Today's story is about a fiction writer who used her own life as inspiration for her books.
However, as she would find out, some stories are better left untold.
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Okay, let's get into today's story.
On the night of June 1st 2018, 68-year-old Nancy Crampton Brophy sat in bed with her computer on her lap in the home she shared with her husband in the suburb of Beaverton Oregon.
Nancy was trying to work on her newest book, but for some reason she just couldn't focus on the chapter she was writing.
So Nancy was a romance writer who had actually finished 11 novels, and she also ran a blog with some other romance writers who lived in the area.
Now, writing really was Nancy's passion, and she'd been doing it her whole life.
But despite that, she really had not made any real money from writing.
She'd never gotten a legitimate publisher to buy one of her books.
So those 11 novels she did well.
They had to be self-published and basically had to be free online for anybody to read them.
And so in order to keep on writing, she had to have a day job to pay the bills.
In the past, she'd run a catering company, but now she worked for Medicare.
However, despite not having made it big at least not financially as a writer, yet it didn't deter Nancy.
I mean, she was totally motivated to keep on writing because she believed that, you know, the next thing she wrote was going to be the thing that finally made her a bestseller and made her famous and financially stable.
On her writing,
However, tonight, Nancy just felt completely stuck.
She could not think of what to write next.
So she leaned back into her pillow and just thought about what her character was going through and tried to think if she'd ever gone through anything similar that might inspire you know what would need to happen next in the story.
So these romance epics that Nancy wrote were very over the top, but she did draw a lot of inspiration from her actual personal life.
Most of her work featured very powerful women and had similar themes like freedom and strength and love, because Nancy really valued all those things in her own life.
The other things all her books had in common was they always had happy endings.
And Nancy knew all about happy endings because in some ways, you know, she was living one.
Nancy and her husband, Dan Brophy, had been married for almost 25 years.
They had both been married before, and Dan actually had a son and granddaughter from his first marriage.
And so the fact that Nancy and Dan had found each other after essentially, both of them had been living what you know felt like very complete lives to that point felt like another theme that she wrote about all the time, which was this idea of fate.
You know, as if fate is the thing that brought Nancy and Dan together.
Dan and Nancy even called themselves soulmates, sort of playing on this idea that really fate had led them together.
I mean, they had fights and disagreements like any other couple.
But they also knew each other so well that sometimes Nancy felt like they could almost read each other's minds and that sort of got them through any rough patches.
And also another part of the reason that they seem to work so well together as a couple was because they gave each other plenty of space to pursue their own interests.
They were, you know, given freedom, something again that Nancy really valued.
And so, for Nancy, her sense of freedom, her sense of, you know, being able to pursue what she wanted to meant shutting herself away every evening in their little attic bedroom for hours and hours to write.
And for Dan, you know his sense of freedom and his ability to pursue his own interests meant working long hours at a career he loved, as a chef and a teacher at the Oregon Culinary Institute.
Just like Nancy was sort of obsessed with writing, Dan was obsessed with food and cooking.
And when he was not in a kitchen, he was often out in the backyard of his and Nancy's house raising chickens and working in his garden, or maybe on a trip into the Oregon woods to forage for mushrooms.
But tonight, despite how happy Nancy's life was and how secure she felt in her own relationship, like none of that really mattered relative to what she was trying to do, which was write this book.
She just was not able to do it.
And as she continued to struggle with writer's block...
Her mind kind of spiraled off into more sort of pessimistic thinking.
And she began thinking about, you know, the money problems that recently had begun to take a toll on both her and Dan.
Neither Nancy nor Dan had ever made particularly high salaries.
And their finances had always been pretty tight.
So that was kind of normal for their relationship.
But about two years ago, they'd gotten really behind on credit card debt.
And that extra debt threw everything else out of whack.
And at one point, they actually had not even been able to afford their mortgage.
Now, realistically, things were actually more under control now.
Nancy and Dan had taken a chunk of money from Dan's retirement account to pay off some of this debt.
And they'd also made the decision to sell the house the house they were in now and downsize, which Nancy actually was kind of excited about.
With these lower overhead costs.
It would likely mean that she would get to quit her day job and just pursue her passion writing and also pursue being the best grandmother she possibly could be.
So, in a way, things were starting to look up, at least in terms of, you know, their financial situation.
But Nancy knew, especially tonight, that she couldn't just forget about the fact that they had these problems.
Like, she couldn't just pretend they weren't there.
In fact, tonight the reason Dan was not home when normally he would be is because recently Dan had picked up a second job, cooking for an assisted living facility.
And he had picked it up to help pay off this debt.
So it really was sort of beginning to infect their whole lives, this debt.
He was working for a friend of theirs.
It was a woman whose name was Tanya Medlin.
And the job wasn't bad exactly, but it definitely was not Dan's dream job either.
But just then, as Nancy's having all these kind of conflicting and sort of bad thoughts, she heard the front door open and realized that Dan must be home.
So she slammed her laptop shut, figured she would attack this later, and she went downstairs to meet him.
Nancy got to the front door just as Dan was taking off his boots and coming into the house.
And she quickly gave him a kiss and asked how his shift went.
But Dan just kind of grunted and said you know fine.
And then he disappeared into the kitchen to make some food.
Dan had always been a pretty gruff person, but to Nancy, it was sort of part of his charm.
He was blunt and a little socially awkward, but his love language was food.
And so he made her elaborate meals to show her that he cared about her, and she knew that.
Nancy did know that other people didn't really understand Dan and often took his mannerisms and gruffness the wrong way.
In fact, at the last school where he taught, he'd gotten fired because of his bad attitude.
And at the culinary institute where he was currently teaching, a group of students had complained that he was way too tough and had impossible standards.
Now, Nancy did worry about this.
I mean, she understood Dan.
She knew what he was like.
But I mean.
The reality here is that if he loses his job or multiple jobs here, they're going to be in a bad spot financially.
And again they have these financial problems that they're working through.
But that would be really bad.
And then also on top of that this was sort of buried in the back of Nancy's mind is she had this fear that you know Dan was going to upset the wrong person.
It just seemed like he kind of made people mad everywhere he went.
And who knows?
I mean, a student could snap and try to hurt him.
And so maybe it was just the stress kind of coming through as she can't write and they have money problems.
But on this night, she just had this feeling of like...
I hope he's going to be okay here.
I hope he isn't going to make more people mad and jeopardize his own safety.
And so Nancy goes to Dan in the kitchen and she kind of tries to lighten the mood and just like ask him how the day went.
You know, nothing too crazy.
But she noticed that Dan's attitude was really bad.
Like even by his standards, he was really being quite rude.
And Nancy knew that very likely the reason for this is because he had to work the second job, because they were in debt.
And so Nancy tried to be understanding.
But as Dan got grouchier and grouchier over the course of the next few minutes, you know, Nancy just started to feel like he was being rude to her and it was totally unnecessary.
And it's like, she's in this with him.
You know, why are you treating me so badly?
Eventually, Dan finished making his snack and it was big enough that he put some on a plate for Nancy as well, and he handed it to her.
And this made Nancy smile, even though she was kind of annoyed with Dan.
Because it felt like, oh, the old Dan's back.
You know, giving me food is his way of showing me he loves me.
And so they ultimately sat down together and they ate, and they chatted a little bit before Dan said I'm tired, I'm going to bed.
Just before 5 am the next day, so June 2nd, Nancy woke up to the sound of Dan banging around in their bathroom.
Nancy liked to sleep in when she could, and today she could, but Dan he couldn't because he had a lot to do that morning, so he was up.
That day he had to go to his school, the Oregon Culinary Institute, to set up the classroom before his students got there and then also teach that day.
And then before that he also had a list of chores that he did around the house before work, like feeding his chickens.
Nancy tried to fall back asleep, but Dan, frankly, was too loud.
And at this point you know, she was kind of back in some negative thought loops and she couldn't sleep.
And so she laid there and she began thinking in particular of all the negative thoughts about the book, that she just couldn't continue to write this book.
It was like she really had writer's block.
And she had not really experienced that in previous novels.
This one was just really, really challenging.
And so, after tossing and turning for a few more minutes, feeling really frustrated, she decided she would just get up and go take a drive and just clear her mind.
This was Nancy's go-to.
Whenever she needed to work out a storyline or plot hole, she would just hop in her car and drive around and just kind of let her thoughts wander.
And this morning, she knew exactly where she wanted to go.
She wanted to go to this very beautiful neighborhood with streetcar tracks and tree-lined roads in the nearby city of Portland.
So up and out of bed she got.
She found Dan in the bathroom and said bye to him, and then she went outside, got in her car and she was off.
Less than 20 minutes later, and Nancy was in Portland.
In particular, she was in the neighborhood that she thought was beautiful.
And it was this area near a place called Washington Park.
And so it's got beautiful foliage and there's all these beautiful homes and it's just this wonderful area.
And she's driving around, just kind of looking out the window, enjoying herself.
And then she had this sort of pang of jealousy because Dan's school, where he worked, was roughly in this area.
And so he got to go through here every morning and she suddenly felt like man.
I wish I could do that.
However, as she continued to drive around Portland, she began to see other sides of the city that she herself did not necessarily think were so great.
In particular, she drove through an area where there were all these tents on the streets, where people who were displaced or potentially homeless that's where they were living.
And they were making the best of it, but from her perspective, this represented danger.
And in fact there'd been a whole lot more drug and criminal activity in this area lately.
That sort of coincided with more and more of these tents popping up around town.
And this had actually really bothered Dan.
You know, he was worried about this.
However, the way Dan had responded ultimately, beyond just telling Nancy about his concerns, is he had recently started this outreach program where he took extra food from his school and he gave it to a local church to help feed the homeless.
Now, Nancy and Dan both thought this was a great idea.
And it seemed like you know, giving back in that way was exactly the right way to respond to what really amounted to a homelessness crisis in the city.
But for Nancy, who worried about Dan, she couldn't help but feel like I kind of wish he wasn't really getting involved.
Like, I don't really want him in this part of town.
I want him home and safe or just at his school and safe there.
And just, she just had this growing sense of dread that something was going to happen to Dan.
But as Nancy is having seemingly like 10 thoughts all at once in all different directions, she suddenly has an epiphany.
She has this moment of absolute clarity about how to write her book.
It was like all these elements came together and were showing her the way.
And so in an instant, she turned back around and she drove back home to get to work.
When Nancy got back to her house she saw that Dan was already gone, which meant he was off to work at the Culinary Institute, which meant Dan was sort of you know back into the dangerous part of town, you know potentially, you know, surrounded by these homeless people that could potentially harm him.
At least that's where her head was going.
But she told herself she needed to focus.
She needed to just do the writing while she had this moment of clarity.
And so she rushes up to her bedroom and she spends the next two plus hours just writing nonstop.
But then at around 10 a.m. that morning, her concentration was broken when her cell phone rang.
And when she answered it she was very surprised to hear one of Dan's colleagues from the institute on the other line.
And the colleague sounded totally frantic.
And she told Nancy that Dan was not at the school and she had heard there was a shooting at the school this morning.
And so she was just worried about Dan.
She had to make sure he was okay.
She said she had tried to call Dan to see what was going on, but he hadn't answered, and so she was hoping that Nancy would know where he was.
When Nancy heard this, it was like immediately her mind exploded, with all the worst possible case scenarios that could be playing out here.
But you know, she took a deep breath and tried to stay calm and she told this colleague, although she was not confident.
This was true, but she told the colleague likely Dan is just in the middle of a lesson and that's why he's not picking up his phone.
He's probably just fine.
The colleagues sort of agreed and decided they would sort of wait and see if maybe Dan got back in touch with them.
But as soon as Nancy hung up the phone, she threw her laptop aside and ran downstairs and turned on the TV.
And as she was flipping through channels looking for the news to find out more about the shooting, she also grabbed her phone and called Dan.
But it rang and went to voicemail.
So she hung up, she tried it again, but again, he didn't answer.
And so she texted him, but he didn't text back.
At this point, the news was now on the TV.
And as Nancy took stock of what she was seeing on the screen, she was horrified.
Because it was all these images, you know, from helicopters and from reporters showing Dan's school with all these police and all these news crews outside.
I mean, clearly something had happened at the school.
And she had just spoken to the colleague who said there was maybe the shooting.
And so she raised the volume to see if they would maybe say, you know, was it a shooting?
Did somebody get shot?
Who got shot?
Who did the shooting?
What happened, but nobody was saying anything that clarified it, just that something had happened at the school.
And so at this point, Nancy couldn't wait any longer.
She grabbed her keys, rushed out to her car, and she sped towards Dan's school.
Less than 20 minutes later, Nancy drove through that same beautiful neighborhood that she had been in that morning in Portland.
But this time, instead of admiring the scenery, she was laser-focused on trying to find out if Dan was okay.
She was calling and texting him and she was cycling through the radio to hear any news broadcast about what had actually happened here, to make sure Dan was not involved in it in any way.
But at this point all she had learned from the news was that there really had been a shooting at the Oregon Culinary Institute.
But that was it.
There was no other information.
And so by the time Nancy actually got to the school, she was such a nervous wreck.
She was so anxious.
She was nauseous.
Her hands ached from having white-knuckled the steering wheel on the drive over.
I mean, she was a mess.
As Nancy looked around, all she saw was this sea of police officers and other first responders and all this crime scene tape had been put out and all these reporters.
I mean, it was total madness.
But in the chaos and despite her anxiety, Nancy was able to identify a couple of people in this big crowd that she recognized.
They were colleagues of Dan's.
And so she rushed over to them to ask them questions about where her husband was, what's going on.
But as she ran up some stairs to get over to these other colleagues...
They saw her coming and all of them just kind of looked away like they couldn't look her in the eye.
Nancy didn't know what to do, but clearly picked up on the signal.
And so instead of talking to them, she turned course and went to the nearest police officer.
And she said, my name is Nancy Crampton Brophy.
Dan Brophy is my husband.
He works here.
I can't get in touch with him.
Is he okay?
And as soon as she said this, the officers told her to just wait right here.
They'll be right back.
And then Nancy, she's standing there as these officers leave and they come back with these two other men who are wearing dark suits.
And those men walk up to her and they introduce themselves and they say Nancy, we're homicide detectives.
And that her husband, Dan Brophy, was the man who was shot on campus and that he was dead.
The next few days went by in a blur for Nancy.
She spent basically half her time crying and grieving and the other half being the person that was sort of in charge of delivering the bad news to friends and colleagues and family about what had happened to Dan.
And the reality was, what happened to Dan was still very much up in the air.
I mean, the only thing detectives knew at this point was that Dan had been found dead by his students in the kitchen after being shot twice, and that's what killed him.
But the school actually didn't have good security camera footage and so there was no footage to try to indicate who could have come into the classroom and killed him and then left.
It was like they didn't really have any good leads.
They didn't have any good evidence.
And in many ways it was just this big mystery that didn't appear like it was going to get solved anytime soon.
Now, Nancy certainly had her own theory.
I mean, she felt like she knew Dan rubbed people the wrong way.
And she always had this kind of you know, basic concern that he was going to make the wrong person mad and they were going to just snap and hurt him someday.
And that was definitely a worst case scenario.
But here she is.
Her husband's been killed.
He's been shot to death.
And so that's what she thought had happened.
You know, maybe it was a student who went crazy and snapped and killed him, or the fact that there was this burgeoning homeless crisis in Portland and that he was often, or at least recently, interacting with homeless people.
And she kind of equated that to being in danger due to the rising drug and criminal activity that was popping up in Portland.
And so she had this theory that you know.
Basically, he had rubbed shoulders with the wrong people and they had killed him over it.
She had no way to prove it, but that's what she thought.
But instead of really dwelling on what happened to her husband, the reality was is over the couple of months following her husband's death, Nancy's life basically fell apart.
She wasn't able to focus on anything.
It was like her mind had gone blank.
It was so traumatic what had happened to her.
And so as a result, she couldn't write, so she didn't do any writing.
And she also couldn't work.
She had to quit her day job because she just could not concentrate on anything.
Eventually, Nancy did decide that she would go through and try to sell the house, basically do the plan that she and Dan had thought of to sell it and downsize to get rid of some of this debt.
But then she discovered her name was not actually on the deed to the house, and so she couldn't sell it because it technically really wasn't hers.
And so now the bank was likely going to foreclose on it because she couldn't afford it.
And so again, Nancy's life is just completely upside down.
She's totally in debt.
You know, she's facing financial ruin.
Her husband's been killed.
The police have no suspects, no leads.
It seems like the case is just going to go cold.
And so Nancy just didn't even know what to do.
I mean, she was surrounded by friends and family that were there to support her, but there was nothing that anybody could reasonably do to lift her out of this horrible situation she was in.
Fast forward to September 5th, so two months after Dan had been killed and Nancy was on her way back to her house the house that she still couldn't sell and she had, by this point, sold a lot of stuff inside of the house just to pay the bills.
And she still wasn't working and she had tried writing a little bit, but still it was like her mind was just blank at this point from all the trauma.
And she's on her way home from some errands and she pulls into the driveway.
And as she gets out of her car, she hears another car pulling behind her.
And she turns and she sees it's a police cruiser.
Now.
She had had several interactions with police pretty much immediately following the death of her husband.
But for the most part, she didn't really see police officers all that often.
And so these two detectives get out of the vehicle and they walk up to Nancy.
And so Nancy, she's looking at them expectantly, like, clearly this has to do with Dan.
Why else would you be here?
But she's wondering, you know, maybe there was a break in the case.
You know, maybe there's a promising new lead or they just want to talk to her.
She didn't know, but she just stood there and walked up to her and they told her that there has been a huge break in the case.
They found something on the internet that points to exactly who Dan's killer is.
It would turn out, Dan's killer had actually confessed to their crime on the internet more than a decade before it happened.
The killer literally wrote about how all they think about is murder, and that you have to be organized and ruthless and very clever to commit murder.
And that you know.
The thing they know about murder is that everybody has it in them if they're pushed far enough.
But the most damning thing about the confession was that the killer posted it on a romance blog under the title How to Murder Your Husband.
Dan's killer was his own wife, Nancy.
After she wrote that blog post, Nancy would spend the next 10 plus years writing romantic thrillers about powerful women who fell in love and then murdered their enemies.
Now to be clear Nancy really did love Dan and she did think they had this beautiful life together.
But Nancy ultimately loved writing more than she loved Dan.
And so ultimately, Nancy killed Dan, basically to one live out the sort of fantasy that she played out in all of her novels about these powerful women killing their enemies.
And you know, Dan was not her enemy, but he sort of represented a hurdle between her and the life she wanted, which was to be a writer full time, which meant she needed more money.
And if she killed Dan and got rid of him, she could collect on his life insurance policies and fund the lifestyle that she wanted.
And so in a way, there was a parallel there.
And so she was able to literally live out a fantasy and also finance this lifestyle that she dreamed of to be a writer.
And so on that day that Nancy was driving around Portland, you know, clearing her mind to think about what she was gonna write, she really was doing that.
But then she realized her big solve was just go shoot Dan to death in his school and all your problems are solved.
But because Nancy had done all this writing in the years leading up to the crime about how to kill your husband that was a central theme in a lot of her writing it made her look really suspicious and they brought that to Nancy and quickly, you know, her story fell apart and she was found guilty.
Nancy was ultimately sentenced to life in prison for the murder.
A quick note about our stories.
They are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes.
The Mr Ballin Podcast Strange Dark and Mysterious Stories is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr Ballin.
Our head of writing is Evan Allen.
Our head of production is Zach Levitt.
Produced by Jeremy Bone.
Story editing by Evan Allen.
Research and fact-checking by Shelley Hsu, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway and Camille Callahan.
Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear.
Audio editing and post-produced by Wit Lacascio and Cole Lacascio, Perry Kroll, and Jordan Stidham.
Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain.
Production coordination by Samantha Collins.
Production support by Antonio Minata and Delaina Corley.
Artwork by Jessica Clogsden-Kiner.
Theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
And just a reminder every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr Ballin Podcast you can also now watch on the Mr Ballin YouTube channel that very same day.
And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe.
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So that's going to do it.
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Until next time, see ya.
