Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This article contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
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 loved one? lets found out.
It’s early saturday morning june 2nd 20018 at the Oregon Culinary Institute in Portland.
students walk in, expeting a day of learning techniques and recepies.yet instead …
they found discovered the body of their instructor ,63 year old Daniel brophy lying on the floor of one of the school’s kitchen .
Daniel brophy was at his school where he teatchers culinary arts and on the day he was preparing for students to come in , it was just like any other day.
studens had found chef brophy lying on his back by the sink, the water was still running, one of the students actually tried to perform CPR,
they assumed that he had maybe had a medical event.
what made it harder at the beginning was prosecutors had initial 911 call, that’s even confusing the callers stating ” hey we have an older gentlemen down ” they didn’t even know.
Right away that dan had been shot .
the gunshots wounds were not apparent.there were no pool of blood ,there wasn’t the classic kind of signs that people imagine and it wasn’t until student saw blood on her hand that they realize that ,” oh this isn’t some sort of heart attack”
the 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 arrive.
they realize after examining chef brophy’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.
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 the shooter could still be in the building
they went through and methodically cleared the entire building to make sure there was no shooter or suspect still at the scene.
this is a building with exits on multiple streets.if the shooter’s still at large, they need to get a perimeter going.
after confirming there’s no active threat on the property authorities have to figure out what happened here.
who would want to do this , why would somebody do this. law enforcement treated it like they do any other homicidethey start to separate all the witnesses and in this situation there were numerous wittnesses because there were two different classes going on on that day .
so there were anywhere from 30 to 40 some students. investigators started looking at the students first
the students that were there. and more importantly the students that weren’t there, that should have been. pilice tracked all of them down.
it kind of looked like well given the area of downtown portland could have been a robbery gone wrong, those were som of the things police were thinking.could this been maybe a houseless person that came in and wanted tto rob the place . but chef brophy interrupted it.
it just didn’t seemed that way from him working at the sink and getting shot in the back.
there was no video ,there was no eyewitness, didn’t look anything was really disturbed.one person that became interest was a guy named Oscar taylor .
somebody who steels, he was out looking for cans that morning.law enforcement thought:
” okay,he didn’t go canning walk and murder dan for no reason whatsoever” and then just leave.
that dosen’t make any sense .
he’s living from day to day trying to survive canning. law enforcement don’t expect him to have a 500 dollar Glock hand 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.
one of the things that stood out right away ,was 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 taking.
police thought; ” okay this maybe is more personal , maybe ,this was targeted.
the lack of evidence was pretty telling. when you look 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 ryunning 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 and 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 brophy 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 can provide some clues as to who may have done this to her husband.
Nancy was from Texas, she decided she was going to go into culinary world and that’s where she met Dan. In the early 90s Dan was actually her instructor ,they got together and 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 knon 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.can Nancy brophy help law enforcement find her husbands killer?
Back on june 2nd 2018 culinary students discover 63 year old cooking instructor Dan brophy 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 Brophy dead .
hours after the murder, Dan’s wife 67 year old Nancy Brophy arrives downtown at the school.
police were just kind of standing around and that’s when Nancy Brophy first got to the crime sceme. investigators remember that very vividly she was just standing there ,didn’t show any emotion , she was just kind of there.
police initally met with nancy to let her know that her husband was killed.
it was something that normal with every homicide that takes place.
police took Nancy brophy into the van, that’s set up for intervies.
they needed to learn as much as they can about chef brophy’s activities that morning, what he did,if there was anything going on , problems grievances with other people.
she said that he had come up and taken a shower upstairs in the master bedroom area while she was in the bad and then he left.
A mutual friend of hers and Dan’s , maxine called nancy. maxine kind of filled her in and asked her if she was going to go down to the culinary institute and nancy’s reply to the detectives was farily odd.she said that she wasn’t .
because something along the lines of there was going to be toomany cops around there. and then she gets a call from Dan’s mom Karen and 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.
somebody whose name came up was a janitor that may or may not have been there that night before or maybe that morning.
investigators had alarm panel codes and so they had the history of the alarm panel . they know nobody was was there. the night before or the morning before Dan.
Dan brophy was a beloved teacher but in terms of hwo couldh ave killed him.invetstigators know it’s se 7 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
no one knows.
Nancy made it very clear that nobody would want hurt Dan.
he wasn’t abusive at home,he wasn’t secretely doing side deals with people, he went to work, tended his chickens and lived a pretty simple life.
where to turn in a case where it seemed no one wanted dan brophy dead? authorities learned some case changing information.
2018 Portlan Oregon.
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 brothy , a self- published romance author. they realize her behavior and answers are a bit off.
when they met wit Nancy, Nancy very talkativ inserting herself a little bit but more shocking was when they let her know that her husband is person that was killed.
she said ” oh i fugred that, by the way that people were looking at me “
your 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 is no reaction.
The unusual thing was she never asked investigtors ” is my husband okay?is he doing okay?” prior to her finally being notified that he was in fact deceased.she was giggling ,she was laughing.she as beingvery talkative, she wasn’t in shock.
but then Nancy finally starts asking questions which leads to some interesting details.
Nancy” was it an AR-15 that killed him”and investigators like ” what?”
it seemed like an unusal question, investigators realize and understand that there’s always shock and different reactions that people have in a time of a such of trauma so they didn’t pay too much attention to it.
Nancy disclosed that back in february they had purchased a glock 17,9 mm.she said that they got it home , they took it out of the box ,they looked at it . they thought it was ugly and heavy ,kind of scared them a little bit and so she just put it away never did anything with it.
at first investigators thinking ” well if she is the murder, there¨s noway this is the gun she just voluntarily turned it over. so they tested it and it was not a match.
they knew the gun she got from the gun show was not the gun that shot daniel brophy. she liked to have hands -on experience with props and things that she used in her books.
the thing though that didn’t fit is that she bought approximately 1.500 dollar worth of guns and gun parts,during this time frame leading up to her husband’s murder.
detectives did a search of one of her storage units and they found a box and sure enough they opened up the box and there were scarves and purses and a glock kit .
it was a ghost gun , detectives thought:” oh my gosh ,this must be it , this must be the murder weapon.”
but as they got looking closer at the physical gun itself , they 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 on online .
however she failed to mention to law enforcement that she had purchased a ghost gun piece a slide from eBay.
detectives hace experts that can test to determine which shell casings came out of which gun. the parts that leaves the mark on the shell casing comes fromthe slide and barrel of the gun.
so in theory you could take a slide and barrel off of one gun and put it on an identical lower unit and it would work . the big question was .where’s the slide and barrel from eBay? thats 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.
everybody around them thought they had a great relationship.they seem to be doing fine …until 2016 is where things investigators could see started to deral , Nancy is management and she controlled pretty much all aspects of their life.
most importantly,their finances,they had a lot of finacial issues and financial troubles from taking out loans on their pension to their full 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 this Glock parts and some guns
simultaneously she’sprioritizing paying for life insurance policies and these are in Dan’s name some of them
so it looked very suspicious to investigators.
she would takeout 35 ,000 dollars on their 401 k andshe woul spend it on getting the yard cleaned up and vacations andthen she of course spent part of that money on firearms and firearm accessiories.
but having financialproblems doesn’t mean Nancy’s a murderer or does it …..
as detectives try to sort out what actually happened to Dan brophy,days after the murder they receive a strange phone call from Nancy.
Nancy called and asked the investigate:
” i know this is weird but can i get a letter and say that i’m not a suspect?that i wasn’t involved”
detectives is caught off guard.
it was just an odd phone call in general . Nancy is laughing .she¨s very much downplaying.
It was something that gave some additional insight to this investigator:
” wait hold up , insurance policies?”
and it wasn’t just the 40 .000 there were also other insurance policies totaling over 1 million
Nancy seems to be a very weird person .just her interaction and h ow she had this conversation with this investigator , so it was definitely a red flag.
investigators did lot of work trying to find a suspect that was not Nancy brophy and to try to rule out that there was no other motive
perosn that had a problem with then there was nothing else suspicious or anything else that led detectives 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 brophy.
one of the investigators googled Nancy brophy’s writings and learned that she had written :
and it talked about police tactics avoiding detection by law enforcement if you were to carry ot a murder of your spuse.
another odd deatail, 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 …..investigators find out something big about the murder.
It’s summer 2018 and Portland investigators suspect 67 year old romance novelist Nancy brophy may have shot and killed her own husband 63 year old dan brophyas he was preparing his kitchen at the oregon culinary institute for a saturday class.
financial motive to kill suspicious, firearm related purchases,strange comments to to police and literally authoring an essay on how to kill your husband. all look bad for Nancy brophy.however there’s nothing concrete tying her to the crime untill we take a closer at the scene.
as detectives contune to investigate, they learned there’s no video surveillance on the premises in the interior of OCI.
across the strreet. bellagios pizza.
detectives watch the video together.
the first pass goes by of this kind of silvery tanish minivan,detectives don’t even know that they noticed it on the first pass. they didn’t really pay it much attention,until they saw it after the time of the homicide as well .
detectives like ” hey isn’t that Nancy’s van we just saw her drive away in .” and they start looking at it and wer’e slowing it down ,were’re rewinding it , pausing it, doing still images. and it looks exactly like the wan they just saw .
and not only that . rights as the van crosses in fron of the bellagios it stops for a stop sign and as it stops you can see the driver appears to look just like Nancy brophy.
she said that she never got out of the bed from the masterbed upstairs.that she was working on a book.
investigators ears perked up quite a bit .
what is the chance of the same exat type of minivan, the same Rim.the same lights has this particular in it and then it wasn’t just a scratch. it was a pretty significant scrape down the side
and so really to connect the van to Nancy it was that arixkwe in rgw window, Dan’s mom karen explained that ,that minivan used to belong jack and karen brophy.
and that they had given that minivan to Nancy when she needed a vehicle. that was a church parkinglot sticker in the corner of the van. investigators were able to verift it was 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.
Nanct brophy is arrested and later charged with the seconf deegree murder of her own husband.
when they put handcuff on her ,she said” oh you must think i killed my husband.”
which investigators thougth was not something you say when being arrested for your husbands murder.
four years after Dan brophy’s murder prosecutors lay out the case for the jury in a criminal trial of Nancy brothy .
the prosecution put forward that yeas they had a lot of financial issues and financial troubles.
prosecutor call several witnesses over the course of the trial to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Nancy murder Dan, these include detectives.an accountant.and an investigative analyst.
but it was some of the first witnesses that really set the stage. 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 emotional all over again and the jury sees that , it’s pretty powerful.
but unfortunately for the prosecutors ,they ran into some difficulty with the key piece of evidence -the 2011 essay authored by Nancy entitled ” how to murder your husband”
Prosecutors were trying to introduce it,trying to show the jury that she has the knowledge of how to do it. this couldbe 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 airing onthe 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.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 most dificult part about the prosecution’s case is the love story that both Nancy and Dan had. they had a wonderful relationship, they worked wery well together .it seemed to be an ideal marriage ,they were very erll suited to each other sort of Yin and Yang. they seemed just really enkoy 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 bee brewing to lead to Dan being killed by his wife.
then Nancy brophy took the stand herself and her testimony caught everyone’s attention.
the person that the jury and all jurors usually want to hear from is the defendant themselves . she was on the stand 4 hours, what happened on that day? why did you lie about where you were at?why is that now you can’t remember where you were at? or what you did that day?
she testified fine on direct examination with her attorneys when she knew what the questions were going to be, she was very comfortable.
attorney“did they tell you that they had video of you near the murder scene”
Nancy” yes
attorney” did you beliveve that is true?
Nancy :” not for one second. i thought they’re makingthis up. this isn’t true.”
it wasn’t until cross examination that just went completely off the rails
prosecutor” why didn¨t you just say yes we have a gun.
Nancy” i wass trying to be helpful to the police at this point, i thought they were going to find my husband’s killer , i didn’t think they were going to say” lets 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 the prosecution and the defense.
prosecutor” you have a gun complete slid and barrel intact, you knew how to remove it , in fact she did. you can manipulate the slide and barrel separate and apart from the resy of the gun but you choose to buy the exact same piece .why? why in the world when you already own this exact piece you would need to buy another one days later.”
Nancy“what i can tell you is, it was for writting it was not to… uh as she would have it murder my husband.”
the jury’s looking at her ,”wait your’re not coming off as that mild mannered
” i wouldn’t hurt a fly” typ person that the defense is trying to sell.
prosecutor ” you think you have relevant evidence to a murder ivnestigation and you dont think you shouldmention it to te police.”
Nancy “even though i market it how is a gun kit relative evidence.”
prosecutor ” i ‘m asking you “
Nancy“i’m asking you because i don’t think it is cuz it’s never been put together.”
prosecutor” then why would you marked it for the police”
Nancy” because i figured the police would come back and want to know.”
Nancy should not have testified . especially since she wasn’t going to be able to provide you an answer as to what were h er whereabouts on the day of the murder.
Nancy “the day of june 2nd,not only is there 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 detectives notification with her and then for the defense to come in and say ” well she had amnesia”causing her to not recall the events that morning. it didn’t sit well wit the prosecutors.
prosecutor” you have no memory of driving around downtown onthe morning on the morning of june 2nd,how can you sit here today and say ” i was driving around writing”
Nancy” 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 …6 minutes or less from the time he signe in to the building until you see me again living the area.
prosecutor ” how do you know you didn’t go in the building?”
Nancy” 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 delibreations jurors returns their descision.
based on her testifying, her performance,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 possible of parole after 25 years. she’d be about 92 when she ‘d be eligible for release which is no guarantee especially somebody who’s defiant and will never admit that they did anything.
but the questions everyone wants to know : why would you kill your husband?
who didn’t sheat on you, didn’t hurt you,didn’t hit you,gave yhou everything,praised you. that’s a question that will always remain unanswered…….