An American writer who wrote an article titled “How to Kill Your Husband” has been charged by a jury in western Oregon with the murder of her husband.
It took a jury in Portland just eight hours on Wednesday to reach a verdict and find Nancy Crampton Brophy guilty of killing her husband Danielle Brophy. Prosecutors said the writer, who published several books with sensational titles including The Wrong Husband and The Wrong Lover, was going through a financial crisis before shooting her husband twice in the heart at the culinary institute where he worked in June 2018. Crampton Brophy, 71, denied the allegations, saying her presence at the crime scene, according to CCTV footage, should have inspired her to write the lyrics. She also claimed that the missing gun, which the police believed to be the murder weapon, was purchased in preparation for writing the novel, and denied that the motive for the murder was the hundreds of thousands of dollars she would have earned from insurance contracts.
An Oregon newspaper reported that Crampton Brophy’s lawyers said they were appealing the conviction for second-degree murder. “Nancy Brophy loved her husband,” attorney Kristen Weinmiller told jurors at the trial. Crampton Brophy was arrested in September 2018 and has been in custody ever since.
Attorney General Sean Overstreet presented evidence that Crampton Brophy conspired to kill her 63-year-old husband. “It’s not just about the money, it’s about the lifestyle that Nancy wanted and that Dan couldn’t provide for her,” he said during the trial.
Crumpton Brophy denied accusations that she had weathered the financial crisis in a court filing last week, saying her financial problems had been resolved long before then. “My financial situation is better when Dan is alive than when Dan is dead,” she said. Crampton Brophy faces a life sentence and will be sentenced at a later date. In his article “How to Kill Your Husband”, still available on the Internet, Crampton Brophy explains the methods and motives for getting rid of an unwanted husband. This includes financial gain and the use of firearms, although the article notes that guns are “noisy and dirty and require a certain amount of skill.”
