[imagesource: Pool / KPIU]

A romance novelist fascinated with betrayal and spousal murder is on trial in Oregon for the killing of her husband.

In a 2011 blog post titled How to Murder Your Husband, Nancy Brophy wrote that a wife who wants to get away with mariticide needs to be “organised, ruthless and very clever,” per The New York Times.

She added that there would be no point in spending time in jail as the killing should be able to set the killer free.

Seven years after that detailed write-up, her husband, Daniel Brophy, was brutally murdered.

Over to The Citizen:

Crampton Brophy, whose “Wrong Never Felt So Right” series of novels include The Wrong Husband and The Wrong Lover, stands accused of shooting Daniel Brophy [twice!], using a gun whose now-missing barrel she bought on eBay.

Prosecutors say the 71-year-old writer was struggling to make payments on her mortgage, but kept up multiple life assurance policies that would pay out a total of $1.4 million in the event of her husband’s demise.

On the stand this week, Brophy said that she does “better with Dan alive financially than I do with Dan dead”:

Image: Courtesy of Brophy Family

And yet, he was left to bleed out on the kitchen floor of the Portland culinary institute where he was arriving for work on a sunny June morning in 2018.

Prosecutors are building a case based on her writings to prove that she “killed her husband with the same type of brutal cunning she once speculated would be necessary to evade conviction and reap the rewards”.

This includes compiling gun components bought over time on eBay to avoid leaving a trace, attacking when no cameras or witnesses were present, and hastily collecting all the life insurance policies within days of her husband’s death.

Their relationship, which began in the 1990s, didn’t seem to have much strife, bar perhaps some financial issues:

“Where is the motivation I would ask you? An editor would laugh and say, ‘I think you need to work harder on this story, you have a big hole in it.’”

Besides facing possible financial ruin, she had continued to pay into 10 separate life insurance policies before her husband’s death.

Image: Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office

Brophy had initially stated that she was still in bed at the time that her husband was murdered, but prosecutor Shawn Overstreet revealed security camera footage had captured her minivan outside the murder site at the exact time of the crime:

“You were there at the same time that someone happens to be shooting your husband… with the exact type of gun that you own and which is now mysteriously missing,” he said.

…Investigators say the barrel from the Glock handgun used in the slaying was purchased by the suspect on eBay. That barrel – which would contain damning forensic clues – has never been recovered, despite an exhaustive police search.

She immediately claimed a degree of amnesia (typical of her novels and short stories), suggesting that she might have been driving in the area to get “inspiration for a story”:

“This is not a man I would have shot because I had a memory issue. It seems to me if I had shot him, I would know every detail.”

That’s not convincing, ma’am.

Lest we forget that you are the same woman who wrote how “every one of us have [murder] in him/her when pushed far enough”.

[sources:nytimes&citizen]