Loving wife or a cold-blooded killer?
Teams of prosecutors and defense attorneys painted two drastically divergent portraits of Oregon romance novelist Nancy Crampton Brophy as opening statements for the first murder jury trial in Multnomah County Circuit Court in more than two years began Monday.
Crampton Brophy has remained in custody since she was arrested Sept. 5, 2018, facing a single count of murder in the fatal shooting of her husband, chef Daniel Brophy, 63, as he prepped for work at the Oregon Culinary Institute in Southwest Portland around 7:30 a.m. June 2.
Multnomah County Senior Deputy District Attorney Shawn Overstreet told jurors that Crampton Brophy was motivated by greed and a $1.4 million insurance policy.
She “executed what she perhaps believed to be the perfect plan,” Overstreet said, when the then-68-year-old allegedly followed her husband to work and shot him in the back, piercing his spine and heart, before firing again as he lay sprawled on a classroom floor.
Either shot from the Glock pistol could have been fatal, Overstreet said.
“All of the leads that detectives followed up with all pointed back at Nancy Brophy,” Overstreet said.
Lead defense attorney Lisa Maxfield said the novelist and her finances both deteriorated after the killing, far from the prosecution’s claim that she profited from ill-gotten gains. Crampton Brophy wasn’t listed on the deed to the couple’s home and grief prevented her from returning to her day job selling Medicare policies, Maxfield said.
Crampton Brophy lost “a great listener, a wonderful lover, a consummate chef and true life partner,” Maxfield said.
The “circumstantial case” against Crampton Brophy “begs you to cast a blind eye to the most powerful evidence of all: love,” the defense attorney said. Her client had no reason to kill her husband, Maxfield said.
Crampton Brophy will take the stand in her own defense, Maxfield said.
Daniel Brophy was the only person inside the culinary school at the time of his death, the prosecutor said. The school had no security cameras, he said.
Detectives found no signs of a robbery, Overstreet noted, as Brophy’s wallet, keys and phone were left untouched.
Brophy’s death remained a mystery until his wife’s arrest, and authorities have never publicly disclosed another suspect in the case.
Traffic cameras show Crampton Brophy’s minivan approaching and departing from city streets near the institute close to the apparent time of the shooting, providing a 13-minute window when she could have fatally shot her husband of 21 years, Overstreet said.
Crampton Brophy stood to collect not only the life insurance from Daniel Brophy’s death, but also the equity in their Beaverton home and a worker’s compensation plan, he said.
“Nancy Brophy was maintaining all those life insurance policies while continuing down a path of financial ruin,” he said. “Well over a thousand dollars a month was being paid into these policies at a time when they were struggling to pay their mortgage.”
Overstreet said Crampton Brophy used a Glock pistol she bought at a Portland gun show to shoot her husband, after previously buying a “ghost gun” assembly kit online that she lacked the know-how to actually build.
She then allegedly swapped out the gun’s barrel with an identical mechanism, he said, preventing forensic experts from matching the spent bullets with the original slide-racking system, which law enforcement officers were never able to recover.
Maxfield, one of two defense lawyers, said Crampton Brophy had worked as a salesperson for a variety of insurance companies and had an incentive to buy multiple policies when she changed jobs to demonstrate her belief in the product and because she received a commission.
The ghost gun kit, Maxfield said, was purchased as research for Crampton Brophy’s novels, as was the replacement gun barrel.
And Maxfield said the defense team would present evidence showing that Daniel Brophy was well aware of the various retirement plans the couple had, including the insurance policies.
Daniel Brophy even signed for the package containing the gun assembly kit while Crampton Brophy was traveling for work, she added.
The Brophys had about $10,000 available at the time of Daniel Brophy’s death and stood to make at least $700,000 when they subdivided their half-acre Beaverton property on Southwest 108th Avenue, Maxfield told a jury of seven men and 11 women, including alternate jurors.
“Nancy has always been thoroughly, madly, crazily in love with Dan Brophy, and she remains so to this day,” Maxfield said, citing letters Crampton Brophy wrote to her husband as well as a voicemail saved on his phone.
The Brophys held a large wedding ceremony in 1997 but weren’t legally married until shortly before Daniel Brophy’s killing when they signed the official paperwork in Washington County, Maxfield said. In the meantime, though, they had filed taxes as a couple.
Maxfield didn’t address the surveillance footage allegedly placing Crampton Brophy’s minivan near the crime scene or address Overstreet’s arguments that the novelist wasn’t forthcoming with detectives about the ghost gun or what she did the morning Daniel Brophy died. Maxfield said the jury would hear testimony from psychologists showing how the wallop of traumatic events can erase memories.
Before the jury entered the room, Circuit Judge Christopher Ramras ruled prosecutors cannot introduce as evidence an essay titled “How to Murder Your Husband” that Crampton Brophy wrote in 2011 while applying to a writer’s group.
Crampton Brophy joined the Romance Writers of America in 2003, according to an online biography, and had published at least a half-dozen novels.
“None of them led to much financial success,” Overstreet said.
The trial is expected to last seven weeks.
— Zane Sparling; zsparling@oregonian.com; 503-319-7083; @pdxzane
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