How To Murder Your Husband: The Nancy Brophy Case

On Prime Crime 911, here is somebody collapsed in one of our kitchen. Do you know what happened? Somebody just found him on the floor and a doored chef is killed in cold blood. I just can't imagine who would want kill him. Sparking a search for the one who committed this callous murder. There was no video. There was no eye witness didn't look like anything was really disturbed and seemed like there was something really personal going on here. Hey everybody, I'm Jesse Weber and Prime Prime is taking over the solved murders feed on Spotify. Now Prime Crime is a true prime docuseries. It dives into cases across America. It features exclusive interviews, body cam and interrogations a lot more. It's all in the pursuit of truth and justice. So join us each week for riveting and respectful storytelling and in-depth reporting. Hey everybody, I'm Jesse Weber and welcome to Prime Crime where we break down the most compelling and memorable true crime cases. Our next story starts with the sudden killing of a culinary instructor. This left investigators scratching their heads. Who would want to kill this man? A stranger? An enemy? A love one? Let's find out. 911. Hi, we are at Oregon Culinary Institute. Here is somebody collapsed in one of our kitchen. It's early Saturday morning. June 2nd, 2018, at the Oregon Culinary Institute in Portland. Students walk in, expecting a day of learning techniques and recipes. Yet instead, they discover the body of their instructor, 63 year old Daniel Brophy, lying on the floor of one of the school's kitchens. He's one of our chefs and he's an older man. All right, is he conscious right now? No, he is not conscious. Is he breeding? No, he's not breathing. Daniel Brophy was at his school where he teaches culinary arts and on that day he was preparing for students to come in. It was just like any other day. The students had found Chef Brophy lying on his back by the sink. The water was still running. One of the students, Clarinda Perez, actually tried to perform CPR, may assume that he had a medical event. Do you know the cause of this or what happened? Did he just know that? We have no idea. Somebody just found him on the floor. What made it harder at the beginning was we have our initial 9-1-1 call. That even that's confusing. The callers stating, "Hey, we have an older gentleman down." They didn't even know right away that Dan had been shot. He's leading out of his check. If someone's still doing CPR yet, should you keep going? The gunshot wounds were not apparent. There was no pool of blood. There wasn't the classic kind of signs that people imagined, and it wasn't until Clarinda Perez saw blood on her hand that they realized that, "Oh, this isn't some sort of heart attack." You're doing a good job. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Oh my god. Do you see any of the responders? No, they're getting a minute. He's okay. Officials are called to the scene, but they aren't sure what exactly happened, or even what to expect when they arrive. Fire and medical arrived. They realized after examining Shiproofy's body that he had what appeared to be a possible gunshot strike to his chest, they found two spent shell casings lying on the floor. The patient is an instructor at the location. He's leading out of his chest at the risk of broken. This is a shooting victim. Okay, we need to figure out if this just happened and where the shooter is. Because this was a large building and it was a school, they didn't know if it might have been an active shooter situation, and if the shooter could still be in the building. I can hear footsteps upstairs. I don't know if that is related to this building. It's something he could advise. They went through and methodically cleared the entire building to make sure there was no shooter or suspect still at the scene. It looks like a lockdown. They don't know what two suspects is. So we need a bunch of people here. This is a building with exits on multiple streets. If the shooter's still at large, when you get out, hurry and get going. After confirming there's no active threat on the property, authorities have to figure out what happened here. You start immediately thinking, "Motive, who would want to do this? Why would somebody want to do this?" We treated it like we do any other homicide. We start to separate all the witnesses. And in this situation, there were numerous witnesses because there were two different classes going on that day. So there were anywhere from 30 to 40 some students. We started looking at the students first, the students that were there. And then more importantly, the students that weren't there that should have been. So we tracked all of them down. While you've been here, have you noticed homeless people or trans people hanging around? A lot. Yeah. That found a couple needles in the bushes right out there by where we smoke. You know, it kind of looked like, well, given the area of downtown Portland, that you know, could have been a robbery gone wrong. A couple months ago, somebody had broke the window. Did they get entry into the building or just- No, they just broke it and they had to fix up the next day. Those were some of the things we were thinking could have been maybe a houseless person that came in and wanted to rob the place, but Chef Brophy interrupted it. There was a homeless man on this side of the street with his back turned towards me. He looked in recycling bins over there and then kind of peaked around the corner to the parking lot and then just walked up the street. This was today. It just didn't seem that way from him working at the sink and getting shot in the back. There was no video. There was no eye witness. It didn't look like anything was really disturbed. One person that became of interest was a guy named Oscar Taylor. I've prosecuted him before. We know him as somebody who steals. He was out looking for cans at Warren, which is pretty normal. So we thought, okay, he didn't go canning, walk in, murder Dan for no reason whatsoever, and then just leave. That doesn't make any sense. You know, he's living from day to day trying to survive canning. I don't expect him to have a $500 block can gun in his pocket. There's no signs of forced entry on the building. They don't really find anything as if somebody had done a robbery or something of that nature. Is there anything of value inside the school, or anything that anybody would you think would break into want to take? I mean, food or equipment is the only real thing that I could think of. I mean, unless there's money in there, but we wouldn't know about that. One of the things that stood out right away was that Dan's wallet was there with money in it. He had cash in his pocket. His credit cards, debit cards, his ID, his cell phone, his watch, his keys. Nothing was taken. We thought, okay, this maybe is more personal. Maybe this was targeted. He said there's no students that really don't get along with Chef Broky. I couldn't think of anybody in that school right now that would be upset with him, at all. He's a very, very kind person. The lack of evidence was pretty telling. When you're looking at the crime scene and you're looking at the video from outside the crime scene, and you don't see anybody fleeing, there's nobody running down the sidewalk. There's no car speeding away. Everyone liked Dan. Everyone respected Dan. He was passionate. His students respected him and loved him. They adored him. Nobody had a bad thing to say about him. He worked them hard and that's what they respected most about him because he brought the best out of them. Investigators aren't sure at this point how to piece together who killed Chef Broky. And they need to get a better understanding of his life. That's when they decide to speak with his wife, 67-year-old Nancy Brophy. Perhaps she could provide some clues as to who may have done this to her husband. So Nancy, I think some people kind of notified you that someone was coming on. Just put the hair on the news. Kate, you tab you. Said that there was a shooting. There was one brutality. Nancy was from Texas. She decided she was going to go into the culinary world, and that's where she met Dan. In the early 90s, Dan was actually her instructor. They got together and they eventually got married in '99. Nancy wore a lot of hats. She was developing her writing. She was working on some books. She sold insurance. She also sold Medicare coverage. Nancy and Dan had been married for years. They were known to love each other and they were always with each other. Sometimes it's the people closest to the victim that can provide the best information. Up next, can Nancy Brophy help law enforcement find her husband's killer? Here's the question I'm just realizing. Where is he now? He's in the building. Oh, man. We're going to do a lot of pictures. We're going to search for evidence, talk to all of the students. We're going to be working real hard on this right now. Hey, everybody. So I think it's clear when you watch prime crime that the world is a pretty scary place at times. There's always a need to protect yourself and those you love. That is why I'm happy to talk about that. Palm pepper spray has now partnered with us. Yeah, it's the next generation of pepper spray. They have this formula that creates this range and capacity. Absolutely incredible. And the design of this prevents accidental misfires if you were worried about that. It just gives you some well-needed peace of mind. Also, super portable. You can carry the unit on your keys or keychain. You can snap it on your backpack, carry it in your pocket. Palm is really. really the perfect every day accessory, my wife even carries it around with her now all the time. You can learn more at pompeperspray.com and use code Crime Crime 10 for 10% off. I just can't imagine who would want to kill him, he wasn't that kind of guy, you know, I've never even known him to have a confrontation with anybody. Back on June 2, 2018, culinary students discover 63-year-old cooking instructor Dan Brofi shot to death on the floor of a kitchen at the Portland Oregon Culinary Institute. Investigators are exploring every avenue to determine who would want Chef Brofi dead. Hours after the murder, Dan's wife, 67-year-old Nancy Brofi, arrives downtown at the school. The wife of the victim just shut up. She's 17 and she is not that notified. We were just kind of standing around and that's when Nancy Brofi first got to the crime scene. I just remember that very vividly, she was just standing there, didn't show any emotion. She was just kind of there. Police initially met when Nancy to let her know that her husband was killed. It was something that's normal with every homicide that takes place. We took Nancy Brofi into the van that set up for interviews. I thought this looks pretty complicated here, there's a lot of unanswered questions. I think maybe we should record the notification with her. Detective Darren Posey began asking her questions. What time did he leave this morning from your guys' place? He left, I'm going to say 7ish, maybe 7.05, that's about the time he normally leaves. We need to learn as much as we can about Chef Brofi's activities that morning, what he did, what he's last doing, if there's anything going on, problems, grievances, whether people. We guys are earlier this morning or anything there are every morning. He has his little list of things he does, you know, he walks the dogs, he feeds chickens. She said that he had come up and taken a shower upstairs in the master bedroom area while she was in bed and then he left. I didn't sleep well, I woke up when it came up for a shower. He used to shower downstairs, but you'll see stitches on his hand because last week in the shower, our shower door shutters. He's not having a good week, oh, so after you got a shower this morning though, he didn't need a spotter. Okay, so you think you left around 7. The next thing you know after that, when did you hear something? Maxine called me, she said, "What do you know about? What's going on at OCI?" And I said, "I don't know anything, what's going on?" And she said, "What is on the news?" And I said, "Okay," and she told me what she had heard. A mutual friend of hers and Dan's, Maxine called Nancy. Maxine kind of filled her in and you know, asked her if she was going to go down to the culinary institute and Nancy's reply to me was fairly odd. She said that she wasn't because it's something along the lines if there was going to be too many cops or there was going to be a lot of cops around there. And then she gets a call from Dan's mom, Karen. And then it was really when Karen insisted that she needed to go down there. That's apparently when Nancy decided that she needed to. As investigators push for more information, they look for possible suspects from Dan's life. Is he typically the first person that opens up in the morning? No, you are doing this. I do. You know, I think you all do get here in the middle of the night. Because it seems to me like, "You all do this always here." And that's the cleaning guy, correct? Yes. Somebody whose name came up was a janitor that may or may not have been there that night before or maybe even that morning. Was there any kind of issues with Yadu or any kind of issues with anybody at the school? You know, Dan is not helpful. Well, Matt, we had no communication issues. I'm not trying to make it sound that way, but he's not a chatter. We had alarm panel codes and so we had the history of the alarm panel. We know nobody was there the night before or the morning of before Dan. Here's the other thing, he doesn't harbor grudges. When he first went to work at Western Culinary, God, I'm going to have to tell you a story is here. There was another shift that really just liked him. Dan said he's just a guy with a different opinion in mind. And he just never, in 25 years of teaching, I have never heard him badmouth a student one time. Dan Profi was a beloved teacher, but in terms of who could have killed him, we know it's seven something in the morning. Could it have been a student that was upset with him? Could it have been just someone with some mental health issues that just went off that day? Or could it have been someone else that he knew that wanted his teacher position or wanted his job? We just don't know. We made it very clear that nobody would want to hurt Dan. He wasn't abusive at home, he wasn't secretly doing side deals with people. He went to work, tended his chickens, and lived a pretty simple life. There's no, you know, like he was like a man that's a person who really got it out from here. No. And that wouldn't be how he thought anyway. Okay. Dan kind of is his own little world. God, that makes him sound incompetent, he's not, he's not. Where to turn in a case where it seemed no one wanted Dan Brophy dead? Yet coming up, authorities learned some case changing information. She said, oh no, I was doing research for my book, for my writing, that's why I was looking at that information up, it had nothing to do with wanting to kill my husband. Investigators are working to determine who shot and killed culinary instructor Daniel Brophy in a teaching kitchen where he worked at the Oregon Culinary Institute. He had been shot twice through the heart. As police try to learn more information about Dan from his wife, Nancy Brophy, a self-published romance author, they realize her behavior and answers are a bit off. When they met with Nancy, Nancy very talkative, inserting herself a little bit, but more shocking was when they let her know that her husband is a person that was killed. I just want to let you know, believe it's Dan, that's been killed. Yeah, I kind of got that when everybody gave me this exact look. She's like, oh, I figured that by the way that people were looking at me. They're being told that the love of your life, this person that you just saw this morning, this person that you've been with for over 10 years was just killed and there's no reaction. The unusual thing was, she never asked us, is my husband okay, is he doing okay prior to her finally being notified that he was in fact deceased? Is there anybody that wanted to do something to Dan? Yeah, I've heard from so far as like Dan's a nice guy, and students seem to like him and everything. He's not a rebel, I mean he is, he just, it took me four and a half years to convince him to marry me, you know. She was giggling, she was laughing, she was being very talkative, she wasn't in shock. But then Nancy finally starts asking questions, which leads to some interesting details. We're just trying to figure out what, you know, and that's why I'm asking some of these kind of questions. Can you tell me what happened? It's far as you know. You shot me. Wasn't AR 15? Yeah, I don't know what it was shot. Why do you say AR 15? Because school students are all AR 15s now. There was an AR 15, they killed them, and we just, we're like, what, that it just seemed like an unusual question, I realize and understand that there's always shock and different reactions that people have in a time of such trauma. So we didn't pay too much attention to it. Nancy disclosed that back in February, they had purchased a Glock 17 9 millimeter. She said that they got it home, they took it out of the box, they looked at it, they thought it was ugly, heavy, kind of scared him a little bit, and so she just put it away and never did anything with it. I bought this gun, I got it home, we looked at it and neither one of us wanted it. And so it's still on my closet shelf and it still has that little plastic band around the Shooter thing. We've never even bought bullets for work. We have a pistol or is it a lock? It's a hang gun That first we're thinking well if she is the murder there's no way this is the gun. She just voluntarily turned it over So we tested it and it was not a match We knew the gun she got from the gun show was not the gun that shot Dambruffy She liked to have hands-on experience with props and things that she used in her books I worked with a bunch of riders. I'm a rider too. I ran Romaniac's suspense and I worked with all these riders and Everybody has a gun The thing though that didn't fit is that She bought approximately $1,500 worth of guns and gun parts during this time frame leading up to her husband's murder It was heavy What did you know how heavy it then? It felt terrible Handling it it was like It just wasn't something you guys did No real frankly I couldn't imagine ever needing it We did a search of one of her storage units and we found a box And sure enough they opened up the box and there were scarves and purses and a glot kit It was a ghost gun We thought oh my gosh this must be it. This must be the murder weapon But as we got looking closer at the physical gun itself we realized that she never built it Nancy had done searches on ghost guns and just guns in general And it turns out that Nancy had purchased ghost gun pieces online However, she failed to mention to law enforcement that she had purchased a ghost gun piece A slide from eBay We have experts that can test to determine Which shell casings came out of which gun? The part that leaves the mark on the shell casing comes from the slide and barrel of the gun So in theory You could take a slide barrel off of one gun and put it on an identical lower unit and it would work The big question was well, where's the slide barrel from eBay That's the only firearm piece that law enforcement was never able to locate With no murder weapon directly connecting Nancy to the crime Investigators begin to question Why would she kill Dan? They discover a key piece of evidence that could change this whole investigation We had a great marriage But the only people I know who have ever hated him was this ex-wife and who it checked who I've done hate The husband you know and I can't believe after 25 years she'd be motivated I mean sure to that we live a quiet life Everybody around them thought they had a great relationship They seemed to be doing fine until 2016 2016 is where things we could see started to derail You know Nancy is management and she controlled pretty much all aspects of their life Most importantly their finances They had a lot of financial issues and financial troubles From taking out loans on their pension to their 401k To paying down their debt to thinking about selling their property They weren't paying their mortgage on time there was repeated times where the mortgage just didn't get paid But ironically she's buying all these glock parts and guns Simultaneously she's prioritizing paying for life insurance policies And these are in Dan's name some of them So it looked very suspicious to us She would take out $35,000 on their 401k And she would spend it on getting the yard cleaned up and vacations And then she of course spent part of that money on firearms and firearm accessories But having financial problems doesn't mean Nancy's a murderer or does it I know selfish but what am I going to do without him? How am I going to get this money? It's not selfish No, you're worried You know I should be worried about him And how I could think about it Oh my god Yeah take one step at a time, okay? I know There's not a lot of things you can do right now As detectives try to sort out what actually happened to Dan Brofi Days after the murder They receive a strange phone call from Nancy Just make him you and I'll ask this afternoon I don't want to be the stupid question of the day But I think I need to be the stupid question of the day Nancy called and asked the investigator I know this is weird But can I get a letter and say that I'm not a suspect that I wasn't involved And I prosecuted homicides for over 10 years And this is the first time I have ever heard this My insurance company said Just have to detect and bribe a letter that you're no longer a suspect My sister when I told her this is a lawyer she laughed so hard she said I was a chair If you listen to that call, Detective Posey is caught off guard Why would you need that? They don't want to pay if it turns out that I secretly look down to the school And shop my husband because I thought Hey, going into old age without Dan after 25 years It's really what I'm looking for, you know Okay, well we never would do something like that I really didn't think so It was just an odd phone call in general I mean she's laughing she's very much downplaying it This is such a stupid little policy I can't believe they're making me jump through This is only $40,000 The other thing is I said what happens to the case never gets resolved And they said well that has to go up to the supervisors to be evaluated And I'm thinking great It was something that gave some additional insight to this investigator Wait, hold up, insurance policies And it wasn't just the $40,000 They were also other insurance policies totaling over $1 million Let me ask you my next question which I know you're going to give me a vague answer But because you've got enough things that you really think you know Or you think you've got the potential to solve it at this point We are looking at a lot of stuff There's a lot of things to go through and review Real frankly, I want you to take as long as it takes Because I want to supply this portion Nancy seems to be a very weird person Just her interaction and how she had this conversation with this investigator So it was definitely a red flag We did a lot of work trying to find a suspect that was not Nancy Brofi And to try to rule out that there was no other motive Person that had a problem with them There was nothing else suspicious or anything else that led us a different direction Based on her statements, behavior and activities leading up to Dan's death Detectives narrow in on Nancy as their likely suspect But there's something else a bit curious about romance novelist Nancy Brofi One of the investigators Googled Nancy Brofi's writings And learned that she had written an essay several years ago Called How to Murder Your Husband And it talked about police tactics Avoiding detection by law enforcement If you were to carry out a murder of your spouse Another odd detail Maybe Nancy did kill Dan to collect life insurance money And to live out her retirement years without him But a lot of this is purely circumstantial And there's still not quite enough evidence to charge her However, when we return Investigators find out something big about the murder Nancy said that she had not left her house All of a sudden the investigator gets a call from another investigator and said Look, we pulled some surveillance and in the surveillance we see this van pass by Ding, ding, ding It's a wonderful guy. He really is a wonderful guy. Oh man It's summer 2018 and Portland investigators suspect 67-year-old romance novelist Nancy Brofi May have shot and killed her own husband 63-year-old chef Dan Brofi As he was preparing his kitchen at the Oregon Culinary Institute for a Saturday class A potential financial motive to kill suspicious firearm-related purchases Strange comments to police and literally authoring an essay on how to kill your husband All look bad for Nancy Brofi However, there's nothing concrete tying her to the crime Until we take a closer look at the scene As we continue to investigate We learn that there's no video surveillance on the premises in the interior of OCI Detective Merrill and Detective Posey came to me and said Hey, do you want to walk around and look for a surveillance video with us? Which is not something we normally do But we walked across the street to Bellagio's Pizza And we all watched the video together When the first pass goes by of this kind of silvery tan-ish minivan I don't even know that we noticed it on the first pass We didn't really I think pay much attention until we saw it after the time of the homicide as well What kind of vehicles do you guys drive? You guys each have your own vehicles He has a white truck And I have a Toyota van What color is that gray what year's that one 2007? It was detective Posey actually he's like hey isn't that Nancy's van that we just saw her drive away and And we start looking at it and we're just lowering it down We're rewinding it pausing it doing still images and it looks exactly like the van We just saw and not only that Right as the van crosses in front of Belagio's it stops for a stop sign and as it stops You can see the driver appears to look just like Nancy Brofee I didn't get on the bed. Oh, you just kind of woke up and you were alert. Yeah, and he got dressed on my off She said that she never got out of bed from their master bedroom upstairs that she was working on a book Our ears perked up quite a bit just What are the you know chances of the same exact type of minivan the same rim same lights? Has this particular scratch in it and then it wasn't just a scratch I mean it was a pretty significant scrape down the side and so really to connect the van To Nancy it was that sticker in the window Dan's mom Karen explained that that minivan used to belong to Jack and Karen Brofee And that they had given that minivan to Nancy when she needed a vehicle That was a church parking lot sticker in the corner of the van We were able to verify it wasn't fact the church parking sticker The van was spotted in the area without any reason to be in that area at that time If somebody says they're not there when their husband's getting murdered, but the video shows otherwise that's a huge problem Nancy Brofee is arrested and later charged with the second degree murder of her own husband When they put handcuffs on her, she said oh, you must think I killed my husband Which I thought was not something you say when being arrested for your husband's murder Four years after Dan Brofee's murder prosecutors lay out the case for the jury in the criminal trial of Nancy Brofee On the surface the brofee's appeared to their friends at Valing to be a couple in love We're entering the next age of life My mental struggles really began to develop in 2016 by late 2017 Financial despair evident and no one inside Nancy started researching and Planning the murder Dan Brofee The prosecution put forward that yes, they had a lot of financial issues and financial troubles Nancy made claims on ten separate life insurance policies In which she was the beneficiary of over 1.4 million dollars Eventually all of the evidence and all of the leads all pointed back to Nancy Brofee Prosecutors call several witnesses over the course of the trial to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Nancy murdered Dan These include detectives We couldn't figure out any other motive of what happened that day Because it didn't look like a burglary a robbery. There were no grudges against Dan and accountant I reviewed bank accounts. There were insurance payments for six different kind of life insurance accounts It was a Wells Fargo home mortgage. I did see a lot of months where there was loan delinquency And an investigative analyst that X in the middle is that that public shooting range? Yes, the North Fork Wolf Creek public range That morning March 26, 2018 You're detecting Nancy Brofee's home starting around the area of her home heading out highway 26 Into the area. Yes But it was some of the first witnesses that really set the stage So you're in the lounge area at the table. What's the next thing that you remember? The next thing I remember is a student A fellow student yelling call 911. I came to her to see what she needed I think I had my phone in my hand already and I dialed 911 I went to Dan and tried to figure out what was going on I knelt down beside him I didn't know what to do. So I held his hand. I Just I wanted to see if he would squeeze it back and he didn't so It was obvious that That Dan was gone They knew Dan too. It was personal for them They all loved and respected him and they tried to save his life When those people testify and they're feeling that emotion all over again and the jury sees that It's pretty powerful But unfortunately for prosecutors they ran into some difficulty with the key piece of evidence The 2011 essay authored by Nancy entitled How to Murder Your Husband We were trying to introduce it trying to show the jury That she has the knowledge of how to do it This could be helpful to a jury But it's so prejudicial That it's too much to give that to a jury It would be too sensational So the judge I think airing on the side of caution Decided to keep it out And once the case turned to the defense Nancy's attorneys took their time Their case lasting weeks Arguing Nancy couldn't possibly be Dan's killer Nancy cramped in Brophy firmly believes in life insurance And her love and concern for her husband Was demonstrated in the life insurance As he made over the years The other thing that's important about insurance is legal ownership Nancy Brophy made Dan Brophy The legal owner of every policy Then ensured his life I kind of thought well what were they supposed to do They weren't working with much All they could do is try to distract away from all of that evidence And try to humanize Nancy as much as they could The state suggests that Nancy Brophy's life was going to get a lot better when Dan was gone They're wrong Nancy was lost after Dan was killed It was as though the earth had fallen away from her feet Nancy Brophy did not kill her husband The most difficult part about the prosecution's case Is the love story that both Nancy and Dan had They had a wonderful relationship They worked very well together This was a relationship one of the only ones that I know of that I thought if that's what marriage is like I would want that It seemed to be an ideal marriage They personally I think were very well suited to each other You know a sort of yin and yang You know and they just seemed to I mean just really enjoy each other There was no inclination that there were any troubles in the sense of There was any infidelity that there were any arguments That they were bickering or that they couldn't stand each other They couldn't find anything that could have been brewing to lead to Dan being killed by his wife Then Nancy Brophy took the stand herself And her testimony caught everyone's attention Did you ever met a guy anything like Dan Brophy before he met him? No, no He was unique He loved me and I loved him back The person at the jury and all jurors usually want to hear from Mr. Defendant themselves She was on the stand for hours What happened on that day? Why did you lie about where you were at? Why is it that now you can't remember where you were at or what you did that day? I'm reconstructing this base upon what I know in my heart And what I know in my heart is the reason why I have no memory is because I was stunned by the fact Dan was dead And I wouldn't have been stunned if I'd been in the building and shot him She testified fine on direct examination with her attorneys When she knew what the questions were going to be, she was very comfortable Did they tell you that they had video of you near the murder scene? Yes, did you believe that was true? Not for one second I thought they were making this up This isn't true It wasn't until cross examination that just went completely off the rails You talk about the interview with the police and how the just none of your husband died and told him the whole story about why and how you were at the jury Dan owned half a block I told him about the full block I answered him the best way I knew how Why didn't you just say yes we have a gun? I was trying to be helpful to the police at this point I thought they were going to find my husband killer And I didn't think they were going to say let's look at the one person who didn't kill him The longer that she was on that stand She just became so combative Two different people between a prosecution and a defense The Slidenbarrel is what is that issue right? Yes You have a gun Complete Slidenbarrel intact You know how to remove it in fact you did You can manipulate the Slidenbarrel separate in the parking lots of the gun But you chose to buy the exact same piece Why in the world when you've already owned this exact piece you would need to buy Another one Days later What I can tell you is it was for writing it was not to As you would have it murder my husband The jury's looking at her "Wait, you're not coming off as that mouth manored. "I wouldn't hurt a fly." Type person that the defense is trying to sell us. -You think you have relevant evidence to a murder investigation. And you don't think you should mention it to the police. -Even though I marked it, how is a gun kit relative evidence? -I'm asking you. -I'm asking you because I don't think it is 'cause it's never been put together. -No, why would you mark it for the police? Because I figured the police would come back and want to know. -Nancy Bropey should not have testified, especially since she wasn't going to be able to provide you an answer as to what were her whereabouts on the day of the murder. -Today of June 2nd, not only is she a memory hole, but I have a hard time making it clear what I actually remember. -There were so many things that she could remember during our notification with her. And then for the defense to come in and say, "Well, she had retro-grade amnesia causing her to not recall the events that morning, it just didn't sit well with me." -You have no memory of driving around downtown on the morning of June 2nd. How can you sit here today and say that I was driving around right? -If I was down there, that's what I was doing. I do know, based upon the timestamps, that I was only down there for six minutes or less from the time that he signed into the building until you see me again, leaving the area. -How do you know you didn't go in the building? -I know I didn't go in the building because I didn't kill Dan. I know that for a fact. -After weeks of testimony and a day and a half of deliberations, jurors return their decision. -We, the jury, do find our verdicts as follows. Count one, murdering the second degree guilty. -I was a surprise. Based on her testifying her performance while she was on the stand, that played a huge role in jury deliberations and the quickness of their verdict. That just goes to show you that they did not find her to be believable. -Following her conviction, Nancy Brophy was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years. I felt relief that we had put all this work into this case. We worked our butts off. I've never written so many search warrants in my life. We just kept going every direction it led us and we ruled out all the other things and we felt very confident. Nancy Brophy shot and killed Daniel Brophy. -I think for the family and everybody involved that it was probably the final piece was getting that sentence handed down. Frankly, I mean 25 years, I think we figured we should be about 92 when she'd be eligible for release, which there's no guarantee, especially somebody who's defiant and will never admit that they did anything. -But it's the question that the family will love to know, friends will love to know, the public will love to know. Why would you kill your husband who didn't cheat on you, didn't hurt you, didn't hit you, gave you everything, praised you? That's the question that will always remain unanswered. -What a case. Started with a dead body, a potential school shooting, possibly the work of a stranger or enemy, and it all came full circle to one of the closest people in Dan Brophy's life. It seems like one take away from this story, never judge a book by its cover. That's all we have for you here on this episode of Prime Crime. Everybody, thank you so much for joining us. And as always, stay safe.