‘How To Murder Your Husband’ Author Convicted For Killing Her Husband

Nancy Crampton Brophy has now been convicted of second-degree murder for shooting dead her chef husband, Daniel Brophy, on June 2nd, 2018, while he was at the Oregon Culinary Institute in Southwest Portland, where he had worked since the year 2016. His students reportedly arrived shortly and discovered Daniel’s body on the floor. 

Police claimed at the time that the 63-Year-Old was shot twice. Thanks to a CCTV, Nancy was spotted driving to the culinary institute half an hour before the death. 

And just twenty minutes later, she was again seen as she drove away and went home to Beavertown. When questioned about this trip, Nancy testified in court she didn’t remember and theorized she might have been making a coffee run and taking notes for her new romance novel. But prosecutors claim she was motivated to kill him by his $1.4 million life insurance policy. 

An audio recording was also played in the court, in which the 71-Year-Old asked a detective 4days later to write a letter explicitly exonerating her in her husband’s death so she could collect the life insurance policy.

According to KOIN, the couple was having financial problems at the time, and the fall before he passed away, they had taken $35K out of Brophy’s 401K account, about half of its total amount, to pay down credit cards and catch up on the more than $8K they owed on their mortgage. Nancy claimed the policy was worth 40K, but investigators have insisted she tried to claim 10 different policies that totaled $1.4milion, including a worker’s compensation plan, because he was killed on the job.

Fast forward to 2022, prosecutors claimed Nancy, the author of “How To Murder Your Husband,” killed her husband to collect his $1.4million life insurance policy. 

They hinged much of their case on the fact that she had acquitted gun pieces in the months before her husband’s death, including a piece that could obscure what gun a bullet was fired from. “She had the plan in place. She had the opportunity to carry out this murder. She was the only one who had the motive. Nancy is the only person who could have committed this crime,” a deputy district attorney, Shawn Overstreet, told the New York Times.

The defense argued Nancy and her husband had been in a loving relationship for more than 25years, but in the end, five men and seven women on the jury delivered a guilty verdict after hours of deliberation. Now, she faces life in prison, and sentencing is scheduled for June 13th. However, the titles of other novels of Nancy include The Wrong Husband and The Wrong Cop, and the Hell Of The Heart.