00:00:00
All I could think about is, oh my god, I want him back. I don't care about who shot him.
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I just want him back. Chef Daniel Brophy was lying on his back in front of this large kitchen sink.
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We believe the suspect snuck up and basically assassinated him. So he never saw it coming?
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No. I lost a friend, and a good friend. I want them to find the person that did this.
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My first thought was maybe it was a student who Dan didn't rub the right way. Who knows if somebody was in the building?
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Who knows if somebody followed him in? Chef Brophy's wife, Nancy Brophy, she's a writer.
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She had this life where she was a novelist, and then it kind of all came together.
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How to murder your husband. That certainly got a lot of attention. Reading it and going, oh my gosh,
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she kind of followed her own plan. I don't think she did it. Nancy not capable of planning and committing a murder.
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Are you kidding me? No. I did not shoot my husband. I don't know even how to defend myself.
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The nightmare's just now beginning. Portland, Oregon, June 2nd, 2018. 911. Hi, we are at Oregon Culinary Institute.
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A shooting. A man down. He's an older man. Is he conscious right now? No, he is not conscious.
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8.24 a.m. on a Saturday. A building that's virtually empty at this hour. The building is on lockdown in the surrounding area.
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A killer is on the loose. They have not located the suspect yet. By the time Portland detectives Anthony Merrill and Darren Posey arrived an hour later,
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uniformed officers had secured the scene. The whole area is taped off. I noticed our criminalists were videoing the whole entire scene.
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I had heard of the Oregon Culinary Institute, but that was as much as I knew at that point.
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The Oregon Culinary Institute, known as OCI, its motto, training kitchen people.
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It was a school as well as a restaurant where the students, as part of the curriculum,
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prepared and served three-course lunches and four-course dinners. Detectives walked in, through a storage area, and then into an instructional room known as Kitchen One.
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He was lying on his back right in front of this large kitchen sink. No surprise there, the victim was a chef and teacher.
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We're giving four dozen oysters to each team. Chef Dan Brophy was one of OCI's OGs, Original Gourmets.
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I have been teaching since the Oregon Culinary Institute opened. Twelve years at OCI, a chef for more than four decades, a commanding presence at the school,
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and a well-known figure in the Portland culinary scene. Dan Brophy was dead at age 63.
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Detectives soon learned Chef Brophy had driven his white pickup to the school, parked,
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and then disabled the building's alarm at 7.22 a.m. It was about 10 minutes later when a colleague arrived.
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She soon found Chef Brophy lying on the floor, and a student made that 911 call.
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Could you tell what Dan Brophy was doing when he was murdered? Yes, he was at the sink getting the ice water ready
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and coffee ready for the students who were going to be coming in. Not far from the body, detectives saw this.
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A large ice scooper. So we believe he was up there at the sink when whoever shot him came in and shot him in the back first.
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He had another gunshot directly center mass to his chest. He's shot. He falls. He drops the ice shovel. And then whoever it is stands over him and finishes the job.
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Correct. Somebody just wanted to execute this person. No gun was present. Investigators did find two 9mm shell casings.
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When they don't pick up the brass, that say anything to you? They wanted to get in quick and get out quick.
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If this was a professional hitman, then yeah, maybe they do pick up those casings.
00:04:25
As detectives went about their work, word was beginning to spread. Students showing up for class found a man shot to death in the school's kitchen.
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By mid-morning, Chef Brophy's son Nathaniel was hearing the news. My wife and I took a phone call from my grandmother, who said that it was my father that had been killed.
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And what did you think? We were in shock. It was really hard to wrap our minds around what could have possibly happened.
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A common reaction, as it turned out. This is Vanessa Paz. She used to work with us here at Dateline and then went on to OCI as a marketing and communication specialist.
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She and Chef Brophy were close. In fact, these videos you're seeing of Chef Brophy?
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Vanessa was behind the camera. I received a text message, Dan Brophy is dead. And I remember I stopped and I just started crying.
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I couldn't believe it. About two hours after the 911 call at 1028 a.m., Dan Brophy's wife Nancy had driven from their home in nearby Beaverton to OCI and had been ushered into a command post for what police call a death notification.
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Dan is your husband, is that correct? Nancy Brophy told police that as usual that morning Dan had risen early and
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left for work around 7 0 5 or 7 10 while she was still in bed seven minutes into that conversation detective Posey finally broke the bad news So I just want to let you know that we believe it Dan that the video
00:06:09
Yeah, I kind of got that when everybody gave me the sad sack book. Yeah, all I could think about is, oh my God.
00:06:17
Yeah, take one step at a time, okay? I know, I'm sorry. Take it slow, and there's not a lot of things you can do right now.
00:06:26
Your mind's going a million miles per hour. It is. Here's the terrible thing. Even if you find who shot him, it's not going to bring him back.
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And I want him back. That's the part I want. I don't care about who shot him. I just want him back.
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I don't want him dead. Detective Soon sent Nancy home to grieve, and she called her best friend, Tanya Medlin.
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She sounded like she was in shock. She couldn't form a whole sentence. Tanya had been a friend of Nancy's for 30 years, and she'd known Dan well, too.
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In fact, to earn a little extra money, Dan had been moonlighting, cooking for fellow chef Tanya at an assisted living home.
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You saw him the night before he died. What was he like on that last night? He was his same old self. He was happy. He gave me crap about the menu.
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You said he's the same old Dan, which is what? Like, when I first met him, I didn't think he liked me.
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And I would always go to Nancy and ask him, you know, what the heck is his problem?
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Like, does he not like me? She's like, no, that's just Dan. You didn't sense he was concerned about anything in his life?
00:07:26
No. No. It sucks. Because like I said, he wasn't just my employee. I lost a friend.
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I want them to find the person that did this. She was not alone in wanting that.
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Ingredients for a mystery. I'm always looking to learn new techniques, new cuisines.
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He was very much into teaching others, and the more he saw somebody feed off of what they were learning, the more he wanted to teach.
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Who'd want to kill Dan? My first thought was maybe it was a student who Dan didn't rub the right way.
00:08:17
In the days after Chef Dan Brophy was shot dead working in his kitchen at the Oregon Culinary Institute,
00:08:30
those who loved him were all asking the same question. Who'd want to kill Dan? My first thought was maybe it was a student who Dan didn't rub the right way, you know.
00:08:42
It was true, friends said. Dan Brophy, like many chefs, could come off a bit crusty.
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And maybe it had something to do with the way he'd been trained. I probably work for 10 different European chefs.
00:08:55
They don't really believe in human rights. Chef Brophy's career began washing dishes in Kansas City,
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which led to a job as a graveyard shift cook in a 24-hour restaurant. Later, he'd gone to culinary school and then begun teaching.
00:09:13
His mom said he'd always had his nose in a book, and that never changed. I'm always looking to learn new ingredients, new techniques, new cuisines.
00:09:24
He was very much into teaching others, and the more he saw somebody feed off of what they were learning, the more he wanted to teach.
00:09:33
One way he taught was by taking field trips. He loved the Oregon coast, had a degree in marine biology,
00:09:41
and was a bon vivant of the beach. We're taking a look at what we might see that's edible in the woods.
00:09:49
Chef Brophy was also an expert in foraging for and cooking edible mushrooms. With the portobello, you may not want to...
00:09:57
And he was a beekeeper. So we can pull these aside. A master gardener and an enthusiastic composter.
00:10:06
Our first field trip, he gave me these bags made out of compost, right, for the kids to throw trash in.
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He said, here, disperse them to the students. And then I said, oh, I said, these feel really good.
00:10:19
And he goes, do you want me to leave you alone with them? Like that was, and that was the first day I met him.
00:10:25
But that was his humor. That humor came through in what came to be known as brophyisms.
00:10:32
Job wouldn't go so slow if you only did it faster. How do you fix a sick chicken?
00:10:36
With a shovel. You can eat any exotic mushroom once. The chef also had a softer side, donating food and helping his parents feed hundreds of meals a week to the homeless at a church not far from OCI.
00:10:52
His personal life was simple. His marriage to Nancy was his second. In the early 90s, Nancy, a Texas native with a degree in economics and a divorce on her resume,
00:11:03
ended up as both a student at a cooking school where Dan taught and a roommate of Tanya Medlin.
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She comes home and she says, you have Dan Brophy? I said, no, he came after I left.
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She goes, what do you know about him? I said, he's married. She goes, well, yeah, that's not going to last.
00:11:20
And I said, don't be dipping your candle in somebody else's wax. You know what I mean?
00:11:24
Be careful there. She's like, no, no, no, no, no. He's got to handle his business.
00:11:28
She graduated school. She opened up a catering company. and then next thing I know we got a wedding invitation.
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Dan's son Nathaniel would soon go to work for Nancy's catering company. When your dad finally introduced you to Nancy,
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was that a moment of some tension or nervousness? I mean, I assumed that if he'd brought her into his life,
00:11:48
then she was someone that was going to be a good match for him. Everyone said it was obvious Nancy and Dan loved one another even if Dan did have a rather odd pet name for his wife Anytime someone was like hey Dan what do you think of you know making it on this trip
00:12:07
His response would be, oh, I have to ask management or let me check with management.
00:12:12
She was in charge. She was in charge. Nancy eventually sold the catering company when she could no longer do all the physical work required.
00:12:20
She began selling insurance. Her real passion, it turned out, was writing. Specifically, mysteries and romance novels.
00:12:30
Bodice rippers with names like Hell on the Heart. She'd written a series mostly revolving around Navy SEALs.
00:12:38
The wrong cop, the wrong lover, the wrong husband. You get the idea. It's funny, we go to work and we bust Dan's chops about it.
00:12:45
So you must be a firecracker in bed, buddy. He'd be like, shut up. Oh yeah, we bust his chops constantly.
00:12:51
Nancy had her writing, Dan had his gardening, mushroom hunting, and teaching. And they were active grandparents to Nathaniel's daughter.
00:13:00
They had started making some plans for what was going to happen in their retirement years.
00:13:04
And while it hadn't been nailed down yet, it seemed like they were on to some exciting
00:13:07
ideas. Now there would be no retirement for Dan Brophy. Instead, everyone wanted to know who'd killed him in a kitchen while Dan was doing what he
00:13:18
loved. Or as a mystery writer might have asked, who had developed a taste for murder?
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Who knows if somebody was in the building? Who knows if somebody followed him in?
00:13:32
We found that he had his wallet on him with all of his credit cards. He had 70-some dollars in cash, a cell phone, a watch, keys to his truck that was parked outside.
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Detectives dig deep for a motive. There's alcohol in there and a lot of expensive cooking equipment.
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Any of that disturbed or missing? We did several layers of searches of the building.
00:13:54
What would they find? Two days after Chef Dan Brophy was shot in the back, friends and family gathered at the Oregon Culinary Institute.
00:14:23
Hundreds of people came out for his vigil, and it was sad. Nancy sat there and gave her favorite memories of Dan.
00:14:31
He was a person who did what he loved. He loved teaching. He loved mushrooms. Dan was one of the few people I've ever known.
00:14:39
He did exactly what he wanted in life and loved doing it. Do you have any idea he'd touch that many people?
00:14:46
I do, yeah. It never ceased to amaze me how many people he intersected with throughout the course of his career.
00:14:54
Detectives Anthony Merrill and Darren Posey were aware that Dan's friends and family were asking some obvious questions.
00:15:02
Who knows if somebody was in the building? Who knows if, you know, somebody followed him in?
00:15:07
You wouldn't look at him in the street and say, yeah, that's somebody we should tap for money.
00:15:11
We found that he had his wallet on him with all of his credit cards. He had 70-some dollars in cash, a cell phone, a watch, keys to his truck that was parked outside.
00:15:22
Detectives wondered, could the killer or killers have been after something else?
00:15:28
There's alcohol in there and there's a lot of expensive cooking equipment. Any of that disturbed or missing?
00:15:34
We did several layers of searches of the building. From what we could determine, that all seemed to be in place.
00:15:40
In your investigation, I mean, who didn't like Dan Brophy? There was people that were like, he's tough, and he kind of has a dry humor that sometimes maybe would rub somebody the wrong way, right?
00:15:54
But nothing that somebody had it out for him because they had had their career ended by him or anything like that.
00:16:02
There was also no sign of forced entry, maybe because Dan Brophy's habit after disarming the alarm was to raise a roll-up door and load in supplies.
00:16:14
A killer could have simply walked in that open door. Clues from the scene were hard to come by.
00:16:21
OCI had no security cameras inside or outside the school. Meantime, Dan's widow Nancy had begun cleaning out the home they'd shared for 22 years,
00:16:32
getting set to put it up for sale. Nancy's exact words to me were, Everywhere I look in this house, Tanya, I see Dan.
00:16:39
She did not want to be in that big house. That house was theirs. It made sense. It was also a project that they had embarked upon before his death, so it didn't seem out of the ordinary.
00:16:50
They were going to sell anyhow. Correct. And as summer started to fade, so too did Nathaniel's hope.
00:16:57
It seemed like police weren't making any progress. Honestly, we were coming to terms that this would be an unsolved murder.
00:17:04
What none of Dan Brophy's friends or family members knew was that there was a lot happening behind the scenes.
00:17:11
In fact, just days after the murder, detectives had received a call from Dan's wife, Nancy.
00:17:17
She had a question about collecting life insurance. And police recorded it. I don't want to be the stupid question of the day, but I think I need to be the stupid question of the day.
00:17:29
So, my insurance company said, just have the detective write a letter that you're no longer a suspect.
00:17:36
No longer a suspect? At that point, she wasn't named a suspect, and neither was anyone else.
00:17:43
And I said, man, I just don't know that he's there. And I'm not sure that he looks it that way.
00:17:49
But if you do, I'd get you to write the letter. This would be something that would go to an insurance company
00:17:54
that would allow them to make a payout to her Well yeah Why would you need that Because they don want to pay if it turns out that I secretly went down to the school and shot my husband
00:18:08
Well, we never would do something like that. I've never heard of that being done.
00:18:14
This is such a stupid little policy. I can't believe they're making me jump to the hoops like this.
00:18:18
This is only $40,000. And as my sister said, you know, usually when they do that, it's for millions.
00:18:24
And I said, yeah, we weren't insured for millions. Well, as we say around here, or were they?
00:18:30
More on that later. For now, normally in murder investigations, the way you clear somebody is you arrest somebody else and take them to trial.
00:18:41
Correct. You find the perpetrator and you clear the case. And that means other people who might have been suspects earlier are now off the hook.
00:18:48
Yes, that would help. And there was something else. Investigators discovered that Nancy, the romance novelist, had, in 2011, written a blog post.
00:19:01
The title? How to Murder Your Husband. That blog post? Tongue in cheek or tipping her hand?
00:19:13
What did you think when you saw that? It was really weird. You know, it just makes you wonder, what is going on here?
00:19:19
I was absolutely shocked. It's like somebody hit me with a bat. We were all shocked, especially after reading it and kind of going, oh my gosh, she kind of followed her own plan.
00:19:46
How to murder your husband. The blog post does sound provocative, especially when penned by someone whose husband was just murdered.
00:19:58
Nancy Brophy wrote that she spends a lot of time thinking about murder and consequently police procedure.
00:20:05
After all, if the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don't want to spend any time in jail.
00:20:12
and let me say clearly for the record, I don't like jumpsuits and orange isn't my color.
00:20:20
She then lists the various motives for murder, financial, lying, cheating, and fell in love with someone else.
00:20:29
In some ways, the post is less than it seems. Nancy wrote it seven years before the murder,
00:20:36
and it was dark humor, certainly not a blueprint for the crime. This is, after all, a woman whose books all bore the tagline,
00:20:45
Wrong never felt so right. Still, it couldn't be ignored, especially when Nancy listed options to consider for killing your husband.
00:20:55
Number one was labeled, guns. What did you think when you saw that? It was really weird. It just makes you wonder, what is going on here?
00:21:05
In one of the post's closing paragraphs, Nancy summed up her feelings, writing, I find it is easier to wish people dead than to actually kill them.
00:21:15
But the thing I know about murder is that every one of us have it in him or her when pushed far enough.
00:21:24
Nancy Brophy had definitely written a twist into her own life story. Except that blog post was not what detectives had focused on
00:21:33
when they wrote their own twist three months after Chef Dan Brophy's murder. The stunning break in the murder of an Oregon Culinary Institute instructor.
00:21:44
Police tonight have arrested his wife for the crime. Nancy Brophy, Dan's wife of more than 20 years, was now charged with murdering him in cold blood.
00:21:56
I was absolutely shocked. It's like somebody hit me with a bat. They loved each other.
00:22:01
Yeah. I don't think she did it. And I would be embarrassed if I was them, if they can't prove this.
00:22:07
I'm sure that by now you have reviewed almost every memory you have of the two of them,
00:22:11
thinking to yourself, was there something there that I didn't see? Certainly. And it still, you know, doesn't make any sense.
00:22:18
As Nancy Brophy's trial began, the case became a late-night punchline. This is a weird story. You know, you hear a lot about life imitating art,
00:22:27
but rarely do you hear about death imitating it. Prosecutors Nicole Herman and Sean Overstreet were in charge of the Multnomah County DA's team.
00:22:37
It's not that often, I think, that you get someone who's accused of murdering their husband
00:22:41
attached to a blog post in which they write about how to murder their husband. No, it's not.
00:22:47
And it was quite a piece of information to find. We were all shocked, and then especially after reading it,
00:22:55
and kind of going, oh my gosh, she kind of followed her own plan. However, on the first day of trial in April 2022,
00:23:03
the judge dealt prosecutors a bit of a blow. Ruling that Nancy's blog post, How to Murder Your Husband, could not be seen by the jury.
00:23:13
Any minimal probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice and confusion of the issues.
00:23:22
The blog post was years old, and it's not as if it described the crime exactly. How much of a roadblock to your case is it when the judge won't let that blog post in?
00:23:32
We decided pretty early that it wasn't going to be a roadblock. We had a plan to move forward without it.
00:23:37
And so prosecutors did. All of the leads the detectives followed up with, all pointed back to Nancy Brophy.
00:23:46
One of those came from the laptop found in Nancy's closet. Looks like there was an attempt to log in.
00:23:52
In November 2017, six months before the murder, Nancy's computer visited a website that
00:24:00
...old ghost guns, and soon ordered a ghost gun, some assembly required. It's an un-serialized, unregistered firearm.
00:24:11
She was going to buy it, she was going to use it, and then once she received it,
00:24:15
I think she quickly realized this is too complicated for her to put together. Records then showed Nancy Googling about Glock revolvers,
00:24:24
asking if Glocks have a big kickback, and searching for gun shops in Portland. Then, in February, four months before the murder, Nancy went to a gun show and bought this 9mm Glock 17.
00:24:37
She registered it in her own name and admitted owning the gun to police the morning of the murder.
00:24:44
What she did not tell police is that she also went on eBay and bought an extra slide and barrel that fit the Glock.
00:24:52
That's one way of disguising whether a bullet or casing comes from a particular gun.
00:24:58
Prosecutors showed the jury this video made by a detective showing how a slide and barrel can be easily swapped out
00:25:06
Together they leave distinctive marks on the bullet as it moves down the barrel toward the target
00:25:12
and on the empty casings as they're ejected So if you switch the slide and barrel
00:25:18
a firearms analysis will suggest it's not the same gun Yes, absolutely What do you think happened to that extra slide and barrel?
00:25:27
We have a lot of bodies of water here in Oregon. Could be in any one of them. Missing evidence claimed prosecutors did not clear Nancy Brophy.
00:25:36
Her attorneys, however, were about to reveal the identity of a man they thought just might do exactly that.
00:25:47
I don't care about who shot him. I just want him back. Nancy Crampton Brophy has always been thoroughly, madly, crazy in love with Daniel Brophy, and she still is today.
00:25:59
The defense serves up an alternate suspect. Could this be Dan Brophy's real killer?
00:26:20
All of the evidence and all of the... Prosecutors at Nancy Brophy's murder trial were about to drop a bombshell.
00:26:29
They called the two detectives to the stand to lay out the heart of the case, starting with that death notification just a couple hours after the murder.
00:26:39
I don't care about who shot him. I just want him back. After that, detectives sent Nancy home in the company of two investigators.
00:26:47
They watched Nancy's gray Toyota van disappear down the street. And then they began to look for evidence in the neighborhood.
00:26:57
We don't have a motive. We have no eyewitness, and we have no video camera at the scene.
00:27:02
So any of the surrounding businesses that have video is going to be extremely important to us at this point.
00:27:09
The first stop was a pizza place called Bellagio's. It had a video surveillance camera inside behind the counter that faced the windows.
00:27:21
Detectives looked at the store's video, starting about 10 minutes before Chef Dan Brophy arrived at OCI that morning at 7.20.
00:27:30
Watching it and I see this van drive by, I'm like going, wait a second, that looks just like her van.
00:27:38
hers meaning that gray toyota van owned by nancy brophy i said yeah it looks just like it we were
00:27:47
like okay there's something probably wrong portland's a big city there's probably a lot of
00:27:51
gray toyota minivans in there exactly let's double check this because this doesn't add up
00:27:56
because here's her van at the crime scene at a time when she shouldn't be there and she told you
00:28:02
she was home. Correct. So to make sure it was the same van, the detectives asked those investigators who'd taken Nancy
00:28:10
home to snap some pictures of the van And Nancy van and the van on the surveillance tape each had a visible scratch below the gas cap In the detective business that what you guys call a clue
00:28:25
Absolutely. Detectives immediately began looking for more security footage from the area, and they found plenty.
00:28:33
All of it providing a clearer picture of the timeline on the morning of Dan's murder.
00:28:38
at 6 39 a.m a full 41 minutes before dan brophy arrived at oci there is nancy's gray van and i
00:28:50
think she left her house about 6 30 i think trying to find a vantage point where she could see dan
00:28:55
coming in that morning at 708 a.m there's nancy's gray van driving by that pizza place across the
00:29:02
street from OCI. Then at 7.20, Dan Brophy drove by in his white pickup and parked at the curb next
00:29:09
to the school. And we already know that two minutes later at 7.22, Dan entered OCI and disabled the
00:29:18
alarm on the wall. He probably went in and out of the building a couple of times. And so I think
00:29:25
she probably waited. And then she walked up right behind him and shot him through the back first.
00:29:32
He wouldn't have been dead yet, so she had to take that second shot. And then I think she very casually walked out of the building, got in her van, and went home.
00:29:42
And on the route back to the couple's home, Nancy's van is again caught on camera just before 7.29 a.m.
00:29:50
You know this is somewhere in a seven-minute window. 7.22 to 7.29. Probably about a five-and-a-half to six-minute window.
00:29:58
Very tight. Very tight frame. She had to have figured there were going to be some cameras in the area.
00:30:05
She either miscalculated or she thought we just wouldn't be looking for it. Prosecutors argued Nancy had means and opportunity to kill Dan.
00:30:17
So then what about motive? Why would Nancy Brophy kill the man everyone said she loved and adored?
00:30:25
Well, they said maybe the oldest motive in the book. They'd had money troubles. Remember, Nancy sold life insurance and knew that business.
00:30:36
It turned out that after Dan's death, prosecutors revealed Nancy had put in claims on multiple policies
00:30:42
that would pay out, if Dan died, a little more than $800,000. The state theorized this wasn't as much about the money
00:30:53
as what it could buy. You know, Nancy wanted more. Nancy wanted a lifestyle that Dan couldn't give her.
00:31:02
And so I think that she thought, if I could do this, I'll get enough money that will allow me to change that lifestyle.
00:31:11
And because Dan doesn't want to go on that ride with me, he doesn't need to be there.
00:31:15
And he's kind of a curmudgeon, so I'll be better off without him. We never thought that she didn't love him.
00:31:21
I think she probably hoped things had worked out differently. But when they didn't, he was a problem for her.
00:31:27
After 11 days and 47 prosecution witnesses, Nancy Brophy's defense would have its turn.
00:31:35
Her attorneys had said in their opening that prosecutors had it wrong, dead wrong.
00:31:41
Nancy Crampton Brophy has always been thoroughly, madly, crazy in love with Daniel Brophy, and she still is today.
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When Nancy Brophy's defense team began offering its theory of the case, the strategy was one you've heard on Dateline before.
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It's the Saudi defense. Some other dude did it. Although there was no evidence to support it,
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the only alternative suspect the defense offered was a homeless man picking up cans around OCI the morning of the murder.
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The defense saying he might have been the killer. They dismissed money as a possible motive.
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They had absolutely turned around their financial health. The defense admitted the Brofies had some financial problems in the past Now financial experts testified Dan and Nancy were well on their way to straightening those out by paying off debts and making plans to sell their home
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I'll have you please raise your right hand. And as for the suggestion that Nancy had far more life insurance on Dan than was needed
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or normal, the defense said that was hogwash. I'd say he was adequately insured, not underinsured and not overinsured.
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All of this was a prelude to the main event, an hors d'oeuvre. On day 20 of the trial, when Nancy Brophy broke her silence on the witness stand.
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From the frying pan into the fire. How many years were you together? 24 years, 10 months, 2 days.
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Nancy's story on the stand. I did not shoot my husband, and I don't know even how to defend myself.
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You were there in the area at the same time that someone happens to be shooting your husband
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within a six-minute window with the exact type of gun that you own. That's your version of what happened. That is not my version.
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A jury is about to write the final chapter. Did you kill Dan Brophy? No, I did not.
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After listening for three weeks to prosecutors who painted her as a killer, Nancy Brophy took the stand to answer her lawyer's questions,
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testifying in her own defense. How many years were you together? 24 years. 10 months, two days.
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What's it like to be without him now? It's like you've lost an arm, you know? Like, you're just not as good as you were when you were with him.
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So, if Nancy hadn't killed Dan, why had she purchased that ghost gun kit and the Glock 17 months before the murder?
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Well, said the romantic suspense writer, it all started with a story. I read an article about a guy in California who bought a gun online, put it together and killed his family.
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I'm sitting there thinking, you know, what if it was a woman who was afraid? And so once I kind of flipped the story in my mind, I started building it.
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That's why she testified she visited the Ghost Gun website and bought a kit to research a new novel.
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Then, six weeks later, in February 2018, a mass shooting took the lives of 17 students and faculty at a Florida high school.
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And Nancy said that once again brought guns to the forefront of her mind. After all, Dan taught at a school.
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I said, Dan, it's time. And he said, OK. In other words, Nancy testified, it was their idea, not just hers.
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Dan Brophy, she said, signed off on getting the Glock for protection. Nancy, though, said she went on eBay and bought that extra slide and barrel that police believe was used in the murder.
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As she got back to researching that new novel. Where was the slide and barrel now?
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Who knows, was her answer. As for June 2nd, the day Dan was murdered, Nancy said she remembers waking up and talking briefly with Dan.
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and then? Do you remember anything else from that morning? No. No. The next thing I remember from that morning
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is the phone ringing. You heard right. Nancy testified she has no recollection of the time from somewhere around 7 a.m.
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until that phone call around 10 a.m. Stress traumatic memory loss or something like that Because when police later told Nancy they had videos of her driving her gray van around OCI the morning Dan was killed I thought they making this up This isn true
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Nancy Brophy testified that she now believes that during those missing periods of memory
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she drove to Starbucks and then disappeared into a world of her own making. The world of a writer
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sketching out a story in her head, driving around aimlessly, until, just by coincidence,
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she drove right by OCI, right around the time of the murder. Strangely, the only time Nancy's van wasn't on camera was between 722 and 728,
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the exact window of time in which police believe Dan Brophy was murdered. Was there anything you needed to do to this?
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As cross-examination began, that coincidence of Nancy having no memory of the very time period the murder occurred went over like sweet and low in Chef Brophy's organic kitchen.
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Isn't it possible with your memory problems of the morning that you actually went into the building and shot your husband and you just don't remember?
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No, it is not. I did not shoot my husband and I don't know even how to defend myself against the truth.
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You were there in the area at the same time that someone happens to be shooting your husband within a six-minute window with the exact type of gun that you own.
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That's your version of what happened. That is not my version. The fact that you have managed to construct a case against me out of that is you've constructed a case.
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But I think your case is held together with, real frankly, Band-Aids. And then, although the judge had not allowed the blog post
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How to Murder Your Husband to be used Prosecutor Overstreet could use the information in it
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As the basis for his questions Do you agree that divorce is expensive? Divorce is expensive
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I don't think that is a mystery to anybody here You actually find it easier to wish people dead
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Instead of actually killing them, correct? Oh, yeah My last question to you, Ms. Brophy
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is if there's one thing that you know about murder, is it that anyone is capable of doing it?
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I absolutely believe that. I think people get pushed into a corner where they have no other options.
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Going back to my case, there's not enough financial reason there to make it. I do better with Dan alive financially
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than I do with Dan dead. We had solved our problem. She went on and on and on about why people commit murder.
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and I thought that, well, that's all the jury needs to hear from her. You guys feel confident as the jury goes out?
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I think we felt like we did the best job that we could do. If we can have Mrs. Brophy right.
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After just eight hours of deliberation, the jury was back. Count one, murder in the second degree, guilty.
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The judge had no choice in Nancy's sentence. Mandatory life in prison. She will not be eligible for parole until she is 93 years old.
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Her best friend, Tanya, who once stuck by Nancy, now believes prison is not punishment enough.
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I'm a firm believer in an eye for an eye. I know that sounds cruel, but if that was my mother or father, I'd want justice.
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I would demand it. It has definitely brought some modicum of closure. There was certainly a time where we were concerned if she was acquitted that there would be a very real threat to the safety of our family.
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That relief is priceless. For Dan's son, Nathaniel, it was finally time to send the ashes of his father, the organic farmer, back to the place he loved.
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I'm going to find a little bed of Chanterelle mushrooms growing somewhere, and I think that'll
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be the perfect spot. It seems like a fitting place to return it.