Who is Nancy Crampton-Brophy? Lifetime movie ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ based on author’s cold-blooded crime
PORTLAND, OREGON: Lifetime is all set to premiere ‘How to Murder Your Husband: The Nancy Brophy Story’, starring Cybill Shepherd and Steve Guttenberg, on Saturday, January 14. This movie is one of the new “Ripped from the Headlines” movies the network has been working on and is sure to be captivating to watch. True crime fans surely don’t want to miss out on this thrilling and suspenseful movie.
Based on a bone-chilling true story, Nancy Crampton-Brophy was a Portland-based novelist who had a special talent for her romance thrillers that featured seductive men on the covers and women protagonists who dreamed of getting rid of their husbands or running away and faking their own deaths. Little did the public know, an unexpected twist of fate was brewing in the background. In 2022, Nancy was convicted of murdering her own husband. The shocking revelation led to a court case documented on TV and now a feature film.
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Who is Nancy Crampton-Brophy?
Nancy Crompto-Brophy was many things, including a savvy entrepreneur with 25 employees and $500,000 in revenue, a self-published novelist who invented steamy scenes that found few readers, a stepgrandmother, and finally, according to prosecutors, a killer. In 2018, the author of the blog post ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ was charged with the cold-blooded killing of her husband, chef Daniel Brophy, by fatally shooting him twice at close range in the chest. After months of deliberation, a jury in Multnomah County found her guilty of second-degree murder. Her story has caused many to speculate whether her blog post was simply a macabre fictional narrative or a chilling true-life prelude.
Nancy grew up reading and writing and was passionate about her career as an author. Her first published work was a pamphlet for the University of Houston entitled 'Between Your Navel and Your Knees'. She was the middle child of two Texas lawyers and was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, on June 16, 1950, as per Oregon Live. The 71-year-old majored in economics at the University of Houston. Her first marriage was to a police officer, and after the eventual divorce, Nancy moved from Texas to Oregon in 1990 or 1991, where she enrolled at the now-closed Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts. The university was where she met Daniel, who was her instructor. The couple wed eight years after their first meeting and filed the legal paperwork years later in 2016. For a decade, Nancy was the head of Chef Du Jour Catering in Northwest Portland. The organization’s business took a downturn after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, resulting in a decrease in the catering team from 25 to 15 members. She eventually left the business a few years later and took up selling life insurance and Medicare policies on commission.
Nancy Crampton-Brophy's writing and the link to Daniel Brophy's murder
Following her graduation from culinary school, Nancy began to explore her interests in literature and took part in local writing circles. She had already released her first pamphlet during her college years and had dabbled in technical writing. It wasn’t until 2013 that she published the first of the five books in her romance novel series, marking the beginning of her career as a fiction writer. Prosecutors stated that Nancy’s nine self-published books, which had very few reviews on Amazon, did not bring in a lot of revenue. Her arrest made them more noteworthy, particularly since she had written an essay called 'How to Murder Your Husband' which included various methods of killing someone and said it was only worthwhile if it was undetectable.
At the trial, Nancy acknowledged she had bought an unlicensed gun kit and a Glock pistol barrel online to write a book about a woman assembling a gun to protect herself from an abusive ex-partner. The prosecution claims Nancy murdered her husband with a Glock bought from a gun show and swapped the barrel from the gun with the one she purchased online to prevent investigators from tracing the murder weapon. Nancy’s writing avocation also came into play as she explained why she didn’t tell detectives that she had driven near the culinary school at the time her 63-year-old husband was shot, as per reports. Instead, Nancy told detectives she had been in bed all morning writing, according to an audio recording of her police interview. Prosecutors found that Nancy had the motive and the capability to kill her husband, especially since his death would benefit her $1.4 million from the insurance company. After being found guilty, Nancy was handed a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 25 years.
Watch ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ to catch the full story on Saturday, January 14, 2023, at 8 pm ET/PT on Lifetime.