She Wrote 'How to Murder Your Husband.' Did She Do It?

[NJCher]

Prosecutors are building a follow-the-string murder case against a romance novelist. She says their real story is one about love.

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By Mike Baker


May 18, 2022, 9:49 a.m. ET

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PORTLAND, Ore. — While pondering the best methods for spousal murder, the romance novelist Nancy Brophy wrote that her career as an author — with steamy stories of romance and betrayal — left her thinking often about killings and how the police investigate them.

A spouse who commits mariticide will almost certainly become a prime suspect, she said in a 2011 blog post titled “How to Murder Your Husband.” The wife, she said, must “be organized, ruthless and very clever.”

“After all, if the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail,” Ms. Brophy wrote. “And let me say clearly for the record, I don’t like jumpsuits and orange isn’t my color.”

Seven years later, Ms. Brophy’s husband, Daniel, was brutally murdered, shot twice inside the kitchen of a Portland, Ore., culinary institute where he was arriving for work on a sunny June morning. Now, prosecutors are trying to build a follow-the-string criminal case to prove that Ms. Brophy, 71, killed her husband with the same type of brutal cunning she once speculated would be necessary to evade conviction and reap the rewards — compiling gun components to avoid leaving a trace, attacking when no cameras or witnesses were present and moving to collect on a series of life insurance policies within days of her husband’s death.

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More at NY Times.