about her and Dan at her trial. And for that story, she was also going to introduce a twist. Something that no one in the courtroom would see coming.