Oregon romance novelist Nancy Crampton Brophy took the witness stand in a Portland courtroom Monday, testifying in her defense against charges that she murdered her husband in 2018, seven years after penning the salacious essay “How to Murder Your Husband.”
For the first time, Brophy walked through the morning of her husband’s death, addressing what may be the most challenging piece of evidence for her defense: surveillance footage showing what appears to be her and her minivan driving in the area of the Oregon Culinary Institute in June 2018, where her husband Dan Brophy was gunned down.
To most of the prosecution’s case, which contends that the Brophys were in dire financial straits, and that Nancy Brophy killed her husband, a chef, so she could collect on a series of life insurance policies in his name, Brophy’s attorneys have countered that her marriage and the couple’s finances were sound.
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There’d been no explanation for Nancy Brophy’s apparent presence near the scene on the morning of the murder, however — until Monday.
Brophy testified that she’d slept poorly the night before, trying to resolve a plot twist in a trilogy she was working on. “I was frantically trying to figure out how to bend light in a tunnel and get my plot moving along,” Brophy said.
When morning came, Dan awoke about a half hour before her, noticing some wet towels in the sink that she’d used to mop up a leak the night before. The next thing she remembers, she told the courtroom, was waking up again to a phone call, about something going on at the school. No driving downtown, in other words.
After her arrest a few months later, Brophy saw photographs of herself and her car near the scene of the crime for the first time. Her attorney at the time “showed me a photograph of what looked like my van and looked like me in it. The clothes I recognized. It was obviously somewhere near the school… It looked like me, I was frightened to death.”
What to make of the photographs? “You know what they say, old age isn’t for sissies. I turn 65, I’m starting to lose my eyesight, I’m looking at this thinking ‘Oh man, I’m starting to lose my mind. How can this have happened and me not remember this?’... Even now, my mind kind of goes blank with the horror of it.”
Brophy’s attorney then asked if she ever used the neighborhood of the culinary school as a place to write. She did, she said, because it’s “shady” and she felt safe there.
“After seeing the photographs, did you watch the video surveillance, and did any of that video spark any memory of what you might have been doing on June 2?” Brophy attorney Lisa Maxfield asked.
“I am seeing myself sitting at this park, writing,” Brophy replied. “The reason why this sticks out, it was a parking lot, it looks empty, but there was a white van there. But there was some guy that kept walking back and forth, walking back and forth. It was just enough to throw me out of there that I moved.”
“So in this memory — this is a real memory, right?” Maxfield asked.
“Yes,” her client replied.
“What are you doing when you’re in the car?”
“I have a pad of paper, I’m jotting things down. It’s a pleasant day, I can remember that because it wasn’t raining. It’s shady, I’m sitting here pulling it together. It would be a place I would have felt very comfortable writing, so I’m sure it’s a true memory,” Brophy said.
“You’re saying this video triggers this memory,” Maxfield asked. “Do you know whether this event you’re describing occurred on June 2?”
“No,” Brophy replied.
“Do you know that it didn’t?” Maxfield asked.
“No.”
So went the defense’s apparent explanation for the conflict between Nancy Brophy’s story — that she went back to sleep after her husband left for work, and woke up to a phone call after the murder — and the photos and video proving she took a ride.
Otherwise, Brophy’s testimony largely mirrored the case her defense attorneys laid out in response to the charges filed against her. On the stand, Brophy insisted her marriage was strong and the couple’s finances were sound. She seemed comfortable, even jovial for much of the morning’s session, laughing loudly at times and responding to questions in a Texas drawl. She showed emotion only at the start of her testimony, when her lawyer Lisa Maxfield asked what drew her to her husband when they first met in the early 1990s.
“He was smart. He was really smart,” Brophy said. “He was funny. I laughed all the time… He was kind. He was so kind. That probably won me over more than most of the other things.
“The thing I probably liked the best about him,” Brophy continued, stifling tears, “he loved me. And if that isn’t a big number one item I don’t know what is. And I loved him back.”
The pair were together for 24 years, 10 months, and two days, Brophy said, completing one another; her strengths matched his weaknesses and vice versa. He was a planner; she was happy to fly by the seat of her pants.
The couple did encounter some financial problems in 2017, Brophy testified, falling some $8,000 behind in mortgage payments on their Portland home. But that was the result of a few gigs Dan had relied on drying up all at the same time, and a slew of sudden medical expenses, she said, adding that they quickly pivoted to shore up the debt and renew their path towards a financially sound retirement.
Dan Brophy took out a $35,000 loan from his 401k, both to catch up on the mortgage and to spend on getting the house ready for a sale. The couple planned either to subdivide their property and live in a smaller house on it or leave it altogether for something they wouldn’t still be paying on into their 80s.
Brophy spent much of the morning walking through her work history as a caterer and seller of life insurance and Medicare policies, which included the ins and outs of how those plans worked. Much of her lawyer’s questions were aimed at refuting suggestions the prosecutors made—that Nancy plotted to sell the house without Dan’s knowledge, for example, or that she rented a storage facility in secret.
Nancy Brophy insisted the two were working hand-in-hand, both to resolve their financial woes and look to the future. By the time the trial broke for lunch, she had yet to address what happened the morning of Dan Brophy’s murder. But she did say what it was like to live without him.
“It’s like you’ve lost an arm, you know?” she said. “You’re just not as good as you were when you were with him. You were the best you could be, when you were together with him. Now it’s like, yeah, I function, but there’s something missing.”
Brophy also described her search for a gun kit online, testifying that it was to research a story about a woman who decided to purchase a kit to defend herself against an abusive husband. On December 26, 2017, she bought such a kit, telling Dan about it when he got home that day. Two months later, after the Parkland school shooting in Florida, she said she convinced Dan the couple should own a gun, a Glock 17 she would later purchase at a Portland gun show.
Detectives were unable to find the slide and barrel matching the bullets that killed Dan Brophy. “On the day I was arrested, if they had asked me, I would have said it was in storage, or the house,” Nancy Brophy said. Asked if she knew where it is now, she said “No. I would have thought somebody would have found it.”
When she learned her husband was dead, she said, “In the lighter moments I thought it was karma kicking me in the ass. In the heavier moments I thought, ‘We own a gun and it didn’t protect us. We bought a gun and it didn’t do its job. At that moment, I’d never hated the gun more.”
In the months after the murder, Brophy said “weird shit” kept happening. “I found food where there shouldn’t have been food. The tomatoes were in the linen closet.”
She hasn’t properly grieved her husband’s death, Brophy said. “I talk to him every day. He’s a little quieter than he was.”
