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The morning he was killed, Daniel Brophy’s body lay in the kitchen of the Culinary Institute in Portland, Oregon, where he worked. One of the students who found his body described the chef’s last expression on Monday as a “completely broken heart”.
Student Clarinda Perez attributes the chef’s green-eyed, grief-stricken gaze to the last thing she said she saw before two bullets pierced his spine and heart: his wife, Nancy Crampton Brophy, holding a 9mm Glock pistol.
Last month, after a seven-week trial, Crampton Brophy, a 71-year-old romance writer best known for writing a 2011 blog post entitled How to Kill Your Husband, was found guilty of second-degree murder. On Monday, she was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years for the murder of her then 63-year-old husband in 2018.
Four years later, Brophy’s family was still shaken by the loss. They described the pain of knowing that his grandson would never meet him — all because Brophy had been killed by the woman he cooked for, dusted, and taken to his family’s pen for 27 years.
“You chose to lie, steal, cheat, cheat, and ultimately killed the man who, for some reason still unknown to me, was your biggest fan,” Nathaniel Stillwater, Brophy’s son, said in a statement before the sentencing. be pronounced. “You executed my father in an act of cold-blooded, premeditated murder. The man who did everything for you. ”
During the trial against Crampton Brophy, which began on April 4, prosecutors from the Multnoma County District Attorney’s Office outlined to jurors how they believe she planned to assassinate her favorite chef at the Culinary Institute in Oregon. They claim that Crampton Brophy bought a ghost gun and tried to collect life insurance policies, reflecting things she wrote about in her romantic novels.
The author of “How to Kill Your Husband” is on trial for alleged murder of her husband
Brophys’ marriage looked idyllic on the outside – “the kind of relationship that made me personally think that marriage might not be a bad idea,” testified Susan Estrada, the writer’s niece. The couple built a quiet life in the suburbs of Portland, where chickens joked in the backyard, hot meals were served every night and a “fairytale” vegetable garden bloomed, Crampton Brophy wrote on his website.
But the couple’s financial situation has begun to crack, prosecutors said. Money ran tight the year before Brophy’s death – then his wife came up with a deadly collection plan life insurance policies, they said.
The alleged conspiracy involves a kit for building a ghost pistol, the type of untraceable weapon that people can assemble at home. But after having trouble assembling it, Crampton Brophy claims he bought a gun. Prosecutors said she replaced the pistol’s slider and barrel with one she had ordered from eBay – so the pistol’s cartridges didn’t seem to match the weapon she had.
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On June 2, 2018, Crampton Brophy went with her minivan to the Culinary Institute shortly before her husband arrived at work, surveillance cameras showed. When Brophy arrived there around 7:20 in the morning, the cook poured ice and water into buckets he was filling up next to the sink. He was shot then.
Students from the now defunct Cooking Institute discovered his bleeding body about an hour later. Perez, the student who gave a statement on Crampton Brophy’s sentence, tried to apply CPR. Others called 911. Another “boldly cleared the kitchen so no one should see Chef Brophy the way he did. [his wife] leave him, “Perez said.
Shortly after the death of her husband, Crampton Brophy tried to raise $ 1.4 million in life insurance. Prosecutors say this is the motive for the murder.
Police never found the gun that killed Crampton Brophy’s wife. During the trial, prosecutors allege that Crampton Brophy changed the barrel of the gun and then dumped it to evict investigators. Her defense team, on the other hand, suggested that someone else may have killed Daniel Brophy – perhaps during a failed robbery.
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Through all this, Crampton Brophy maintained his innocence. When she took office, Crampton Brophy said she and her husband had bought life insurance policies as part of their retirement planning. The weapons she bought, she said, are part of research she is doing on her upcoming novel, about a woman in a toxic relationship who gradually begins to acquire gun parts to gain the upper hand over her violent lover.
But the jury was not convinced – instead, it unanimously found her guilty on May 25 after eight hours of deliberation.
The upcoming restitution hearing is scheduled for August. Judge Christopher Ramras, meanwhile, said he hoped the sentence could lead to the imprisonment of the relatives of a man he knew as “Chef Brophy” during the trial.
“I think the thing you can take away, which I hope will give you some comfort, is that he was a mentor and teacher to many and had an impact on the lives of many people, and I hope they turn around and influence the others themselves while teaching, ”Ramras said.
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