It sounds like a supermarket noir story: writer Nancy Crampton Brophy, 71, has been convicted after a seven-week trial in Portland, Oregon, for the murder of her husband Daniel. In addition to her romantic suspense stories, a genre in which she had focused a career based on self-publishing and relative literary glory, Brophy was the author of an article entitled “How to kill your husband”, which she published in 2011 in a blog . In the text, which the judge prohibited citing during the process, she offered the secrets of the perfect crime for wives with murderous whims. She advised them to be “ruthless” and “very intelligent”, since the proximity to the victim would make them the main suspects. What about the way to kill? Better to avoid knives (too personal and bloody), poison (easy to trace), guns (very noisy and complicated to handle) and assassins (because they are unreliable).
The sentence, known last Wednesday, concludes that Crampton Brophy, who finally opted for a firearm, killed her husband after months of stealthily plotting the perfect crime. During that time, she worked hard to make the bullets used escape police tracking, eventually shooting her husband twice on June 2, 2018, at his workplace, the Culinary Institute of Oregon, a compound without CCTV cameras. surveillance. There, Daniel Brophy, 63, acted as a teacher with a particular sense of humor (often tinged with black) for a student body who appreciated his eccentricities.
The next day, the wife wrote on her social networks: “To my Facebook friends and family, I have sad news to tell,” she wrote. “My husband and best friend, chef Dan Brophy, was murdered yesterday morning. For those of you who are closest to me and who feel that this deserves a phone call, you are right, but I am struggling to make sense of it all right now (…) Although I appreciate all your loving responses, I am overwhelmed. After that message, she busied herself collecting lucrative life insurance policies signed by him.
She was unsuccessful in her role as a grieving widow, and around the time that summer, she was arrested by the police as the prime suspect in the murder. Almost four years later, she heard the guilty verdict this Wednesday, standing and covered by a mask. The sentence, which could lead to a life sentence, will be known on June 13.
During the trial, it was proven that Crampton Brophy bought a kit to build what is known in jargon as a “ghost gun”, which remains off the radar of the authorities, as well as a service pistol. Also, that he later purchased an additional slide and barrel on eBay to build, by mixing the parts, a hard-to-trace Frankenstein gun. She testified that the gun had been ordered for her own protection with the knowledge of her husband, like the rest of the material, which she intended to use as inspiration for one of her fictional pieces. According to her, she was working on a story about a woman who, the victim of her partner’s abusive behavior, was out for revenge.
Crampton Brophy told the police that her husband had gone to work alone that day. What she didn’t count on was a security camera from the neighborhood where the cooking school was located that caught her loitering around the area around the time of death behind the wheel of her van. The defense relied on that same video to try to charge the murder owl to a homeless person, who was never identified. The man is seen hiding behind a door when the agents arrived at the crime scene alerted by the students who found the victim’s body.
Prosecutors built up the edifice of circumstantial evidence that has buttressed Crampton Brophy’s guilt by arguing that the couple, apparently united after a quarter-century of dating, had struggled financially and had moved to try to collect insurance policies. lives worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They also pointed out that she ran too fast to ask the police for a letter of exoneration in order to collect the insurance money as soon as possible.
In that famous blog post, the closest its author probably gets to literary significance (for the wrong reasons, to be sure), Crampton Brophy began: “As a romantic suspense novelist, I spend a lot of time thinking about the murders and also in police proceedings. If I put myself in the shoes of a murderer, it is so as not to end up in jail. I’ll say it plainly for the record: I don’t like to wear overalls and orange is not my favorite color.” If the appeal announced by her lawyers does not prosper, she expects a few years of wearing an orange jumpsuit, the characteristic uniform of prisoners in the United States.
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