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Crime

26th May 2022

How to Murder your husband author found guilty of murdering her husband

Steve Hopkins

Nancy Crampton Brophy wrote a series called Wrong Never Felt So Right

A romance writer who once wrote about ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ has been convicted of fatally shooting her husband.

In Portland, Oregon, a jury on Wednesday took eight hours to return a verdict of second-degree murder against Nancy Crampton Brophy for shooting 63-year-old Daniel Brophy at the Oregon Culinary Institute in June 2018.

The romance novelist, whose Wrong Never Felt So Right series of novels include The Wrong Husband and The Wrong Lover, killed her husband in order to collect his $1.4 million life insurance policy, prosecutors told the court.

Daniel Brophy was shot twice and found dead by his students.

His 71-year-old wife denied killing him but security camera footage put her at the scene.

The writer also claimed a missing gun, which police believe was the murder weapon, that had been bought months before her husband’s death, was research for the novel. She also denied her husband’s life assurance politics were a motive for the murder.

“She had the plan in place,” Shawn Overstreet, a deputy district attorney claimed in closing arguments last week, the New York Times reported.

“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”.

Crampton Brophy’s lawyers claimed the writer and her husband were actually in a loving relationship of more than 25 years.

“You can see that in her eyes every time she talked about him. Her eyes lit up, they absolutely twinkled,” her attorney Kristen Winemiller told the jury.

Daniel Brophy’s mother, Karen, sat through the nearly two-month-long trial and later told reporters: “We’re very, very thankful that everything turned out the way it did.”

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Crime,Murder