The Oregon novelist who wrote an essay called “How to Murder Your Husband” will spend life in prison after a Multnomah County judge handed down the sentence in the shooting death of her real-life husband Monday.
A jury found Nancy Crampton Brophy, 71, guilty of second-degree murder last month at the end of a seven-week trial.
Facing financial struggles in Oregon in 2018, she shot her chef husband Daniel Brophy, 63, in the back at his teaching job at the now-defunct Oregon Culinary Institute with a 9mm handgun, prosecutors alleged.
In her essay, which the judge did not allow to be introduced at trial, she lists five motives for killing a husband. The first is financial – which she explains, “is big.”
“As a romantic suspense writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about murder and, consequently, about police procedure,” her essay begins. “After all, if the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail.”
After killing her husband, she sought to collect about $1.4 million in life insurance claims, according to FOX 12 Oregon.
On the morning of the murder, June 2, 2018, She appeared on security video entering the culinary school before her husband. She appeared again leaving just before 7:30 a.m., shortly after her husband’s arrival.
