SITTING down at her computer in the four-bedroom house she shared with her husband Dan, Nancy Brophy looked every inch the genteel romance novelist – big round cheeks, curly grey hair, glasses.
She had recently self-published her first steamy thriller, The Wrong Brother, which – like all her subsequent books – starred a beautiful but desperate woman and muscle-bound hero.
But that day as she was writing at home, in November 2011, Nancy had something very different on her mind.
“I don’t want blood and brains spattered on my walls. And really, I’m not good at remembering lies.
“But the thing I know about murder is that every one of us has it in him or her when pushed far enough,” she wrote on her blog.
Her post, entitled How To Murder Your Husband, proved eerily prophetic.
Seven years later, Nancy, now 74, would indeed go on to murder her husband in an elaborate scheme to pocket more than $1million in life insurance policies.
Making headlines beyond their US hometown of Portland, the murder inspired a film starring Steve Guttenberg and Cybill Shepherd in 2023, named after her ominous blog post.
It’s now the subject of Wondery podcast Happily Never After: Dan And Nancy, which unravels a tale stranger than any fiction Nancy ever wrote.
Born in Texas, where she grew up with lawyer parents, Nancy moved to Portland in the early 90s following the end of her first marriage.
She enrolled in culinary school and met Dan, a divorced chef instructor.
He was quiet and serious, whereas she was outgoing and garrulous.
Opposites attracted and the pair fell in love and married in 1993.
By 2000, they were living a seemingly idyllic life in the suburbs, with their chicken coop and a nice home that had a kitchen garden.
They never had children, but Nancy – who had long dreamed of being a writer – often described on her blog how much she loved Dan and how healthy their sex life was.
It was in Portland that Heidi Tretheway, who hosts the Happily Never After podcast, first met Nancy in 1993.
“I joined our local writing group, the Rose City Romance Writers,” says Heidi. “Nancy made an impression, not just on me, but on almost everyone there.
“She had real ‘main character’ energy. She even had a thing where she would hand out roses to writers for finishing their novels, like she was on The Bachelor.
“All her books had similar plots – there was always a woman in a troubled relationship, and almost always a gun involved. . .”
Still, no one could ever have believed it was anything but fiction – until on June 2, 2018, when Dan, 63, was found dead in his cooking school kitchen at Oregon Culinary Institute.
When police arrived, they confirmed Dan had been shot in the back and chest as he’d struggled on the ground. It was a brutal assassination, but there was no forced entry, no defensive wounds and nothing stolen.
As shockwaves rippled through Portland, the close-knit community struggled to make sense of it. Chef Brophy had been so quiet, so unassuming and well-liked – who could possibly have wanted him dead?
Called to the scene by police, Nancy took the news of her husband’s death calmly, though officers surmised she must have been in shock.
Asked some routine questions about her whereabouts and whether they owned a gun, Nancy explained she’d been in bed writing that morning and they did have a gun, which she’d got for protection, but hadn’t bought bullets for.
Later, on Facebook, she posted that she’d lost her “best friend” and was “struggling to make sense of everything”, asking that people give her space to grieve.
However, she also told friends and family she was going to sell the house, and asked for help decluttering and clearing the garden, getting rid of Dan’s beloved chickens and uprooting the kitchen garden.
Meanwhile, the police continued their investigation.
The Brophys’ gun, a Glock semi-automatic, was the same calibre as the shell casings left at the scene.
It was sent to ballistics to see if it was a match, but Nancy still wasn’t considered a suspect.
That began to change when detectives reviewed security cameras from businesses in the area.
Footage from a pizzeria across the street revealed a silver minivan like Nancy’s driving by just before 7.30am – the time Dan was killed.
Then, on June 6, one of the lead detectives received a phone call from Nancy asking for a letter of exoneration to prove she wasn’t a suspect.
She said it was needed by the company handling Dan’s life insurance claim of $40,000.
Suspicious, investigators combed through the couple’s bank statements and discovered that they were struggling financially.
“After over a decade of writing romance, Nancy didn’t have an agent or a publisher,” reveals Heidi. “She was still self-publishing and offering her books online for free.”
In fact, Nancy had asked to borrow money from a friend to go to a writing conference.
The couple had also sold their car, Dan had taken on a second job and they’d missed mortgage payments.
To supplement her income, Nancy sold life insurance – and investigators discovered that she was the beneficiary of 10 policies that meant, on Dan’s death, she would be entitled to more than $1.4million.
Even more damning was the fact that, despite their money woes, the premiums had been paid without fail every month.
When the ballistics report came back, it showed Nancy and Dan’s Glock wasn’t the murder weapon.
However, analysis of the security footage of the minivan revealed the first three letters of the licence plate were a match with those on Nancy’s own vehicle, and on September 6, she was taken into custody.
“I hadn’t seen Nancy in years,” says Heidi. “But there she was on the news, accused of murdering her husband.
“In the writers’ community, messages were flying around. People were shocked – no one could believe what they were hearing.”
When detectives searched the house, two laptops were retrieved, and they showed that from November 2017 to March 2018, Nancy had researched the Glock 17 and was browsing YouTube videos about the gun.
Nancy shared a post on Facebook telling friends not to call her[/caption]
Then, they found a receipt in her emails that would prove the break they needed.
It was for a Glock 17 slide and barrel – the upper section on a gun – bought on eBay on February 28, 2018.
“This was the key that allowed us to figure out how Dan had been murdered,” reveals Shawn Overstreet, the District Attorney who would eventually put Nancy behind bars.
Investigators realised she must have switched the slide and barrel into her old gun, shot Dan, then put the original back in, before handing it over to detectives that day, safe in the knowledge it could not be traced to the murder.
“She seemed very calculated,” says Shawn. “She knew it wouldn’t be a match.”
The eBay slide and barrel itself had not been found, but Shawn was not deterred by the lack of a murder weapon.
“There was a lot of circumstantial evidence from the life insurance policies, plus the fact she was in the vicinity at the time and had lied to detectives about where she was,” he says.
Maintaining her innocence, Nancy refused to take a plea deal, and her trial began on April 4, 2022.
Over six weeks, her lawyer argued that Nancy had simply purchased multiple insurance policies on Dan because he was younger than her so was eligible for policies she couldn’t get, and that the guns and internet searches were all just research for her next book.
I think she believed she was the smartest person in the room and could convince the jurors
Shawn Overstreet
Women from the Rose City Romance Writers were called as witnesses, to back up the fact that in the course of researching their books, they had all done things that could be taken as out of character.
Her defence also painted a vivid picture of the Brophys’ happy marriage, via the testimony of a number of witnesses, who said the couple were very much in love.
However, the prosecution argued that they were in clear financial difficulty and Nancy had plotted to kill Dan so she could achieve her dream of living as an expat in Portugal.
On May 16, 2022, Nancy herself took the stand.
“I think she believed she was the smartest person in the room and could convince the jurors,” explains Shawn.
On her first day, Nancy was wearing a baby-blue cardigan and knitted scarf with her white hair perfectly curled.
“I was concerned jurors would view Nancy as a sweet, elderly woman who couldn’t possibly have committed such a heinous act,” Shawn says.
“I thought they’d see their grandmother in Nancy. She could be very charming, with a folksy southern drawl that I thought people would connect with.
“My tactic was to ask easy, soft questions that would make her feel comfortable, so when I got to the tough ones, we’d see a change in how she spoke, indicating maybe she was lying about certain things.”
‘She didn’t even blink’
Shawn asked her to explain what happened to the barrel and slide she’d bought from eBay, and how it had conveniently gone missing.
“She claimed she didn’t know what happened to it,” he recalls. “She couldn’t explain why she needed it.
“She also claimed that she had very limited knowledge of guns, despite the fact in several of her books she describes firearms.”
Shawn’s final question to Nancy referenced her infamous How To Murder Your Husband blog post.
“I asked her, ‘If there was one thing that you know about murder, is it that anyone is capable of doing it?’”
Nancy’s own writing had come back to haunt her.
“She went on a long rant about circumstances in which people might kill. It was incoherent,” he says.
The jury deliberated the case over two days, before returning with a guilty verdict for second-degree murder.
Three weeks later, Nancy was sentenced to life with parole only possible after 25 years.
“When the jury returned their guilty verdict, she didn’t even blink,” says Sean.
“She is still trying to get a retrial and has never given any indication that she accepts responsibility for what she did.”
During her sentencing, Dan’s son Nathaniel delivered a devastating victim impact statement directed at Nancy.
“The pain you have delivered to us is immeasurable,” he said. “You were, to borrow from your catalogue, the Wrong Wife.
“There’s no greater misfortune than dying alone. Yet for you, Nancy, I can’t imagine a more fitting end to this tragedy.”
