A Portland jury has convicted a self-published love novelist of shooting her husband four years ago.
A jury of seven women and five men found 71-year-old Nancy Crampton Brophy, who once wrote an essay entitled “How to Kill Your Husband”, guilty of second-degree murder on Wednesday after two days of deliberations, KOIN-TV reported. .
The 63-year-old chef Daniel Brophy was killed on June 2, 2018, while preparing to work at the Oregon Culinary Institute in Southwest Portland.
Crampton Brophy showed no visible reaction Wednesday in a crowded Multnomah County Courthouse.
Lisa Maxfield, one of Crampton Brophy’s lawyers, said the defense team plans to appeal.
Prosecutors told jurors that Crampton Brophy was motivated by money problems and life insurance.
However, Crampton Brophy said during the trial that she had no reason to kill her husband and that their financial problems had been largely solved by cashing in part of Brophy’s retirement savings plan.
She owned the same brand and model of gun used to kill her husband, and was seen on surveillance footage driving to and from the Culinary Institute, court exhibits and court testimony showed.
Police never found the gun that killed Brophy. Prosecutors say Crampton Brophy changed the barrel of the gun used in the shooting and then discarded the barrel.
Defense attorneys said the parts of the gun were the inspiration for Crampton Brophy’s writing and suggested that someone else may have killed Brophy during a confused robbery. Crampton Brophy testified during the trial that her presence near the culinary school on the day of her husband’s death was a coincidence and that she parked in the area to work on her writing.
Crampton Brophy’s treatise How-Two describes in detail the various options for committing untraceable murder and professes a desire not to be captured. District Judge Christopher Ramras eventually excluded the essay from the trial, noting that it was published in 2011. However, a prosecutor hinted at the topics of the essay without naming it after Crampton Brophy took office.
Crampton Brophy remains in custody after her arrest in September 2018, a few months after her husband was shot. Her sentence is scheduled for June 13.
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